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sls

320 karma · joined December 5, 2009

I will disengage from a comment thread if it appears to me that you aren't conversing in good faith. You can have the last word.
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sls··on Are “landscrapers” the new skyscrapers?
This is an old science-fiction idea, Robert Heinlein's _The Roads Must Roll_ was published in 1940. When I looked this up to get a date for the citation, I found that H. G. Wells used the idea in 1910 as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_walkway#Slidewalk

sls··on The Power of Tmux Hooks
Even at the Fortune x00 companies I've consulted for, I believe I would have been able to get that approved. Any time you are asking people to manually administer boxes, those people are going to want tooling for that job. Manual deploy takes 8+ hours and sometimes ssh sessions time out or are interrupted? We'd like to install a persistent session management tool.

I'm not sure if you're saying that myopic management won't see a business justification or that there truly is not one.

sls··on A minimalist guide to tmux
As I noted above, the tmux command send-prefix will send the command prefix character to the process tmux is managing. So if you open a connection to a remote system and run/connect to a tmux session there, and you have the same command prefix for both systems, you can <command prefix>:send-prefix<enter> to e.g. disconnect and reconnect from a shell that's not running tmux. If you're going to be doing this on purpose and fairly often, you might consider binding a key for send-prefix.

I would prefer not to have to remember which tmux I was talking to all the time and so I would just connect from a normal shell, but ymmv of course.

sls··on A minimalist guide to tmux
As c256 surmised, I use kill to send signals other than SIGKILL. I don't think I've ever even known about the C-\ or C-y bindings for SIGQUIT. I also hardly ever use shell job control, to the extent that I have an alias fg that does something unrelated, so I would need to say \fg to get the shell foreground command.

But if for some reason I wanted to do that, I would use C-\ : send-prefix. That sends the prefix character to the process running in tmux, in this case the shell. It's also super useful if you ever find yourself running a nested tmux (i.e. in an ssh session) with the same prefix character. You can just send-prefix d to disconnect the remote shell from the remote tmux session, then open a new local shell outside of your local tmux session, log in and reconnect to the remote tmux.

sls··on My unusual hobby
Not really, the English word "cock" has a very different vowel than the French "coq" - https://youtu.be/bIraCzL3dtI?t=4s is a pretty fair exemplar. It's a lot more like the "o" in "joke".

(edit: maybe you're English? Some English accents of England would articulate "cock" very close to French "coq" and "joke" would be far away. Apologies, one really does need to specify which "English" is meant, and I should have seen that at once. First cup of coffee still in progress.)

sls··on A minimalist guide to tmux
Best thing I ever did for tmux was change the command key prefix to "C-\". With caps lock mapped to control, this makes tmux commands available with almost no hand motion, just a slight reaching out with the pinkies. It also restores access to C-b for "back one character" in emacs and all programs using emacs key bindings, which is hardwired into my fingers at this point. (You're blocking emacs' function "toggle-input-method" - "Enable or disable multilingual text input method for the current buffer". For some users that would probably be an issue, but hasn't been for me.)

Another useful thing is to "bind-key C-\ last-window". That makes C-\ C-\ jump back to the last window you visited, which facilitates creating short-lived windows for specific tasks.

Final small tweak I like is "set -g base-index 1" so that C-\ 1 is the first window, 2 is the next, etc. instead of having the first window way over on 0.

My other tweaks are probably more idiosyncratic to my workflow.

sls··on There are over a billion outdated Android devices in use
Outside the US? My 6P got official 8.0 non-beta in September, I'm pretty sure. OTA, the whole nine yards.
sls··on Online Retailers Are Desperate to Stem a Surging Tide of Returns
The clothing industry could really use some a shared, standard set of measurements. Even though bodies are all different, most of them have a lot in common. When three pairs of pants with the same waist "size" can vary in circumference by three or more inches[0], it's all but worthless.

[0] http://flowingdata.com/2010/09/30/advertised-vs-actual-waist...

sls··on ESPN Can’t Afford Monday Night Football Any More
Not to argue that point necessarily, but there's been only the one success of significance, the UFC. Pride went out of business 10 years ago and the organization founded to replace it, Dream, went out of business only a few years later. (Pride ended up as a UFC acquisition, as did the WEC, but both of them were foundering and were picked up for their rights - access to fighters and video libraries).
sls··on Moving on from Picasa
https://theoldreader.com/ works for me
sls··on Flocking for Road Traffic Efficiency Improvement
This reminds me of the description of traffic on the Motie home world Mote Prime in "A Mote in God's Eye"

I found this quote from it at the following link: http://aramink.com/blog/2012/08/31/the-mote-in-gods-eye-35-y...

