hwestiii

Oh noes, too much democracy…

This is me. This sounds like the worst designed algorithm ever. When I read it the other night I uncontrollably moved to shout “WTF?!?!” I literally can’t imagine the circumstances that would lead to that solution. When is the only option for saving a date string to encode it as a 32 bit int? To quote The Princess Bride “Inconceivable!”

I doubt this is your situation, but about 10 years ago, I discovered a person’s 1Password database on a bookmark sharing service, and it was using a very poorly chosen password. My recollection is that it was a large text file containing Javascript code at the beginning and the encrypted text database at the end. The person must ha inadverantly saved it as part of arching their desktop files to the service.

When I was in HS, I found Asimov’s “World of Carbon” on a book shelf in my second trimester Chemistry class, read it, and then proceeded to ace Organic Chemistry when it was presented during third trimester.

This seems very interesting to me, but is it any kind of big deal?

This is why I come to HN. To be shamed.

As far as I know, pure vanilla emacs from GNU comes with multiple vi emulations. I’ve been using viper for 20 years. It’s the only reason I use emacs at all. I had a co-worker many years ago who swore by emacs, but I found the key bindings completely counterintuitive having learned vi while getting my degree. Having made that discovery I was off to the races with emacs, and have never looked back.

The only thing that matters to Facebook is money, and denying this mechanism to the Kazakh government, and the potential loss of the Kazakh audience, is simply a case of leaving money on the table to them.

Does anyone use it seriously? I guess I need better informational resources. I’m still wondering where the man pages are.

The title perhaps inspired by the Peter Carey novel “The Chemistry of Tears”?

I very vaguely recall the Bowie Bond issue being reported somewhere but confess to promptly forgetting it. Would have been interesting to have followed it in real time. It appears to have quickly lost news-worthyness.

The future is like that a lot.

I have been a big fan of GNU screen for many years. What makes Tmux better?

Louis Pasteur figured this out in the 19th century. “Chance favors the prepared mind.”

I think this is the basis of the "Cat Detector Van" skit on Monty Python's Flying Circus

The Wire really is a remarkable show in that, unlike a most of TV before it, it literally springs from who the characters are. The closest thing to an imposed narrative is the decision to focus on a specific segment of the phenomenon that is Baltimore, the police bureaucracy in S1, the white+ working class (well before DJT) in S2, etc. Literally everything else derives from the who the characters are, not the arc imposed by the writers. The scripts are as much channeled as written.

I think I would have liked this. I had a 6th grade teacher who read aloud to us daily, something more age appropriate, though, and this experience a remarkably large, and fond component of my recollection of those days. Unfortunately I was promoted right into an "innovative" program of "individualized learning" which ultimately crashed and burned in about 6 years, but consumed all of my middle school years. I didn't really encounter anything comparable again until high school

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. It has a well deserved reputation of impenetrability, and it takes a bit of mental adjustment to shift into the gear necessary to negotiate it. My first time through, at approx 20 was easily my third or fourth attempt at it, and was possible only because I forced myself to continue through it at a relatively normal pace without stopping too long to go "wha...." and try to figure out what was really going on. I would compare it to the reading version of what you have to do with your eyes to see those MagicEye images. It worked and I made it through after a few weeks and I think it is the book that in some way taught me to read other books, and I only actually arrived at that reflection as writing this, but it is a true statement. While the plot of the book is clearly discernible from beginning to end, the frequent shift of setting, characters, tone, voice, etc occurs nearly continuously, at least within the first section. Its like one of those movies where a different director shoots a single plot thread, only in this case its as though there were a different director for every scene or cut.

The quantity of invention on display for the 700-however many pages it consumes, is titanic. And the various pastiches that Pynchon pulls off with both accuracy and love are astonishingly numerous. Its like he was daring the world to come up with something he couldn't write and had so far come out on top. The additional pay off for all the work required to consume GR is that it is outrageously funny. Jokes and Broadway numbers performed transparently by the characters, complete with blocking directions straight out of Gene Kelly - Vincent Minnelli musical.

Gravity's Rainbow is one of those ciphers of modern American literature, in which the reality of it, and the cultural parodies it has inspired, like one of my other electrifying reads, IJ, almost perfectly balance. For every proto-hipster than insists that it is to be disregarded for its self indulgence and self-consciousness of pretensions, a serious reader who will stipulate to all of the above, but go on to acknowledge and assert that all the cultural baggage aside, there really is a THERE there.

