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Do you remember when he did that BBQ ad saying he wanted to tour America and hear opinions? It looks like he might be trying to edge his way into a political career again.

I like him because his uncanny valley appearance and single-minded morally-neutral totalitarianism make me feel like I'm living in some high-quality vintage science fiction.

I wouldn't think twice about buying something nice from a store for $25 dollars.

Once upon a time I bought something online for about $10 from what was a legitimate business with an address in San Francisco. About 14 months later they claimed I subscribed to some service and started making huge charges to my card ($150/week). Getting them to stop and getting my money back was an enormously stressful and difficult process.

That's why I have a knee-jerk reaction - not a cold, logical reaction - to online purchases from companies I haven't used before, and I'm not the only person like that.

It's quite good, and I really like their automatically-generated recommendations BUT there is a small fee, and I have a knee-jerk reaction to anything on the internet that asks me for money.

I just got a copy of The Western Canon by Bloom from the library, and I think it is the most ridiculous thing I've ever read in my life. He is a very convoluted writer that goes for as much high emotional impact as possible, because his theories are generally ridiculous and only make sense when you're lost in his fog of anger and disdain for everything. He also has a weird tendency of using "Western Civilization" and "America" as synonyms, even though most of his pet authors died before the US existed. It's like reading a book by a cartoon parody of an English professor, and it's hard to believe that he was even a real person. It all seems like an elaborate joke.

If you want the actual story of the Western Canon - which includes things like Euclid, Fourier, Darwin, etc., not just the fiction that American English professors like - try "Great Books Of The Western World":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_Wor...

Well, if that's the case, I can do you one better.

It's true that some people can write extremely clean, beautiful Perl. Nevertheless, it's still a lot less effort to write clean, beautiful Python or Ruby.

Making a language is fun, and builds your skills. I'd rather work with a person who has made a bad language than someone who has never made one.

Don't make fun of people for making languages.

Where I live (Victoria BC), we don't have many pedestrian lights, but pedestrians definitely do not have priority in crosswalks.

Pedestrians here make sure that there are definitely no cars moving anywhere near the crosswalk, and no one potentially wanting to make a left turn, before venturing out.

Right below the headline, there is a prominent Facebook icon, providing free publicity for Facebook, as well as allowing Wired to use Facebook as a marketing platform.

This isn't necessarily a good thing. The earliest versions of Javascript were insane. Bad isn't the word. Buggy isn't the word. You've never seen a language as ridiculous as early Javascript. It took a good twenty years to fix it.

Wealth Of Nations is a weird book to read. Where I grew up, people worshipped it and generally considered it to be the second greatest book of all time, after the Bible. I ended up reading both in my thirties, and two things occurred to me:

1) It's very obvious that none of the adults I knew as a child had read more than a few isolated quotes from Wealth of Nations or the Bible. None of them had even the slightest idea what sort of content either of those books contained, or what they were like in tone or in substance. 99% of what I grew up hearing about both books was completely made up.

2) Wealth of Nations presents a very chipper and optimistic sense of entrepreneurship that 99% of people in the world of business today would consider naive at best. If Adam Smith had written that book today, he would be laughing stock.

A pretty good consolation for the alienation and rage Buzzfeed is telling me about is being able to go to Buzzfeed and find out which Friends character I'm most like.

One one hand, I like a nice long commit message. On the other hand, human nature is terrible.

I know that if long commit messages catch on, some synergetic managers will start insisting on minimum lengths for commit messages, and start having meetings discussing standards and policies for commit messages, and start filling binders with more rules than one person could ever memorize. Soon, fixing a single-character typo in a comment will take 20 minutes, and pressing enter will be nerve-racking because you know there's just something you're forgetting from the binder.

Imagine a book where you wrote a bunch of Javascript implementations without learning Javascript.

Javascript is such a good language that, even after two decades of fixes, it's only good when you use a different language - specifically created to address JS's many problems - that compiles to it.

