girzel

As I understand it, "privilege" has nothing to do with income metrics and what have you. Privilege means that you can assume that society and all its mechanisms will work in your favor. Privilege means that if something horribly unfair happens to you, you can shout about it, and people will listen. Lacking privilege means that, when you shout about it, society will tell you to STFU. Having privilege means you can forget about having privilege. Lacking privilege means you need to constantly worry about losing it.

The reason that a majority of people in a country can be privileged is that, as the majority, they can forget that the minority exists. They can forget that they are the majority.

The minority can never, ever forget that they are the minority.

What you've described is exactly what I like about it! Just nice visible text, interactive elements are very evident, your eye goes in the right direction, and there's "nothing special" about it.

The tips you've provided are how not to screw up an excellent design. Not how to get an excellent design to begin with.

I feel the same way, and as someone who has struggled to make his open source projects look like anything other than roaring garbage, I am perplexed, and jealous, and guess somehow a little hopeful?

I can totally imagine making something like Sir Hat (sorry) a part-time project and, in an alternate universe where I am a better coder and more dedicated than I actually am, producing something super solid after a few years. I cannot, however, imagine any universe in which I would produce something that looked as good as this.

I recommended it to the Emacs developers (who are considering moving to some sort of forge-alike site) in part because it seems to fit the FSF's principles, but more because the aesthetics are what Emacs should aspire to: plain text that looks good.

My guess is that Prolog was more of an AI thing back when people were doing symbolic AI (including Lisp), instead of the statistical shotgun it's latterly become. Prolog is very good at NLP programming, and BNF grammars, and those things were important to an earlier approach to AI.

Yes, some commits, but see:

https://github.com/Kozea/Radicale/issues/997

This is what I've been using, but it appears to be abandoned now?

I finally got the caldav part of it to work for a group of people using various flavors of Mac, Linux, and Windows -- PCs and phones. It was a huge pain in the ass, because each client accepted a different form of base-url-plus-calendar-locator, and some very non-technical users were on the other side of the planet, and it took weeks of trial and error before we got everything working.

Carddav looks hopeless, I can't even something that works between DavX5 on my android phone, and whatever the hell my wife's iPhone needs, and we're in the same room.

This was fairly useful, if not amazingly insightful.

I think that "give yourself some space" is by far the most helpful tip. At any given moment, in any given state of mind, you'll only ever have an imperfect perspective on what it is you're trying to say, and how well you've succeeded in saying it.

Waiting until you're in a different frame of mind, then revisiting the piece, is the best way of "layering" your own ideas – filling in gaps, considering new perspectives, coming to new realizations.

I think it's something that has to be done with every piece of writing. You either get someone else to look at it and do it for you (if you don't have time), or let enough time pass that you have (in a sense) become "someone else" yourself, and read again.

Double nuts!

I'm guessing because it's so fundamentally different from most of the other programming languages out there, which I sometimes think are just variations on the variable/function/control flow theme (and yes, I've gone fairly far in Lisp).

I've been teaching myself Prolog, and it's sufficiently different that I feel like I'm learning to program all over again. You can sort of pretend that predicates are just funny functions, where you have to put the return value's container into the argument list, but that's not really what's going on. I loved reading the docs for SWI-Prolog, where most of the predicate docstrings start: "True if...". You can say that the length predicate returns the length of a list, but really it returns true if the given list has a length equal to the given integer. It will tell you the length of a list, sure, but it will also do the reverse:

?- length(List, 5) -> List = [_,_,_,_,_]

Nuts!

Gluten development can happen through two mechanisms (usually both are in play), once water is added to flour: either physical stretching (kneading), or just time. The stretch-and-fold method balances these two. But if you're letting the dough sit for 12-20 hours, that's achieving the same effect.

If you're in Seattle (ideally near the University District), I'd be happy to share some of my very healthy starter. Leave a window open and I'll huck it in.

This is exactly what I found it didn't work for. I live in Seattle, and basically gave up on it (with today's news, I'll uninstall it from my Android phone). I could look out the window at steady rain, and Dark Sky would still be telling me it was going to be clear all day. Like that more often than not.

Cf Emacs' "windows", "frames", "kill", "yank", etc...

The absolute best-tasting "regular sourdough" I've ever made came from grinding my own wheat berries. I'm not actually that excited about whole-wheat bread, but what I do is get a 25-pound sack of wheat berries from Eastern Washington (I'm in Seattle), grind out about 120g, and make a "dry poolish" -- something like 40% hydration -- with the sourdough starter and a touch of malt powder (commercial flour has enzymes already added). Leave that in the fridge overnight, or for a day or two, and then use that to build a regular sourdough dough (which also gets bulk fermented in the fridge later).

Takes planning (and a grinder!), but very little effort. You get the all flavor of "real" whole wheat, compounded by slow fermentation, and the resulting bread is some of the best I've ever tasted.

I tried doing the same thing with ground rye berries, but oddly it wasn't all that exciting.

