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davegaueron Fast machines, slow machines

"Retrofitting performance into existing applications is very difficult technically, and almost impossible to prioritize organizationally."

While this may not be the only explanation for why this trend continues, I think it's *spot on* to explain why this continues in commercially-funded software.

davegaueron VundleVim

Yeah, Vundle's (presumably temporary) removal caught me off guard today on a fresh install. This, in turn, has caused me to take a hard look at the Vim plugins I was using. Turns out I only needed one...which I wrote. So I'm now just storing that one in the horrible "vanilla" Vim plugin scheme and putting that in my dotfile management.

Just a good reminder that dependencies will always let you down. It's just a matter of time. Oh, and never turn your back on a big company.

Here's the tracking on this issue:

https://github.com/community/community/discussions/48173

GitHub: "The VundleVim organization has been flagged. Because of that, your organization is hidden from the public."

davegaueron Forth: The programming language that writes itself

Exactly, thank you. :-)

davegaueron Forth: The programming language that writes itself

Please note that these are slides for a talk. Regular web page in the works!

davegaueron Forth: The programming language that writes itself

Please note that these are slides for a talk. Regular web page in the works!

davegaueron Forth: The programming language that writes itself

Please note that these are slides for a talk. Regular web page in the works!

davegaueron Dice baseball: a tabletop tradition

I visited the article only to make sure it mentioned the novel "The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop." by Robert Coover.

I was thinking about that book just yesterday. I find something about the way it goes "all in" on a tabletop gaming system deeply appealing. Probably for the same reasons I find pencil and paper RPGs and programming computers appealing.

davegaueron The New Art of Making Books

There might be something to that!

davegaueron I wish my web server were in the corner of my room

I'm a huge fan of running web servers in the house - but they don't have to be connected to the Internet to be useful and fun! An Apache instance on my always-on box in the basement [0] serves an incredible number of uses and can be connected to from any computer-like thing on my home network. Old-school CGI scripts can be written almost as quickly as terminal scripts and HTML forms make super quick interfaces. A home web server is probably STILL the easiest way to get files to heterogeneous computers and phones and tablets and...

[0] https://ratfactor.com/setup2

davegaueron School vs. Wikipedia

School shooting drills.

davegaueron School vs. Wikipedia

This is correct.

davegaueron What is TTY?

This is an excellent and entertaining intro to the world of TTYs and I think the first question is a particularly clever way to introduce it:

> The answer is Ctrl+W. Because Ctrl+W is provided by something called TTY, and the other three are provided by the shell.

My only criticism is a pet peeve of mine: screenshots of terminals. I know it's more work to copy/paste and make sure formatting is correct, and you lose the ANSI colors. But it just feels so wasteful and inaccessible (<img alt="tty">).

davegaueron From novice to master, and back again (2013)

To expand on this, people needlessly cargo-cult arcane dd commands, but on many (most?) systems, "cp foo.iso /dev/sdb" will do the same thing, but with possibly even better performance!

davegaueron Hacker’s Delight (2012)

Ha ha, this falls firmly into the "I wish I needed to reference this more" category for me as well.

davegaueron Woman ‘dehumanised’ by viral TikTok filmed without her consent

This may not work since I don't know anything about you, but: imagine you discovered this was your own mother (or grandmother or...) in the video.

davegaueron GoDaddy locks out derivatives of Chrome

Haven't had any issues with name.com since switching to them in 2018. Their interface leans form-over-function for my taste (massive waste of screen real estate), but I can always muddle through to the DNS record editing interface in less than 30 seconds, which is all that matters to me.

davegaueron Ed is the standard text editor (2014)

Exactly. I assumed this would be a link to the glorious document https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html

I love reading C2, but anything in reference to ed(1) besides "Ed, man! !man ed" is wasting my VALUABLE time. :-)

davegaueron You don’t need to be “enterprise-ready” or “scalable”

There's this great quote at the beginning of the chapter I'm currently reading in the book _Designing Data-Intensive Applications_:

> "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work."

--John Gall, Systemantics (1975)

davegaueron Ask HN: How do you sync your computer’s development configurations/environment?

