hammerandtongs

Accent is not just the actual tones and sound of actual speech but also the sentence construction, word selection and style that influence the voice heard in a reader's mind.

As an example looking at your second sentence.

"Honest question, where did you FIND his accent in the text". It might have been better phrased as "where did you hear/read/see/detect the accent in his text?" Find isn't quite the right choice to my eye.

This was a minor error that could have been a simple typo but is also a typical error of a non-native english speaker. If you made mistakes like this repeatedly over a longer post it would influence the voice we heard as we read your post.

This is not a huge issue or something you should worry about beyond just noticing and self improving over time.

(I would not have particularly noticed or disapproved of your sentence if you hadn't asked.)

The blog post was missing several words in the first few paragraphs and had some awkward constructions. It was largely ok reading for a technical post but there was definitely an "accent" that emerged from reading it.

Reread my comment where I said "seems fine".

I think as airbnb starts to be more about capitalized companies purchasing and then renting residential properties we might come to remember why it was we have zoning laws in the first place.

It all seems fine and dandy(not so much if you live next to someone aggressively renting) when you have rich neighborhoods renting to rich transients ("professionals" in the article).

Whats the impact in poor and middle class neighborhoods having their transient population massively increased by airbnb slumlords?

Which he actually answered in some detail within his rant...

I think you are using words and concepts with multiple definitions like "good", "perfect"(for whose purpose) and "rational". You are swapping definitions at will and it's leading you astray.

Perhaps look at this to temper the econofountain -

http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterubel/2014/12/15/is-homo-eco...

Generally I'd discourage you from caring.

It's frequently that case that new users of Linux think there is something to be gained by "trying" (and continuously reinstalling) different Linux distributions.

The reality is that the software that makes up Linux (iirc there are 30k packages in Debian) is generally available across all of these distributions to a greater or lesser extent.

It's all the same software with relatively minor changes made to it to fit into the particular distribution.

You can use almost any desktop environment from any of these.

The underlying system software is aligning quite a bit these days as well with systemd.

Stick with a distribution.

When something goes wrong, try not to reinstall but instead figure out the problem and fix it.

Modify the system to your liking and in the process actually learn the pieces that make it up.

Document, for yourself, the things you did so that you can be confident you actually learned something that you can reproduce.

A good example of Emacs as a platform* for building a true "IDE" for a workflow.

*can even include a real editor like Evil :)

evil-surround is the more idiomatic way to do smartparens stuff.

https://github.com/guns/vim-sexp

This is actually an open problem in evil/emacs at the moment.

Would be nice to sort out.

Evil has full text objects support and ci( works for me though I use Emacs+Evil and not spacemacs.

You'll want to add "evil-surround" for dat

I found little or no disfluencies in the keybindings/text objects etc and I use them extensively. Though you'll want to add some of the core emacs keys to your repertoire as many of them have no natural vim alternative.

Twenty five year Vi(m) user here.

I switched to Evil and Emacs last year.

The combination of Vim and Emacs is a much better Vim.

org-mode is life changing.

In general I've found that the plugins in the Emacs environment make more sense and simply work better then Vim equivalents.

At times it feels as if the entire Nosql industry was created by people not reading the Postgresql manual.

edit: thanks for the link to logical decoding, looks very useful.

Because esc-b esc-b esc-b is much more painful then esc b b b

From my experience with people and their vim knowledge, not "set -o vi" on their shell is what holds them back from becoming truly good at vim.

Yes it's uncomfortable but that's most likely a result of a person's disfluency in vim itself.

If you are having problems with vi in bash its likely that you aren't using w W b B cw dw D a A regularly in vim either.

Emacs is a repl for the programming language elisp.

It has a lot of elisp functions (1.6m lines iirc) that are very useful for shaping text including, but not limited to, almost everything that people think is so unique to IDE.

Elisp and the editor pieces within Emacs are focused on providing you the tools to manipulate text of all types and from many different sources and outputs, not just a few programming languages.

