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twrenschon The Shadow Scholar

I spent five years teaching at the University level. The beginning of the end of my academic career was receiving an e-mail from a student explaining one of my (programming) assignments and asking if they could write this one too. To me this was an obvious case of VERY incorrectly choosing the "to" address for an e-mail.

I immediately contacted my department head and was ready to apply the school's academic dishonesty policy, which would lead to--at least--failure of the course. It didn't happen. The student came up with a lame excuse, I was chided for harassing the student, and it was all swept under the rug. I was tempted to resign in protest, but kept with it for two more years before quietly leaving academics.

I enjoy teaching, I think I'm good at it and my students tended to agree. Unfortunately, I can't make myself teach in the current educational system here in the US.

twrenschon Lua 5.2.0 (work1) now available

There's some information in the readme.html file included with the distribution, and a bit more in the manual.

Work versions are aimed at the active lua community as a way to get feedback on features before they are finalized.

Very quick summary:

new syntax for lexical 'sandbox' environments

hex escapes in strings

tables and strings support _len metamethod

__pairs and __ipairs metamethod for iterator support

improvements to GC, week tables, xpcall

twrenschon Scientists Prove Toxic Assets are Impossible to Regulate

A fairly good summary, though I'm not certain someone who hasn't studied computability is going to get it. The "See Also" amichail posted is good.

twrenschon Ask HN: What web/desktop apps do you use to manage your startup?

I'm not happy with my mix yet, and spend too much time trying out new things. Here's what I'm currently using:

PM: Google notebook, Google calendar, "Stickies app" (Tomboy)

Finance: sigh still looking

Files: Dropbox

Communications: GMail, Skype (NOT Twitter)

Documents: Mix Google Docs & OpenOffice. I've started using Etherpad quite a bit as well.

Invoicing & Billing: Still looking for something that fits my needs, Spreadsheets & Docs for now

Source code: Local SNV server, thinking about Github

twrenschon What's the problem with pico?

Except for basic editing tasks they aren't really comparable. Pico (or it's clone nano) are basic text editors designed to be easy for beginners to learn and use. Emacs is a text editor that is so extensible (and so extended!) that it's often compared to an operating system.

I used Emacs continuously for two years and vi on-and-off over five years. What do I use now when I need to do a bit of text-editing on a CLI...I use pico or nano. The problem is that I don't use Emacs or vi all the time, and can't remember the key bindings well enough to use them effectively. That's not a problem with pico.

So to answer your question: as long as you're doing relatively small programs (hundreds of lines and only a few files) pico should be fine. You might want to look into nano though, it looks the same but allows syntax highlighting and is more configurable.