I love QMK, but I do worry about the physical security of a keyboard running a flashable firmware. It would be so easy to snarf passwords off of one, even less detectably than by installing a keylogger.
8,423 karma · joined August 11, 2015
One also needs to learn to read the room. Sometimes one simply can't persuade others: then the question is whether to go along with them, or to resign.
Other than HN, I maintain a very light social media presence. Like smoking, in moderation it is fine but in excess it can be fatal.
Choosing JavaScript is a very different mistake than choosing C (it is at least memory safe, which counts for something). But it is deeply disheartening to imagine how many man-centuries (or man-millennia?) of work have gone into the ramshackle apparatus which is the JavaScript ecosystem while better ecosystems wither and starve for lack of involvement.
JavaScript delenda est.
As I recall, it was pretty snappy! I think it would still have been sufficiently snappy had its OS been written in Smalltalk or Lisp …
I think that still holds even if they demonstrably do not care about performance all that much! You are quite right: current software is heavier and slower than it used to be and than it needs to be; it is also less safe and is more difficult to develop than it needs to be.
The popularity of things like Java or JavaScript is another disfunction: although they are very different from one another, they are similar in that they have poor syntax, frighteningly bad ergonomics and poor semantics. They require too much boilerplate (in very different ways) and are insufficiently expressive and powerful. They are not even as much safer as they should be, given their memory safety!
Our industry is appallingly immature.
I think that modern computers are so amazingly fast that a little cleverness can go a long way, permitting us to run more safely and write more quickly with more powerful languages. Honestly, I wish we had been doing that for decades at this point — computers were actually plenty fast even in the 90s!
Tcl is horribly, terribly under-appreciated. It is one of the great might-have-beens of modern computing, almost as much as is Lisp.
The CIA didn't install the Shah; he already was the ruler of the country. Nor did the CIA overthrow his insubordinate minister Mossadegh; the Shah's government did that.
It needs to 'infect' (as you put it) everything because it needs to pervade everything, so a library can pass it through to anything it calls. This is a good argument for making it implicit.
> And it includes an untyped key-value store implemented as a linked-list of pairs (!!!!), because why not?
That is just a cons chain, famous for example as the foundation of the Lisp programming language, and there is nothing wrong with it. Note that it is unfair to say that it is untyped: the values themselves are strongly typed, and the cells too are typed — interface{} (or T in Lisp terms) is still a type!
A cons chain has advantages for inheritance of values in a DAG of calls. It is not necessarily the most efficient, but simplicity is a virtue.
0: Continuation-passing style is both really powerful and well-nigh unreadable, for a reason.
Of Myra, actually — his relics were stolen from his tomb in Myra by sailors from Bari, where they remain today, but he probably never even visited there.
A debt jubilee would not fly so well now when all of our pensions, retirements and endowments are tied up as … someone else's debt.
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. In a market with units for sale and for rent, prices tend to reach an equilibrium. The only difference is that rent includes a premium for the relative ease with which one can move.
Another way of looking at it is that traditionally it was considered reasonable for annual rent to be 1/20th of the purchase price of a property. Likewise, 5% annual maintenance was considered reasonable. Unsurprisingly … 1/20th == 5%.
> Many landlords probably spend more time sending out bills than they do on maintaining the property.
That was certainly not my experience when renting. My most recent apartment had multiple full-time employees maintaining it and had an annual improvements budget. I won't claim that it had all the amenities I would have liked, but the landlord was definitely not just letting the cash roll in.
Can't you imagine the headlines? 'Sweetheart deal for politicially-connected landlords allows rent-control evasion for the next year!'
(N.b. for those unfamiliar with the term: 'martyr' comes the Greek word μάρτυρ, meaning 'witness.' The modern secondary meaning 'suicide murderer' is … something else entirely.)
It appears to be the default with emacs — at least, hard-wrap off appears to be the default. Soft-wrap is on, but … I can't imagine that you dislike soft-wrap, do you?
I wonder if the issue is with how footnotes are displayed electronically? Perhaps a Sufficiently Smart E-Reader could display a footnote as long as its footnote marker, sentence, line or paragraph (would need research to see which is best, I think) is on-screen.
Remember, too, that the immediate aftermath was truly widespread horror. Everyone agreed that it was terrible. My recollection is that is the protests against police in general grew harsher, other folks started to accentuate the fact that Floyd was not a perfect man. And then everyone lost control of their collective sanity.
It's important to point out that you have absolutely no evidence of anyone being tortured to confess to the purpose of a watch. The interrogators could have just asked.
That's something my wife & I have been discussing recently. She pointed out that traditional family structures have more slack built into them, which comes in handy in times of trouble. The problem is that in the modern Taylorist world we treat slack as waste. But it really isn't, any more than insurance is waste.
Amazing the lengths people go to in order to avoid sharing and treating others well! Imagine if they did the opposite: imagine if they just freely shared their source code.
They may not, but Beats and Apple — the former is a subsidiary of the latter — lock one into a proprietary ecosystem in which your data is not your data (just try sharing iCloud photos with Android users), you have no right to run, view, modify or share the software you depend on, your message security rests 100% on the corporate goodwill of Apple and any government which can force Apple to do its will (your iMessages are end-to-end encrypted … to whatever keys Apple says belong to your correspondents; Apple can add new keys at will). And of course Apple are also doing their best to replace the standard headphone jack with crufty, battery-draining, CPU-requiring Bluetooth.
Headphones capable of running Bluetooth are headphones capable of collecting data about you, because they need some sort of processor to speak the Bluetooth protocol. Headphones which are composed of wire and drivers aren't capable of anything other than playing or receiving audio.
S-expressions have the advantage of not containing the redundant object type (there's no need for an object, map or dictionary when one has alists or plists), and the even greater advantage of elegantly representing code.
Also they are easier to write parsers for.
Man, I miss them.
The distinction is that an identifier identifies a resource; a locator states where it is located.
'My grand-father's diary, 4 July 1930' is a resource identifier (but not a URI); urn:isbn:0-486-27557-4 is a URI, but not a URL; https://news.ycombinator.com/ is a URL.
No, the North Vietnamese were the invading force. They invaded South Vietnam, and after the Paris Peace Accords they invaded it again and conquered it.