People write academic papers, books, organize their lives and yes program with emacs.

Yes it's much much more then an ide.

Whatever you do, master something and become truly fluent with it. It's worth your time and will pay you back many times over.

I think the really hard problems are almost unsolvable so waiting for them to be fixed before putting effort into this area doesn't seem wise.

In general we need a common mechanism to be able to make simple factual assertions in a web page or when describing a data flow.

The other very significant problem is that learning the technologies around rdf/owl/sparql is a lot of work and to be honest about it, most developers refuse to even learn sql properly.

I'm hopeful google's slow but steady focus on web page/email markup(for google now) will get the momentum behind solving some of the simple problems that it's insane we still have (things like, is there an address that describes this businesses location somewhere on this web page?).

The paper itself is pretty readable and interesting even for a layperson.

The correct test is simply whether the owner of the device has a clear path to root.

Trying to divine somethings "general purpose" via just evaluating the runtime is murky and distracts from the core issue.

By the root standard iOS fails completely.

ChromeOS, Android and FirefoxOS all get middling grades in this.

This was an excellent read, thanks for the link.

A great deal of nuance in the essay about doing vs thinking vs reading/consuming.

I actually find writing ideas down helps me clear out the cobwebs.

It allows me to move something that's consuming a piece of working memory and or subconscious processing into a concrete form that my mind can let go of.

I can come back later and decide whether to do anything with the idea or not. As a bonus very often the process of writing it down revealed a bunch of the complexity or awkwardness of the idea.

I think it's pretty foolish that most programmers assume they will always be "working above the api".

http://rein.pk/replacing-middle-management-with-apis/

edit: To clarify, I think AI is the wrong question it's a question of the layers of abstraction and where it puts you in the labor force. Who cares what inhuman force is telling you what to do or how fast to do it?

Org-mode really is vastly more functional than other solutions, with the added benefit that you can learn and use as much or as little as you want and not be bothered by what isn't useful.

The other thing I try to call out about org-mode is that there is nothing else that is likely to be around and useful in 20 years.

Eyeglasses are an example directly from this book, which at least one of the news organization has likely read.

This problem is across every industry, but because of the way branding, shell corporations etc work people do not notice.

Ask yourself whether shoes is truly different? How many places around the globe produce a _lot_ of shoes?

How about hard drives? Refrigerators?

Perhaps reality and the market are not as its been described to you?

http://www.amazon.com/Cornered-Monopoly-Capitalism-Economics...

"""Apple tried to solve the issue with "Numbers" but ymmv on how well."""

Your "tiny subset" is your confusion at not seeing numbers I suspect.

Wikipedia actually does a decent job of trying to describe the philosophy.

Works great in emacs.

Yes that was in my mind as I was typing it actually :)

Notice that its only a yearish old I think?

Sqitch problem domain I handle a different way.

Pgtap is on my list of things to poke around with.

edit: thanks btw

If users had a clean and straightforward way to define the permanent header row, and viewed it as just what you did for a spreadsheet, the whole industry would be better off.

This is probably a glass half full/empty at the end of the day.

Fact is spreadsheets don't scale because they are sloppy and they don't provide a clean coherent path to getting the user to scale themselves into a sql like solution.

Oh well.

It "isn't reality" because it's a very hard problem that hasn't been well solved. That should intimidate you enough to take it seriously but not to keep you from trying.

While the concepts are similar the brittleness and bad design of spreadsheets (as I say elsewhere in the thread they should have had tables as first class object from day one) limits the ability to really make them a sane solution.

That being said, spreadsheets (some running hedge funds) are a testament that the core concepts are learnable.

The goal isn't teaching everyone.

It's to teach the very limited subset of business analysts that CARE about the answer to learn their tools well enough to ask the question properly.

Generally I think we are seeing some of these things should probably be part of much earlier math education.

Sets, predicate logic in 7-8th grade?