Maybe "aletheiacline?"
34 karma · joined March 29, 2020
> This book has been hugely influential and is a fun read that can be digested in one sitting.
Wow. The PDF is over 700 pages. That seems fairly impressive for single-sitting digestion.
I have never seen terms like domain and attribute used as if they were plurals (the way "data" is), but even were that correct, "a domain have" would be contradictory, so I think it is just a linguistic quirk of the writer.
I would say that of all forms of procrastinating writing that novel, writing novel-writing software is most sublime. That, or maybe taking a "research trip" to Tibet or something.
I consequently once spent quite some time trying to get it working under Cygwin so I could use it at work, but never got past problems with Cygwin group names that have spaces in them. It was too complex for me to fix....
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/05/08/blast-from...
I worked not that long ago in a Goodwill program that did electronics processing and was finally shut down because it never came close to breaking even. We were refurbishing the best tiny percent of the laptops and such we got and selling them on Ebay; but most of what we got was junk and we had people on an assembly line pulling things apart (chips, RAM, raw metal, etc. etc.) to be sold to recycling operations. We were R2 certified, which is great for the environment, but added enormous bureaucratic and labor overhead. We couldn't just throw out all the batteries and toxic stuff, we had to pay to get it disposed of properly. Finally they shut it down and went to sending everything to Dell Reconnect, which, as far as I can tell, is Dell's way of keeping people from buying used computers.
In any case, it is a shame you can't buy computers there any longer. Back in the late 90s I bought an AT&T 16 bit Unix workstation that I understand was intended to be AT&T's answer to the IBM PC. It was a really cool thing, but way too big an heavy to move across states with, so I eventually gave it -- to Goodwill, I think.
I hadn't thought about Vavilov and all that in years. It happens that my grandmother worked for him briefly in the early 30s. She and her husband decided communism was a good idea and shipped out to Russia from their home (in Philadelphia) and within a year or so concluded that communism was insane. There was (I was told) a certain amount of touch-and-go securing a boat ride for the two of them back to somewhere in Scandinavia and thence back to the US. They both remained staunch anti-communists for the rest of their lives.
Not a lot of point telling all that, I guess, but it is interesting to think that I grew up in a household where Lysenko and the ills he caused were a commonplace. Funny to see it on Hacker News.
And then the thought that comes up, of course, is, don't copy or verify data that way. Automate it.
I used to use three huge monitors at work, but since working at home during Covid I've found that I not only like typing on my HP laptop's built-in keyboard better than on my full-sized mechanical keyboard, but I mostly prefer just using the laptop's display to using multiple displays, and for exactly the reason you gave -- I'm better off automating things and serializing work from the command line. I've made aliases for opening the web sites I need from the command line and usually just kill them when I'm done with them, instead of using tabs. It really does have a kind of head-clearing effect.
But the killer app for me with web browsers is link hints, like in several browser extensions (e.g. vrome, tridactyl) and in browsers like qutebrowser. It takes a little getting used to at first to use efficiently, but I hate not having it when I use Lynx or w3m.
Slightly apropos, and for what it's worth, I've noticed that 99% of my browsing seems to be or start from maybe 20 or so web sites. I've started creating shell aliases to open those sites and there is no reason not to use the best browser for the site for each one. It works well with a philosophy like seems to be the one behind the surf browser, where you open each thing in its own window and use your window manager to deal with it, instead of using tabs.