metaxy2

I don't know if there's a name for this genre of photography (it's not exactly "abstract" since clearly things are being represented), but another example is the cover of Modest Mouse's Good News for People Who Love Bad News [0], which looks like a digital drawing or composite but was physically built and photographed by bandleader Isaac Brock.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_News_for_People_Who_Love_...

To flesh this out, the root notes of C and A minor are not that close in the circle of fifths, but the chords sound similar because they share 2 notes (C is spelled C, E, G, and A minor is spelled A, C, E). A common device in major keys is to take a part played over the "1" chord (C in this case) and play it again, or some close variation, over the chord 2 steps down (A minor in this case) to get a "kind of the same, but sadder" version of the same part.

Hey, the original Myst was made in HyperCard!

Well, in principle you could have the node objects be created with an object literal in an outside builder function, and the manipulation also be done by outside functions. That's how it's done in languages without OOP. The question is how far are you willing to go to avoid doing anything that looks like OOP.

They're using objects, including arrays [1], so I think they would have been more precise to say that they're using objects and arrays as simple data structures rather than using OO features like inheritance and mutation.

[1] https://github.com/tonaljs/tonal/blob/main/packages/chord/in...

Americans (and I'd imagine the British) have "eh?" too, it's just not as common ("not bad, eh?"). Among Americans I feel like I've seen it more in casual written online conversation than in speech.

I wonder if "ent" evolved from "innit" under British colonization (or they both evolved from a common ancestor in British English).

A slight variation of that is even in colloquial English, with "no." As in "we should probably get going, no?"

Maybe "endangerment" is more fair, given that it's still massively popular compared to, say, the interrobang.

Also note that two of the three authors cited are known for their bare-bones, economical prose styles; not exactly a cross-section of the literary world. (Poe is debatable--he was probably economical for a 19th century romantic, but not in absolute terms.)

Man, McCarthy's vendetta against semicolons makes sense in his hard-bitten Western prose, but does it really make sense to have zero semicolons in these nonfiction books? When used properly, semicolons reveal a layer of meaning that occurs in natural speech: when you have two sentences that are grammatically separate sentences but have a link in meaning or make a larger point together.

That said, I can't say I would turn down a free copyediting job by Cormac McCarthy even if I had to drop all my semicolons in exchange.

I don't think Oxide is trying to say no one's done this before, more that they're the best and most comprehensive offering to buy an onsite setup for this fully set up from a third party.

Right or wrong, I think the notion of "the cloud" that Oxide is selling is the "elastic" part--the ability to request resources by quantity instead of having to think about the exact servers responsible for serving your request. So physical servers become an implementation detail rather than a developer concern. That's a concept that can apply to how you provision two on-site servers (or even one, really) as much as a whole multi-data-center cloud computing service.

> In my experience, it is rare for a network to correctly generate Time Exceeded messages for both IPv4 and IPv6.

Doesn't that make it more one of those situations where the non-documented behavior has become the de facto standard, rather than "wrong" exactly? (I guess it depends on whether that decision is being made consciously by the implementors or just for lack of knowledge of the standards.)

Chrome is also very big on macOS even though it's not preinstalled, although yeah, that also has to do with the marketing. It seems hard to find good stats on this but it's definitely in the web developer zeitgeist. On mobile, though, people do pretty much just use whatever comes installed.

Practically no one would ever be talking about Australian Rules Football (outside of the handful of countries where that's popular, of course), although presumably outside of the US they'd often be talking about soccer.

It really highlights the amazing security level of one time pads, that they can be comfortably doing secret announcements on a public radio channel with provably perfect security. (Assuming an adequate PRNG--for such small messages they could easily be using a hardware PRNG; I wonder.) Only issue is that you have to have all of your recipients keep track (and not leak) a pad that is at least as long as the data you intend to send.

I actually did make a quick search to see if I was blowing hot air, and found this blog post that shows a bunch of benchmarks over time with a fairly typical Raku/Perl flavored text processing task, and it was taking 0.23s for the July 2022 release vs. 0.59s in Jan 2016 [1].