The target audience are people who don't want to learn Lisp but want to write a bunch of Lisp interpreters and compilers. Obviously.

What's your source for that? Not that I doubt you, I just can't find any record of him saying that.

A long essay could be written about that. A few quick things. There's Scheme's simple syntax, which doesn't get in the way of what the book is actually teaching. The fact that, of the mainstream programming languages, Javascript is the most crufty and full of gotchas, with all kinds of weird, unexpected behaviours even experienced developers can't always keep track of, many caused by bugs in the first version. Javascript's tendency to fail quietly when other languages would shoot out error messages makes it an awful language to experiment and play around in. Javascript Stockholm Syndrome. Decades of tradition. The entire last section of the book's intimate relationship with Scheme.

The fact that this is a book about learning to program, not about maximizing your potential for jobs. It's a compsci book to learn to be a good programmer, not a book about synergizing industry trends to build your resume.

When SICP was written, most people still wrote in Assembly for most things but COBOL, ADA, and old-school FORTRAN were also popular. Part of the longevity of the book is its appropriate choice of language.

Would it be as enlightening to write a series of JS compilers in JS? Or are they writing Lisp compilers in JS? Doesn't that miss the entire point of the book?

I wonder how much of the software between me and that blog post is open source?

I've certainly seen that on internet, but I don't known of any real research or hard data, and just go to any old graveyard and work out people's ages. Seems like clickbait debunking rather than real debunking.

Remember how there used to be pro-gay fried chicken and anti-gay fried chicken? Now we've got an anti-gay web browser. Amazing how the market provides. What's next? An anti-Jew web browser? An anti-black web browser? The only thing I can say for sure is that the next radicalized web browser will also feature blockchain.

The fact that headline points out that it's not bullshit makes it sound like bullshit.

When a pitch answers a question that no one asked, it's a pretty good indication that something's wrong. Like when an employer says they're looking for "team players", it means they have an aggressive workplace with a lot of backstabbing. If a restaurant specifically advertised that it was clean, and had a sign saying "clean food and kitchen" in the window, would you eat there?

Segregation brought joy into some people's lives. I'm sure Stalin was quite happy about engineering the famine in the Ukraine. Every great human-created disaster was pleasing to someone. There are inevitably people who enjoy conflict, destruction, and tragedy. I mean that this logo is a waste of graphic design in the sense that the SS uniform is one of the finest examples of uniform design ever made, but wasted on an organization that would have been better off never existing.

I think it's great graphic design, wasted on a project that doesn't need branding or identity, and certainly doesn't need any more publicity than it already has. That logo could have been used on something that brought joy into people's lives.

Building a Linux distro was like playing with Lego: the pieces were very interchangeable (in practice there were difficulties, but usually ones that were fun and rewarding to resolve; "fun and rewarding" is the exact opposite of SystemD).

SystemD also fails quietly or with useless errors and makes problems hard to diagnose - so a bug not directly caused by SystemD looks like it comes from SystemD because SystemD slime is on everything - is extremely poorly-documented, extremely over-engineered, and subject to rapid change due to the moodiness and instability of the OverPoetter.

What a waste of graphic design.

I'm kind of surprised the movie isn't more famous, considering the high quality and the powerhouse cast.

Another Facebook killer? 4329847328943298th time's the charm!

Use an ad blocker.

Gnome3 is great if you want to disable 4323 hotkey combinations to open their overlay (except the one that can't be disabled), and download an extension that makes it so moving the cursor over 15% of the upper left corner of the screen doesn't open the overlay.

But it is slow. The overlay barely works well on a new mid-range system. A cheap laptop that is as old as Gnome3 has no chance of running Gnome3 in a satisfying way. Even if you ignore the overlay and install dmenu (which a noob isn't going to know about) it is slower than not only other wm's for Linux, but Windows and OSX. It's not a good way to get new people interested in Linux.