slashnull

Too late. :wq is already embedded in my autonomic nervous system.

Really this is what vim is about. The commands you first remember just stay with you. Just so you can forget alternatives even exist and use that memory to save new commands.

Thanks either way.

$i for a Few Important People:wq

The rebound visualizer widget is the illest thing

http://grantland.com/wp-content/themes/vip/espn-grantland/as...

Edit: damn, I need to git gud with D3

Yeah, they were too, it seems; there a slide asking the author himself whether the code, the copyrights, the logos, or just what exactly was sold. No answer was provided.

But seriously, it takes some nerve to write a blogpost against Worse is Better that's on every aspect worse than the paper that originally codified Worse is Better.

Oh wait, no, is this lack of quality justifiable because this content-free 2 minutes read is more efficient and easier to write than a serious exploration of the consequences of whatever the author was ranting about?

I'm just gonna go full Poindexter and say that Richard Gabriel did try to distance himself from worse is better, at first, but then he veered wildly in the following years between the two positions.

And, the fundamental idea of Worse is Better is so incredibly older than UNIX, even in the field of computer science; John Von Neumann said himself that the Von Neumann machine was a temporary workaround and that a better architecture would quickly replace it.

I live in a near constant fight in the rebel factions of Better and so far, I have to reckon we get constantly massacred by the Empire of Worse.

Please god of good urban planning give the force to Street Art the tagline "BUILD NARROW STREETS" everywhere

Can I... Can I actually date Watson? Is that in the short-term plan? Anybody knows?

You seem much more methodic than me. I use tabs like Haskell uses memory. (the implication that my tabs are immutable is intentional)

I would quite like to be able to group tabs together, collapse groups, move them between instances, tile 'em, bookmark a group to open it later...

While I'm at it.

I utterly abuse every form of fuzzy-matching autocomplete I encounter, which is why I'm a terminal zsh fan (see what I did there?); one of the coolest UI experience I had in a browser was with the Viperator plugin on Firefox. The few letters controlling the few navigation features I used were juuuuust at the right place, and hitting t or o to autocomplete the url of the page I wanted or to autocomplete the web search syntax shorthand it provided was immediately natural and extremely fast and fun to use. With the caveat that whatever questionable website or search query I typed in tended to stay rather high in the autocomplete matches. With awkward results. But that's my problem.

It has a shorthand that puts a numeric id on every link and allows (what else) fuzzy-matching autocompleting them, as a mean to replace mouse clicks, but I never really got the hang of it. The numeric labels were really invasive, and I almost always had to use the numeric key as I almost never got the matcher to select the link I wanted quickly enough; I just used my nipple mouse instead. Which is sad because I really liked the idea; the implementation was just not quite good enough.

It was missing a few features that I consider pointy enough to have to script myself, for example, I wanted keyboard hooks to save images, text copy-pastes and stuff, in a directory set in advance or specified on the spot or whatever, but since Vimperator uses vimscrip (or a subset thereof, I don't recall), I never made it. Actually I can barely script my actual vim, but that's besides the point.

It was supposed to open my editor of choice on a certain keyboard hook in text fields, but I never got it to work, which is a shame; I really wanted that feature. There's a built-in vim-style editor, but I never got the hang of the modal transition in and out of it, so I never used it.

In the end I stopped using it because it was f%$king slow; having the browser freeze for several seconds after a keyboard shortcut makes the shortcut moot, you see? The keyboard focus also tended to be hard to follow; the worse being (I know it's now Vimperator's fault) flash, which captured the focus so hard I had to click on the page to get my freaking focus back. Sometimes to get it back in some random mode I don't care about, which made me develop the habit of smashing escape all the time not only once, as I already do in Vim, but several times. Just to make sure. Whenever I wasn't trapped into the raw input mode.

(Edit: it got gradually slower and slower, but out of the box, FF + Vimperator on my p.o.s mid '00 laptops was already, uh, not this fast.)

So I'd say that my perfect eternal browser would be a cleaner subset of Vimperator, lightning fast, with a functional and efficient set of navigation/link-clicker bindings, without Firefox's huge baggage of UI bloat, and with a healthy dose of It Just Works.

1) I like tabs and I use a whole lot of them

2) tabs alone are starting to feel limited as the average number of tabs and the relation between them gets larger and more complex.

3) browsers are just too fucking big. I tried I think it was surf, or something, I mean, a browser that's basically WebKit + V8 + a few keyboard navigation bindings, along with I think it was uzbl, a tabber system, and it worked decently. I like the idea of small, independent, lightweight single-tab browser instances along with another application that would supply the rest of the functionalities of a traditional browser. Unfortunately I quit this setup because changing is hard and I'm lazy.

4) I use like one thousandth of my favourite browser's UI elements and functionalities. The UI I really need is a set of quick shortcuts to navigate tabs and click and edit stuff in the dom.

