stepvhen

This looks great! I too have been working on a critter tracker[0], but writing it in C using kcgi[1] (no JS at all).

I have never done a web project before, so this has been a great learning experience. I still have some functionality to complete, but so far it has been pretty useful, even just the "available now" feature.

[0] https://xvetrd.tilde.institute/index.cgi

[1] https://kristaps.bsd.lv/kcgi/

I would have to check, but the resources on lex/yacc that I remember would make a point of their usability at scale. Generally it would be unlikely to wrote a faster lexer than what lex could do, but very likely to write a better parser than yacc. However writing a small lexer and/or parser _quickly_ would be easier with those tools than hand rolling one almost every time. Its great parser generators are still being developed and improved, and its fine to point out issues, but this article misses the point by a wide margin.

The author's math works out to a bit over 2 hours a book. I assume this was elided because thats wild to expect.

I would have been more convinced if the author posted their list of books, with page and/or word count, and math'd from that.

For what its worth, my speed is between 1 to 3 minutes a page, depending on size and subject matter. At best, 2 hours would get me through a novella, a moderate sized book of poems, or maybe one of Plato's dialogues. That actually sounds right. But most books are longer than that.

in situations like this "one bad cluster of comments" isn't considered a mistake or a lapse in judgement but a symptom of what a person actually thinks. RMS more than likely did not form those opinions on the spot and then forgot he had them afterward. and RMS has a public history that is congruent with those opinions and how he presented them.

im sure it leaves a bad taste in a lot of mouths what the leader of GNU has done and how he thinks.

The "Hard CC" isn't a power move its how things get done. I constantly check in to make sure I'm doing my job right and when I am and the problem isn't fixed, its time for it to be someone else's problem.

source: working in Support.

> maybe even playing with colors to indicate if verbs form a train or other composition. I understand that is a quite different problem from just substituting @: with o̲.

With regards to how different of a problem that would be, J's syntax is context-sensitive. If you were to accurately identify trains and forks, you could not use regex, and would probably end up implementing a subset of the J parser.

If you only read one book, I suggest Don Quixote, the Grossman translation particularly, if only for the higher quality footnotes (compared to Lathrop's which is very well translated but poorly commented). The advantage here is DQ is really like four or five books of various types, and has a Yale Open Courseware series attached to it, so for any chapters you want to know more about, the resources are at hand. Through this book you can learn so, so much about literature.

But also, watching Don Quixote and Sancho's friendship develop is heartwarming. It was a book written for entertainment first, and just happened to be saturated in intense philosophical and literary quality.

i actually just finished reading it last night. probably one of the best bits of fiction ive read.

i think you might be making metaphysical claims, while the topologist is not. moreover, in topology, things dont.become other things or kinds of things; they stay as they are and the (simplified) statement "a staw is a donut" means "a straw is similar to a donut in that they share certain qualities." there is never any actual stretching of an object to change its metaphysical identity, that is a virtual process (and one that has rules and restrictions) that is used to help humans wrap their head around the concept of homotopy.

is for->fer Utah? I'm in Indiana, born on the West Coast, and I dont know where I picked that up. I have also started to morph "car" and similar in the direction of "kerr," and (most embarrassingly) instead of "robot" in conversation ill say "robit." I havent been able to find out from those around me, or hear the same changes.

FWIW, from what i remember facebook's redesigns were never just a visual thing. they always added and pushed some functionality, made some things much harder to find, or quietly removed things entirely.

A similar thing happened when Last.fm did their huge redesign. The new website was all js now, and they quit all support on the forums, messaging, pretty much all the old ways of communication between users. And for me, that was awful, since i was a part of a music collective that communicated primarily on those forums. After that everybody dispersed.

So outrage at a redesign is not always unfounded or silly. Web companies tend to hide things in them.

For literary fiction, literary friends and book reviews. Also, anytime you see a name come up again and again, look into getting a something they have written. I bought Dostoyevsky because I kept seeing him come up (worth it).

Find small/independent presses that do cool things; even independent presses as large as New Directions will have a certain culture you can base opinions off of and figure out if its worth your time. Note that if its an imprint of one of the Big 5 theres no way to know if the book is gonna be worth it based on that.

And read books in translation. By virtue of being translated you already know its worth somebody's time, bad books arent often translated. And often they are hella good.

