3 ms·
Speaking of pretty printing, here is a copy of that quote made readable for mobile devices. (Don't use leading spaces to format quotes on HN, it doesn't work we
by Stratoscope 8y ago
Speaking of pretty printing, here is a copy of that quote made readable for mobile devices. (Don't use leading spaces to format quotes on HN, it doesn't work well.)
> "We sat down one morning," recalls Steele. "I was at
the keyboard, and he was at my elbow," says Steele.
"He was perfectly willing to let me type, but he was
also telling me what to type.
> The programming session lasted 10 hours. Throughout
that entire time, Steele says, neither he nor Stallman
took a break or made any small talk. By the end of the
session, they had managed to hack the pretty print
source code to just under 100 lines. "My fingers were
on the keyboard the whole time," Steele recalls, "but
it felt like both of our ideas were flowing onto the
screen. He told me what to type, and I typed it."
> The length of the session revealed itself when Steele
finally left the AI Lab. Standing outside the building
at 545 Tech Square, he was surprised to find himself
surrounded by nighttime darkness. As a programmer,
Steele was used to marathon coding sessions. Still,
something about this session was different. Working with
Stallman had forced Steele to block out all external
stimuli and focus his entire mental energies on the task
at hand. Looking back, Steele says he found the Stallman
mind-meld both exhilarating and scary at the same
time. "My first thought afterward was: it was a great
experience, very intense, and that I never wanted to do
it again in my life." - Guy Steele
- baby 8y agoThanks! If you’re thinking about reposting broken quotes, just do it. A lot of people browse HN on mobile and will be happy to see that.
- srean 8y ago> (Don't use leading spaces to format quotes on HN, it doesn't work well.) I hear you. It does suck on small screens. But that's exactly what the leading space syntax is for -- to markup quotes. It works fine tablet/laptop/netbook etc but I hear that smaller form factors is a problem. I think the right solution is to fix the layout so that it works form mobile. Not using the markup that's specially intended for quotes seems a wrong way of going about it.
- grzm 8y ago> "But that's exactly what the leading space syntax is for -- to markup quotes" Per the HN docs, leading spaces are meant for code, not quotes. > "Text after a blank line that is indented by two or more spaces is reproduced verbatim. (This is intended for code.)" https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc HN doesn't have specific formatting for quotes. Many people use leading '>' along with quotation marks and italics to set off quoted text.
- srean 8y agoAh I see, I got it wrong.
- Stratoscope 8y agoNo worries, it's an easy mistake to make. The formatting options on HN are pretty meager: two leading spaces (not four like Markdown) for block code, asterisks for emphasis. So it's natural that people try to make do with what's available. I don't mind, I get a lot of upvotes for posting those mobile friendly quotes. Just call me the Quote Fixer Bot. ;-) Markdown recognizes the > quote convention and puts the text in a <blockquote> so it can be styled, typically indented a bit with a vertical bar on the left. I wish HN did that too! A convention that is often used for quotes here is to both use the > and italicize them, like this: > *You can quote me on this.* which renders as: > You can quote me on this. This is especially useful when you are interspersing quotes with your own text, as grzm did above. I can't make up my mind which I like better for longer multi-paragraph quotes: the italics make it look more like a quote, but I find long stretches of italic text harder to read.
- bradleyjg 8y agoThe leading greater than is the old usenet and mailing list convention. With multiple greater thans for deeper levels of quotes. There wasn’t italics but people used to surround words with stars or underscores for emphasis.
- 8y ago