telemachos

The source is available if you build it yourself: https://github.com/b4winckler/macvim/releases. The binaries should be coming soon.

I agreed with the people saying that a confirmation before uploading would be helpful, so I went to file an issue.

It turns out there is one there already. You can weigh in here: https://github.com/ConradIrwin/showterm/issues/12.

EDIT: A follow up: It turns out that there is a slightly hidden and indirect way to abort uploads. Start the program as `showterm -e`, and it will offer you a chance to edit timings before uploading. (This is intended to give you a chance to trim out long pauses.) At that point, if you can cause your editor to abort with a non-zero status, the upload aborts. For Vim users, the gem's author points to exiting with `:cq`.

See here: https://github.com/ConradIrwin/showterm/blob/master/bin/show...

I'm not sure you finished the piece. The author says this:

    Luckily, Twitter has an amazing feature that will
    instantly remove negativity from your stream. It's
    called UNFOLLOWING. The next time something feels a
    bit too snarky: Unfollow that user. Before you know
    it, you'll have a really nice place where people have
    interesting and quirky conversations.

So you seem to be agreeing with him, not disagreeing.

To me the larger take-away points are these:

1. We should not idolize these people.

2. We should try to be better ourselves.

I'm guessing he had in mind this (very controversial) feature that was proposed for Ruby 2.0 and then scaled back: http://www.rubyinside.com/ruby-refinements-an-overview-of-a-....

Yup. I do this since I'm used to za in Vim for toggling folds:

    # Collapse all threads by default, except if 
    # there's new mail in one.
    unset collapse_unread
    folder-hook . "exec collapse-all"
    # Toggle collapsed threads with za, like in vim.
    bind index za collapse-thread

I also don't know the psych lingo, but I thought right away of the anthropological distinction between cultures of shame[1] (external disapproval from other people) and guilt[2] (internal disapproval from self). On that score, either could work: shame is certainly appropriate here since devs shame each other all the time.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shame_society

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt_society

This reminded me of a favorite story of mine about Nabokov and Thomas Pynchon: Pynchon was a student of Nabokov's when he was at Cornell. Years later when Pynchon himself became famous, Nabokov told interviewers that he had no memory of Pynchon as a student. But Vera remembered Pynchon's handwriting. She really was the "course assistant" as this article mentions: she must have done the grading too.

I have a PhD in Classics. My focus was on ancient philosophy, in particular on Epicurean philosophy, in particular on a Roman Epicurean named Lucretius, in particular on Book 3 of his De Rerum Natura, in particular about his arguments against the fear of death in that book, in particular about the structure, formal & logical analysis and evaluation of his argument for the thesis that "death is nothing to us" in the later portion of Book 3. (De Rerum Natura is a Roman philosophical poem from the mid-first century BCE. Lucretius and his poem are getting a lot of press recently because of a book called The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt.)

The linked guide to PhDs made me smile, and it rings true to me for non-sciences. As an undergraduate I was a Comparative Literature major with lots of credits in Latin, Greek and Philosophy. Once I got to graduate school for Classics, my studies became increasingly concentrated in smaller and smaller areas of an already small field (Greco-Roman antiquity).

tl;dr I think literature and philosophy PhDs are also pimples of knowledge.

As for whether or not we expand human knowledge, that depends on how you define "human knowledge" and "expand", I suppose. I think it's charitable to say that (many? some?) people produce PhDs that expand human knowledge of Homer and Dante and James Joyce and Plato and Nietzsche and so on and so on. But of course if your definition of "knowledge" only makes room for numerical or quantifiable or experimental subjects, then you may disagree. I arguably expanded the world's knowledge of De Rerum Natura. My work has been cited at least once that I know of in subsequent work on the Epicureans, and not by me. (That's not just a joke: I remember reading that a large percentage of all research across disciplines is only ever cited again by the original author. I find that depressing.) I've also met a handful of people who tell me that it helped them in some other study.

[1]: http://books.wwnorton.com/books/The-Swerve/

They don't "creep in". The site is designed to let duplicates in after a certain amount of time.

> Usually Hacker News doesn't let you post the same link more than once.