The suspense for the announced parts IV and V is just unbearable.

Makes me want to buy his books.

I don't know if Microsoft outsources product naming, but with all that rebranding they do all the time, they just have to be a goldmine for naming companies

I name them after the coolest character of the book I'm currently reading.

A few hopefully relevant thoughts about translating docs

1) translating a piece of english UI will almost double the length of it. That's annoying.

2) documentation is hard to write and to maintain, and sometimes it's hard to read and use documentation. Creating multilingual documentation is even harder, and it's nearly impossible to have an entire coverage of the docs in all languages, which leads to incomplete or outdated/incorrect documentation - which, as the saying goes, is worse than none. Multilingual software inevitably makes the documentation situation of a software worse. Trying to apply language A docs to a language B interface is hell.

3) documentation alone isn't part of the story; forum threads, answered support questions and that kind of discussion-style paradocumentation is ranges in importance from helpful to just full-on essential and that kind of stuff is never really translated. Trying to get help from a mostly english community for a software translated is hell.

4) The sublanguage used in a given UI isn't written in a given tongue; really, it's written in a pidgin made of the original language of the application plus the slang of the domain of the application, which is usually tied to one, say, culture or spoken language in particular; very large software also typically creates its own sub-language, which separates itself from actual tongue the UI could say to have been written in. After all, any description of a what a software does, expressed in a language evolved for the interaction of human beings in the real, material world, must be a vague and fragile metaphor. Translating metaphors is nearly impossible. It's hell. It's poetry, but when poetry is not the goal, it's hell.

That also means that to read the documentation and UI of an application amounts to learning the sublanguage of that application, which as I explained is different from the actual human language it was written in. I can understand that "save" means "serialize the relevant subset of the application state to a file" without knowing anything about the "dictionary" meaning of the English word "save". It's not the same thing. "Save" could be replaced by "blub" as far as I'm concerned, but it's convenient for people who speak english to associate "serialize" to the concept of preserving, of keeping. But it's not as important as the consistency of the language developed to describe the concepts and operations of that application. A single "blub" is better than "Save" and "Sauvegarder". Duplicating the pidgin a software develops for itself makes using that software a special kind of hell.

Conclusion: it's easy to end up in situations where I have to use french software here in Quebec. Most of my friends have laptops and phones with french UIs. It makes using them a pain in the ass.

I absolutely, deeply despise translated UIs; translating a UI is almost systematically a counter-productive activity. It's hell.

1)

- because it's fun, and I really like to eat what I cook

- cooking for a girl and being told it tastes good is one of the things I live for

- it's the only occasion where I can eat really well.

2) typically I recognize a nice occasion or it catches my whim a few hours to a day before the act.

3) a big-ass stir-fry, with or without a bit of meat

4) no

5) cook simple

Stir-fry random is a miracle.

Oh, whoops

That's bizarre, why would they fill a petition instead of litigating?

Anyone got something more technical? I googled a bit and I can't seem to find anything beyond marketoid handwaving

Web developer, right now mostly front-end and integration.

Using zsh convinced me that clever and dead-easy autocomplete and hinting is what will save textual interfaces; I don't have precise metrics but it really feels like pimp-slapping tab and ctrl-r all the time saves me a lot of typing.

This project seems to take that idea in a really cool direction.

Makes me want to try it.

TIME, GOT THE TIME TICK TICK TICKIN IN MY HEAD

TIME, GOT THE TIME TICK TICK TICKIN IN MY HEAD

TIME, GOT THE TIME TICK TICK TICKIN IN MY HEAD

TIME, GOT THE TIME TICK TICK TICKIN IN MY HEAD

... sorry

Wow, I didn't even notice this chapter... Thanks!

"People scream about efficiency, go on the web you read "efficiency efficiency efficiency!". No. They will actually love things that, that however slow, [will make] things convenient for them. And most researchers, really, when it comes to it, love inefficient languages that make it easy to write a n academic paper about how to improve it. Um, let's see, language myths: we want a language for writing reliable code. No! Most programmers, most of the time, scream in horror when they have to do something extra to for reliability, maintainability, safety, all the good stuff"

All hail ultraliberal interpreted properties-based dynamic languages!

Those books are seriously excellent. As a FP nerd I particularly enjoyed the GHC entry.

Right yeah it's completely unrelated. My bad.

Somebody leak this manual please for the love of everything that is holy

... well I meant put it somewhere I could download from my Debian

www.mcs.anl.gov/papers/P1818.pdf

Swift: a language for parallel scripting, 2011, mostly from University of Chicago

Anyone knows if it's related?

I'm just going to leave this here because it's outrageously funny

http://bit.csc.lsu.edu/~gb/csc4101/Reading/gigo-1997-04.html