"Tall, ugly buildings loomed above them to shoulder out the sky. The black streets were wide but very crowded, and the Moties drove like maniacs. Tiny vehicles passed each other in intricate curved paths with centimeters of clearance. The traffic was not quite silent. There was a steady low hum that might have been all the hundreds of motors sounding together, and sometimes a stream of high-pitched gibberish that might have been cursing. Once the humans were able to stop wincing away from each potential collision…"

sls··on Consciousness Began When the Gods Stopped Speaking
In the Sabbasava Sutta of the Pali texts ( http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.002.than.html ), the Buddha says that there are six types of wrong view about the self:

> As he attends inappropriately in this way, one of six kinds of view arises in him: The view I have a self arises in him as true & established, or the view I have no self... or the view It is precisely by means of self that I perceive self... or the view It is precisely by means of self that I perceive not-self... or the view It is precisely by means of not-self that I perceive self arises in him as true & established, or else he has a view like this: This very self of mine — the knower that is sensitive here & there to the ripening of good & bad actions — is the self of mine that is constant, everlasting, eternal, not subject to change, and will stay just as it is for eternity. This is called a thicket of views, a wilderness of views, a contortion of views, a writhing of views, a fetter of views. Bound by a fetter of views, the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person is not freed from birth, aging, & death, from sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, & despair. He is not freed, I tell you, from suffering & stress.

So while it is important to continue to examine things to realize that each thing under examination isn't a self, isn't me, isn't mine, isn't unchanging, isn't eternal, that doesn't mean that there is a doctrine that there is no self. The Buddha explicitly refuses to answer the question of the existence of a self, and says that to hold either of the views "there is a self" or "there is no self" is unskillful, a fetter, an impediment to freedom.

cf "Selves & Not-self: The Buddhist Teaching on Anatta, Thanissaro Bhikkhu" http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/selves...

sls··on Deku: How we built our functional alternative to React
I reflexively dislike the notion, but am trying to consider it with an open mind. The notion that a subtree of the DOM and some JavaScript that manipulates it, designed together to create a single functional component, represent a single concern and should be packaged together, is not unreasonable.

I think it is very different than the spaghetti pages found in jsps and php pages of yore, and the emphasis on component is a big part of why.

sls··on Functional Programming in Haskell by Examples
C is just portable assembler, ask him why he's got people wasting company time and cpu cycles on such a thing. I'm sure you're targeting x86, time to put on your big boy pants.
sls··on The Effect of Physical Exercise on the Concentration of Individuals with ADHD
You can do walking meditation. Once you have a basis in concentration practice, it's just about continually returning to awareness of the present moment.

It's common to alternate sitting and walking meditation during extended sessions, to my knowledge both in south-east Asia and in Japan.

sls··on Chris Granger on the LightTable architecture
I too fit that description for some time. Vim is what I would use when starting an editor to do something to a file, and emacs when wanting to live in the editor and reach out to external tools like a repl for some extended time.

Using emacs in daemon mode with launchctl on osx and then making a shell alias and an automator launcher for emacsclient that just connects makes starting the new client so fast that I can use emacs for the quick jobs, too. The only thing I have to do now is get used to the emacs command equivalents for the quick edit jobs. For example, in vim I can open a file to a specific line, delete that line and then the first 5 characters of the next 50 lines, and exit the editor in just a few keystrokes, while in emacs I'd still be playing with C-h a and googling. The things I've spent the most time in emacs doing, common lisp, clojure, latex, and so on, have a very different set of common operations than the common sysadmin tasks I used vim for.

sls··on Hidden backdoor API to root privileges in Apple OS X
> JWZ used to say that Linux is only free if you don't value your time.

My reply to that has always been that Windows is only $300 if you don't value your time. (Preserving archaic cost of Windows to match JWZ quote.)

