paulajohnson

Same here. So what is chrony doing differently? Is it just that the developer(s) are really clever, or are they using static analysis, or a better coding standard, or what?

This is important. We don't often get the chance to compare side-by-side implementations of the same requirement, so when big differences turn up we need to understand why.

I don't believe that you can do justice to Snow Crash in just an hour. Its going to be visually great, but with all the complexity and depth stripped out.

Ramez Naam, for the Nexus trilogy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nexus_Trilogy

My ghast is totally flabbered!

On the GUI toolkit issue, I'd recommend combining gtk2hs (which is a thin wrapper around GTK) with Reactive Banana. GTK signals are isomorphic with Banana events and GTK attributes are isomorphic with Banana behaviors. So you can connect up a button press signal from GTK to an Event, transform that event with data from some other behavior, and hence generate a new behavior which is connected to the GTK attribute of the text displayed in a text box. Your application logic is then expressed as the plumbing that pipes data from event sources to event and behavior sinks. This works well because the event plumbing is composable in ways that callbacks and state variables of native GTK aren't.

For those who don't speak Haskell, its worth noting that "<>" is the monoid concatenation operator. The "~>" operator returns a function type "a -> Maybe String". A function type is a monoid if its return type is a monoid, so this works.

The essay describes a 2x2 grid with axes of generality and surprise. Things that are suprising and general are valuable. Things that are general but unsurprising are platitudes, and things that are specific but surprising are gossip. The essay itself is a platitude.

Its not just about the release of an unfinished novel with lots of rough edges, its our understanding of how the Diskworld evolved in Pterry's mind over the years. TCOM was a simple spoof of swords-and-sorcery epics, but by Going Postal it had become a complex world that fused magic with steampunk. The rough drafts, abandoned dead-ends and private notes that presumably inhabited those disk drives would have provided insights into how this happened.

Update: just read loopbit's response to the same post. Good point.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand this was his wish, but on the other hand I am sure that future generations of pratchettologists will mourn the loss.

A similar paper: http://alistair.cockburn.us/Characterizing+people+as+non-lin...

The book "Peopleware" is also worth reading.

Unfortunately it seems that nobody has done any serious anthropology on software production with a view to improving it.

concept of блат

Can you explain that?

To answer that you need a way of equating money with "utility" (i.e. the use and/or pleasure that people get from their money).

I believe that utility is logarithmic with rate of expenditure. Hence doubling your spending rate gets you a constant increment in utility. This is why we measure pay rises in percent rather than absolute value. Another $100/week would make a huge difference to someone on the breadline, but is lost in the noise for a millionaire.

This means that money transferred from a rich person to a poor person will increase utility, because the decrement in the rich person's utility is more than outweighed by the incremenent in the poor person's utility. This difference can also accomodate the transaction costs (i.e. running the IRS) and the "deadweight cost" of decreasing the rich person's incentive to earn more.

This would seem to suggest that money should be redistributed so that everyone has the same amount, as that would maximise utility if the total amount of money is constant. But of course that condition isn't true: in a world with zero economic incentives there would be no economic activity. In reality of course such a world would go horribly wrong in any number of ways.

So there would seem to be an optimum amount of inequality in a society. Too little, and you destroy incentives to create new stuff, thereby making everyone poorer than they would have been. Too much and you are wasting valuable resources on gold plated baths that would be better spent giving poor people a tolerable standard of living, education, health care etc.

One of Terry Pratchett's characters, an old shepherdess, summed it up well. From memory: "We are as gods to the beasts of the field: we order the hour of their birth and their death. In between times, we has a duty."

I'm not a doctor, but it sounds to me like you may be suffering from clinical depression. You should talk to your doctor about this urgently.

I can imagine an app for managing small amateur sports teams, Little Leagues etc. Club secretaries take a lot of time on this work and its pretty thankless, plus they have a modest budget, so something that charges a $50 a year to host your team data with easy to use tools for booking matches, managing email lists etc could be a viable business. But I wouldn't call it a "social network".

They might consider it a lie if you represented it as a password, and arrest you for it.

Lying to them is a serious criminal offense carrying (IIRC) up to 5 years in prison. Even a harmless fib counts.

The Rats of NIMH? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Frisby_and_the_Rats_of_NI...

I doubt they learned anything in prison; this is stuff they knew when they came in. Don't assume that everyone in prison is some kind of illiterate moron.

Right. You can learn a lot of Javascript by breaking up old computers.

This isn't an "education", its just slave labour.

Also Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", which has a similar theme.

The article makes it pretty clear that this was "hack" in the criminal sense. The nature of the forum is a question of fact, and it sounds like the prosecution will have no difficulty in showing that lawbreaking was a major topic of conversation. With "Hacker News" on the other hand the hypothetical defense could easily demonstrate that it was for "hack" in the positive sense. Dictionaries routinely list both senses of the word.

I don't think you would need an actual criminal case. "Chilling effects" (i.e. people can't find out the law, and hence might refrain from lawful behavior) would seem to be sufficient.

I would have thought that this could be challenged under the 14th Amendment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Due_Process_Clause). "Due process" must surely include being able to find out what laws might apply to you, and a paywall would seem to breach that.

The Nordic states are about 5M people each, and they routinely top the score cards for general wellbeing. Some people (who?) have suggested that 5M might be an optimal number.

Much of the work of the EU is done by the European Commission, which consists of one senior appointee from each member state. On one hand this is clearly not particularly democratic, but on the other hand it gives the member governments an avenue to make policy that doesn't go via their population, which is why none of the member governments wants to change it.

The drain in brains goes mainly west in planes.

There is a reason why the things we read in magazines and newspapers are called "stories".

Yes, provided you are prepared to pay for one, know why you should want one in the first place, can put up with the increased latency, and are competent enough to set up your computer to use it. Most people are some combination of aren't/don't/can't/aren't.

I was under the impression that filing baseless lawsuits was a tort. Furthermore attorneys are required to make a good-faith investigation of their client's case and refuse to take part in frivolous lawsuits. This may be a pretty low bar, but it sounds like Acushnet's attorneys may be failing to clear it.