another-cuppa

What's your reason for thinking Google is the best then? Do you even use maps for anything except major highways?

Google does not have the best base map info. OSM may well be the best global base map, actually. Google's advantage is their applications that use the data.

Just a few hours ago there was a conversation in #gentoo-chat about the Thompson attack. I wondered how difficult it would be to write a C compiler that can compile GCC. How far away is this?

Tabs are better, yes, for the reasons you stated. But people have too much difficulty using them correctly so we have to make do with spaces.

You just Google for "buy gold" just like you would for anything else.

> I mean, what advantage does it have over gold?

It's electronic. That is the only advantage, but it's a huge one considering that virtually all (yes, virtually all) money transfers are done electronically today.

> only one API exposes data in XML rather than JSON

They are not mutually exclusive. It should be trivial to offer the data as either JSON or XML at the user's request.

This is essentially how all business works. When I got my first job before I went to university I was very surprised to learn that accountants always pay invoices on the very last day of the terms rather than as soon as they can. Since everyone else is going to pay you as late as they poassibly can, if you pay your invoices as soon as you can you'll lose out in the long run.

The way everyone tries to get slightly more from other people than they give back is one of the things I dislike most about humans. I wish we had a system that punished such behaviour rather than rewarding it.

Is unrealircd not decent? That's what I used to use.

Before I had a home network or always-on internet connection I used to play with servers locally. I actually set up my own IRC network using unrealircd and learnt how to configure it etc. I don't know why but one day I decided to try to telnet into the IRC server and it blew my mind that it actually worked. You can do the same thing with an FTP server as well.

Does anyone use something like this to help them wake up in the morning? During the winter in the UK I find it very hard to wake up. I think it would help if I simulated the sun. Is there a bulb that supports a soft, warm light in the evening and bright sunlight in the morning?

That compares the 1960s to the 1980s. A lot has changed in 30 years. In particular Financialisation has increased dramatically. Are there any more recent figures?

Also, less work being done at home isn't necessarily a good thing. More people eating microwaved ready meals or takeaways probably means lower quality of life overall.

This is covered in more detail in the book Hacker's Delight. A recommended read.

So who does the work at home now? Both partners after they get home from work? That doesn't sound like a better deal to me.

I wonder what the speed is like. I bought a netbook as soon as I could back in 2007 or so. I still run my Dell Mini 9 to this day. Back then I wanted to be able to hack on emacs in bed (seriously). I never actually did that much because using a keyboard (especially a very small keyboard) in bed isn't very comfortable. But the other point was this was a portable computer I could actually afford (it was less than £200). The computer also has no moving parts whatsoever which I found very cool. It's powered by 32 bit Atom and these days I find even Lubuntu has unsatisfactory performance. So it now run Gentoo with a minimal kernel and just enough to run i3wm with Firefox and emacs on there.

I guess the ARM64 is more powerful than my Atom. But it still only has 2GB of memory which is the same as my netbook! (I might have upgraded my RAM, I can't remember).

No it's not splitting hairs. Using a piece of software and distributing a derivative of that piece of software are two completely different things. Nobody chooses not to use a piece of software because it's GPL. If people choose not to distribute derivatives under restrictive terms then that's great because that's exactly the reason I licensed it to them under the GPL.

You're not talking about using the software, you're talking about making derivatives. The GPL doesn't restrict use of software in any way. It only prevents you from redistributing derivatives under more restrictive terms.

When I install Gentoo or Arch, one of the first things I install is vim and one of the last things I install is emacs because that's where I do all my work.

Why do you think that? Linux is the most widely used operating system in the world and it's licensed under GPL. People don't choose not to use software because it's GPL. Why would they?

I don't want to use Windows ever again in my life (of course I'm talking about the current software made by the current software company, not the name Windows, this isn't a religious issue).

Also, rebooting takes ages. My Linux boot time might be measured in seconds, but I'm always in the middle of some kind of work and I use my running system to maintain continuity. It's a major pain in the arse to reboot, so I do it rarely.

> wearing open source's uniform without making open source's sacrifices.

Open source isn't a "sacrifice", for most people at least. Many release under permissive licences because they think there is more chance that people will use their software. They want to be popular and that makes them feel good and might get them a job. People release code under the GPL and if it becomes popular eventually benefit from patches coming back up stream. It's not supposed to be about sacrifice. It's supposed to be about being a good member of a community and sharing your work.

It's really sad that the GPL has essentially "gone out of fashion". It's sad that developers would be driven merely by fashion rather than careful consideration. The fact that we have free software at all is largely thanks to the GNU and the GPL.

The best thing to do is probably to buy high quality clothes and keep them for a long time. Don't buy t-shirts (especially printed t-shirts) that wear out quickly and get disposed of. Buy shirts and take care of them. Don't wash them often. Wash then minimally when they become dirty. They'll last you many years this way.

I had a very similar experience except I was a student at the time. I had no job and therefore gradually my sober life became less and less. I'd stay up later into the night, wake up later, and light up earlier. Eventually I got to the point where I was high all the time, but not happy. I had to move house and ran out of weed so I just decided not to get any more. The next couple of weeks were weird. I couldn't sleep properly. But things got better. I've smoked a couple of times since but have no desire to do it again now even though I know it does feel good.

I think a lot of this complexity can be avoided by just writing single threaded python and using GNU parallel for running it on multiple cores. You can even trivially distribute the work across a cluster that way.

Concurrency and parallelism are two different things. Python is fine for concurrency.

Clojure is Lisp. In any case it's not just having one or two features from Lisp, every language has that, it's about the combination of those features.

I think you missed out symbols. That's a big part of Lisp programming and sorely missed in other languages.

I'm so glad I spent about twenty minutes to learn awk several years ago. That's really all it takes to learn it and you get incredible power.

Short variable names like `i` are often the most appropriate. It's a thoroughly understood idiom and to use anything else just because you don't like single letters is just stupid. It's fine if you want to use a language that let's you easily avoid using indexes at all, though. But only if it's idiomatic in that language.