sevensor

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631.
by sevensor 2y ago
Fascinating. How reliable is the measurement apparatus? Or to put it another way, how tolerant of missed measurements is this scheme? I’ve been in a similar situation in a past life and we took a different approach. I was never satisfied w
632.
by sevensor 2y ago
I’ve been appreciating awk more and more lately as a desktop calculator. There are things dc and bc can’t handle, that awk will cheerfully compete for me. Of all the tools I can expect to be present on a Linux machine, it gives me the easie
633.
by sevensor 2y ago
That was a good read, thanks for posting! I suspect in 50 years it will become much clearer what the 50 year computer is. The leading edge still moves at a blistering rate, but computing devices are so widespread now that eddies full of slo
634.
by sevensor 2y ago
I take it you disagree with the thesis of the article, which is that new features are a thing we need less of, as they’re being used to preclude the possibility of competition with the dominant browsers.
635.
by sevensor 2y ago
This is why I’ve started writing marginalia when I read. It’s a conversation with the future, and an explanation of why you should care about the book. If a reader wants a pristine copy, it’s easy to come by. For the most part. I’m not goin
636.
by sevensor 2y ago
Stepping into the library of someone who has passed on can be very personal, and confusing. Who were you, that you have 31 volumes of Reader’s Digest condensed books, shelved next to Josephus, a full matched set of the Waverly novels, a mix
637.
by sevensor 2y ago
Maybe they’re contrasting with sidereal days?
638.
by sevensor 2y ago
I have a lot of respect for emacs, but my favorite editor takes what somebody in this conversation called an “exterior” approach instead. This is kakoune, and it gets a lot more attention for its editing model (which is quite good) than for
639.
by sevensor 2y ago
Minimum contrast! What a great feature! One of which I was entirely unaware until just now.
640.
by sevensor 2y ago
Productive procrastination is where it’s at. Find something mundane, uninspiring, and mandatory, and avoid it by doing something else instead right up to the last minute. Just make sure something else is also work that you wanted to do.
641.
by sevensor 2y ago
While we’re at it, modern Fortran exists and has its boosters. https://fortran-lang.org/
642.
by sevensor 2y ago
> On Hacker News, the site for programmers owned by YC Oh are we?
643.
by sevensor 2y ago
> (according to one rumour, because Dana Scott was fond of curry) I always assumed it was related to Haskell Curry, the logician.
644.
by sevensor 2y ago
Personally I can’t stand measuring my performance, but a run outside in fresh air, in any weather, is grand, sometimes transcendent.
645.
by sevensor 2y ago
VSCode also, by design, obscures what’s really going on on the development environment, so that when I help a VSCode user who gets stuck, they often don’t know what computer they’re logged into, where their files actually are in the file sy
646.
by sevensor 2y ago
That’s my read on it. Far too tidy, pitched to make you feel just so. If it’s real, so many details are missing that it may as well not be.
647.
by sevensor 2y ago
PG used to write interesting essays, like the recently reposted one about programs you can keep in your head. His later work suffers in my estimation from being too obviously motivated. He’s trying to bend reality by convincing more kids to
648.
by sevensor 2y ago
> That's not good enough. It needs to be 99%. Look at the other stories in this thread. Even 5% is enough to avoid it. That’s a pretty high standard considering the behavior of highway drivers. How do you get around, friend?
649.
by sevensor 2y ago
I’ve been my share of 15 hour bus rides. Greyhound. Megabus. Changing buses downtown at midnight. Mostly it’s just people trying to get around. Worst that ever happened is I got scammed out of $20 when I was a kid and I’d never heard “I’m
650.
by sevensor 2y ago
Thank you for saying this, I was hoping somebody would bring class into it. Intercity bus lines aren’t subsidized because poor people ride buses between cities, and as a society we prefer not to subsidize poor people’s physical mobility. Ph
651.
by sevensor 2y ago
> those that bother with PyPy Which itself needed to be compiled from source the first time I tried it. All the hours of Mandelbrot were worth the spectacular speedup.
652.
by sevensor 2y ago
Great innovation. Maybe soon they’ll figure out how to make a printer with drivers that work.
653.
by sevensor 2y ago
A few years ago when 3d printing was blowing up it was my hope that someone would use an open source 3d printer to make an open source paper printer, but if that happened I never heard about it.
654.
by sevensor 2y ago
For me, the problem has gone from “figure out the author’s agenda” to “figure out whether this is a meaningful text at all,” because gibberish now looks a whole lot more like meaning than it used to.
655.
by sevensor 2y ago
> Some great grand ancestor of mine was a civil servant, a great achievement given his peasant background. The single skill that enabled it was the knowledge of calligraphy. He went to school and wrote nicely and that was sufficient. Sim
656.
by sevensor 2y ago
Importantly, the author abandoned the efforts before releasing them, which rather takes the curse off.
657.
by sevensor 2y ago
No, I do mean FORTRAN. Massively lowered the bar. Not that COBOL didn’t, but it was in a different domain and slightly later as I understand it. Have you ever worked with properly old FORTRAN? Some of it is quite good, but some of it, well,
658.
by sevensor 2y ago
Ever since FORTRAN came on the scene, there have been tools that make disdainful, unskilled programmers more productive. I doubt this will ever change. It’s in the interest of mainstream employers to treat programmers as a fungible resource
659.
by sevensor 2y ago
I bring it up because the author was talking about network transparent APIs, where the developer doesn’t have to care about whether the call goes over the network. But of course this is not something you can actually afford to ignore. It’s
660.
by sevensor 2y ago
To a great extent, the experience of using Arch is the experience of reading the Wiki and doing what it says. I say this without any judgement implied: if you don’t want to read the Wiki, Arch is not for you. Debian is an excellent distribu

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