sramsay

You've seen a case where someone wrote something in Python that later devs could not understand and then rewrote it in . . . what? And you've seen that with Java?

There's a big difference between a developer going off and writing something in one of the top five most used languages in the world and doing so in Scala.

It’s the “interested party” part that’s hard. He might be a collector of rare works in the area, but it doesn’t sound like it. So it’s likely the value of the collection as a collection lies with the name attached to it. But trust me: People thousands of times more famous than him have trouble with this.

But I’m reacting more to his certainty that he will have so many people wanting to pay for his books, that he’ll actually be trying to decide whether this or that library will have the privilege (and that he’s being magnanimous by not charging for it). Again, he really doesn’t understand the book market.

It would have been wiser to ask a local bookseller to take a look (and tell him the brutal truth) before posting his “offer.”

He sounds like he has no concept of the book market at all, and like most people, vastly overestimates what his collection is worth. I guarantee you he will pay someone to haul those books away.

I would not recommend that someone just starting out and who doesn't fully understand subtractive synthesis start with a very sophisticated, open-ended modular system.

oscs, filters, lfos, envelopes, vcos . . . for a beginner, this is all hard enough without adding control signals and fancy routings to the equation.

Rack is amazing; I don't mean to criticize it in any way. But if you're trying to learn to fly, you might want to start with a Cessna instead of trying to jump into the cockpit of a 787.

A thousand times yes. You can read all the tutorials you want, but the ear training that Syntorial offers is really worth it.

Getting "the sound in your head" coming out of the machine takes lots of practice, but this really, really gives you a running start.

No argument from me at all. Just a bit of sadness.

My “results” are Postgres. And curl. And gcc. Etc., etc. Are you seriously arguing that we didn’t put our money where our mouth is?

As always, I wish there was a way to DM on HN. :)

We didn’t “hate” proprietary code (it often came off that way, I’ll admit). We did think it was morally wrong to make money off it. We thought it was like patenting the Pythagorean theorem.

So really, you think “building things in general” required . . . what? Calm acceptance of restrictive licensing and software patents? Or maybe we should have been nicer about it? Again, it’s like “building things” must be properly done the way we currently do it. With lots of lawyers and lots of EULAs.

This strikes me as a profoundly conservative position. How rude those Jacobins were! If only they were more polite. If only they had recognized that we live in the best of all possible worlds . . .

It wasn’t “spite,” first of all. But “a good long term strategy” for what, exactly?

I am 51 years old. I learned my first programming language (C) in the mid nineties, and have been writing software ever since.

Back then, there was this enormous revolutionary fervor around free software, and it was intensely idealogical. You used the GPL because you wanted to fuck Microsoft and the entire concept of proprietary code. Linux was punk, not a good “solution.” And every time someone hacked up a free version of something, we all rejoiced, not because it “didn’t cost anything,” but because it was another way to make the point that the entire concept of making money off binary blobs was inherently evil. Install fests! Bring us that old 486, and we’ll make it YOURS! What a party.

Were we hopelessly naive? Maybe. Probably. But I find it depressing to read threads like this. It’s like everybody is just doing some kind of cost benefit analysis, but nobody is asking serious questions about whether the world we built is actually the world we want.

I’ll say it: If many of you had walked into some scrappy LUG in 1996, you’d have been laughed out of there as some kind of tool.

Are you a tool? I don’t know. But the resignation still bums me out. Y’all want to “support OSS devs,” not throw a sledgehammer at the screen.

What about something like recutils? Or maybe I mean “a recutils type thing.”

But note that they're only 43rd in the Order of Precedence for livery companies:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livery_company#Precedence

I mean, way above the Worshipful Company of Educators (109) and the Worshipful Company of Security Professionals (108) -- and rightly so! -- but rather below the Girdlers (23), Dyers (13), and Brewers (14).

Finally, finally a precedence table that follows the Principle of Least Surprise.

I saw what you did there.

Perhaps, but REAPER is none of those things.

Wow, TMG was a new one for me. From the Wiki article on it:

"Douglas McIlroy ported TMG to an early version of Unix. According to Ken Thompson, McIlroy wrote TMG in TMG on a piece of paper and "decided to give his piece of paper his piece of paper," hand-compiling assembly language that he entered and assembled on Thompson's Unix system running on PDP-7."

