flother

> Bun has no REPL

Bun has a really nice REPL, can recommend https://bun.com/docs/runtime/repl

You’re in good company. Tom Standage makes the same argument in his book A History of the World in Six Glasses.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3872.A_History_of_the_Wo...

Nathan Mayer Rothschild probably died of staphylococcal or streptococcal septicaemia, either from the abscess or secondary contamination from the surgeon’s knife. Today that infection would almost certainly be cured with standard antibiotics.

No offence intended but wavefunction is very low-quality.

Apple has an active team editing OpenStreetMap and their maps use OSM data in many countries. I see them making edits in my country regularly (they tag changesets with “#adt” so they’re quite visible). More info on the OSM wiki and their GitHub repo:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Apple

https://github.com/osmlab/appledata/

I came here to say the same thing. Opening a new issue of The New York Review of Books or the London Review of Books are two of the great pleasures in life.

https://lrb.co.uk/ https://www.nybooks.com/

The Digital Antiquarian had a thoroughly interesting article on Chris Sawyer and his work not too long ago:

https://www.filfre.net/2020/10/transport-tycoon/

“Coming from a country where mapmakers tend to exclude any landscape feature smaller than, say, Pike’s Peak, I am constantly impressed by the richness of detail on the OS 1:25,000 series. They include every wrinkle and divot of the landscape, every barn, milestone, wind pump and tumulus. They distinguish between sand pits and gravel pits and between power lines strung from pylons and power lines strung from poles. This one even included the stone seat on which I sat now. It astounds me to be able to look at a map and know to the square metre where my buttocks are deployed.”

— Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island (1997)

It’s happened in politics for a long time. Two decades ago, a political advisor in the British government sent an email on 11th Sept 2001 saying the day was “a very good day to get out anything we want to bury”. It didn’t go down well, but others have been much more subtle.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/1588323.stm

I know what you mean, but I think it’s more down to the fact that it’s broadcast live on BBC radio, and they have 45 minutes to cover as much as they can of the week’s topic. The host, Melvyn Bragg, has to run a tight ship to keep the guests from drifting from the topic or going in to too much detail. (The opposite problem — a poor chairperson — is often why meetings at work can drag or seem unfocused.)

I love In Our Time. Broadcast since 1998, a podcast since 2004, over 800 episodes. And almost every single one is pure gold.

> Plus you’ll be able to see the Eiffel Tower

A story about Guy de Maupassant always makes me smile. He hated the Eiffel Tower (“I left Paris and even France because in the end, the Eiffel Tower annoyed me too much”) and yet supposedly ate lunch there every day. Why? Because it’s the only place in Paris where you can’t see the Eiffel Tower.

https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/09/20/priority-french-wr...

At the end of the original article:

> It is not the case that these oaks were kept for the express purpose of replacing the Hall ceiling. It is standard woodland management to grow stands of mixed broadleaf trees e.g., oaks, interplanted with hazel and ash. The hazel and ash are coppiced approximately every 20-25 years to yield poles. The oaks, however, are left to grow on and eventally, after 150 years or more, they yield large pieces for major construction work such as beams, knees etc.

It’s location-dependent. Crimea is shown as within Russia’s boundaries only “when viewed from Russia”.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50573069

There's also an important difference between recess and progrogation.

Recess is just a quick break for the conference season, and is normal at this time of year. Progrogation brings all parliamentary business to an end, bills are not carried over to the next session (so work on them has to start from scratch), and select committees can't sit. That's a very different state of affairs.

It's hidden in the article but I think this originates from a fascinating episode of the BBC's More or Less: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0001y9p

Apologies for blowing my own trumpet, but after I listened to the episode I was so captivated by the idea that I tried my hand at visualising it: https://flother.is/2019/which-planet-is-closest-to-earth/

Oliver Hawkins, the researcher who found the answer for More or Less in the first place, also wrote about it: https://olihawkins.com/2019/02/1

At the end of the article csvkit is given an honourable mention. I’m a big fan and I’ve used it a lot in the past, but these days I’d say that xsv > csvkit for working with CSV files on the command-line.

https://github.com/BurntSushi/xsv

> I got a trainer for winter riding, and it ate my tires.

A tip I got from someone is to switch your rear road tyre for a special trainer tyre so you don’t have to worry about wear-and-tear. Something like this:

http://www.wiggle.co.uk/vittoria-zaffiro-pro-home-trainer-ty...

