avgcorrection

Step one of securing a “pension” is making sure that the world is livable half a century from now. On that account their priorities are correct.

> White space in variable names is a bad idea.

Pff. You can have your cake and eat it too: disallow whitespace in variable names except no-break space. ;)

Yes? What about unamused Vec?

I’m referring to going for the most closely adjacent explanation, the mundane noun which represents something which tells something, like secrets. Since I apparently have to spell everything out.

You can take this further (aside). Famous people are people but there is no point in loving them. They won’t love you back. I don’t understand people who are fascinated by people like the king of Denmark. Or Churchill.

I have people I admire (that don’t know me). But I hope I don’t love them.

Road safety:

- What is "right of way"?

- Would a Beyoncé reference confuse you while driving?

A “teller” tells things.

> I couldn't stop thinking to myself about how many smart people work there, and how much money the company has, yet still it was one of the worst online experiences that I've had.

Intellect by itself does not cause good. When will HN understand that? (Never.)

> No. If you don't want people pointing out devilish deeds, don't do the deeds.

What I was trying to point out is that it’s not about you. No reasonable person is either going to (1) thank you personally for landing on the Moon or (2) blame you for killing half a million Iraqis.

Most bad things the US does is done by the government. And the US is not terribly democratic anyway.

So you can chill out.

> This is how you disregard the opinion of 8 billion people? Memes? […] Flippantly dismissing all this is the American Way.

I keep becoming an Honorary American.

> Sure, it feels good to be blissfully ignorant of how detested we've become, and how far we have fallen in the eyes of the world.

“Fallen”.

It seems you interpreted my whole comment as an excuse for what America does. When what I said was:

- Europeans seemed to love the US when their interpretation of “the US” was by way of the US (Hollywood)

- Europeans seemed to start disliking the US when they saw what America is like by way of the Internet

I can’t fathom how that is a compliment.

Your pre-2003 amnesia is interesting but oh well; it seems that it can go in either direction.

> Help me understand the intended relevance of that passage.

My intent seems straightforward to me, whether you agree with it or not. You do know that there has only been one black president? Moreover.

> > the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices;

Maybe I’m misremembering here, but I’m pretty sure that I’ve seen comments adjacent to this by the same author (Reed) which commented on how Obama was claiming that he was from the grassroots. Then either Reed himself or other people from the local grassroots would ask, who is this? Hence: foundation-hatched black communitarian voice; an astroturf.

Perhaps that wasn’t what Obama did. (Again: I might be misremembering and this quote is from 1996 so there are a lot of [dead] links around.) Assertive people just showing up and claiming to be the voice of X without having done any work is certainly a kind of grift.

But it’s not like any of this would make a difference to you anyway. Because when you indirectly make claims like “Trump is the first grifter president” then what a “grift” is to one person apparently is just “savvy and politically astute” to the people you find respectable. (I’m alluding here to the viewpoint that politician is the most dishonorable kind of profession that wears a suite.)

> but it seems ahistorical

Again, a quote from 1996. It was printed and all that so apparently the historicity seems fine enough (that it happened).

A lot of Norway isn’t amazingly cold compared to the interior US. Wikipedia tells me that the January mean temperatures in Chicago and Oslo are pretty similar. (Pretty confusing to read though because they each prioritize Fahrenheit and Celsius in opposite ways.)

What you would typically worry about here—unless you live in one of the frigid parts—is distance and if you have to drive over a mountain.

Obsidian is that thing in the back of my mind which is Markdown+Synch. Service.

I’ve never really gotten into synch. since I tend to monocompute a lot.

I write things in Org Mode. Not a power user of that thing, just the markup I use. I don’t use links in Org but I would like to. I sometimes make very informal and tedious links. So that would be a welcome feature.

> Obsidian’s choice to work with plain text files make it future-proof

Future-proof yes. It is. But as a customer this doesn’t sound that exciting. A company could offer to print all my data and mail it to me when I terminate the plan. That’s also future-proof.

