twopoint718

After I heard about him, I went to my campus library and checked out "Afternoon." It comes on one 3.5" floppy disk and couldn't be removed from the reading room. So I sat down (at the only machine left with a floppy drive) and clicked through it for about an hour.

It is certainly very different from a usual novel. For starters you have no idea how long it is. Hyperlinks aren't highlighted as we've come to expect and so I have to admit that I was doing some Myst-style random clicking at times. You'll often get back to the same paragraph but through a different path, these paragraphs are usually written in such a way that they would make sense by any path that you'd arrived at them.

The thing that comes to mind here is the notion of a "controlled vocabulary" from library science. When you're building a hierarchical model of concepts (Library of Congress, or Dewey Decimal Classification) it helps to have a relatively small and consistent set of identifiers so that you can consistently refer to the same thing.

I think of good English usage as being similar. When what you mean is X, use the word for X. So these sorts of lists of usage can be thought of as a mapping from concepts to words.

English is dynamic, true, but you have to remember that when you talk about "English is what English speakers speak" I think you have to also consider, to avoid a grave disservice to history, that "English speakers" mean not only those walking around today, but all the vast collection of written words through the ages.

"Anarchy" (the word) isn't a political argument, it just means "an-" without, "-arkhos" leader.

I'll offer Michael Joyce as an example:

http://faculty.vassar.edu/mijoyce/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afternoon:_a_story

I think you could consider this a use of hyperlinking before the web. And if you count "As We May Think", then it is a use way before the web.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_We_May_Think

This was my favorite blogging platform back in the day. It was easy to plug markdown into and I thought they had a good idea for just using the filesystem (no web post editor). Not to put words into any mouths, but they must have figured you already had a favorite text editor (Emacs, Vim, etc.)

The book (and TV series) "Connections" by James Burke is a very interesting peek into just how interconnected technology is.

The one that amazed me was how the technology of the auto loom lead to the computer (via punch cards). Again, this won't give you insight into the math of things, but it will show you how one innovation lead to another.

http://www.amazon.com/Connections-James-Burke/dp/0316116726

You may have to watch out because the GPLv3 is designed to prevent this sort of thing (having some GPL'd software inaccessible on the server side (the "application service provider" loophole)).

So it could be a problem, I'm not an expert on this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Vers...

*Edit, nothing to do with "Tivoization"

It looks like Sun is going to get into the game with an app store based around Java:

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/165219/sun_see...

http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/will_java_be_the_world

I've never heard this characterized so well. There was a <something> that I had always been trying to put my finger on when I'd read these sorts of articles and the top-down/bottom-up description is right on the mark.

My own feeling is something like this. Before Newton there was Kepler. Now Kepler was no dummy and he used the exacting measurements of Tycho Brahe to arrive at a very accurate model of planetary motion. He found that planets traveled in ellipses not circles, and he knew that they swept out equal areas in equal times (among other things). In short, he had a very firm "top-down" grasp on what planets did.

Then along came Newton, a "bottom-up" thinker if there ever was one (calculus was invented in what was perhaps the most supreme feat of yak shaving ever http://catb.org/jargon/html/Y/yak-shaving.html ). He found that there was an underlying and unifying idea, gravity, that explained why the planets behave as they do.

So to cap off my analogy, I've found that if I've worked in a sufficiently bottom-up way on something then sometimes what seems complex or intricate collapses down into some small and elegant solution that I wouldn't have seen if I were coming from the other direction (or at least it would be much more difficult).

On Lisp is a must, it is just a really brilliant book that delves into what Graham argues (and I accept) is the most distinct and powerful feature of Lisp, macros.

I can see evidence that Clojure contributors have read it too, just the other day there was an example of an anaphoric macro posted on the mailing list. Very cool.

http://www.bookshelf.jp/texi/onlisp/onlisp_17.html#SEC111

Reader macros?

I had never heard of the idea of keeping a ring of rings for a limited stack trace (the "history"). It's my experience that seeing the last few calls in a backtrace is usually enough for me to see where I went wrong.

When someone pays to advertise they know it is a "leaky" mechanism. It is understood (or should be) that not every person in the world will see that ad. It is also understood that not every person that sees the ad will buy the products advertised. That's the nature of advertising.

Why do they still advertise? Because of the people that do see the ad, some do buy the product.

