artlogic

I started indoor climbing 3 months ago and it's done wonders for my grip strength, as well as my overall health. I can't recommend it enough for engineers and other problem solving addicts. I was, frankly, bored by weight training and other more traditional exercise routes. Now I look forward to a nice change of pace - solving physical problems as opposed to logic problems.

I'd strongly suggest you contact the maintainer of the python3 package and request a backport. 3.5.1 is in testing, so it should be possible, and perhaps even easy to backport.

Respectfully, I think this amounts to bias more than anything. It's a lot easier to believe that the slide-offs are caused by bad driving - and most probably are. But some are unavoidable.

> Winter driving is really no different from any other kind of driving in which the driver exceeds the limits of the vehicle's available traction.

I actually agree with this statement. The problem is that, in good conditions, low traction events are rare, and often caused by catastrophic conditions. In winter driving it's practically the norm, once you leave well traveled roadways.

I think AI could be trained to drive a car that only occasionally has full traction, and probably more effectively than a person given enough time. But again - it's like you said - someone needs to be addressing this case directly.

Having lived nearly my whole life in Michigan, I think this grossly oversimplifies the problem. I'm sure my Canadian friends will agree. This assumes there's some clear algorithm for determining a "safe" speed. There's not.

Even in highway driving you can lose traction in an instant if you hit a patch of black ice. Autonomous vehicles will need to be able to recover from a complete loss of traction safely. This isn't trivial - in fact it's probably the most complicated bit of driving I tend to do. Once you are sliding and your steering wheel becomes more of a suggestion than a command, the entire act of driving becomes a process of trying to coax the car off the road using a combination of steering, brakes, and even occasionally gas. I think it's possible for a computer to do this - but you can't avoid all slides just by driving slowly.

Then there's the plethora of other winter fun you run into with a vehicle: getting stuck (happens all the time on city streets) and all the techniques to get unstuck, going too slow and losing your momentum (and thus traction), having every indication you have traction and then discovering you actually don't (it's very easy to be driving at a "safe" speed and still slide through an intersection), white out conditions where you are guessing where the lane is... etc...

To be clear, I believe most of these conditions could eventually be handled by computers. I also believe a lot of people drive too fast in/on snow. However, winter driving is in no way simple. It's a problem domain unto itself, and one I've seen relatively little work being done on.

When you say "move M-x customize to gtk widgets", which text based would you replace with GTK widgets? Customize certainly doesn't initially seem as friendly as a traditional preferences dialog, but I would be hesitant to lose the "it's all text" navigability and consistency.

At this rate, they'll be sold out by the time it's supposed to go "public".

In IPv4 terms, imagine owning a class B block of addresses.

I'm no expert, but I believe the rationale is to simplify relicensing (GPLv2 -> GPLv3, for instance). I also think the papers disallow dual licensing the project with a proprietary license.

There's more discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11953703

GNU requires contributors (and maintainers) to assign copyright for non-trivial contributions. Benno doesn't want to do this, thus in GNU's eyes, he can't be the maintainer.

You can argue (and it has been, to death) whether copyright assignment is right or wrong. When it comes to GNU projects, it's the rule of law. Based on mailing list posts and contribution history, it seems like the project had probably been in questionable GNU territory for awhile, given Benno's strong role and his unwillingness to assign copyright. I'm curious to see how the GNU project will respond.

You aren't going to get away from systemd with a Debian or Ubuntu system. Both Debian 8 and Ubuntu 15.04 (and beyond) use systemd. There are very few mainstream Linux distributions that haven't adopted it, Slackware being the notable exception.

The more interesting thing to do (for this crowd, at least) would be to run your own instance: https://git.gnu.io/gnu/gnu-social/blob/master/INSTALL

You've probably lived somewhere with leaded pipes. They are very common. Across the country we are working to replace leaded pipes when we can, but the problem is very complex. As it turns out, it's much more cost-effective to treat water than embark upon giant infrastructure projects. Simply put, the MDEQ, and the EPA should have known to treat the water, which would have kept the lead from leeching into the water. Unfortunately, this wasn't done, and now the pipes are damaged - perhaps beyond repair.

