peatfreak

> I can't tell whether you are being sarcastic or not.

Me too. Sometimes one informs or inspires the other, but so far it seems that is about it.

> Just give in to our new code overlords and go with the flow.

No. They are turning coding into a monopolistic monoculture. Not everybody loves pull request-based workflows, you know.

> a "social" coding experience

Do people still buy into this? I feel this phrase was just a marketing ploy by GitHub.

I still use MacPorts because it's actually a proper package management system. Homebrew is not, and its limitations started to show a long time ago. The obnoxious assertion that Homebrew should take complete control of /usr/local AND be able to install in there as an unprivileged user is utterly ridiculous. It's just some nonsense that the author cooked up in his own head, contradicting a long history of convention regarding the use of /usr/local.

The maintainers of packages are supposed to port their software to the relevant platform, that's their job, and yes sometimes this takes some work, whereas Homebrew seems to assume that ./configure; make; make install should flawlessly work out of the box for pretty much anything (this is not true). The fact that they actively discourage even trying to install outside of /usr/local is simply laziness (and not in a good way). This is a foolish and naive approach, and pursuing this idealistic, reductive approach for "simplicitly" breaks down very, very quickly. MacPorts is a well behaved, self-contained system, and a well designed one at that. Homebrew just dumps everything into a system directory that it really shouldn't have exclusive rights to in the first place (/usr/local).

Moreover, there is nothing wrong with installing extra compilers, libraries, etc, under /opt/local and having them run alongside the system libraries. Lots of systems have provisions for doing something like this.

Also, using version control systems as distribution and deployment systems is a horrible anti-pattern and I really, really wish people would stop doing this.

Homebrew's documentation is terrible. Its terminology is facile and stupid in the way it analogizes everything with beer.

> How utterly despicable.

> Perhaps Paul Davis could apply, and claim to be Pauline Davis for internship purposes.

How utterly reactionary.

Moreover, do you realize just how despicably transphobic or queerphobic this statement is? The irony in your comment is appalling. Your comment is a perfect example of precisely why we do need to support people who don't conform to heteronormative stereotypes.

I can't tell if you're serious, or this is just brilliant satire.

Does anybody else find that, even though this might have been a "sensible" decision, particularly for people who have a vested (i.e., financial) interest, that now a lot of the "wow" factor and everything that made Ethereum exciting, has just evaporated? Now it's clear that rather than being idealistic and principled for the greater good, it's simply nothing more than a way for people to make money and for the powers that be to retain the status quo. Business as usual, "the system" will prevail. The magic has gone.

> The reason it's not on the list is I just didn't see what it had to offer that isn't covered in later books.

It's concise and readable. Every word is used for a reason.

> I can't believe he didn't mention Gilbert Strang. This should be the starting point for everyone, IMO.

Not everybody loves this book, you know. A lot of people find its sloppy, disorganized, chatty style quite irritating.

> Not sure the highly theoretical stuff is actually worth anything as far as getting things done, unless you go on to study Algebra and mathematics in general.

You've answered your own question. It's "highly theoretical", not "highly practical". The focus is different by definition.

> A beginner player would not appreciate the difference between a $200 guitar and a $2000 guitar. Someone struggling to find the finger positions for a simple chord isn't going to notice the action, fret shape, fingerboard radius, tonewoods etc.

This is a common thing to say, but it's untrue. A cheap and nasty instrument will have bad features that are noticeable even to beginners. Things like poor quality finishing, hardware that rattles, sharp edges on the edge of the fretboard where the frets haven't been smoothed off properly, etc, etc, and it's really uninspiring if your guitar isn't enjoyable to hold. Even more "advanced" things like having the right action or a comfortable neck radius are noticeable early on. Tuning heads are another big one, cheap tuning heads are awful (the difference between good and bad ones is like night and day), and if your guitar is constantly going out of tune due to that or something else, and if you're not completely tone deaf, you will notice and it will annoy you.

You know what would be AMAZING? If there was a Coursera course (or some other MOOC course, books, etc) that explains how archive.org works from the foundational technologies upwards. So, like, you could build your own mini version of archive.org as an exercise. It'd be a fascinating project and could be a great case study in web archiving techniques and information retrieval. Does anything like this exist already?

What the hell was that drivel supposed to be about?

> My impression so far was that Google more or less created the whole machine Learning movement

How did you get this impression? It has little basis in reality.

I looked at the README but I can't understand what this project is or what it is for. Is it something for collaborative editing?

> Without real consequences, what is the incentive to participate if the rules can change when they don’t always go in your favor?

Yes. This should be the very core of the argument, with a focus on the words "conseqeunces" and "incentive".

Why is the choice between these two? Both are very limited in what they can do for documentation of any complexity.

What a great book! I wish they'd publish a new edition (the latest was ten years ago).

Has anything as good been released since? What is the current "standard reference" on DNS and BIND?

Oh yeah, and even in regular work too. I've noticed a lot of peer pressure in many different environments, sometimes team members feel obligated to provide a "me too" or "thumbs up" or whatever, out of fear of being the nail that sticks up and gets hammered back down.

Thanks for providing these links.

It's not necessary to buy a domain and host one's own server. For example, there is https://savannah.gnu.org/ , which is where Emacs itself is hosted.

Why is so much Emacs stuff hosted on GitHub these days? It seems antithetical to the spirit of the project as a whole.

Like pretty much most things.

But of course screenshots and videos made in OS X are available, especially considering Emacs has been running on that OS since forever. The point of interest here is that it's on an FSF website. Otherwise I don't see why you would even bother to point it out.

Yes. I doubt that somebody who was so close to the GNU project as to have authorization to change the main Emacs website wouldn't know about this. Clearly it's just a simple mistake, easily fixed.

Even in videos and screenshots that are endorsed by the FSF? I find that hard to believe.

> I can imagine Richard asking for new videos to advertise the GNU platform instead.

Me too. He often asks for corrections in light of these types of oversights (at least, it looks like an oversight to me).

Hmm, I'm not so sure that's what the intention is. The FSF is adamant that non-free software should not be promoted if there is a free equivalent that can do the same thing. So I'm also surprised that OS X features prominently, like this, on the front page.

> smart people

Uh, I'm not so sure about this. Programmers tend to have a bad habit of severely overestimating their own intelligence. This is one of the things I dislike about the profession: Everybody is so self-assured of their own brilliance.

Can you give me a recommendation?

This is a good opportunity for us to be positive and to list up-to-date resources that clearly list laptops that work on Linux, or what to look for, what models are good and not-so-good, what is Free and mostly-Free, etc, etc. I am looking for a "mostly-Free", modern Gnu/Linux laptop that I can purchase either new or recently second hand but am having a terrible time trying to figure it all out.