So that's a pretty impressive improvement--3x over 6 years--but I remember Raku being numbers like 4x or 5x slower than Python on benchmarks from the last few years, so by my very sloppy math it's still got to speed up by at least 2x or 3x to go to match Python.

It's also possible that there has been a ton of speedup in the last year-and-a-half since that benchmark, or it's not representative, but that's where I got the idea from.

[1] https://blogs.perl.org/users/sylvain_colinet/2023/01/benchma...

Raku has metaprogramming and an almost unprecedented amount of syntax... and an insanely slow implementation. Although they're chipping away at the speed thing.

I remember it taking a few years between DHTML becoming a buzzword and XHR becoming popular. XHR was slept on for a while even though it was available in all major browsers by the early 2000's. Back when we were calling things "DHTML," updates originating from the server typically would happen by refreshing the whole page, or sometimes an IFRAME if you wanted to get fancy [1]. Once XHR finally started to get popular is when people started talking about "Web 2.0" in the mid 2000s.

I heard that someone did a talk on why it took so long for the Web 2.0 phenomenon to happen even though the technologies were available for several years before. Can't remember who.

A little known fact is that even streaming updates (e.g. for live chat) were actually not that hard to implement on the front end going back to the original days of XHR, via "long polling" (basically starting a new XHR request that you held open until the next piece of info comes in) though it took until well into the Web 2.0 era for that to be common. The problem was actually on the server side; to cope with long polling, the server would have to keep a long-running thread (and in the case of CGI, a whole process!) for each of those open requests and the servers would get overloaded. Nowadays of course servers have much better hardware, and we have technologies like nginx that can handle huge amounts of connections in one thread.

In principle you could build almost everything in the modern day front page of Facebook or Google results page with the tools we had in 2001, front-end wise, but the servers couldn't handle long polling for the streaming updated needed for things like the Facebook chat. Also the pages are so complex that it would be easy to get yourself tied in knots without modern conveniences like CSS frameworks (or even resets!)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_HTML

I think the joke about it being "the only way to vertically center elements" is just referring to the fact that it's still kind of hard to do vertical centering and there's still no definitive, easy solution after 27 years of CSS. (It's now doable with Flexbox or CSS Grid as well as more obscure hacks, but it's still more fiddly than it should be.) Could be wrong, though.

Edit: I think thejohnconway has the answer [1]: the post was written before the Flexbox stuff for vertical centering was widely supported.

There were still less nasty options than 1x1 GIFs available, like "display: table-cell", so it's still very likely a joke.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39127936

It's almost certainly a joke but not obvious exactly what the joke is. What it actually stood for (in case you don't know) is "Dynamic HTML." My guess is that he's drawing a parallel with "distributed" as a modern day buzzword that's used in so many ways it's almost meaningless, but attracts attention and money almost automatically (other modern-day buzzwords like this include "blockchain," although that's fading, and "AI").

Incidentally, nowadays we never refer to DHTML because probably over 99.9% of pages use at least some JavaScript and CSS, so it's redundant to even mention them; you just say "front-end development."

> > Japan reactivating nuclear reactors:

> Japan invested on nuclear then nowadays don't want it anymore but now needs energy. One has to see them canceling their planned phase-out, as "in March 2021, only 11 percent of Japanese said they wanted that nuclear energy generation be discontinued immediately. Another 49 percent was asking for a gradual exit from nuclear energy" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Japan#Post-Fu... )

Wow. To have even ~40% of the population not opposing nuclear after a national trauma like Fukushima, shows their sophistication as a people.

I'm not surprised if there's no link between violent games and violence in real life. But as a subtler concern, I do wonder if (some) violent games help to cultivate a sense of general nihilism and lack of value. I work with teens and maybe 15% of them have this sense of "blankness" in the spot where a sense of value/meaning/morality should be. (Not even in the classic 90's sense of "teen apathy" -- more like they've never even been notified that anything can mean anything.)

I do wonder if spending 40% of your waking hours playing simulators where you dice people up for no good reason, might contribute a little to that attitude. Especially the kids that already aren't being socialized particularly well (abusive parents that barely talk to them, etc.)

