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Slackwise

1,050 karma · joined July 18, 2010

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/slackwise; my proof: https://keybase.io/slackwise/sigs/3k-jplnwfNlBvyK12ne8DIqZ5OPt9KSd6AP515PY9SM ]
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Slackwise··on Anatomy of a Mechanical Keyboard (2018)
Actually, increasing resistance has reduced my strain from typing. After a few minutes of typing, I start to bottom out less and less, and instead I feel like I have little shock absorbers under each key, reducing the impact of every press.

As for the community, most seem to dislike high resistance switches, which is why my preference for MX Clears leaves me with few brands to purchase from, and my dream ideal of a higher resistance Topre will probably never happen.

Slackwise··on Ask HN: Why do new(ish) programming languages eschew OOP features?
https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Value-Values/

https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/

https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-Hi...

If you're going to watch any of these, at least watch "The Value of Values".

Slackwise··on An Anti-Adblock Defuser for Nano Adblocker and uBlock Origin
So if I understand correctly, it's an anti-anti-adblocker...?
Slackwise··on Happy Birthday, Ruby

    (def fizzbuzz-nums (range 1 101))

    (defn fizz? [n] (zero? (% n)))

    (defn buzz? [n] (zero? (% n 5)))

    (defn fizzbuzz? [n] (and (fizz? n) (buzz? n)))

    (defn fizzbuzz [n]
      (cond (fizzbuzz? n) "FizzBuzz"
            (fizz?     n) "Fizz"
            (buzz?     n) "Buzz"
            :else         n)))

    (def fizzbuzz-list (map fizzbuzz fizzbuzz-nums))

    (apply println fizzbuzz-list)
Slackwise··on Let the Fountain Pens Flow
I'm a lefty and while I avoid writing, a fountain pen with fast drying ink and a BOLD tip is very lefty usable.

The trick to lefty pens is to get BOLD tips!

When you have a thin needle-like tip, as you know, you end up stabbing or scratching the paper. But if the tip is either a big round rolling ball or nib, then it glides across the paper on its roundy edge.

I can definitely recommend the Lamy Safari with a 1.0 bold tip, or any Pilot ballpoint pen with a 1.0 bold tip. (I carry a Pilot Precision 1.0 Bold ballpoint pen with me at all times.)

Slackwise··on GnuPG can now be used to perform notarial acts in the State of Washington
> So I get the impression GnuPG is considered obsolete by the security community.

This is news to me, but I'm not in "the Security Community". I can't find anything that corroborates this. Why do you say that?

Slackwise··on SQL Style Guide
>> Where possible avoid simply using "id" as the primary identifier for the table.

> I wonder what is the reasoning behind this? To escape the ambiguity during joins?

Most justifications center around the "USING" clause which can only be used on matching column names:

    select user_id,
           username,
           comment

    from   users
           inner join
           comments     using (user_id);

Versus `on user.id = comments.user_id`.

The argument against this is that the USING clause really mucks up the result set columns by unifying those that match the USING clause.

Slackwise··on Announcing TypeScript 3.0
If I'm going to "upgrade" from JavaScript, why would I specifically choose TypeScript?

Yes, it gives some compile-time-only type safety in certain places, but it doesn't provide state safety like ClojureScript. I'm more worried about state/reference-based bugs creeping into my code versus type related issues, which I'll be checking via unit tests anyway. On top of that, it doesn't protect you from the usual JavaScript pitfalls since it's backwards compatible, including the bad parts.

Or am I missing something here? Is it popular because it lets you directly upgrade existing JavaScript files? I can see that being a big draw. Small and gradual improvement, yeah?

Slackwise··on Taskwarrior, where have you been all my life?
Not the parent commenter, but...

- Add a time to reminders, as they're currently only due date reminders. (Nearly useless, really, other than appearing on your calendar.)

- Merge Tasks remidners with the Google Assistant reminders, and the Google Keep reminders. Three different places to have Googley reminders, all separate.

- Re-arranging the task lists. (You can only re-arrange tasks on a list, but not the lists themselves. This is a basic feature that is surprisingly missing.)

- Add a widget for the Android home screen so you can keep a specific list in full view all the time. (This is kinda' a personal wishlist item.)

- Add Google Assistant voice command support to create tasks, review tasks, etc. (Super useful while driving and remembering something.)

- Add tagging to list items, and a search function so you can have "meta-lists" like "All Items Due Today" without having to maintain items across lists. (This would allow you implement the GTD methodology.)

- Add minimal per-list collaboration of some sort, similar to Keep. (I guess it's already available for Keep, so maybe not super relevant.)

Slackwise··on Taskwarrior, where have you been all my life?
I don't see any actual¹ JavaScript on the page, so how would this have been accomplished? Some fancy but broken scrolling manipulation CSS...?

1: The only JS on the page is an IE conditional comment adding an HTML5 shim script, and the Disqus comment embedding script. Then there's the Google analytics that gets pulled in from font references and I guess Facebook JS via the Disqus embed.