We are not worthy, friends. We are not worthy.

It's fascinating, isn't it? Right! Users . . . :)

I am absolutely the opposite. I've avoided CMake for a long time since many projects use autotools and because of its reputation as a painful thing to learn. ;)

But actually, one of the points made in the Calcote book really stuck with me: Build tools are not just about developer convenience; they're also about the user's convenience. It's more work on my end, but my users (who, admittedly, are on UNIX-likes) know to type:

  ./configure
  make

From their standpoint, it just works as expected.

> Then the article goes into full-on snake oil mode, trying to convince you that “technology that resolves that problem, by creating infinite phase, is currently available” if only you buy their “Sensorium™ LSV III Function Generators and Altitudinal Oscillators [that] utilize a polynomial transition region algorithm”.

Definitely my favorite part. It's complete gibberish, but because it uses audio nerd words (phase, oscillator, function generator) it sounds like it might not be.

Right. I was actually alive too. What we're trying to tell you, is that the kind of explanation offered in that article is absolute bullshit. It's common! People make this kind of argument all the time. It's still wrong, for the reasons eloquently outlined in the replies.

I think the thing that trips people up is that they think that a digital process can somehow fail to make something happen to an analogue speaker cone that an analog process can do effortlessly because of the nature of the process (or the medium). It's not true.

Do you like vinyl better? Or CDs better? Or reel-to-reel tape? You'll get no argument from me, because "better" is a pretty subjective thing. But the following propositions are absurd:

1. Vinyl has "higher fidelity" than CDs. 2. CDs "add treble" to recordings. 3. Digital processes can never accurately reproduce analog phenomena. 4. Analog "warmth" is only achievable with analog equipment. 5. No one ever over-compressed their tracks until CDs (or Pro Tools, or DAT tapes, or whatever) came along, and so these things are to blame.

I could go on.

I'm not accusing you of having said all of these things; they're just examples of things are absolutely not true, but which get said all the time, and which start to seem like truth because everyone is nodding.

Saying "CDs have too much treble" is like saying "books have too many adjectives."

And no, for millionth time. Per the Nyquist theorem, the waveform being generated is identical -- the same, without any difference whatsoever -- when the sample rate is twice the frequency being reproduced. Which it is, because the sample rate of a CD is more than twice the theoretical upper range of human hearing.

You can talk about aliasing if you like. I see some people in the thread with super-human hearing can detect the buzz of CD drive motors. But this "digital is not as good because it's discrete and audio is continuous" is complete nonsense.

If you are thinking that the "digital waveforms" (?) coming out of your speakers don't sound as good because they're not continuous, or "choppy," or missing information . . . you're really not making any sense at all.

> intent to manipulate the price (which IS illegal)

Is it "illegal price manipulation" even if it's done completely out in the open for everyone to see? (I'm seriously asking this question).

I feel like laws governing market manipulation imagine secret collusion among actors that one might reasonably assume are either competing with one another or pursuing their interests independently.

But in this case, the actors are entirely transparent with their motives. Anyone can go see what they're up to. Figuring out why these stocks suddenly went through the roof required no formal investigation at all, as far I know; it didn't take long to figure out why it was happening.

I also wonder whether those motives are even an issue here. Certain people in the system might be legally bound to be truthful with their clients, they might be required to pursue their clients' interests faithfully, and so forth. But isn't it true that as an individual investor, I am perfectly free to invest in stocks based on my horoscope, my initials, random throws at a dartboard, or anything else?

In other words, are the "lulz" illegal here? Is it illegal to not be "serious" with the market (whatever that means)?

Let's suppose there's a massive oil spill tomorrow. Everyone goes on reddit and says, "Hey, let's destroy this company by executing the following actions with the following securities . . ." (let's assume this is possible for a moment). Is that "market manipulation?" Is that illegal? Is that "abusive" (as the SEC puts it)? After all, in that case, they are trying to abuse the company for reasons they regard as entirely rational and reasonable, and they're doing it for all to see.

[edits for grammar and clarity]

I absolutely love backgammon. I think people dismiss it as not being on the same level as chess or go because of the "chance element," but that element is probably better described as "management of risk" or "the calculation of risk," and it is remarkably deep.

And while it's true that a novice can beat a grandmaster in a single game, you can be sure that you would have been destroyed in six games by a player like Natanzon.

