I wonder how the Beatles count compares to the count of references to Alice in Wonderland, which I think are especially frequent in papers on physics and mathematics.
As you say, Apple would not be a trillion dollar company without a great product, but you can build something great and also aggressively market it. Nobody is saying they got where they are just with marketing.
I just now learned of DHH’s views by reading the Github discussion. I think the quote should be removed. But I do not think that, without further information, we should condemn someone for using the quote in the first place. And that is because it’s a big world, and you can’t know everything. And I at least do not investigate someone’s political positions before I quote them. If I read that DHH said "Tests are money in the bank" I might have quoted him here or on some other site. And that’s because I didn’t stop to investigate his positions before quoting him, not because I endorse his positions.
I also am not going to dismiss the work of all the other Neovim contributors and stop using it.
I like a hierarchy, too. Presumably the underlying engine could be a database but it would at least appear to the user as a tree. But with the option to find files with SQL or a SQL-like language. I would love to be able to find files based on all kinds of metadata that was available for searching with the OS’s file system, and not using any special tools. I’m thinking things like EXIF data, audio file metadata, text file line count, and so on.
Yes. In this interview Michael Stonebreaker, one of the original developers of PostgreSQL, discusses (among other topics) replacing the file system with a database :
The site doesn't give you printouts you can fold into a globe, but it is very informative. You highlight countries, drag them around, and their size adjusts to whatever degree of distortion you'd get for any land mass at the given longitude. So you can, say, highlight Greenland and drag it on top of Brazil and see how they compare. You can highlight and drag countries, US states, Canadian provinces, and Australian states. Hovering over an entity shows you area and population.
I think Bash won as Bityard says above, in the sense that COBOL won, which was because it was everywhere (approximately) and then when another system was being built to do something in COBOL’s niche COBOL was the obvious choice. Once it was sufficiently established it won by inertia and absolutely not because it was the better language. Or maybe it was the better language in its time, but it certainly is not now. And note I’m only talking about COBOL’s niche, of mainframe-based processing in the banking, insurance, state and federal payroll and similar areas.
Quoting from an earlier comment in this discussion:
There's always some nincompoop who brings that up. Al Gore deserves credit for what he did as a senator and vice president. He helped to pass legislation that enabled the NSFNET backbone to grow and to permit commercial traffic to flow on the government-sponsored backbones in the US. Had he not done that, it's pretty likely that the commercial sector would not have seen an opportunity to create a commercial internet that all of us can enjoy, so he does deserve some credit for what he's done.
To me they look oppressive and bleak. They are interesting, to be sure. But I don’t find them beautiful. And aesthetics are subjective, of course. I can well believe others find them beautiful.
The January 6, 2022 date at the bottom of the page is not the date the page was last updated. It is the date problem 8.9 (Boundary value error in the secondary journals used by nested transactions) directly above it was fixed. The date at the very bottom of the screen in the middle says the page itself was last updated on 2026-04-13.
Martin Gardner’s The Annotated Alice explains the subtleties, mathematical and otherwise, of both Alice books in engaging detail. It explained things I never understood, and showed me things I missed (and then explained them). Besides the mathematics there are references to politicians and events of the era, and jokes that would be known only to people at Oxford.
The subhead on the article is: Animals that feed on dead matter perform an important service. Without them, we’d live in a world of putridity and pestilence.
This is the first I’ve heard of straight-tusked elephants, which are almost twice the mass of modern day elephants. You’d need a lot of cooperation and coordination to kill one of them.
Byte was great. For years it was the highlight of my month. And I thought the cover art was amazing. The Smalltalk hot air balloon logo came from the cover of the August 1981 issue, which was devoted entirely to Smalltalk.
Robert Tinney, who painted many of the covers, died in February:
The population density of Italy 201/km2 is lower then population density of Germany 241/km2, so from point of view of density, Germany should have more high-speed rail than Italy.
That would be if kilometers of rail tracks scaled linearly with population density per unit area. My guess (based on no research at all) is it’s more that there’s a population density tipping point, and after reaching it rail development dramatically increases. I do also think you’re right about the influence of the German car industry.
The population density is probably one factor. New Zealand has 5.34 million people in 103,000 square miles. At the other extreme you have Hong Kong with 7.5 million people in 430 square miles. Each mile of track gives service to a much larger percentage of the population in Hong Kong than New Zealand. The same goes for a lot of the United States. The coastal corridors in the United States are population dense, but the interior less so.
Yes. You get a lot of bang for your buck as far as the number of people served. Hong Kong is less than half the area of Rhode Island, but the populations are 7.5 million for Hong Kong and 1.1 million for Rhode Island. Small area plus high population density is the situation where trains are most valuable.
The fact that a product has not yet been created from a given technology does not mean the technology or the research itself is useless, or will not turn out to be useful in the long term. You can also learn a lot from research or development that does not ultimately work out.
His article has a link to an article about Uganda called How the deceased are robbing
the living. [1]
I know approximately nothing about Uganda, and I have no way of evaluating the article. Especially since I haven’t read it yet. But it does contradict Madradavid’s statement that these kind of burials are unheard of there.
Replying to slibhb, while the research involving mental illness is not conclusive, fecal transplants are a known and accepted treatment for persistent C. diff (Clostridioides difficile) infection. Just for the record.