Despite the above, the water problems in Flint can't be attributed to a single thing, but rather a culmination of failures in state and local government best described as a problem of culture. Instead of a culture of openness and communication, there are indications the state, and to a lesser degree, the local government embraced a culture of only communicating good news and spinning or squashing bad news - even internally.

> I thought the MIT License was always the best license to use.

This community in particular seems to like the MIT License because it is quite simple and perceived as commercial friendly. The truth is, like most things, it depends on what you are trying to accomplish. Open source licenses all have an agenda. If your agenda is "Anyone should be able to use this software, for any purpose, and not hold me liable," then the MIT License is perhaps the simplest option.

In my (non-lawyer) opinion, where the MIT License falls short is in assuming that all contributors, companies, and users share the basic ideal that licensing software for free use and modification is in our collective best interest. Other licenses (Apache, GPL) try to attack this problem in various ways. It turns out it's a complicated and not fully understood domain - which is why those licenses are more complex.

The point is that there is no "best" license to use because licensing is not a technical problem - it's a social problem. Licenses attempt to address the slippery concept of community using a legal framework. In choosing a license, you want to be thinking about not just the community you are currently contributing to, but the community you would ideally like to be contributing to.

My guess is this:

> I was able to share 15 GBs of vacation videos with 10 of my non-techie friends by sending them a read only key to a shared folder. All of them got it right away with no technical questions or issues.

I appreciate SyncThing's security first stance, but it would be incredibly helpful if it was a bit easier to share specific synced things with non-techies.

This isn't as surprising as you might think. Roger and Me isn't a documentary, it's an editorial. It's actually used in film classes as an example of creative editing to make a point. I'm not saying that Flint isn't bad, but Moore did pretty much everything he could to make it look as bad as possible.

The feeling of most folks from Flint I've spoken to is that Moore made a disingenuous "documentary" about Flint not to raise awareness, but to make a buck. It's understandable he's not lauded as a hero.

I also think it's unfair to characterize the reaction of some residents of Michigan to a controversial figure at best as "Michigans backwardness".

If you are interested in a detailed breakdown of everything that's been happening over the past year or so, I would suggest reading Michigan Radio's excellent coverage: http://michiganradio.org/term/flint-water

Full disclosure: my wife works as a reporter Michigan Radio, but generally doesn't cover Flint.

If you'd like to explore a bit more quickly:

   window.i.am.gandalf = true

There's also something like a debug mode available by calling:

   window.ze.goggles()

If you'd like a whole book on this topic, I can't recommend Mickey Petersen's "Mastering Emacs" enough: https://www.masteringemacs.org/

I think a lot of the common idioms passed around about microkernels stem from the old Torvalds v. Tannenbaum argument [1]. It wasn't that Torvalds was right and Tannebaum was wrong. It was simply that Tannenbaum had reliability and theoretical correctness in mind, while Torvalds was concerned with performance. The less context switching you do, the more performant your computer will be. We can take this to the extreme and look at OSes like TempleOS [2] where EVERYTHING runs in kernel mode. Most people prefer a bit more reliability, and so modern desktop kernels are generally hybrid kernels (with the notable exception of Linux which is, of course monolithic). I don't think there's any real technical reason a microkernel couldn't work on today's hardware which is many orders of magnitude faster than what we had in 1992, but a hybrid kernel is always going to be faster.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_deb...

[2] http://www.templeos.org/

Exactly - that's why I say that the "enter a URL" issue seems like a minor update, not a glaring technical issue.

I've heard vague mentions of OpenIDs fundamental problems, but is there a breakdown somewhere? I've had a hard time finding a detailed technical description of why OpenID failed.

I do understand that it confused the hell out of users that they had to login in with a URL, but that seems like branding and education more than a technical flaw.

Puri.sm has been saying for weeks they are going to have a big announcement about the ME "next week". I do wish their process was a bit more open, but I'm hoping they've actually found a way to make the machine boot without an ME. That in and of itself would be a huge step forward for libreboot/coreboot.