The other nice thing about it is that while two strong players can break each other's brains over it for hours, it's also a fantastic casual game that's just good fun with coffee and conversation (as it is throughout much of the Middle and Near East).

I'm always hoping it undergoes a resurgence one of these days. Stranger things have happened!

Foster's brilliance and wit are legendary.

Less well known, I think, is that he was a deeply religious man and a fearsome ascetic. It is not a coincidence that he joined the Discalced Carmelites -- among the more mystical, contemplative, and historically, among the more severely austere of the Catholic mendicant religious orders (it was founded by Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross).

He almost never wore the traditional habit of the Carmelites (or even "the blacks" of a priest), because he felt clerical garb no longer represented what it originally was (the dress of the poor). He owned almost nothing, gave anything given to him to the poor (except books!), dressed like a plumber, and slept on the floor. I read somewhere that his office had a dictionary, a telephone, and not much else.

He was so famous for being "the Pope's Latinist." I have often wondered if anyone ever asked him about his faith or the pursuit of holiness. Because I sincerely think he took these matters just as seriously, and probably more seriously than Latin.

This. Several years ago, I sat through a panel (at a university) in which representatives from various businesses tried to lecture a bunch of academics about how the university is a hidebound institution, and that if doesn't "get with the times" it will be crushed by the new technological world order.

I recall noting that "the university" had not only outlasted any particular firm they could name, but had indeed survived the rise and fall of empires. I also noted the irony of being lectured by a representative from Big Blue about one's inability to "pivot."

"The university" is a remarkably resilient institution. That doesn't make it a good institution, but we should pause before we analyze them with the kind of narrow-minded presentism we see in this post. Universities have survived these many centuries not because they refuse to change, but because they're better at changing than even the nation states that have supported them.

There was a golden age of philosophy 2500 years ago (during a period in which there were very few massacres or genocides). Then there was a long "dark age" in which there were no philosophers and lots of massacres, genocides, and general ignorance. Then philosophy had a resurgence and gave birth to the notion of "facts."

It's hard to imagine how this absurd fantasy vision of western history can lead to insight about anything.

I wondered about this. Say I have a block, at the end of which I free a bunch of memory. I also have a bunch of other exit points within the block (mostly for catastrophic errors, say). Would a deferred free only apply to the outer scope? Because if so, I really don't see the point at all.

> allow servers to instruct clients on how to construct appropriate URIs

Right. That would be great, and actually, that's what the commercial services do.

With NWS it goes something like this: Say the user has a lat/long. You fire off an http request for a document that tells you what "quadrant" you are in and the URL for it. You then fire off a request for the quadrant document, that lists the products that are available (and their associated URLs). You then fire another request for the actual product for that quadrant . . .

This is not a real example, but this is basically how it works. Even when you can construct a single URL with the info you need, you still need to make multiple requests to have enough information to build the URL (if that makes sense).

> You can make multiple requests over a single connection.

You mean with some kind of http keep-alive thing? I'm not sure I can do that in these circumstance (with cURL).

(edits for grammar, minor issues of clarity)

I have written several command-line weather programs for different services -- many of which I had to abandon. For example, I wrote a popular one for Weather Underground that I had to retire because WU stopped allowing free access to their API.

My latest effort is one that just deals with NWS/NOAA directly, and reading this article has me wondering if part of their bandwidth trouble is a product of the way their API works.

The API is a huge set of linked JSON documents. So it very often happens that a request for data is actually half-a-dozen requests through embedded URLs (all of which are made by the client one after the other). It's all very logical in some ways, but at the same time a bit byzantine. I often wonder which entity is served by the way it's set up. From my perspective, it's easily the hardest API to work with. Weather Underground was wonderful, and so was Dark Sky (which I played with for awhile).

I've had people over the years ask if one or another of my tools could be used for large scale or very rapid weather data collection, but all of the services I have worked with throttle connections exactly as NOAA is proposing. I suppose I'm at least relieved to hear that they're not restricting access by independent developers!

And just to add to the above . . .

This is not a problem confined to ancient texts. If you read The Great Gatsby any time before the 1990s, you probably read a quite "corrupt" version of it. And, of course, there's Hamlet -- a textual situation so complicated, that some scholars have spent most of their careers trying to work it out.