Same here: that's the only site that doesn't work. I wonder if it has something to do with the post-login redirects: it's impossible to say "always open this site in this container", because you've already been redirected to a different url.

There's also Liberapay: https://liberapay.com/

All this seems very right to me. Our daughter is 18 months, and we got her a little step-up attachment to the toilet. We started with basically no expectation that any of this would work, we just made a game out of sitting on the toilet extension. She sees us there (she regularly comes into the bathroom while one of us is taking a crap) and she's at the age where she wants to do everything we're doing. In fact, I think that's the key to the whole thing: she's still at the imitative stage, not quite to the rebellious stage. So it's fun just to sit.

We let her run naked. She basically has no idea when she's going to pee, and yes we have to clean that up. But by this point, in the couple hours of diaper-free time she has in the morning, she heads to the toilet for number two every time. It doesn't always all get in there, there are accidents, but she's already got the idea, and it seems natural to her. I understand that the author of the article is an economist and so is bound to think in terms of incentives, but (as the article illustrates) that can easily backfire, and turn into a game for its own sake. Just make sure the whole thing is fun.

It was an excellently written article, btw.

In my experience, a Kindle connected to wifi burns through battery like there's no tomorrow. Like a percentage point every half hour. I absolutely keep it on airplane mode to preserve charge.

One of the nice things about a fully-featured email filter (I'm using sieve on my own Dovecot installation but you wouldn't have to go that far) is making your own "bulk" mailbox. I have a sieve rule that's got maybe ten "or" conditionals in it, and does a darn good job of picking out mailing list/bulk emails and shunting them to their own box. I don't mind signing up for newsletters or letting merchants mail me so much, because I know those messages are all going to their own special home. I have an older-than-three-months autodelete on the mailbox, and manually move anything I want to keep (receipts, etc) into a "bulk-keep" mailbox, and that's it. Takes me seconds to scan each day, and doesn't pollute my inbox.

I feel like vodka only comes in two classes: "noticeably bad" and "not noticeable".

I've been reading this book to get an overview of Prolog: http://www.learnprolognow.org/. It's much better than most of the tutorials I found out there, and provides a very gentle, very thorough introduction to what might be some fairly alien programming ideas (at least, they were to me).

I'm still chewing over the fact that a Prolog term looks exactly the same whether it's in a knowledge base (ie it's true), or whether you're feeding it to the prompt (ie you're asking if it's true or not). Maybe I'm just spooking myself out, but the identity of facts and queries feels reminiscent of Lisp's homoiconicity between code and data.

Living in China, I was curious to discover that many people there were actually pretty familiar with IPA, I assume it's taught as part of advanced language learning, to cope with all the very different sounds in other languages. On several occasions people expressed great puzzlement that I had no idea how most IPA symbols were pronounced.

A torus. Take it from someone who's slaughtered a cow.

This looks like it's MacOS only, right? Surely it wouldn't be too hard to get the same stuff working for Linux?

There's a nice phrase in Chinese: 过日子, literally "passing the days". It also has that connotation of being content with a regular life, wanting nothing special. The phrase is also extended into several other usages (thriftiness, etc), but that's the heart of it.

I think home-ground whole-wheat flour has to have more gluten than pretty much any other flour out there...

Are you putting a whole bunch of other stuff in there? There's a reason fat is called "shortening" -- it breaks the gluten strands, and makes the bread crumbly. Unless you're putting a whole bunch of butter or some other fat into the flour, I can't imagine why it would be crumbly.

What are your ingredients?

Oh I don't mean the bread itself is sweet like sandwich bread, but that there's a slight hint of sweetness, which doesn't overwhelm any of the other flavors.

As I understand it, the principle shenanigans going on with commercial flour is that they add enzymes (if you're doing this at home, it will be malt) to the flour before you take it home. Unless I'm quite mistaken -- please tell me if I am -- the whole point of a slow/retarded proof is to give the enzymes a chance to break the starch down into component sugars. When more sugars are broken out, you get both a nicer taste (it's sweet!) and a more beautiful crust (the sugars caramelize/brown).

But with home-milled flour, are there no enzymes at all? What happens to the slow-proofed dough?

I knew I'd fallen down the rabbit hole when my dad and I started going in on 50lb sacks of wheat berries from Eastern Washington (I'm in Seattle). I can't remember, I think it's like 20 or 30 dollars a sack. I have a mill attachment for a KitchenAid, it's not awesome but it does the trick. My dad bakes 100% ground berries (so completely whole-wheat, by definition), but I mix it with bread flour -- using whole wheat to feed the sourdough starter.

It produces an absolutely incredible flavor. If you give it a slow proof and bake in a cast iron dutch oven, you get these amazing cinnamon and nut smells as it bakes. Just the most delicious bread.

Insane! But in a good way. I've been very slowly working towards refactoring Gnus to use real OO classes to implement backends, and I always thought I'd know I was done when I could implement a HN backend without too much trouble. Both sad and happy to see that someone got there first. I will give this a try.