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I do this on my personal site and it seems to Just Work. I specify a max-width for my content, specify font sizes in em values, and it looks fine on every browser I've ever tried, even a shitty Chinese cellphone (not smartphone).

I was pretty shocked that they're asking $18k for a workstation and hoping to get $3.7 million total. I was rather excited for it but this project is stillborn in my opinion. I may end up having work order one of IBM's basic dual-Power8 systems, which are only $6k: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/s821lc/index.ht...

I can only assume that when the article was written in 2000, Plan 9 was getting some press in the venues he was following, so writing an article purporting to be about Plan 9 (but not really about Plan 9 at all) seemed sensible.

> Most of these seem possible (the tty structure already has stubs for window size), except maybe for the user-mode filesystems

And thus Linus dug a hole out of which Linux has only recently begun to clamber.

It's just the stereotype of the guy who got a black belt from some bullshido trainer: "Oh, I can't fight you, I'm too dangerous, my killer instincts and ninja training means I'd just rip your throat out immediately."

Hahaha, "my hands are registered as deadly weapons"

Only tangentially related, while I don't like having to wake up at 4, being out and about in town at 4 a.m. is a pretty enjoyable experience, especially on say a Sunday morning. I love driving through foggy streets as dawn is just starting to break, and the only other people around are gas station attendants and the occasional extra-early rising farmer.

> One thinks of Homeowner Associations and the way they place fines and pseudo-legal orders on people, a concept which is utterly anathema to the english. The two cultures have very different ideas of privacy.

Yes, the English idea of privacy is that you, the commoner, should leave well enough alone while the State surveils you.

> Like most engineers and other creatives

Free yourself of culturally-assigned norms ("engineers and creative people work best at midnight, with lots of coffee") and consider a wider breadth of experience.

The most productive and effective person I know, a computer engineer, typically starts working before I'm even awake. The premise of the article is that 4 a.m. is both outside most of society's normal waking period AND it's immediately after you've had a solid night's sleep, while 12-2 isn't really such an unusual time to be awake and, for most people, it comes at the end of the day.

As someone who woke up at 5 a.m. for many summers so I could start work on the farm before dawn, I know that you can definitely accomplish a lot of work before most people even roll into the office, but I also know that sleeping in is incredibly satisfying :)

Yep, same. I got a Discover card when I went off to my first internship at 19. I kept that card, and only that card, until I was about 27, when I finally added a Visa for Southwest points.

Paying off every single bill on-time and in full (except for one month when I'd just moved cross-country and hadn't got my first paycheck yet) meant that I received nothing but benefits from the credit card, and ended up with a credit score over 800 when I finally decided to buy a house this year.

As a student, the Discover card was great because there were no yearly fees (what student wants to spend $100/year on that?) and it gave 1% cash-back, which was a nice little bonus a couple times a year that I could apply directly to the current bill.

I know quite a few people who refuse to get a credit card, because they apparently think they'll just be unable to control themselves and rack up $10,000 in debt the first month. I guess the voices in their heads tell them to spend. They tend to be a little surprised when they try to get a home loan and realize that, sans credit history, they have no chance.

He didn't create it, he just more or less appointed himself maintainer after 1990-ish.

You may be right, maybe I've just only looked at Scheme lately and thought "?" had migrated to Common Lisp.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/cltl/clm/node188.html seems to indicate that you could use ? in a common lisp function name, though.

> When I knew him during the 80's, he would go on and on ad nauseum about his beloved "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle NetNews Reader" and how so much better than every other netnews reader. But he never collaborated with anyone, and he never released it under any license. Much more Bizarre than Cathedral.

The world is full of such things, and was much more so back in the 90s and early 2000s. People brag about how great their tool is, but refuse to share it. I've never been sure if they're exaggerating the features, or if they're insecure about criticism on their magnum opus, or if they just have such a weird and idiosyncratic evolved setup that they cannot effectively package the software for others to use.

Edit: I mean, it's not like ESR had qualms about releasing fetchmail, which has always been a buggy pain in the ass and far less impressive than he makes it sound.

