mvaliente2001

Gerrymandering is so pointless. The political party in government changes the map to win elections, prolonging its reign. But it eventually loses, and the new party uses gerrymandering to prolong its stay in power... In the long term the result is the same. If only political parties understood.

One possible solution would be to agree in objective reproducible rules on when and how draw new lines in the map, but again, that would require common sense from the political parties.

> History [..] is full of geniuses who came up with a revolutionary idea largely on their own [...] (Aristotle, Newton, Darwin, Einstein to name the most obvious examples).

This line has almost the opposite effect than intended in me. Yes, Newton and Darwin were geniuses that came with revolutionary ideas, but on the other hand, for calculus and evolution it seems to have been their time. Leibniz and Alfred Russel Wallace came to the same ideas around the same time.

Sometimes you need to embed an expression interpreter in your application, for example to allow users to define them at runtime. In cases like that one, having a library with a well defined specification could save a lot of time.

"The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain: A Course in Enhancing Creativity and Artistic Confidence" by Betty Edwars.

She taught drawing classes and discovered that one reason why people is bad at drawing is that they symbolize what they see before drawing it. For example, when we see a face, we tend to focus about the eyes and mouth and ignore other features like the front. That contributes to a distorted representation that is reflected in the drawing.

She devised a series of exercises to avoid that problem. For example, try to draw a picture upside down, or try to draw an object shape using negative space (you focus on the shapes outside the object).

PS: I found that book in The Last Psychiatrist blog: https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/10/how_to_draw_not_abou...

This article is both interesting and frustrating. On one hand, it makes a good job justifying the existence of financial instruments. On the other hand, it seems to have a huge blind spot about how the actors (mis)use them, the consequences it carries and _who should pay for them_.

That even if the perceived duration of a year depends on the number of years lived (1/x), the sum of all perceived durations is unbound.

Top greatest writer who never won a Nobel prize: Jorge Luis Borges.

Maybe other terms are better at describing interfaces, like "discoverable" or "consistent".

One nice thing of the first WIMP apps was its discoverability. If you wanted to learn how to use your word processor, you clicked in the icons and navigate the menus. Good apps had related actions in the same menus.

Another trick, create a `help` target:

    help:                      ## Show this help
        @fgrep -h "##" $(MAKEFILE_LIST) | fgrep -v fgrep | sed -e 's/\\$$//' | sed -e 's/##//'
    
    foo:         ## foo help
        # make help will print the names of the targets with 
        # the help message following ##

I don't remember the source, I think I saw it in a stackoverflow question.

Yes, it's hard in both sides. I'm one of those people who got good grades in high school physics (I was able to solve problems), and still thought that satellites were kept in orbit because "there's not gravity" (or is too small). And I was genuinely interested in learning.

Part of the problem is the lack of time. Both teachers and students need to cover all the topics in one semester/year, and it takes time to assimilate and integrate the knowledge. Add to that that as student, you don't know what's important, even when you're told so, if you're told at all. That's why we can hold contradictory models in our minds. They're good enough to solve some problems, but conceptually wrong.

I think that a possible solution would be to keep the grades open. You get a B in physics-101, since you got a flawed model in your mind, you got to physics-201 where new experiences show the problems in your model and force you to correct it, and now you prove you achieved a knowledge that deserves an A.

I know, that proposal it's impractical, and time consuming, but I think that's how most of us really learn.

That reminds me a short fictional story by Jorge Luis Borges (if you excuse the quasi non-sequitur): The Lottery in Babylon. It describes how the lottery became so popular in Babylon that they began not just to play for money, but all kind of prizes, and then not only prizes but punishments. Finally, they decided that people didn't even need to buy a ticket. Everybody was implicitly part of the game, where good or bad things could be made to happen to you just by random chance... At the end of the day, The Lottery in Babylon became indistinguishable from normal life.

In my experience, when we talk about software (hardware issues are always a thing on less used systems) Linux is the less black-box of these three OSes. If you have a non trivial problem with Windows or OSX OSes or apps, you're out of luck. With Linux, you have the tools to reach the root causes. Or at least, that used to be the case. New apps in Linux (particularly in Ubuntu) want to be as "friendly" as Windows or OSX, so they hide how things works, and put layer over layer of abstraction to the point where nothing is obvious anymore.

Thank you very much for sharing it! This paper is not only poignant, but surprisingly readable.

That's wonderful! It's good to know that there's a tested DBMS under the hood.

SmallTalk could have been used by Sun instead of Java.