I enjoy using xmonad too. It puts you in a very different workflow. Also don't miss the great list of people's config files: http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Config_archive

I ended up adopting this one almost without modification: http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Config_archive/Thomas_... (warning, for Dvorak keyboard layout)

I've come to like my iBook G4 more since I've been running Debian on it. The advantage, which no fanboy can dispute is this, free upgrades. I got sick of this or that not working under 10.3 (no Java updates, for example) and so I thought "I'm just not shelling out $100+ for a new OS."

I do appreciate that OSX is now an official UNIX, more power to 'em.

This falls more into the "tips and tricks" category, but I wish someone had mentioned this to me earlier. Once you have a good book on C[1] install all the man pages for the standard library. Once you start writing code, being able to say something like "man strlen" is amazingly useful.

I made the most progress in C when I took a class on OSs. Mainly, we wrote systems programming sorts of things like a simple shell, our own version of malloc, a simple user-space thread library, and so on. This really gave me insight into how these things would be done for real. Also, writing something really linked-list-heavy gets you a feel for pointers really quickly.

[1]: I have K&R ANSI C and I found it very concise and well-written. It is probably one step up from the "raw newbie" class of books in terms of difficulty, but should feel just right for someone already acquainted with (an) other language(s).

As long as you're paying for PS, check out Codeweavers' Crossover Linux. You can run native Windows programs under Linux (Crossover is a tweaked version of Wine).

It looks like Photoshop isn't quite there yet though: http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/cat/?cat_id=...

It is one of the top applications that they are working on: http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/toplists/

That does look nice, thanks!

Again, not an anti-MS person here, I support a large number of Windows clients, but it is not my OS of choice.

Maybe there are user interface tweaks that one can perform on Windows (do tell) but I can never seem to get it as minimal as running something like fluxbox on Linux (to say nothing of ratpoison, stumpwm, or xmonad). My very unscientific poll of the computer support staff at my office shows that there is fluxbox, openbox, and twm. My Windows usage is cursory, so maybe I'm totally wrong on this.

Don't let me put words in other mouths, but the reason tomsaffell is saying that if MS sells a $y-priced version of Windows for netbooks that they'll end up losing $(x-y)(# of non-netbook PCs) is this: if there is a fully-functional* Windows version on the market then all contemporary Windows versions will tend to that price. Users will say "why do I pay $x for Windows when John Q. Otherguy got it for $y on his netbook?".

The only way that users won't say that is if the "Windows for Netbooks" is lousy in some way or another.

*(Means something like "works the same, except for feature Z" where Z is sufficiently obscure)

Thanks. I was looking for a "search in book"-type link but couldn't find it. There are some excerpts on e2 that I found, but not of the passage that I was thinking of.

This reminds me about the story where Feynman is being interviewed by a psychologist. He answers each question in a way that is both perfectly reasonable yet would cause the psychologist to become increasingly concerned.

Here is a podcast interview with the Laconica creator that cleared a lot of things up for me: http://www.twit.tv/floss37

Lately, I've been using Pandoc (http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/) which is a better markdown than markdown (uses a parser rather than regexes). It also knows how to convert between lots of different markups it can read LaTeX, HTML, reStructuredText and markdown. It can write that and many more. I use it to convert LaTeX into S5 presentations and HTML; very nice for giving talks.

Is this really Hacker News? Flagged.

Thank you. I was going to say the same thing.

This is really interesting. One using a URL shortener is essentially setting up a parallel DNS infrastructure (like the article said). And there is nothing preventing anyone from doing exactly this right now. One could run a DNS that re-maps any name to any desired IP. The new root "just" have to get people to put down your servers instead of the ones that their ISP or organization gives out.

As with anything where there are multiple equally good ways to do something, there will be people that do it each way: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root

The nice thing though is that if you have some upfront developer/consultant cost for Linux that cost gets amortized over every netbook you crank out. I have no idea how the economics of this really works, but it would seem at least that the per-machine Linux price would keep falling toward zero.

I just have to put in another plug for GUILE. I've written a sizable chunk of my day-to-day shell scripts in it and it is such a pleasant environment in which to work.

Are there translators out there, for perl, python?

Agreed. The UI for the desktop just gives me a headache but there are some really cool projects coming out of Redmond. There is some really interesting work in computational photography:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/cambridge/projects/au...

http://livelabs.com/photosynth/