Ditto with

> Obsidian allows structure to grow organically

I haven’t read the links but 95% of the time this means “because there isn’t any structure (YOLO)”. Yeah okay I am free as a bird, cool. But I can’t make a decades-spanning personal wiki based on completely unstructured data and links alone.

All in all: most MD tools kind of fade into the background for me. People want all kinds of bells and whistles with that semi-language like a dedicated editor so that they can write headers and unordered bullet lists with a preview. Overall the marketplace feels excessive.

More like there are two modes: no Sun or sunlight directly in your eyes.

Simple is the antonym of complex, and complex means that a lot of things are tangled—in principle it can be investigated in objective ways.

Gmail will helpfully underline a third of my words as being wrong.

Seems like we are in violent agreement.

> In Chicago, for instance, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program — the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics, as in Haiti and wherever else the International Monetary Fund has sway.

https://solidarity-us.org/pdfs/cadreschool/reed3.pdf

> But when the people doing that fighting can put an honest and democratic face to it, they will cause mid-level folks to behave better and oppositely, when the fighting gets out-of-hand, those on lower levels with aspirations start thinking they can use "bad" behaviors to attain them.

Yeah! Like when pre-Trump the norm was that all powerful and well-known people were magnanimous, self-sacrificing, and good people that the “mid-level” and below looked up to. But after Trump (grunts) that just changed on a dime.

Except the opposite of that.

I’ve always wanted to become an honorary American.

Thanks I guffawed.

Think of it more in terms of military power + trigger happiness and less in terms of ideology (good guys and bad guys). Then it might become clearer to you.

> I know it's not a common topic of conversation for Americans, but the world hates us now. We're the number one threat to peace and stability since 2003, and only getting worse. Yes, I am ashamed of us. We had so much potential.

Okay maybe calm down with the Saint/Devil complex. (I’m not an American.) The way a European might have perceived America in the 90’s would have been through Hollywood. And the same person in 2005– would have perceived America through fast and ubiquitous Internet. (Thanks American State Research?)

The perception moved from pure fiction to meme-filtered, sensationalized reality. So even if America itself hadn’t changed in that time (but I guess it did) the outsider perception of it would still have changed.

> Generally speaking if someone behaves badly in public and is not punished, it creates a great incentive for millions of others to do the same thing.

Oh give me a break. People like Trump and Clinton are the creme de la creme of deranged narcissistic sociopaths—part of the reason why they have gotten “so far”. Yet you are worrying about relatively harmless average Joes and Janes looking up to these people? Very weird priorities considering that people like Trump just have very few or no built-in stops. Unlike most people. A normal person can’t just live like a sociopath and also be able to sleep at night.

You see these people ruining everything and you think to yourself: you know the problem here is that hypothetically someone might be inspired to steal my television if I leave the door unlocked.

Is this your unironic stance?

> The third group is overwhelmingly full of people with good social skills, and skilled professionals are almost always personable too.

All of my fifty closest underlings laugh at my jokes. What more social proof do I need?

Yeah I love how you can interrogate things like that.

Meanwhile, in GUI land: here’s fifteen screenshots carefully manually highlighted which shows you how to change your language to Turkish.

Regular GUI apps are just too rigid.

I could take an existing language and throw in a lot of rules that would make compilation marginally faster:

1. No variable names etc. with a length of more than 8

2. The order of functions matter now; don’t forward-reference anything

3. You can only nest scopes 16 times, max

Would this make the language simpler for me in a way that I would care about?

> And then there comes Rust in all its glory with "my string constant".to_string() awkwardness

Would you feel better if it was `"my string constant".to_owned_string()`?

Emacs has something similar in which-key.

Of course GUI apps have had pop-downs from the File-Edit-View-... row [since forever?] so that things like Alt+F will show contextual actions. But at least in the Emacs community people get blown away when someone makes such a basic addition.

Yeah, I get your point. However I also think [see more]