telemachos

I don't think the parent means to compare Gladwell directly to Daisey. Daisey is just an example of how easy it is to spin tales if you don't care about truth.

If I understand him, the parent is responding to this question of yours "Why isn't [the blogger] spectacularly successful too?" The answer is "ethics": some people don't follow easy paths to success because they care about what they write (say, do, etc.). I doubt you really disagree with that, but I find your first post odd. You go out of your way to defend Gladwell, even though you seem to find his thinking pretty weak and his corporate connections too close for comfort.

Yes, Gladwell writes well, but is that all that matters?

> Gladwell might be a compelling - albeit extremely formulaic - writer, but how does he fare as a journalist?

In fairness, we probably shouldn't judge him as a journalist. He's a storyteller and a popularizer instead: someone who reads scholarly works and whips them into a shape that larger audiences can and will read.

Case in point: in 1985, Timothy Wilson published an amazing article called "Strangers to Ourselves". Years later, he turned it into a book (of the same title). But most people haven't heard of Wilson or that book, certainly nowhere near as many people as have heard of or read Malcolm Gladwell's Blink. By Gladwell's own admission, most of the ideas in Blink start from Wilson's work.[1]

[1] http://www.gladwell.com/tippingpoint/tp_reading.html

> Jab at him all you want for the superficiality of the ideas he's trafficking in, or for being beholden to corporate sponsors. I'm not sticking up for what he writes. But what he writes isn't the key to his success. Gladwell could write the phone book and it'd be more convincing than this post was.

Maybe this will seem snobby, but isn't such success a problem itself? That is, I wouldn't be particularly proud of writing something that succeeded almost entirely because of its style and despite its subject matter (or truth or information, however you want to put that).

Being a great writer is a tremendous skill. No question. But don't you find it weird to be defending someone while saying his ideas are "superficial" and he's "beholden to corporate sponsors"?

I've posted and deleted this a few times, since I keep rethinking it. This is a Lua version, and I'm pretty new to Lua (it's good practice). No reverses needed; just numeric for loops.

I'd rather keep n = 0 as a separate case since it doesn't need to consider a break point or a count variable. The test - Is n 0? - happens once and by including it, you can omit a lot of pointless tests - Am I at the breakpoint? - and increments - Add another one to count. Those tests and increments seem much worse than the single test - especially if the array (a table in Lua) will grow to very, very large sizes.

But I would be happy to hear if I'm looking at it wrong or missing a good trick in Lua.

    function add1(t, val, n)
        if n >= 0 then
            start = 1; stop = #t; step = 1
        else
            start = #t; stop = 1; step = -1
        end
    
        if n == 0 then
            for i = start, stop, step do
                if t[i] == val then t[i] = t[i] + 1 end
            end
        else
            break_point = math.abs(n)
            count = 0
            for i = start, stop, step do
                if count == break_point then break end
    
                if t[i] == val then
                    t[i] = t[i] + 1
                    count = count + 1
                end
            end
        end
    
        return t
    end

Again, I didn't really think you were being judgmental. It's just that in Ruby, the for loop definitely doesn't have pride of place at all. You're may be right that most programmers learn languages where for is more common, but I wonder about people who start with Ruby. That is, do they think for is weirdly primitive when they start doing Javascript?

Anyhow, no offense taken at all. But I would be shocked if any Rubyist did use for.

> Are you using iterators like .each or .map, or are you using a normal, index-based for loop?

I doubt you mean anything very judgmental by 'normal', but this still jumped out at me. In Ruby an index-based for loop is pretty unusual. The for loop is non-idiomatic, and it also has a scope leak: https://gist.github.com/3232118.

It's a John Doerr quote[1]. Here's the opening paragraphs from an article which discusses it:

Legendary venture capitalist John Doerr is said to have once described his investment philosophy as "no conflict, no interest."

In other words, when Doerr and venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins aren't privileged enough to enjoy a potential conflict of interest with respect to a potential investment, they have no interest in making the investment.

[1]: http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-03-11/tech/30001236...

How high are you setting the bar on "numerate person"?

People make terrible choices all the time despite knowing and understanding all sorts of things (math, health risks, harm they may cause themselves or others) because they have emotions and because weakness of will is a real phenomenon. You seem to be completely discounting all other considerations except "understanding the numbers".

I edited this about twenty times. I suspect we have radically different views of human psychology and how knowledge affects choice. Might be interesting to discuss over a beer, but here only a distraction from the larger issue in the article. Apologies.