I think the most incredible thing about GEOS are the hobbyist programmers who continued to maintain/modify it well after its mainstream lifetime.

I once mentioned to my auto mechanic that I was a programmer, and he invited me into the back room of his garage full of old C64 stuff. He showed me a modified C128 with an IDE interface, running his custom modded version of GEOS (Wheels). He had an accelerator hooked up to the machine and could change the CPU speed from the original C64/128 speed to something that appeared to be 10 times faster. To top off the demo, he showed me the web browser he was working on, bringing up a roughly rendered version of Yahoo's page (it was 1999) on the screen.

It turned out my mechanic was the famous (or infamous) Maurice Randall. It's worth searching for his name to learn about his accomplishments in the C64 hobbyist scene (and his unfortunate unreliability).

I don't think improvisational programming (as I understand it) is equivalent to data entry. That also was not what I was describing.

You seem to be a fairly adept programmer. The concept of improvisational programming makes sense for you - you draw on years of experience and training (formal, or not) to feel out a concept when you have a goal in mind but no clear way to get there. You probably perform many small experiments to learn more about the intricacies of whatever you are working on. You can do all this because you've progressed past the beginning stages.

Most beginners simply aren't capable of this. There are too many blind alleys. Too many traps. It's not that I discourage self-directed learning, experimenting or researching - all are essential to learning computer science. Rather I've seen far too many students simply resort to guess and check methodology when face with a problem. This isn't the kind of guided exploration that comes with experience but: "Adding 1 to that index didn't work - I wonder if 2 will? 3? 4? 10? Oh! 12 works! Great - I'm done!"

Incidentally, I have done data entry. My first computer was an Apple II. I used to type in programs from magazines without really understand what they were doing. Even worse, I typed in raw hexadecimal program data. I know what it's like to type something in you don't understand, find out it's wrong, tweak it, and try again ad infinitum (or so it seemed). "Does A9 work? What about AA? AC? ...AF works! Great - I'm done!"

I have to second the deck of cards approach. One particularly effective exercise is to hand someone a shuffled deck of numeric cards and ask them to write down a process for sorting them, using only the concept of bigger or smaller. Given about 20 minutes, most people will come up with selection sort on their own.

It's this sort of introspection that's key to understanding computers. We abstract large chunks of computational thinking naturally. It's essential to be able to ask yourself, "How am I really doing this?" - and to come up with an answer.

edited slightly for grammar

I'm very happy to see this. I've taught computer science at the college level. Whether you realize it or not, learning CS has very little to do with typing symbols into a computer. While it's true the computer sometimes surprises us, I've told my students that if you can't run the program in your head, then you simply don't understand what's going on. You haven't learned anything.

More often than not, the computer facilitates a guess and check programming mentality that isn't just endemic to students, but to our profession in general. I'm certainly not immune to the temptation to fix problems by repeated runs with small tweaks: "Does it work? No... no... no... yes! Move on!" That's not computer science. It's data entry.

It's not that computers have no place in the curriculum. They can be immensely helpful in understanding of complex algorithms, much the same way performing an experiment can lead to a more thorough understanding of physics, or chemistry. However, no one would argue chemistry is about moving chemicals from one test tube to another.

It should run just fine on an emulator. If you've got a Mac, Sweet16 is the way to go: http://www.sheppyware.net/software-mac/sweet16/

However, I get the feeling you are thinking of Mac OS - this is for the Apple IIgs - an entirely different beast. However, if you're interested in running old versions of Mac OS, give Basilisk II a try: http://basilisk.cebix.net/

Most Older OSes up to 7.5.5 can be downloaded directly from Apple last I checked. I particularly liked Mac OS 6.0.8 for it's simplicity.

Actually, 6.0.3 was just released: http://a2central.com/6499/the-source-awakens-system-6-0-3/

Exciting times for IIgs hackers!

The HSP looks really interesting, and I'm currently living in Ann Arbor so UofM is practically within walking distance. Thanks for the information!