The implication that the one system is free and time-consuming and the other moderately in price but not time-consuming is entirely false. At the time, for many requirements, configuring and administering a Windows machine would have been more time-consuming than for Linux. It's also glossing over the fact that you can't horizontally scale your $-per-cpu/server solution once you do have the configuration worked out, without going back to the well for more money.

This amusing and glib quote also deliberately glosses over the "freedom" part of free software, which is essential. For example, I wonder if Google would exist today if not for a free unix workalike.

sls··on German Professor Apologises for 'Rape Problem' Email to Indian Student
You can't believe the reporting rate is the same.
sls··on A Tale of Two Zippers
Did you read the article? He's not overthinking it, that's what the article is about.
sls··on Research into psychedelics, shut down for decades, is yielding results
Yes, many people raised in Buddhist households would say that, but it's not an accurate representation of what the Buddha taught, based on the Pali texts which are the earliest written record. You can decide whether that means it's "Buddhism" or not.
sls··on A better pull request
GitHub Enterprise is an appliance VM you run internally. It's charged per seat. The last enterprise-y company I was at used it primarily because you keep your code inside the firewall, but also because the pricing model is more aligned with the usage in that environment, as you suggest.
sls··on Can't you just turn up the volume?
Seemed natural to me, dimensions in a phase space.
sls··on Federal Court Throws Out Six Weeks of Warrantless Video Surveillance
No civil libertarian is delighted to save criminals from prosecution just to frustrate law enforcement. It often happens that the frontiers of acceptable state conduct are tested in such cases, though. Here, EFF isn't interested in making sure Vargas can shoot cans in his yard without interference. Rather, they are concerned that the government not be able to put people's homes under 24/7 video surveillance without even probable cause (which is all that is needed for a warrant).
sls··on A farewell note to a programming language
Rarely isn't never. I'd join in the recommendation above to read pg's "On Lisp" to get a sense of the sort of things one can accomplish with a few small macros. But just as a sampler, if your language has a preprocessor phase where source code is manipulated by source code you provide, you can add control structures. Maybe your language has a loop construct but no way to iterate through a collection without explicit indices. You can add that, and it will be a first-class control structure that gets to control evaluation and everything. You do not have to file a feature request and drum up support and wait five years to get it.
sls··on A clock that can detect tiny shifts in the flow of time itself
No. What you are calling 'fixed' is a local hidden variable - an internal state that has yet to be measured but is already determined. This state of affairs is ruled out by Bell's Theorem - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem
sls··on They Call Me Doctor Berry
I don't hold any degree which is connected to the title 'Doctor' at all. But I have to respond to one of your points, that you take issue with people who wish to use the title 'Doctor' when they aren't medical doctors.

The term itself comes from the Latin 'docere' - to teach - and goes back to before the first European universities. The title of Doctor for physicians and surgeons is much more recent, and was actually a status-elevating maneuver. Even today, in the UK and countries that follow that system, a surgeon is called 'Mister' and a physician, who is called 'Doctor', will have an Bachelor of Medicine (MB) degree. The MD in that system is a proper medical research doctorate.

So this notion that an academician isn't a proper or 'real' doctor is quite bizarre and ahistorical, It's also unnecessary to reserve the word to distinguish those in the medical fields, since they already have a number of words that refer exclusively to them, physician, surgeon, etc.

sls··on Ask HN: Have you remapped the Caps Lock key? [Poll]
I wouldn't reply just to say that I map caps lock to control, like so many others. Perhaps a poll that gave the most common remappings, and let people specify more unusual ones in the comments, would gather more respondents for the common ones.
sls··on Fastmail: Increased storage quotas and other service level changes
I've used Fastmail for years. It's been rock-solid, both before and after the acquisition. I can only recall one outage that was long enough for me to notice in that time. It's very, very good if you want an imap provider. The only compelling argument for gmail, imo, is the integration benefit, which continues to increase (e.g. recent Now enhancements).
sls··on Ask HN: How to move away from Gmail
I second the motion. I've used fastmail for years. It's been utterly dependable, worth every penny. I moved to them after deciding that running my own imap server was just too much hassle.
sls··on Philosopher invents clever iPhone case
I use The Glif from Studio Neat (http://www.studioneat.com/products/glif-for-iphone-4), which was also a kickstarter project. It's a stand and a tripod mount, very elegant and small.
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