I believe that's wrong. From what I've seen, I think that that time is also a factor. After some amount of time, you can repost things with exactly the same link and title. And I believe that it's deliberate (the posts are likely to be new to many people since the population turns over to some degree after x amount of time).

> If I want an app, I download it. If I don't want it any more, I move it to the trash. If I really don't want it anymore, I use AppZapper. Can someone explain to me why the issue of package managers comes up so often arouand these parts and why they're so important to people?

You're talking about apps in a relatively recent sense of the word: a wholly self-contained piece of software that you drop into the OSX /Applications folder.

Package managers, in the relevant sense, are for installing software (often called 'packages') into places that OSX normally hides from its users (/usr/local for example). A lot of this software is command line software, though on other operating systems, a package manager would also manage GUI packages. (On OSX there is this somewhat artificial distinction between /usr/local and /Applications.)

In any case, the kind of software pkgsrc, MacPorts or Homebrew installs requires more work than just "download it". You can download the source code easily enough, but you can't simply download the precompiled software itself, unzip it and drop it somewhere. You have to build it, and this will require lots of other packages and also a whole bunch of knowledge and or scripts to configure and build it correctly. Package managers like pkgsrc help to automate and simplify all of this.

If you've never needed anything like this, no great surprise, and likely you never will. But if you do need these things, then OSX poses some extra challenges. (Although as far as that goes, every os has its own issues, no doubt.)

Since a lot of the comments here about the case-sensitive file system, note this comment on the blog[1]:

> pkgsrc hasn't required a case-sensitive file system for some years now. If you've run across documentation that told you otherwise, could you point me at it so it can be fixed?

Assuming that's correct, then using pkgsrc on OSX is very simple: simply download pkgsrc, bootstrap it and then use it.

[1]: http://www.eliteraspberries.com/blog/2013/03/pkgsrc-on-os-x....

s/callous/callus/ # damn brain-fart

Things like this really make me wish I could edit HN posts without a time limit.

Unlike fogus, I am trying to glorify writing by hand in some contexts at least. (The proviso is important: I don't think that writing by hand is always better.)

I believe that writing by hand helps me to think better and write better, precisely because it's slower. (There's probably also something about me liking the specific physical feedback, but I would be the first to admit that's probably idiosyncratic and learned rather than universal.)

As for all the virtues of typed text that you mention, I agree. If you look at my process from above, I typed up what I had handwritten earlier. But even though this means some obvious duplication of effort, the net outcome was worth it for me (and still is).

No doubt people vary and all that, but I think writing by hand is vastly underrated nowadays. I stand by that.

I love that he talks about writing with pens and paper. Too many people overlook how useful this can be, I think.

When I was writing my dissertation, I followed this cycle:

+ Morning: Write new material, always by hand on legal pads, with the same pen (a relatively heavy, but thin Lamy ballpoint - good balance and weight, fine but clear ink, never clogged). Edit: I still have a callous on my finger from those two years of writing.

+ Lunch + shoot pool for a few hours (no books, clear head)

+ Afternoon: Type up what I hand wrote in the morning, edit old pages (on a screen or from print outs, that would vary) and take notes on articles and books.

Having time to think is what makes writing by hand so useful I think. It's like the (apocryphal?) Truman Capote response when he heard about Kerouac's automatic writing style: "That's not writing. It's typing." Too much of what we do is just typing rapidly, without thought.

Maybe more disciplined people can work slowly enough at a keyboard, but I find it difficult still. When I really want to think about something, I still start with paper.

Whoops. I tend to rely on the site itself to block (recent) dupes. I guess the different title threw it, though I would have expected the identical URL to get caught.

The complaints I recall about Ruby keyword arguments were on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/brixen/status/281180931950264320

https://twitter.com/garybernhardt/status/281181122736582656.

Not sure if that's what you're thinking of.

@ch0wn: I'm pretty sure that chao- was talking about the implementation of keyword arguments, not refinements.

I don't work with MySQL or Rails, but I read this all the way through, mostly because the story was well told.

Strikes me as a perfect example of a culture that works hard and enjoys the hell out of it too.

At the end of the post, the author says: "this issue wont be fixed for now." I asked on Twitter for more details, and this was his reply:

> response was roughly like "We might change this in Rails 4" and "$affected_lib should fix it on its side"[1]

[1] https://twitter.com/joernchen/status/298836052410519552

CSS grids seem to fall into that large category of "things software developers" love to make.