I think its probably good that Pynchon writes so infrequently, because it prevents him from becoming his own self-parody. There is something remarkable to me about V., GR, Mason & Dixon, and to a lesser extent, ATD. They all exude an empathy with their characters, that is remarkable anywhere. I'm not sure what happened with Vineland, Inherent Vice, or The Bleeding Edge, except to say that though the plot devices and Pynchonian character names, which are frequently even more omnisciently specific than anyone since Dickens, can be entertaining, the characters themselves prompted zero interest or engagement with me. They are as pure a mechanical constructs. I felt with the first group, that it was clear and emotionally satisfying to me when Pynchon demonstrated that he cared for a given character, and it made reading them a transporting experience the first time around. I kept working to get myself emotionally invested in the characters of the second group only to fail for lack of purchase. I recall reading the DFW thought Pynchon a failed genius because he tended to trivialize his own work and never really betray any emotional engagement to the reader. I wonder if he was responding to the same thing I am describing.

Anyway, Gravity's Rainbow, way worth the hype, as well as the effort to complete it.

The Illiad. As the foundation of Western literature, it may have received the greatest amount of hype that it is possible to receive.

I had attempted to read it and The Odyssey when I was much younger, in middle school, maybe too young, and failed miserably. But as it is always with cultural touchstones, references to it are inescapable, and a few years ago, in my mid 50s I overcame the reluctance accumulated in the intervening time and set out to read the Samuel Butler prose translation of 1898. Most of the translations I'd previously approached were in verse, which is in some ways its own hill to climb when one is customarily a prose reader, so this seemed perfect.

And so it was, and I was bowled over. It was a mind bending experience for me the likes of which I experience much to infrequently as age and experience take their toll on the novelties of youth. I can't say the last work I read I experienced as electrically. For all the stiltedness of epic story telling, the personalities of Agamemnon, Achilles, Zeus, et al are both vivid and convincing; the violence of battle is horrible, electric, and wierdly beautiful in a way that will resonate recognizably with fans Sam Peckinpaugh or Hong Kong action movies. Though the characterizations are far more stereotyped, as befits the age in which it was produced, than modern readers are accustomed to, they still evince a polish that rises above conventional story telling into true literature. Worth every ounce of effort you expend to summit this one.

I will be that guy and say that all the discussion around who is allowed to self-designate as a ”founder” is fatuous and fetishistic. It’s an obvious attempt to amplify one’s importance beyond sense in order to provide some level of resume inflation and just dilutes the meaning of the word.

In my opinion “founder” is not a word someone should be unilaterally conferring upon themselves, but is more meaningfully applied only by others. Until you are making actual money, you are someone trying to start a business. When you actually make money, that is at least break even, perhaps you can consider yourself an “entrepreneur”. Leave the identification of “founders” to people like the Wall Street Journal if you wish for the word to retain any meaning at all.

The naive assumption about this is that it will be used to rally supporters with suspicious or specious “information”, but it makes me wonder about the opposite. With enough user data and backend analysis, you could probably also use it as a platform to depress or discourage the activity or engagement of users determined not to support Trump. Like providing incorrect info about local voting times, regulations, etc.

I feel about Vim the way RMS seems to feel about Linux. Even though, (presumably) everyone knows the relationship of vim to vi, I don’t feel there is enough explicit acknowledgement of that fact. Vim is evidently a wonderful tool, (I say this as a confirmed 20 year emacs user for whom emacs is only usable due to excellent vi emulation possibilities) but it clearly wouldn’t exist without the basic foundation provided by canonical vi which is in my estimation a work of genius.

We lose a dollar on every unit, and make it up in volume!

Wasn’t this common knowledge?

The Dr.Manhattan Project?

Off topic, but when will we finally dispense with the faux gravitas of the term “founder”? Congratulations, you and your partner started a business. Since this apparently happens thousands of times a day, a frequency likely matched by the dissolutions of the same, the use of the term “founder”, which implies a far from established permanence, is probably a bit premature.

Shouldn’t that be “C Python Go, Go Python Go”?

I’ll believe it when I see it. I took the I course (which was excellent) 6 or 7 years ago and gave up on II after the third or fourth cancellation. Should also be goo if it ever actually happens.

This is more or less what I did, but under my own motivation. I charged myself to do all my CS homework in vi and had a copy of O'Reilly's Linux in a Nutshell at my side. It didn't take more than a couple of semesters and I didn't need the book at all.

Seems appropriate to me that he died in the city of Hexham.

Is this supposed to be _new_? I was subscribed to a service called Daily Lit 10 or 15 years ago that did the same thing.