Yeah, mixed environments are really tough. Though (most) of my machines are Linux, they often have _some_ stuff that should be the same and _some_ stuff that should not. My solution has been to use the fine-grained GNU Stow approach, which allows me to apply only the bits I need for a particular machine.

The files you're managing don't even need to be text, though, of course, it makes versioning, etc. a lot easier.

I also check the host name in some of the scripts to modify behavior depending on the machine.

I did a write-up about my whole setup (emphasis on GNU Stow + Git) here:

https://ratfactor.com/setup2

davegaueron Ask HN: Share your personal site

http://ratfactor.com/

Content is statically generated from an AsciiDoc text file wiki managed by a Vim plugin. Though I write heavy Web applications for a living, there's no JS on my personal website except on specific pages with interactive tools. After a revamp a couple years ago, all dynamic server-side actions are handled with old-school CGI applications. Retro and loving it.

I'm really enjoying looking at everyone else's sites!

davegaueron Ask HN: Book recommendations for grammar as it relates to computing?

Yeah, _Automata, Formal Languages, and Turing Machines_ looks like a good topic match (it seems "formal language" is the keyword I was missing?) and Parsing Techniques sounds like an excellent book as well. Thanks for the recommendations!

davegaueron Ask HN: Book recommendations for grammar as it relates to computing?

Oooh, thank you! I had heard of "The Cinderella Book" before, but hadn't looked into it. Seems especially promising given the title that came before it:

> The first edition in turn constituted a major revision of a previous textbook also written by Hopcroft and Ullman, entitled Formal Languages and Their Relation to Automata.

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

Used copy ordered.

Searching for that title also lead me to _Introduction to Formal Languages_ by Gyorgy E. Revesz, which also looks like a good fit and which Dover is currently printing as one of their reasonably-priced paperbacks!

davegaueron Ask HN: Book recommendations for grammar as it relates to computing?

Yes, that very much falls under the area of interest! And following one of the Wikipedia citation links:

> Among his [Backus's] library at the time were the works of the modern philosopher and theorist Noam Chomsky, who studied the evolution of the human intellect and of written and spoken language in parallel. Chomsky was developing a symbolic syntax with which to frame his concepts of languages within languages, in the study of how sociology affects grammar. Backus borrowed some of Chomsky's concepts, including the idea that a symbology could represent a computer language...even one that didn't yet exist.

So again, it all seems to point back to Noam Chomsky. I do have a copy of Chomsky's _Aspects of the Theory of Syntax_ coming to my home soon. Should be interesting.

davegaueron Ask HN: Book recommendations for grammar as it relates to computing?

Thank you. Indeed, I have The Dragon Book and I think it's a great resource! But it does leave me with the feeling that I'm learning about a practical byproduct of a whole other field of study. In other words, I feel like I've seen just one useful tip of an iceberg that might have other really interesting things in it.

In yet other words: I don't know what I don't know about grammar.

davegaueron If you’re not using SSH certificates you’re doing SSH wrong (2019)

Thank you for this reminder! It has slowly dawned on me over the years that when "everyone" thinks something is easy and I don't, it's often because we're comparing a surface level understanding vs. a full grok.

davegaueron Literate programming is much more than just commenting code

Make that several browser windows. And that's a good point. I sometimes end up inefficiently scrolling up and down a document to reference different parts of it. It almost never occurs to me to open another browser window with the same page for side-by-side reference.

davegaueron Regrets of the Dying (2010)

> Life only has meaning when viewed through the collective...

This may be true for ants. But I've never seen how this can be an absolute truth for humans for two reasons:

1. If one life is truly meaningless (0), how does multiplying it produce meaning (0 * 8 billion = 0)?

2. If you found yourself to be the last person on the planet, would you A) realize you have no meaning and die, B) create art and put a little more beauty into the universe? Given those choices, does option A or B have more inherent "meaning"?

davegaueron Microsoft GW-Basic Interpreter Source Code

Heh, now imagine that knowledge is not in README files, but in a certain popular slow WYSIWYG SaaS document product.

davegaueron Frugal Computing (2021)

I like this a lot. Or even without a distributed system, just having a server deliver varying levels of compute/bandwidth based on the position of the Sun (a forum goes text-only at sunset, starts delivering images again at sunrise, does batch processing at high noon).