Hell, I'd even be alright if it were games that have loads of violence but with a sense of purpose (e.g., the Half-Life series, or many Bethesda games). The truly aimless violence is what kinda worries me.

Just as important as anything we can do to contribute on the tech side is how we can take advantage of the privileges this line of work offers in terms of working style. Programming is far more suited to remote work than most fields. Advocate at your company for them to allow remote work! If you want to bring your tech skills into it, develop Slack bots, bookmarklets, bespoke web apps or whatever else it takes to make it easier for your company to work remote.

I'm sorry that I can't directly help you (although I have IBS and a couple of other chronic diseases, so I can sympathize). But it makes me wonder if there's an opportunity for a startup, or even just a nonprofit online community, here. The targeted community being people with rare diseases in countries that are too small (or don't have the communications infrastructure) to offer good support. There's an especially big opportunity to do good in situations like this, where the disease is incredibly common overall, but apparently rare where the OP lives, so there is tons of information online but probably very little is written in Lithuanian or targeted to local needs.

Or maybe there's stuff like that out there already that we'll be able to share with gretar, in which case, even better!

Do we know if exiting vim is solvable in all cases, or would that require some deeper result like solving P = NP?

> Every podcaster is going to claim that no, it's really what they think, what a marvelous coincidence. It's amazing what someone will "think" when their paycheque relies upon it.

I think there's a lot of truth to this, but there are also plenty of podcasters who will literally try all the products themselves (or have some staff do so) and if the thing is no good, pick a different sponsor. The biggest shows are often in a position to do this without any real sacrifice, other than the time investment in testing: they have loads of sponsors knocking at their door that are all offering similar (large) amounts of money, so they're free to pick the one they honestly like.

Here, I feel like the gray area is that they're unlikely to have tried the alternatives to the product. So they'll give a ringing endorsement of Squarespace or Mailchimp or Purple mattresses, but all that shows is that it's probably decent stuff, not the actual highest-quality or best-price option for the listener.

Overall, though, I feel like it's practically a miracle that we have an online media industry that is free of the totally maxed-out creepiness of website advertising (tracking across media, profiling down to the individual level, etc.) And it's even making money. Just listen with a healthy skepticism about the ads. I think most people do.

Well, I did have specific reasons for those examples (besides comedy value). Weed dealer tends to bring sketchy and dangerous people to the property. (If you don't buy that, try "heroin dealer" instead.) And I also stipulated that they lied about it. These are all things that happen all the time.

And then as far as "bass player," that's just a proxy for low income; I also picked a hyper-niche genre that even most metal listeners don't enjoy. If he can prove income via sending copies of contracts with music venues or something, more power to him.

For good or bad, this all stuff that could plausibly be used as an accurate source of information about someone's ability to pay and to not be a problem to the other tenants--especially the lying part.

Conversely, new bosses and landlords who want to avoid choosing someone who is objectively a bad choice for everyone else involved (they say they're a full-time carpenter but they're really a weed dealer/bassist in a progressive death metal band, etc.).

Not saying this is a net positive for society by any means, but just another example of a potentially legitimate use for doing online research about someone.

Maybe I just have an unusual learning style, or haven't gotten the right resources, but I've found traditional, semantic CSS to have a brutal learning curve. When you're trying to build complex apps, you're constantly rearranging your taxonomy of classes to break down the page into an appropriate logical hierarchy. I appreciate that in principle this is a good thing to do, and once you get good at it there is less rewriting, but when you're trying to learn all of the other aspects of this craft at the same time, it can be a draining experience.

And I mean this on the scale of years, not just the 6-12 month "just getting the basics" stage of learning to be a dev.

If we still had the position of "front end developer" in the old sense of writing HTML, CSS, and maybe some light JS, that's someone who could dedicate their resources to mastering semantic CSS. Sometimes I wish there was still a job like that, but for whatever historical reasons, at most companies what we have is a combined role called "front end developer" that involves fairly heavy duty development with client side frameworks like React, but also all of the HTML and CSS stuff. And asking these folks to get good at the semantic side of CSS at the same time as learning all the rest, is asking a lot. Maybe worth it, but it's no joke.