Pretty sure most folk in Hamlet get a bad deal in the end, and Hamlet's brooding and whining doesnt outweigh that. Ophelia literally goes mad and is driven to arguable suicide. Everyone that mattered dies, and if that is outweighed by Fortinbras and his good fortune in the end. Hamlet is Icarus if anything, since it only goes well for him for a moment while everybody else is on a downward spiral.

Think of it this way; the last time you cooked this dish there was way too much and youd prefer not to do that again. This would help.with that problem.

I guess it also makes more sense for baking than cooking.

Perhaps I missed it, but i didn't see anything about physical copies, i.e. it seems this is focused (exclusively?) for the ditigal reader. Is that the case?

> I would skip man pages are they just aren’t used that often anymore.

I understand that man pages might represent a minority, but I cannot express enough how wonderful it is to get the full manual of a program without interfacing with the web. Not to mention how powerful that is, since most apps have short names that are difficult to search for, but how accessible that makes the application.

Greeks didnt invent philosophy, technically. The western tradition, maybe, but not the whole itself. And most of them, Socrates included, talked about thw gods a lot of the time. In fact, socrates's way of living a good life is, more or less, the same idea behind the christian heaven and hell concept. the only thing that really changes is, once most philosophers become theologians, they develop advanced theories in trying to explain away the Trinity or the Eucharist.

I read The Trial, and I am an avid reader of literary fiction. I understand that the trial was published posthumously, and against Kafka's wishes. These facts track, for me, because I feel The Trial was unfinished, unpolished, and most of the time, not very good.

The whole time Joseph K. expounds his innocence, but still acts a total jerk to everybody he can, and at every opportunity. Being a jerk isn't exactly a crime, but its never clear what level of law the novel is operating on, and so its wholly reasonable to suspect K. is completely guilty, which changes the whole narrative (and for the worse)

The first chapter is wonderful and all that good "Kafkaesque" material people harp on about. Then the meeting with the priest where Kafka essentially provides a dialogue and commentary on one of his own short stories; enlightening, and entertaining. But past that nothing jives right.

The knowledge of his hecka abusive father doesnt serve the novel either. From the real world information, it only takes a few small adjustments to make The Trial as an allegory for child abuse, and the rationalizations and bitter remorse associated with it into adulthood. Kafka, as a person, was treated terribly for little to no reason, by an authority he was subject to. Kafka assumes his innocence, and presumes the authority was wrong, until eventually his mind is beaten down enough and the abused believes that the abuse is deserved. Not to mention the natual tendancy to assume parents, even abusive ones, arent actually as bad as they seem (to a child, at least). Goven tvat reading, the mystery of interpreting The Trial dissapates, and a grim and more common than desired account remains.

I guess my frustration with The Trial is not the novel itself, or Kafka himself, but the circumstances of its publication (which, again, in its shambolic presentation, show), and of the "prediction of future bueraucracy" ascribed to it, both factors external to the author.

But on subject, kafka is sorta funny. In a dark and/or cynical way. But I find him more sad and pitiful, both his work anf the author himself.

>How do people decide to make major life changes?

before the change, on those days when it seems like nothing is happening, those people are thinking around the change. constantly, subconsciously (or not) and internally weighing options and possibilities. then, one day, they say "Im done." they find the words needed to make the change, which until then were elusive and, like a key, finding them makes the action doable, and doable without opposition. like a analog-to-digital switch that activates only when the analog portion is in the last 10% of either direction, the pwrson has their finger on the switch for days weeks months before the pressure builds up and things change.

this hypothesis excludes changes made in reaction to other external or involuntary changes in a persons life.

Well, first, use a logic programming language and report back. Then understand that math is almost wholly non-empirical. The things discovered or made up in math are not reflective of the real world, most of the time, regardless of how closely it resembles.

Take for instance euclidean geometry. In the world of equations, everything works. But a point, or a line, are neither things that exist out in the world, much less their relations which, when drawn on the surface of the earth, are probably not actually euclidean at all.

Number theory in particular is almost never about math, but about the patters mathematicians believe they recognize. Somebody a'ong the lines goes "oh hey check out this flower. I bet this is the only flower of this type in the world" and then spend hundreds of years trying to prove it.

It comes in the base of OpenBSD, and I use it in lieu of a calDAV server. Being able to quickly jot down an appointment and recall it on the command line is hecka useful.