Cf. blog engines, URL shorteners, IRC bots, testing frameworks, pretty printers. The list goes on and on.

ML itself is interesting, and I think the material for the class is good. I enjoyed the first round of homework - not too easy, but not really too hard either. The tough thing for me will be seeing whether can I maintain the extra work for the full 10 weeks.

No worries at all. Any feedback is good - and I added a clarification to make it's clearer now.

I definitely think a package manager is better than manual installation. That's why I said this:

> Simply install rlwrap via your operating system’s package manager (or manually)

But I'll add an update that mentions the bug on OSX. Thanks for the feedback.

Thanks for mentioning Emacs: You made me realize why this hadn't come up in the course notes or material for the Coursera class I'm doing[1]: they explicitly recomment using SML inside Emacs. Unfortunately, I'm a relatively long-time Vim user, and I'm just not comfortable editing in Emacs. So I came to this round-about solution.

[1]: https://class.coursera.org/proglang-2012-001/class/index

I'm taking the same course. I was frustrated with the SML REPL, learned about rlwrap and wrote this up. Glad it helps. (I just posted the tip to the course's forums as well. Thanks for reminding me.)

299 days ago - 132 comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3752447

168 days ago - 26 comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4332971

Not complaining at all about the repost, but I remembered previous discussions and people may find comments of interest there.

A promising start. But it would really help if it were possible to edit aliases you've posted. (For example, I want to clean up the tags for something I posted, but that doesn't seem possible.)

I love it overall, but it would be great if the user could fine tune it a bit. An example: Under "Repositories contributed to" on my page, I see two repos from a place I worked. Those repos are private, and after I left, I had my commit rights revoked (reasonably enough!). But the odd upshot is this: those two repos show up on my page, and yet if I follow the links, I get a 404 page (which is how GH handles this situation: "you're trying to look at a private repo where you are not a collaborator".).

Since that's the case, it would be great if I could manually remove those two repos. (Note: if I logout, those repos no longer appear. So I'm not complaining about what others see - which I think is handled very well. I'm just wishing that I had more control over what I saw.)

I have read the book. It does not teach you C. It assumes that you know the language. It does not teach you anything about the syntax of the language.

He does not tell you how to log into a UNIX system. He tells you what happens when you log into a UNIX system. (That is a big difference. Compare the first chapter of Kerrigan and Pike's The Unix Programming Environment, which actually does teach about terminals and explicitly talks about how to log in and what a login is -- for a complete beginner.)

Here's the first bit of code, from page 5:

    #include "apue.h"
    #include <dirent.h>
    
    int
    main(int argc, char *argv[])
    {
    	DIR		*dp;
    	struct dirent	*dirp;
    
    	if (argc != 2)
    		err_quit("usage: ls directory_name");
    
    	if ((dp = opendir(argv[1])) == NULL)
    		err_sys("can't open %s", argv[1]);
    	while ((dirp = readdir(dp)) != NULL)
    		printf("%s\n", dirp->d_name);
    
    	closedir(dp);
    	exit(0);
    }

My point is very simple: If you do not know C and especially if you also do not know any programming language, it would require either magic or another book or tutorial to figure out the syntax or semantics of those lines. Why is the first include thingy in quotes and the second in brackets? What is an include thingy anyhow? What is DIR? Why do some things have a * in front of them? When are semicolons used? Not every line ends in one, but most do - why? What is the -> used for? When do I use parentheses and when do I use braces? What is argc or argv? Are those names important? What is NULL? Why are some things all capitals and some not. Does that matter? He doesn't answer any of these questions (nor should he), because the book is not meant to teach you C. It assumes that you already know C.

It is not a beginner's book.

> Don't be fooled by the title.. it's a beginner book.

I never know what to do with comments like this. It's obviously not a beginner's book. At the very least, it assumes that you know C. If your response is "C is a small language. You can learn it by reading <some-other-thing>.", you're admitting that APUE is not a beginner's book. If your response is, "C is a small language. You can learn it by reading APUE itself.", then I call bullshit. Is it theoretically possible, sure. But is it a natural way for a true beginner to learn C? Certainly not.