I understand your point about going back to the command line in case of something going wrong. But for me that's a plus. Other systems are, to me, black boxes. If something goes wrong with them, there's less that you can do to fix them.

Now, I have a love-hate relationship with Ubuntu. Things kind of work, but they feel the pathological need of changing most of their tools each other version. The sad thing is that those changes don't provide any improvements, it's just the same but different.

I guess (hope) they changed the details. It's not uncommon in these cases to change the irrelevant details to protect the identities. I won't be surprised it her children are not 12-year-old or twins.

I won't comment about the merits of AMP, just something that bugged me about the first paragraph. The author questions if a project is open source due to their authors and main contributors, which seems very odd. A license is a license is a license, don't confuse it with external issues.

that's an option in Spanish.

I would swear that they had years doing this. After using gmail or android for five minutes, I want to throw the devices out of the window.

IMO the advantage of small functions is that they act as a form of documentation. In the given example (short main) I can see that it loads some configuration without having to worry about how it does it. With the long main, I'm forced to see the details.

Also, if we're talking about OOP, small methods are better. With small methods it's easier to change behavior by subclassing. In several occasions, I've been forced to make a subclass with a copy of a big method with only one line changed.

It's a Prototype Oriented Language, a language where the inheritance chains follows objects. Although, in all fairness, Object Oriented programming should be called Class Oriented, and Prototype Oriented should be called OOP.

In my case, my problem is that I like clean languages, languages whose mental model I can keep in my mind. I found "== is broken, use === instead" a terrible way of designing a language. It should have been "== is broken, let's fix it today so tomorrow will be better for everybody."

I can program in JS, and sometimes I even enjoy it. I had a friend who liked snakes and had several as pets, even some poisonous. I prefer kittens.

I agree, this post is super-b, but it also shows why JS is the mess everybody knows it is. When you use a function as a constructor, the function creates an object and assigns as its __proto__ the value of the function's 'prototype', which is an object with the class' methods and that has an attribute 'constructor' that points back to the constructor function... and all that... for what? What purpose has this over-complex dance of references? Before trying to justify the current status quo, let's ask ourselves "could it be done easily?"

The answer is a resounding yes. Javascript is a prototype oriented language (nothing wrong with that) who is ashamed of being prototype oriented and wanted to look object (class) oriented, and that's a shame.

And of course, we have ECMA, a committee whose motto is "let's not change any past error no matter how flagrant it is, let's add just another layer of painting over it". That's why we have to live with hoisting and var/let, and crazy type conversions that are an affront to every living neuron in the universe, and typeof which return useless values, and yes, two comparison operators because the first one was worse than wrong.

HP48(S(X)) also came with two excellent manuals with hundreds of pages of documentation. My only regret is that when I was in college, I could have written better programs. I tended to write huge functions with a deep stack, hard to understand, debug and modify. Had I know what I know now, I would have written dozen of small function and relying more in lambdas... And I didn't know I can use named arguments.

I've always think that "My Big Fat Greek Weeding" was close to that concept. Instead of a big conflict that is resolved at the end, we have small conflicts that are resolved almost immediately after being presented.

Toula feels ugly, ignorant and trapped in an uninterested job. She begins to study, changes her clothes and make up, changes job. She still remembers that she was rejected by the other girls when she was a child, but now in college, she tries again and is accepted. She likes a man, he likes her back. Her father doesn't accept a "xenos", but he tolerates him. He's not catholic orthodox, he gets baptized. And the last part of the movie lacks any conflict, and nevertheless, we're thrilled to see the happy ending materialize because we got to like the main characters.

The problem with that point of view is that you can find a conflict everywhere if you try hard. For a definition, like "conflict", to be useful it must be clearly and distinct. Cinematographic conflict is a problem the characters are confronted with.

Shell and command line tools: Linux users can be more productive in Windows now. The command line interface is very confortable for do a lot of things. If you need to do batch work (rename a lot of files, onvert some images, add metadata to your mp3 collection), you can do it now in the console. Before this, the alternative in windows was to use a sub-par shell, or install several graphical application and expend your evening clicking here and there.

Applications: Now you can install and configure applications like apache, postquesql, etc. on windows in the same way you do in linux/other unix platforms.

Strategically, this is a big win for Microsoft. Now they can go to their clients that are moving or thinking about moving to Linux and tell them "There's no need to migrate, just install your apps in Windows."

Have you thought on writing an article about it? It'll be very interesting to read.