An interesting other side of the coin here: Emily Wilson, in her recent translation of The Odyssey made it a point to call the slaves in Odysseus' house slaves. In other translations, this idea was glossed over, the people called different things, avoiding the term. Wilson instead aimed to stay truer to the culture the work was written in, rather than appealing to contemporary ideals, or what have you.

It makes sense, though, with this context as well. The issue at hand is calling things what they in fact are. In the Odyssey, there is a source text and culture, where persons who were slaves were called such. In codebases, however, we are working with abstract concepts in the first. There is no necessary historical reason to maintain certain language. Abstract concepts are such because they do not exist out in the world, and so have no "actual" name.

Why only one cup of coffee? Is it the caffiene? Does decaf apply here too? (I work in coffee and often skip breakfast.)

any array talk on HN is fine with me. its an opaque topic and more posts means more illumination.

whats particularly interesting is this is implemented in perl, and from a quick look pretty well formatted perl. which, for somebody who might be interested in array languages, would make it a much more palatable starting point for understanding how they are built as opposed to the actual arcane wizardry that is the J source code. whats more, with this laguage operating with a stack and not infix, its parsing can be more easily understood, and in turn, reimplemented. J and APL, on the other hand, are context sensitive, and require more detailed understanding to implement.

i think there is value in analytic philosophy, mostly when used as a tool to clear up otherwise muddy issues. Case in point, Jay F. Rosenberg's "Thinking Clearly About Death." In the second half he spends his time clearing up moral arguments about euthenasia, letting die, and rational suicide, using analytic philosophy. he only comes to a definite conclusion on the rational suicide argument, but his clarifications are invaluable in the other cases.

could you clairify the following: what is an example of a primary problem? what is an example of a secondary problem? what is failure by your definition? what state would a problem be in if it were "solved"? is a problem solved when everybody agrees on a solution? what, then, happens when a contrarian states otherwise? e.g. parmenides was one of the first monists, and that was more or less not acknowledged for a long time after plato, but has since come back into vogue somewhat; was the problem of "is our universe one" solved, and then unsolved?

this paper is about lip reading, which is indeed a difficult task (i cant do it well, to be honest) and worthy of study. however, lip reading is not body language. lip reading maps movements to words in a natural language. recognizing body language requires knowing e.g. that crossing arms maps to the idea of closed-ness and thus that the interlocutor is closing themselves off from the conversation to some degree. or maybe the interlocutor has very long arms and has never been able to know what to do with them in a conversation or something.

GNU and the FSF operate on the level of language, and rightly so, since terms like "freedom" are nebulous and have been thought about and debated by philosophers since Augustine (or maybe before with examples by sophists) all the way through analytic philosophy today. There is an indicator of the GNU endgame on that forst link about not free distros, specifically

  OpenBSD and perhaps other BSD distributions (called “projects” by BSD developers)

We can see here that they enforce their language as the norm first ("distributions") before offhandedly and perhaps disrespectfully acknowledging the language of the BSD crowd ("projects"). This is what GNU and/or the FSF do. Hence the definitions of freedom and the following declarations of what is and os not free.

GNU is a philosophy, and for my money, as long as they arent aggressive in their tactics (i.e. they play in their own space, letting others do their thing) then I can't make any value judgements on their actions, nor would i care to.

Disclaimer, I use OpenBSD, because it works, is secure, and is based on ideas of mandoc, vi, and not fixing what isnt broken in Unix, rather than info, emacs, and reprogrammong everything under the sun.

protip:

tr ' ' '\n' < foo | sort | uniq

as a baseline, to constitute entering an agreement, each party must have a reasonable idea of what they are agreeing to, as well as the capacity (mental, emotional, physical, rational, etc) to actually make such an agreement. to enforce an agreement, it must be recognized that some term.has been broken by some party.

ad providers, as a collective (that is, no single actor is responsible by themselves, and not every actor is at fault) began breaking the terms of the implicit agreements with Pop-up ads, ads with sound, ads with visual motion, ads with full video, ads that look like real articles, ads that block actaul content from the website you are visiting, dishonest or misleading ads, targeted ads without the users consent, ads that are significantly louder than the video you are watching, ads that hijack your mouse, etc.

each of these phenomena were introduced after previous terms were implicitly agreed upon, that is, they were introduced without informing the user beforehand. and so, as a collective, ad providers have broken the agreement much more and morw often than users who wholesale block ads. in this moral economy then, the users have the high ground.