The article says it traces the “oldest intact building in each US state”. Wikipedia says that only a “portion of the structure [the Pirates’ House] was built in 1734”. It sounds like the latter doesn’t match their definition.

Iceland passed an opt-out organ donation law recently. It comes into force from 1 January 2019.

http://icelandreview.com/news/2018/06/07/all-icelanders-are-...

Beware of adding that to your .RProfile though. The author makes a good argument for why that's a bad idea: your code will execute differently on someone else's machine.

http://arrgh.tim-smith.us/factors.html#fn:options

In the UK, at least, there are rules against this. A government bill’s short title

> must describe the content of the bill in a straightforwardly factual manner. An argumentative title or a slogan is not permitted.

From Erskine May, what the Financial Times calls “the bible on parliamentary procedure”.

https://www.ft.com/content/05253602-ce4a-3f64-8ace-6a6f03876...

Ah, that explains it. I store my websites in private S3 buckets, and give CloudFront access using an IAM policy. I must need to jump through extra hoops because of that.

Well that's interesting. An AWS blog post from October 2017 says:

> CloudFront does allow you to specify a default root object (index.html), but it only works on the root of the website (such as http://www.example.com > http://www.example.com/index.html). It does not work on any subdirectory (such as http://www.example.com/about/). If you were to attempt to request this URL through CloudFront, CloudFront would do a S3 GetObject API call against a key that does not exist.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/implementing-default-di...

A request for https://visidata.org/releases (no trailing slash) also results in an HTTP 302 to https://visidata.org/releases/ (with a trailing slash). Is there something other than Lambda@Edge functions handling this on visidata.org?

The article's from December 2017 and you can see from the response headers that it's hosted on GitHub Pages again.

There are plenty of gotchas when serving a static site via CloudFront. Let's say you have a page at example.com/foo/index.html. If you want it serve it from example.com/foo/ then you need to write a Lambda@Edge request function to handle the directory index — the article implies that CloudFront's default root objects handle this, but they don't. That's for the domain root only.

There's also the case of redirecting example.com/foo to example.com/foo/ (adding the trailing slash). That requires a Lambda@Edge response function. It's all a lot of fun to get working, but you do start to wonder if your static site really is static.

Yes. From the linked article:

> Mr. Collins’ profile has grown along with the Cambridge Analytica scandal. His committee questioned the company’s chief executive, Alexander Nix, weeks before news broke about its practices. The panel has published audio records in which an executive tied to Cambridge Analytica discusses how the Trump campaign used techniques used by the Nazis to target voters. A webcast of the committee’s hearing with the former Cambridge Analytica researcher Christopher Wylie was so popular it nearly took down Parliament’s website, Mr. Collins said.

They're outlawed in some countries, notably in Europe.

EU rules presume pre-dispute arbitration clauses in consumer contracts are invalid. France and Sweden completely prohibit consumer arbitration in certain cases. Germany won't enforce a consumer arbitration clause unless it's in a separate, signed document or part of a fully-notarised contract.

Lots of information available at https://www.hausfeld.com/news-press/mandatory-arbitration-in....

Apart from the practical advantages of keeping English, it’s an official language of Ireland and Malta, and de facto official in Cyprus. All three are member states of the European Union.

Interestingly enough, there is no official language in either England or the UK — although other languages do have official status in other parts of the UK.

And Cathy O’Neil's book Weapons of Math Destruction, mentioned in the episode, is also well worth reading.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0141985410

I'm not sure anyone can explain it. Author Aimee Bender:

"What a surprise, then, to find that there is a blank page with 'Goodnight nobody' out of nowhere, sharing a spread with 'Goodnight mush.' [...] 'Goodnight nobody' is an author's inspired moment that is inexplicable and moving and creates an unknown that lingers. [...] I feel sure I will never crack open the meaning of 'Goodnight nobody,' and moments like that make rereading a genuine joy."

https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/19/what-writer...

But for what it's worth, I think it's there for a simple reason: to reassure children that there is nobody else in the room, nobody else to fear.

But no software can help you with the age-old problem of human error (aka PEBCAK):

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/31/this-is-over-p...

There are also her essays in the London Review of Books [1] and, as mentioned in the article, her long-running blog for the Times Literary Supplement, A Don's Life [2].

[1]: https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/mary-beard [2]: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/category/a-dons-life/