nicklaf

14 ms·

91.
by nicklaf 6y ago
I'm 32 and, after previously being quite healthy, developed POTS after having gone through four years of chronic pain from a freak muscle spasm in my pec, chest and neck resembling TOS and continues to this day. I've been seen at
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by nicklaf 6y ago
When I found this video (on Hacker News) many years ago, it had a profound influence on my thinking. I still reflexively think about his words in this talk, from time to time.
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by nicklaf 6y ago
Heh, I initially read this as "realizing that 90% of programs are unsupported junk".
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by nicklaf 6y ago
Hm. I've still had trouble integrated gender-neutral pronouns into my brain (for years and years I had been taught that "their" was strictly plural). Believe me when I say I meant nothing by inserting a default gender. If not
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by nicklaf 6y ago
I dunno. What I posted was a reference to a 20 year old in-joke that poked fun at GP for (in the eyes of his father) conforming to a humorously incorrect cliche of a "computer hacker", that anyone who frequented Slashdot would hav
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by nicklaf 6y ago
I dunno. You might be right, but another thing about that is whereas Slashdot had a moderation system that enabled voting along a dimension such as "funny", "interesting", or "insightful", I believe that a +1 F
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by nicklaf 6y ago
It's a troll! An infamous Slashdot/Usenet one at that, which in the day raised the hackles of many a * nix folk: Adequacy first gained widespread Internet notoriety after the December 2, 2001 publication of a story entitled &quot
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by nicklaf 6y ago
In high school I ran Plan 9 on a 600E I found on ebay. The specs were plenty fast enough to run the fourth edition of Plan 9, which hadn't gotten any slower since the early 90s... and Bell Labs had thoroughly worked out the driver kink
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by nicklaf 6y ago
I'm going to second the recommendation of Common Lisp Recipes. The others too, of course (especially PAIP).
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by nicklaf 6y ago
Paradoxically, I think just acknowledging procrastination as an example of a bad thing, but not the most important one, might work well. I say this because anxiety around needing to do something important is one possible cause of procra
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by nicklaf 7y ago
Check out some of his newer stuff. Wonderful musically and also often also brilliant satire. E.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGM8PT1eAvY
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by nicklaf 7y ago
> Perhaps the news people should be pointing that out, and doing a "here's how to use a mask properly" section. No doubt. We definitely have got a long way to go toward educating the public if mask-wearing is ever going to
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by nicklaf 7y ago
The most offensive idea I'm seeing here is that Americans are somehow too stupid to be trusted with masks because they can't put them on properly or will use them as an excuse to ignore social distancing protocols. I sincerely hop
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by nicklaf 7y ago
Honestly? When I was in high school I was fortunate enough to find a copy of The Unix Programming Environment [0], which is a marvelously accessible tutorial introduction to incrementally building UNIX® programs using nothing more than the
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by nicklaf 7y ago
The universe is a spheroid region, 705m in diameter.
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by nicklaf 7y ago
"[Geometer] H.S.M. Coxeter lived to the age of 96, working and lecturing right until his death. He attributed his long life to a strict vegetarian diet and he did 50 push-ups every day. He said, I am never bored. " http:/&#
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by nicklaf 7y ago
Mathematics and Logic by Mark Kac and Stan Ulam (1992 Dover paperback, ISBN 978-0486670850) [1] Mathematics, Form and Function by Saunders Mac Lane (1986 Springer-Verlag hardcover, ISBN 0-387-96217-4) [2] [1]: https://www.cut-the
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by nicklaf 7y ago
Yes, this is a good idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS
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by nicklaf 7y ago
I am still learning this stuff (and have only had undergrad abstract algebra), so thank you for the context and motivation. As it happens, today I was thinking about semirings, and how to apply them to discrete event systems[1][2], and was
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by nicklaf 7y ago
Possibly to avoid the kind of cat-and-mouse dynamics that played out when MS enabled Do Not Track by default in IE10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track#Internet_Explorer...
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by nicklaf 7y ago
A more recent version of this set of notes is available from the MIT course page: https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.042/spring18/mcs.pdf
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by nicklaf 7y ago
While we're on the topic of this kind of thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synopsis_of_Pure_Mathematics
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by nicklaf 7y ago
As an Emacs user myself, I share your pain. You will find the following Easter egg in the distribution, though: term% man 1 emacs EMACS(1) EMACS(1) NAME emacs - edito
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by nicklaf 7y ago
Real Programmers write in Fortran. Maybe they do now, in this decadent era of Lite beer, hand calculators and "user-friendly" software but back in the Good Old Days, when the term "software" sounded funny and Real Compu
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by nicklaf 7y ago
Assembler^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HMachine code: http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html https://research.swtch.com/mel
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by nicklaf 7y ago
It means he's not a fan of the GNU philosophy: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-impor...
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by nicklaf 7y ago
I concur. Although personally, I use a somewhat modified version: 1. Find the closest person who knows more about what you are doing than you do. Then, for everything you can say about the problem, do so, out loud. (It is very important tha
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by nicklaf 7y ago
Fair point! :-) What can I say, my training is in math, where we take great pleasure in squinting at obvious things until we feel insightful.
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by nicklaf 7y ago
I am struck in particular by the 'expert --> idea' simulation. It suggests that an effective strategy for beating the competition to the punch in making a breakthrough discovery is to concentrate a diverse collection of experti
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by nicklaf 7y ago
It's amusing to note that the rewriting of a concurrent language as a C library has happened before in Bell Lab's history (by some of the same people who worked on Go and its precursors). Specifically, the same thing we're ta

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