veddox

49 ms·

481.
by veddox 9y ago
Cultures are complex things; encompassing, amongst others, habits of thought, a common vocabulary, shared values, a sense of group history, and so on. The hacker culture is indeed quite heavily defined by its ways of thinking and shared val
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by veddox 9y ago
To understand the hacker culture, you must understand its background and history. Here are some good books: "The Jargon File", Eric S. Raymond (ed.) http://www.catb.org/jargon/ "The Cuckoo's Egg&quo
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by veddox 9y ago
From the introduction: "The co-operation of the “nroff” program must also be mentioned. Without it, these notes could never have been produced in this form. However it has yielded some of its more enigmatic secrets so reluctantly, that
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by veddox 9y ago
Oh, I absolutely agree with you! I'm heading for a career in academia right now, and I love university! But coming from a similarly conservative background, I wanted to help you understand why some are rather wary of colleges. In my ex
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by veddox 9y ago
Please remain civil. Insulting language of that sort has no place in this discussion.
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by veddox 9y ago
Universities tend to be strongly influenced by liberal thinking and values (or are at least perceived to be). They can in fact be quite aggressively anti-conservative. If you're from a very conservative background, that isn't an e
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by veddox 9y ago
The German car companies (BMW, Audi, Mercedes, VW) are very much pushing their electric models right now (both in development and marketing). They can't move as fast as Tesla does currently, but they are larger, have the advantage of a
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by veddox 9y ago
I find it a pleasant change to talk about natural language once in a while, rather than the latest-and-greatest web frameworks that so often dominate other discussions here... Plus, I seldom get the chance to practice my prose writing these
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by veddox 9y ago
Here's a passage from Dawkins' "The Greatest Show on Earth": "As we look back on the history of life, we see a picture of never-ending, ever-rejuvenating novelty. Individuals die; species, families orders and even c
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by veddox 9y ago
Sadly unable to find the source I got that from (an article I read several months ago). It did feature noun declensions quite prominently though, you're right in that respect ;-) My understanding was that as major languages spread and
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by veddox 9y ago
Related to that, here's an observation about English vs. German writing: English has a huge vocabulary, so educated authors show their mettle by using "big words": the one word from amongst all the approximately 600,000 Engli
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by veddox 9y ago
A very interesting look at language evolution! One effect she didn't mention, though, is that language grammar has a propensity to decrease in complexity over time. Thus, Shakespeare's English was more complicated than our own, Go
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by veddox 9y ago
I think you missed the point of the article. The author isn't talking about the language scientists use when talking to each other, but about the communication between scientists and non-scientists. The way we speak and write in the sc
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by veddox 9y ago
Alexander von Humboldt believed that a scientist never interacts with nature in a purely rational manner, but that there are always emotions involved as well. And those emotions, he said, ought to be a part of the way he communicated his fi
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by veddox 9y ago
One alias I use a lot when programming is this one: alias todo='grep -r "FIXME" * ; grep -r "TODO" * ; grep -r "XXX" *' Also, with git (the first line is in my .bashrc, the second in .gitconfig
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by veddox 9y ago
True that. Good point ;-)
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by veddox 9y ago
There is a big difference between looking up to somebody and idolising him/her. Looking up to somebody means that you admire them for their character and/or achievements. "Honour to whom honour is due." In a further step
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by veddox 9y ago
"The Invention of Nature" about Alexander von Humboldt, by Andrea Wulf. Very in-depth book about a naturalist who deserves to be much better known than he generally is. It also includes several chapters with mini-biographies of fa
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by veddox 9y ago
My friends and family. I know enough different people to provide almost the whole spectrum of political beliefs, which makes for interesting discussions. And the fact that we all respect each other and talk face to face makes for civil disc
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by veddox 9y ago
Eric S. Raymond. Though he - like Stallman - is a bit of a controversial figure, I learnt a lot about software architecture from his "The Art of Unix Programming". And I admire him for the many key FOSS projects he has been an imp
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by veddox 9y ago
An impressive quote, but I cannot agree with it fully. Of course it is a very important function of art to shake us up and get us to see the world in a different light. No doubt about that. But to reduce it to merely this is to ignore what
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by veddox 9y ago
I'm not sure I agree with you. In fact, a scientist's analytical thinking may be of great help in understanding the more complex art forms and thus engender a deeper appreciation of said art. Also, scientists are highly educated p
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by veddox 9y ago
Although I don't see Bezos saying anything about what his company actually does... None of the modern "We're going to disrupt X industry" / "We're democratizing Y" / "We're changing the
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by veddox 9y ago
Ignoring all privacy-related concerns: Build a service to give users a personality analysis. What are their defining character traits, strengths, weaknesses, etc. I'm sure much of that could be read from a dataset of such proportions.
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by veddox 9y ago
I'm not quite happy about the ethical implications of forcing people to "do nice things" on threat of public shaming... It seems somewhat - hypocritical.
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by veddox 9y ago
This is not explicitly tech-oriented, but I am reading a very interesting book at the moment that seems highly relevant to what you describe: "How Organizations Develop Activists: Civic Associations and Leadership in the 21st Century&q
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by veddox 9y ago
I understand what they do, and I appreciate that it helps performance to inline them. What I don't understand is the (setf vref) syntax. I thought that after a defun statement you had to have a symbol, not an S-expression? Something li
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by veddox 9y ago
Very interesting read! But could somebody explain why the following piece of code is needed? And why is it defined inline? (defun-inline (setf vref) (new-value chip x y) (setf (aref (chip-video chip) (+ (* +screen-width+ y) x))
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by veddox 9y ago
"It has long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things." - Elinor Smith
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Great orators to learn from
2 points by veddox 9y ago|1 comments

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