patrickg

Several people here mention Sublime Text 2. I can't see code folding (which I really like in TM).

I have paid for TM1 before I got the feeling that it is unmaintained. But I still use TM 1 for 90% of my daily writing work (mostly source code and TeX documents) - I still love it.

I don't agree with "but it barely runs under Lion" - I use it daily for several hours and it almost never crashes.

I once bought a printed Shoes manual from Lulu.com and it is the absolute best manual (from a 'I love to read this book' point of view). Extremely impressive. Guess it is already worth a few bucks today ;-)

4) Legislative issues. For example Germany (I'd bet) would not accept bitcoins in one's tax form ("I have to pay 345.67 bit coins of taxes to the state"). And if you have income in a non approved currency, you get into some trouble.

Someone has made a comment on HN before like this: if the title of a submission is a question, the answer is most likely 'no'.

I experiment with this a lot, my fonts folder is full of fixed width fonts. But I somehow always go back to Monaco (11pt) white on black background. This is using TextMate, non anti-alias. (Example: http://tinypic.com/r/2hnayq8/7 ) Perhaps TextMate is too limited in this respect (it doesn't handle proportional fonts well).

How is the "G8 internet" related to the internet governance forum? Why fighting on so many frontiers?

That retirement you mention is only partly true (unless there is a misunderstanding). It all depends how many years you have paid into the fund. For a women with lots of breaks due to kids or for self employed people who have not opted in paying into the fund, this is getting lower and lower.

Jesus, the 90° rotated "8" that should be an infinity sign is ugly as hell.

Edit: wording

I'd love to find a nice overview of Berlin networking groups. Can you recommend one? I've just entered Berlin as a (not that young anymore) startup.

Just done a bit of research (google), it seems to be more complicated then an easy yes/no (in Germany). Something to do with if the source is obviously illegal, then the download is also illegal, otherwise it seems OK. But the copyright laws are getting more and more complicated....

I am not so sure if that applies in all countries. IIRC in central europe (at least in some states) the "bad thing" is copying, not downloading. But I am not a layer and I hope someone with more knowledge can correct me.

If you have enough money for the first days/weeks/months/years.

No, but earthquakes. And we are so clever to build nuclear plants on places where they are more likely to occur.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BClheim-K%C3%A4rlich_Nucle...

> About when I stopped paying attention to TeX and LaTeX many years ago (2002-ish?), there was some effort under way to rewrite all of TeX in Java. Did that go anywhere?

I'd say no. See http://extex.org/

Do you have an example PDF for that? For the average use, TeX is overkill (sometimes OK), but if you need the finest possible typography, TeX yields its power. And then the XSL-FO formatters are pretty fast disappointing.

You can do Lua scripting a the user level (\directlua{...}). But you have to know the Lua interface. What purpose is having Lua inside your document? Do some calculations? Yes, that's easy. Do complex algorithms for placing floats? Then you need to replace a lot of TeX/LaTeX code anyway and then I wouldn't speak of user level. What you can do easily from inside Lua: shuffle nodes (nodelists) around. Everything you see on a page is represented by a node. So you can reposition anything. That requires a lot of knowledge of the internal representation of nodes and the LuaTeX API, but once you grok it, it is much fun to do these things.

And no, Knuth is definitely not the only one using plain TeX. Yes, it is a niche.

LuaTeX has the same macro language as the other TeX engines (pdftex and it's ilk). The true power of LuaTeX comes into play when you use Lua scripting. I am not sure if ConTeXt has more advanced figure placement algorithms due to LuaTeX. LaTeX for sure has the same algorithms as before.

The problem is that you can change TeX's syntax during the run time. I am not sure if it is theoretically possible to create such a tool for TeX input. That is one of the reason why I use (except for approx 10 lines of TeX code) only Lua code in my software. These 10 lines will disappear once there is a tex.initialize() in LuaTeX.

LuaTeX can be used as a PDF writing library that has a "perfect" line breaking algorithm inside along with many other nice features. We use it as a base for our database publishing tool. Its absolutely reliable, has modern features (unicode, OTF) and can be programmed in a very decent language (Lua). You need to know TeX if you want to unleash all the power, but you don't need to program in TeX's macro language (which is fun but also a PITA).

I think that a new generation of TeX based applications will show up in the next 10 years.

Edit: some links:

http://luatex.org/ - official site

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LuaTeX - wikipedia

http://wiki.contextgarden.net/LuaTeX - LuaTeX is now also the base of ConTeXt, a LaTeX alternative

Has anyone experience with this setup: install your software in a git repository. That way you can say something like "version=1.23" on top of the control file (such as a sourcecode file for a scripting language) and the software system checks out that particular version which is on your hard drive. There are obvious drawbacks of the system as where to install the intermediate working directory, but there might be solutions for these problems.

That way updates may be much less hassle. If you have for example a python script on your server running doing important things, an update to python might break the script and could cause some trouble. But if you could say for example "uses python=x.y" and the system silently falls back to that version even if a newer version of pyhton is installed, the script is more likely to keep running even on upgrades.

We can find numerous examples where there are things (like the cameras you mention) that contradict the privacy regulations. But I hope that we don't get into a "well, it's all hopeless" mode. Thanks for the good pointer.

In 10,20 years people around the world may ask the europeans how they got such a rather high privacy standard. While I don't agree to all of the regulations, the tendency here is to make everything private by default and only disclose what is needed. We should be able do decide ourself what to disclose without having to install add-ons to block everything.

That said: I also use tracking, but anonymize as soon as possible. And: there are enough laws that contradict regulations like these (such as the goverments force the ISPs to store the communication data from the users).

Usually I don't like the "mee too" posts, they always appear childish to me. But this time I'd also "sign this petition".

So everyone who is not mainstream is subject to not being sane? What a strange hacker attitude...

Who is patrickb? Why should I change my name?

[edit: ok, I get it! :) ]

I know several people that are productive with that language without a psychiatrist.

Take for example XSLT. You are saying that all XSLT programmers are mad?

I have created a programming language that is written in XML. With a decent editor (I use oxygen xml) and a good schema (I use Relax NG) there is almost no way to make syntax errors and typing is a breeze (auto completion). With schematron you can even make clever (semantic) error checking before compile time. So it always depends on the case.

I like seeing more and more software extensible by Lua, which is a very decent language. My very favorite is LuaTeX (luatex.org), where you can access all ugly TeX internals from Lua and even create a complete typesetting system without using the rather complicated TeX language, which is based on macro expansion. I am not so sure if I'd use Lua Bash, for bash has always been "good enough" for me.