Slackwise··on Introducing extended line endings support in Notepad
Or for those who come from Unixland and see way too much typing, PowerShell has aliases that make this much shorter:

    cd HKCU:
    ls -r -i *HeidiSQL*
Or if you really want to use the match operator, regex, or other expression, you can still pipe it through the Where-Object alias:

    ls -r | ? {$_.Name -match "HeidiSQL"}
Slackwise··on Hello: A new social network founded by Orkut's creator
This is also a comically bad time to release yet another social network, as you've pointed out with the current atmosphere surrounding Facebook.
Slackwise··on Original Windows File Manager with enhancements
Really? Because I'm required to use an Oracle IDE that only does MDI, and it's a pain to use across multiple monitors.
Slackwise··on Great Vowel Shift
Just heard of "The Great Vowel Shift" on the "Lexicon Valley"[1] linguistics podcast, which covered the idiosyncrasies of English spelling, and how the vowel shift was a large factor in how pronunciations diverged from their spellings.

[1]: http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2018/0...

Slackwise··on Goodbye to Eclipse – the end of an era as an Eclipse plugin developer
> unlike Intellij, which sells its IDE

The fancy version costs money, yes, but the community edition is free and Apache licensed. Here's the source code: https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community

> is there another major cause for most of the world drifting to the inferior choice?

I've used both Eclipse and IntelliJ, as well as JetBrain's "ReSharper" tool in Visual Studio, and while the UI is obviously different, and in some ways better, some ways worse than Eclipse, the actual functionality and feature set of IntelliJ is clearly superior to Eclipse, especially all the refactoring and code smell tools.

The feature list is just incredible and constantly increasing: https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/whatsnew/

Also, IdeaVim is way superior to Eclim, if you care about Vim keybindings and modal editing.

Slackwise··on Google removes ‘view image’ button from search results
> Why does Google always think they know what is best for me?

This is the entire ethos of the "AI Revolution" in tech. The algorithm "knows what is best for you". This will only get worse with more "AI" being applied to more tech.

Slackwise··on [dead]
> When did smartphones start regressing?

When they got rid of keyboards.

Then your other mentioned features, the SD cards and batteries left quickly after, but the keyboard was the first to go. Now I struggle with typing in frustration, whereas I used to be able to type full paragraphs without even looking at the phone, including backspaces, on my old WinMo, BlackBerry, and early Android phones.

Slackwise··on Mastodon makes the Internet feel like home again
Oh yeah, we need a purely unfiltered web to prevent echo chambers forming! Let's see what that turns out like—oh that's right, 4chan. (Do we really need more 4chans?)

It looks like even with an unfiltered world, echo chambers still evolve. It's the nature of communities.

Slackwise··on The triumph and near-tragedy of the first Moon landing
Oh, also, Russ Olsen does a wonderful talk about the moon landing and the engineering involved:

https://youtu.be/4Sso4HtvJsw

Slackwise··on Automakers: Don't Ask Customers What They Want
The customer isn't always right, but, the customer also didn't ask for glued-in smartphone batteries, removing the MicroSD slot, or removing the headphone jack.
Slackwise··on Lisp at the Frontier of Computation [video]
Whenever I want someone to understand Lisp being a homoiconic metaprogramming language, I link them this:

http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html

Slackwise··on The GNUnet System
Adoption. Users want convenience. They want to click a thing and go, not install a desktop app, configure it, learn about the networking model, etc.

Then when we've all sunk into all these convenient cloud services and "easy to use" disposable devices, we'll have lost all of our privacy and power. The corporations will get regulated, and then the government will have access and control of the systems.

And yet we'll have people argue that these open source and federated/distributed systems are "too confusing" and "not practical" and that we shouldn't even try to avoid this future.

Slackwise··on Apology after Japanese train departs 20 seconds early
Very frequently, my train is up to 4 minutes early, and the doors open on the other side of the track, opposite the parking lot, so sometimes I'm totally on time, walking towards it after parking, but it's swooshing in, and I get to stand there, watch as others board...

So yeah, not cool.

Slackwise··on 4Clojure Easy Problems Updated on Clojurecademy
It's supposed to make you understand the language, how it works, and why it works the way it does, not how to write it professionally. It exposes you to patterns you'll run into.
Slackwise··on Viking ‘Allah’ textile actually doesn't have Allah on it
You'd think by now they'd add a "details" or body section to tweets, so 140 chars is used for a title or summary, and then you could have a standard blog post attached to them. That way people using SMS can still use them for whatever the hell they use them for.
Slackwise··on ES7 brings two new features
Still waiting on TCO.
Slackwise··on Relicensing the GraphQL specification
More like a sigh of relief.
Slackwise··on Malware identified in CCleaner 5.33
CCleaner is also essential for cleaning up poorly uninstalled apps leaving registry keys lingering around. It's also great for when you need to fully reset and reinstall a misbehaving app, such as Symantec Endpoint Protection, which fails to clean up several critical registry keys that it checks during installation, and then refuses to re-install if they exist. Sure, you could hunt them down and write a script for Symantec, but CCleaner does it for all apps. I've fixed so many terrible apps and installs using CCleaner, it's an absolute necessity.

That and RevoUinstaller. You run RevoUinstaller then CCleaner, and maybe a reboot in between, and you've really removed an app. (The paid version of Revo is even cooler, as it will let you log the files generated during an install, and then on uninstall, it'll make sure to remove all the files and directories you had previously logged.)

Slackwise··on The man who wrote the book on password management regrets the error
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.
Slackwise··on Browser Extensions Standard
> IIRC (very unsure of this, but have heard it from different non-google sources) the name "Google Chrome" is actually a joke on this because it had the least chrome amongst browsers of the time (remember the toolbar and status bar?)

Well, that and it was Google.com's "chrome".

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