I agree with your main claim about the value of mathematical literacy, but your example is terrible. It's not really about math at all. It seems to be about decision making and many people's tendency to choose very faint hopes, no matter how well they understand (on some level) that the odds are massively against them. I very much doubt that's about math per se. That is, your relative didn't misunderstand how little 99.5 leaves from 100. She simply isn't a logical machine.

tl;dr What a person recognizes and what a person acts on are not always the same.

The sharing command is new to desktops, but not new to OSX. I've used it in shell scripts on a Snow Leopard (10.6) server. (It's very useful if you are creating or updating the permissions for hundreds of shares at once. The manual method is brutal, as you can imagine.)

Checking the Apple man pages, they show documentation for it on 10.7.4 and for 10.4-intel[1], so it's been around on the servers for some time. (Also, the man pages still list it as a server-only command. Those may not have been updated yet for Mountain Lion.)

(If you're not already aware of them, Apple has a very full set of man pages online. The framed browsing style is a pain, but the pages are still great for scanning and finding new commands[2].)

[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/darwi...

[2]: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/darwi...

Either I'm misunderstanding you, or you misunderstood me.

The /Application folder itself is owned by root:

    achilles /$ ls -ld Applications/
    drwxrwxr-x+ 55 root  admin  1870 Jul 20 06:54 Applications/

But that wasn't what I meant. I meant /Applications/Postgres.app. That is owned by the user who installs it to /Applications. Here it is on my machine, for example:

    achilles /$ ls -ld Applications/Postgres.app/
    drwxr-xr-x@ 3 achilles  staff  102 Jul 18 20:17 Applications/Postgres.app/ 

Beyond that, you can login (with no password), this way:

    achilles /$ /Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/psql 
    psql (9.1.4)
    Type "help" for help.

    achilles=#

I'm sure it works because I just did it. The setup is arguably insecure, but again I don't think it's meant to be a production database. It's meant, as I understand it, for a single developer to use while coding.

From what I can tell, the app defaults to (1) no password and (2) a base user of $USER. Maybe a better way to put it: whoever you install it as is the owner of the app's folder in /Applications. That will be your base user. I think they're assuming (as is most common) a single-user Mac environment. (The postmaster.opts file hardcodes the name of the Postgres.app owner in the path for the data directory. So I don't think this would work as a multi-user application. But maybe I'm misunderstanding the installation.)

Anyhow, start the app, open a psql shell with /Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/psql in a terminal window, and you get a session. Since (I think) the app is intended only for development use, I'm not sure if they intend for you to change those defaults. That's not to say that you shouldn't but just that the app is meant to be (nearly) zero conf. (The documentation suggests adding Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/MacOS/bin to $PATH, which is probably a good idea if you will use the command line tools often.)

I love Inconsolata, except for one small thing: the curly quotation marks.

If you have that same quibble, good news: Inconsolata-dz[1]. Inconsolata with straight quotes.

[1]: http://nodnod.net/2009/feb/12/adding-straight-single-and-dou...

We all do it sometimes, and it's no big deal. I just couldn't pass up the smile.

Without arguing for or against it, I'll just say it's the first book JGC recommends in his linked post. :)

As a counterpoint to the Strunk and White recommendation, please take a look at this: 50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice[1]. (Note that it doesn't primarily object to the stylistic advice in S&W, which it calls "vapid" but "mostly harmless". The real objections are to the grammatical claims and advice.)

Two books on writing I strongly recommend:

Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose[2], exerpt here[3].

Style: Towards Clarity and Grace - this one has gone through countless versions as the publisher seems to re-release it every academic year. (Make used copies obsolete and raise the price.) I prefer the older, shorter versions to the more recent ones. It was clearer itself when briefer! Anyhow, here's an author search on Amazon - look for older used copies[4]. Edit: Just found this outline of the 6th ed. of the book. A good way to see what he covers in a hurry.[5]

The first is not a standard writing guide; it's a thoughtful analysis of what makes a certain kind of writing clear and persuasive. The second is a more nuts-and-bolts guide to writing. They're both excellent.

[1]: http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/2549...

[2]: http://classicprose.com/

[3]: http://classicprose.com/csx.html

[4]: http://www.amazon.com/Joseph-M.-Williams/e/B001H6MZ40/ref=nt...

[5]: http://www.oxfordtutorials.com/StyleTenLessons.htm

I've used Postgres.app recently on Lion. What problem did you have?

I no longer fall into deep pits of yak shaving, but I'm not sure I agree with the opposite extreme either ("use the absolute vanilla defaults").

But I would expect that there's a natural progression (sort of like the many "evolution of a <language> programmer" posts[1]). You start using these programmer's tools, and at first you struggle to do basic things with default settings. Then, later, you learn that everything can be configured. You spend days (weeks? months?) getting very little real work done, but configuring everything. Then, later again, you calm down, find a set of reasonable and productive configurations, automate getting them onto new machines when necessary and go back to work.