In my opinion, the Jargon File is a fun look back at historical hacker lifestyles, but it's also a microcosm of a very few schools in the 60s and 70s. Teenagers have a bad habit of reading the Jargon File and thinking that's how they MUST behave to be a hacker--I did it, to my embarrassment, and a trip to Defcon or most any freshman CS course will find others doing the same.

You don't have to start saying "grok" to be a hacker, or adopt the idiotic "-p convention" which doesn't even really exist in Lisp any more.

Both the Hacker Manifesto and to a lesser extent the Jargon File also tend to perpetrate an "us vs. them" ("freaks vs. squares", "hackers vs. normies") mindset that's pretty outdated these days. You know the only people who give a shit about categories like "geeks and jocks" any more? The ones who are so tied up in their manufactured geek identity that they don't realize the jocks are also learning Python after football practice these days.

He mentions adding line detection for tables, which should be a good start for sheet music.

Yeah, I can see how a lot of people would want the email obfuscation but I don't--especially as I was polishing off a blog post about how ideologically pure my website is, with no javascript or external resources!

I got rid of GA because Cloudflare provides some analytics and that's enough for me.

Congratulations on not using any Javascript on the front page, except for what looks like the same email-obfuscating JS that Cloudflare injected on my site until I disabled that. In my mind, external JS is one of the worst things you can do to a website, and even self-hosted JS is bad if it's affecting layout/behavior much: people without JS enabled get a crap experience.

Your site looks great!

The Kinesis Advantage has really helped me, along with a Kensington Expert Mouse (which is actually a trackball). I used to get pains all the way up my right arm and through both wrists, but now worst case is a slightly tired hand.

Specifically, the wrong politics.

Well, the post's been flagged--into the memory hole with it!

I thought you'd end up "dead" (hellbanned) if you get consistently voted down to negative scores. I don't know a lot about actual mechanisms of how karma and voting work on this site, though, so if I'm wrong about that I apologize and retract the "hellbanned" part of my earlier comment.

I think, rather, that HN has a dominant point of view which tolerates small differences but otherwise will downvote and [EDIT: hellban doesn't work like I thought] anyone who isn't circumspect enough in voicing their different opinions. I definitely couch a lot of my comments in sarcasm or careful disclaimers to try and avoid getting downvoted, as I've seen what can happen if you say The Wrong Opinion too plainly.

The shows with the constant sound effects also usually have what seems like a relatively new format: they try to make it sound like the hosts (it's always two hosts) are a couple of friends, interested laymen, having a talk at their house about the topic. So they stop to interject ("right?!" "No!"), they talk over each other but only occasionally so as not to annoy the listener, they basically feel like your two friends who've read the same Wikipedia page and are discussing it at a party.

And it's during this "conversation" that they play the sound clips:

HOST 1: "So there's this interesting thing they've just discovered, Host 2"

HOST 2: "What's that?"

HOST 1: "Scientists have discovered that when you eat..."

chomping and chewing noises

HOST 1: "... you're actually oppressing black people."

prison cell door slams

HOST 2: "What, seriously?"

Then they move to another state, and drive up the housing markets, and vote for all the same stuff that made California untenable, and wonder why the natives are hostile.

> had to use vi with JKL; instead of the arrow keys. It made me want to stab something.

I can see how this would be frustrating, given that the vi movement keys are in fact HJKL

Active Worlds?

High Fidelity is supposed to be that open replacement: https://highfidelity.io/

The problem I've run into is that it runs worse on my brand-new computer than Second Life ever did, and that's even on the mostly-empty demo areas they have.

Yeah, I was also somewhere around 0.5-0.6 after a minute or so, then got the idea to try truly random numbers

  dd if=/dev/urandom count=1024 bs=1 | xxd -b

Then I hit "d" for 1, "f" for 0 as I read through the bytes of output. It stuck around 0.5 the whole way, which is what I expected.

cat-v is full of assholes, yes, and most of the Plan 9 community retains what I call "a sad devotion to an ancient religion"--anything written at Bell Labs is holy writ, anything written outside is suspect and probably tainted, must purge the heretics.

However, most of your objections down-thread are "People are used to X/Y/Z, it is literally impossible to change them now."