codebaobab

I noticed that when I read Tom Holland's new translation of The Lives of the Caesars. All the dates were in the form "N days before Kalends/Ides".

Yes. And I create and manage the musical notation for over 100 songs in text, specifically Lilypond.

Merry Christmas, HN!

Freeman Dyson's book, Disturbing the Universe, which is quoted in this article, is a great read. Highly recommended.

"He'd kill us if he got the chance." "He'd kill us if he got the chance." "He'd kill us if he got the chance." "He'd kill us if he got the chance."

Maybe modern languages don't have tuples because modern programming language designers don't have any|much|enough experience with tuples? If I wanted to play with tuples, what language(s) would I have to use?

Here's a similar Ask HN from a few years back:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1103578

I recommend Before&After (a magazine and a couple of associated books)

http://www.bamagazine.com/

"Another role Nathoo takes on with founders and startups is an accounting advisor. She’ll ensure that every company incorporates in the state of Delaware, and if they haven’t done this, she’ll help with that process. Y Combinator and most investors will only invest in companies that have been in incorporated in Delaware, and many founders don’t know this. Nathoo says that of the current class of 47 startups at Y Combinator, only one company’s incorporation documents were problem-free when joining the program."

If Kirsty were willing to publicly share any part of her accumulated knowledge in this area, I'm sure I wouldn't be the only one to appreciate it.

OK, now that you bring it up, yeah, I remember that.

But I didn't remember that it was named 'meteor'.

I heard once that the circles-on-circles construction of the motion of the bodies of solar system when Earth is taken as its center is merely the Fourier transform of the ellipses that describe the solar system with the Sun as its center.

Unfortunately, I never saw the actual derivation, so that idea is basically hearsay.

By "extreme acidity" do you mean in your gastrointestinal system or elsewhere? (I've heard people talk about blood-level acidity before.) Was there a test that let you track/monitor acidity as you made changes?

I've heard that too. Would you mind sharing more details of what you did to promote gut health/chemistry/flora?

Squeak Smalltalk bootstrapped itself (back in 1996) by implementing its virtual machine in Slang, a subset of Smalltalk that can essentially be pretty-printed into C.

Back to the future: the story of Squeak, a practical Smalltalk written in itself. http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr1997001_backto.pdf

Its a neat twist that RPython is taking the same engine that optimizes the VM to JIT code that runs on the VM.

Does anyone have any insight into how Galois made the mental leap to his solution? Everything I've read says (or implies) that his solution came completely out of left-field--i.e. it wasn't really related to anything that had come before him.

And along those lines, does anyone know of an English translation of Galois' paper?

Actually, a deck of card is random after 7 shuffles.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuffling#Randomization

Yes, please! Even if it is not a software solution (like some kind of physical filter I could place on top of the screen.)

I've got f.lux on my laptop, but I predominantly use my iPad in the evenings.

Jef presented the idea of a zoomable interface in his book "The Humane Interface" and a zoomable interface was a part of THE/Archy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy

One thing that might help is to prioritize "end-to-end", happy-path work highest. Once you've got the bare-bones, end-to-end functionality working, go back and start filling things in.

Funny, we were chatting about this in the office yesterday...

But I don't see wildfires in their list of disasters.

How does Smalltalk get lumped with C and Java and not with Python and Ruby?

I understand that having to work around fluctuating data might produce less than desirable results. But your users might find the feature useful anyway.

Anil, why didn't you just ignore fields and attributes that were missing? So if education:concentration returns "CompSci" on the first call, but then is missing on the second call, don't treat that as a change. Don't consider the attribute changed until the it is present and different.

Right. And just to drive the nail in a bit deeper: ending a sentence with a preposition is a grammatical construction that English gets from its roots as a Germanic language. German has what are called "separable verbs" where prepositions are combined with verb roots to create a new verb. In certain cases, the preposition prefix is split off of the verb and placed at the end of the sentence. The preposition must come at the end of the sentence in order to be grammatical. You can see remnants of separable verbs in English:

"I passed the man in the red hat by." pass-by

"I threw all of my old, useless papers out." throw-out

To repeat the parent's point: the stricture against ending a sentence with a preposition is simply a bias for grammatical structures that English inherited from Latin (through French) and against structures inherited from German.

The rule against splitting infinitives falls into the same category. It is not possible to split an infinitive in Latin because infinitives aren't made up to two words.

Again, these two rules (and others like them) are about biases, not about grammatical correctness or even clarity of communication. When you say "Who am I speaking with?" and "To boldly go where no man has gone before.", no one is actually left scratching their heads and thinking "I wonder what he means?"

You can see remnants of separable verbs in English:

"I passed the man in the red hat by." pass-by

"I threw all of my old, useless papers out." throw-out

In the case of pass-by, we still have the verb bypass, but its meaning has drifted slightly from pass-by.

OK, sorry to be pedantic, but, no. MobileSafari != WebKit view.

Dan Ingalls, implementor of Smalltalk isn't on the list.

I'm not seeing this in the Kindle app on my iPad. Clicking on "Shop in Kindle Store" kicks you out of the app and into MobileSafari.

Stratfor is also calling this a coup:

http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/20110211-red-alert-mubarak-...

Interesting. I thought Airplane Mode only turned off the cellphone radio. But, nope, I just tried it and it does turn off the WiFi as well. You can, however, manually turn WiFi back on, leaving the cell radio off.

Too late. :) He already had Smalltalk-72 under his belt by then.