[1]: Example for Python: https://gist.github.com/289467.

Worth saying: this is not another minor update of Wrox's Beginning Perl. There have been a number of revisions of Simon Cozens's Perl 5.6 (5.8?) era Beginning Perl, but this is a completely new book (other than the title). Cozen's original version is already available freely online[1], for what that's worth.

[1]: http://www.perl.org/books/beginning-perl/

I love the Harvard Bookstore, but the Cambridge neighborhood (or maybe Boston more generally?) may be a bit unusual.

Cambridge also supports an outstanding independent bookstore focused on books in foreign languages (Schoenhof's[1]), a small poetry-only independent bookstore right around the corner from The Harvard Bookstore (Grolier Poetry Bookshop[2]) and a used bookstore with a focus on scholarly books (Raven Books[3]).

Raven is newer (the Cambridge branch opened only in 2005), and both Grolier and Schoenhof's are less well-stocked than they once were (I've been visiting Cambridge more or less yearly since around 1992), but they still exist. Comparable places in so many other cities are just gone.

Edit: Reading the commenters who live in Boston talk about "the carnage" in their local book scene makes me think "the grass is always greener". Where I live (NYC) I only notice the dead or dying bookstores, but Boston always seems relatively thriving when I visit.

[1]: http://www.schoenhofs.com/

[2]: http://grolierpoetrybookshop.org/blog2/

[3]: http://www.ravencambridge.com/

Ah, fair enough. I really only meant to cite the one example - since I found it so striking when I first saw it. (It had never occurred to me to use sed for head that way.)

> -T seems useful doesn't it? How else would you get that info?

The long (-l) format already provides the month, day, hour and minutes. -T adds only seconds and the year. No utility can possibly provide every format option that someone might find useful. If you really needed that format, and ls were leaner, you would need to write a script (in whatever language).

> And -x is a personal preference.

Basic utilities shouldn't include so many options that are variants for personal preferences.

> None of those seem especially useless.

I don't think that they are outrageously useless, but let's set the bar higher. The core utilities should be, in my opinion, much much leaner than they are.

Getting rid of good things would be bad, but is sed 10q really "ridiculously complex"?

> A lot of legacy has been shed.

An example I remember from the UNIX to Plan 9 command translation page[1]:

    UNIX                       Plan 9

    head                       sed 10q

[1]: http://www.plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/unix_to_plan_9_com...

> No, ls has dozens of tangled options because the philosophy is to "do one thing and do it well".

Do you mean that in order to truly do well its one thing (list information about files), that ls had to incorporate things like these?

      -o      List in long format, but omit the group id.

      -T      When used with the -l (lowercase letter ``ell'') option, display complete
              time information for the file, including month, day, hour, minute, second,
              and year.

      -x      The same as -C, except that the multi-column output is produced with entries
              sorted across, rather than down, the columns.

Some degree of feature creep is probably inevitable, but a lot of the common utilities now seem to lean towards "offer a flag for everything" rather than "do a small number of permutations on one thing; create pipelines for the rest". (Note: These three options are all from OSX's BSD-derived ls. GNU's version is almost certainly more complex still.)

No. It may be unintentional, but the tone of stiff's comments is highly condescending.

Exhibit A: Whatever you think about James's choices in this library, he has clearly thought a lot about OOP. It's just silly to start a comment with "You have to think a bit more about what OO really is about."

The link to the mobi versions still works, but not the epub link. After some quick Googling I can't find a working source for them.

Still, it sounds like a great resource. If anyone knows of a working link for the epub, please let us know.

> I think I'll have a bit of a lie-down now...

Maybe in your lean-to? (Only other example I can think of quickly.)

More seriously, thanks to the grand-parent for squelching the preposition nonsense so soundly.

I think this will interest some HN readers: Zachary Kessin's Building Web Applications with Erlang[1] is available as an early-release ebook. As an early release, the ebook price is already cheap, but combined with the 50% discount, today it's $6.49. Definitely seems worth a look.

[1]: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920021452.do

Roberto Ierusalimschy's Programming in Lua, 2nd Ed. is an absolute gem. Well written, concise and very authoritative (he's one of the language's co-creators).

One thing worth knowing though: he's working on the 3rd edition (updated for Lua 5.2), though I'm not sure how soon that is expected.

The first edition is online, if you want to get an idea what it's like: http://www.lua.org/pil. In addition, the language's refrence manual is freely available online as well. Depending on how you learn, that would get you started very quickly. (It's a small language and very much follows the principle of least surprise - except for indexing arrays from 1, but you get used to that.) http://www.lua.org/docs.html has the full reference manual for 5.1 and 5.2.