read_wharf

And if you use set -o vi in .bashrc, or set editing-mode vi in .inputrc, then 'v' will do the same thing, e.g.

    $ blah blah[ESC]v

puts you in vim with the command line thus far.

But what if you don't have that network?

My conjecture on top of the general value of a more connected network.

What is Facebook's motivation for connecting people? Or Google's? Or LinkedIn's.

A newspaper sold millions of individual pairs of eyeballs to advertisers. I would think the large numbers of correlations available in a largely connected network would be much more valuable than unconnectable individuals.

The network effect says that a person that's connected to five family members is not as (measurably) valuable as someone connected to fifty people.

If you were Google, which would you rather sell to advertisers, correlations between groups of five people of fifty?

Don't put your stuff in there, because they are not going to treat it with the same importance that you do.

Probably not within mine, depending on which side of the family I favor.

Well that's the weirdest thing. I've seen this kind of thing before, so I guessed that <--> would work. But the page asks my browser to store information. If I ignore the question and just allow the query to continue to display at the top of the window, I can navigate fine. If I say "Not now," I'm stuck on whatever page I was on when I answered, and have to reload to be able to move again. Ubuntu 11.10, FF recent.

The guy was sounding really credible and forthcoming until he made that claim.

Although, if you read his claim with the right squint, maybe it's true: No security agency on earth is as bad as the TSA.

And if they really are good, and unfairly painted, then they've got some serious "evidence of outstanding work" type of reputation building to do. They have their reputation for a reason.

"Well... I'd like to suggest that you do not pre-reject yourself. Let them decide."

Everyone post that on your wall above your monitor.

The last example, where the code called within a block is shown to its right, is something that I've often tried to do statically, manually when first trying to learn a large code base. I would want this for that alone. The fact that what's shown is live-ish is a big, diabetic coma-inducing glob of icing on the cake.

There was a warning box/advertisement at the bottom of the page that my download manager is out of date, with an X to close the box. But it's not an X, it's just pixels, and clicking it pops up a window to download a download manager.

Which makes everything at this site suspect and not worth reading.

Linode and Slicehost will be the two most common answers. They are similar to each other. I am a happy Linode customer.

You say that performance can be low, so you might look here:

http://www.lowendbox.com/

No.

They essentially want employees to be near, while they're sleeping during off time. Fully staffed, on the cheap.

If it's that important, then pay for a 2nd and 3rd shift.

No.

Isn't most corporate charity a form of tax management anyway?

If charitable donations were not deductible, I think corporate charity would effectively disappear.

And I've found that text mostly meets my needs too. But that's partly because I'm technical and willing/able to deal with formatting codes for things that should be rendered as more than text: html, restructured text, markdown, etc. In a sense it's a step backwards to WordPerfect and their split screen.

There's a lot to be said for wysiwyg. Most people are unwilling or unable to learn or use formatting code in plain text and no immediate rendering of the result.

But fundamentally there's no reason why anyone should have to deal with plain text source that produces nicely rendered output (unless we want to). Computers are really, really good at displaying things nicely, and hiding details.

The problem is that Word (and the creeping Sharepoint ecosystem) are much too powerful for almost everyone's needs. My work is typical: all our documents are a single font, and they have tables. The docs are kept in Sharepoint, and we do nothing with Sharepoint but keep documents.

That over-engineered solution would be better replaced with a very simple word processor like WordPad or some similar rtf tool, and the file system.

I don't need to use the truck that takes space shuttles from the vehicle assembly building to the launch pad just to get to work.

"maybe clean and simple UI will return to the Office suite"

Laws never disappear from the books, swords are never beaten into plowshares, and Word never, ever loses a feature, although some of them do get hidden.

I've never worked anywhere that they didn't use Word.

I've never worked anywhere that they didn't despise Word.

Why won't it die? Why?

Why?

I use Lubuntu for my desktop, and this line of thought has occurred to me. I expect sometime in the near to medium future I'll be using LXDE on Debian. Unity was the writing on the wall for me. No grudges toward Canonical, I'm just gradually becoming less of a good fit as a user.

But there is an interface for cars that has evolved into something that is intuitive, and all new cars are designed with that in mind.

You used to have to type in 1s and 0s on a keyboard, or cut little square holes in a piece of cardboard with an Exacto knife. You had to learn what opcodes were represented by those 1s and 0s, in which contexts, and reverently hand your stack of cards full of holes to the Keeper of the Card Reader. You had to really, really want to program, with books open on the desk and your lap, and a grilled cheese sandwich holding open the one on your lap. I don't know if that's formal, but it sure doesn't sound like a casual drive around the block to me.

I wouldn't know an opcode from a gerund, and I don't want to know.

Now I can Write a Program for Dummies, or I can write Python the Hard Way, or I can <script>alert('hello world')</script>, all as close as https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=how%20do%20I... while holding a sandwich in one hand. That's not as casual as the OP would like, but it's pretty darn casual compared to The Day.

Edit: vocabulary.

"Further, a car is simple to use out of the box"

Exactly my point. They didn't use to be simple. Crank, choke, throttle, water in the battery, where's the next fuel repository, where are my goggles, where is the rug for my legs, etc. Now they are, and you just think of moving your body from here to there, and almost not at all about how to make your car help you do that. Now people use a car casually.

It's that kind of change, only much more profound and difficult to achieve, that will be needed before people can "program" (if we still call it that) computers casually.

For us, but not for people who don't program otherwise, yet would like to casually do more with their computers than what the installed apps do. Thinking of what you want to do is the more important part of doing something; it seems like, in the spirit of the OP's post, you shouldn't have to make such a large leap from what you want to how to do it.

It is what it is today, merely because it is what it is.

For now.

"It's not as if Python or Ruby have set out to be deliberately difficult. They've grown difficulty because they're used to solve real problems, and real problems are hard."

The problem of getting from the East coast to the West coast has not changed in 100 years (move body until done), yet when was the last time you had to set the spark and choke and hand-crank a car? Cars solve real problems, and today's cars are sophisticated enough that essentially anyone can use one. To solve real problems.

Certainly the problems solved by a car are in a more narrow domain than programming languages. But cars themselves are in a narrower domain than internal combustion engines.

Edit: stealth.

Maybe, sorta.

Why don't people use VBA more for casual programming? Is it because it's Office-centric-ish?

Or, why don't more people do casual programming of any kind? Certainly lack of tools is one. Another is probably that most people don't exist in a culture where people do casual programming.

The biggest problem is that the things above the level of raw bits, the objects like documents and blog posts and check registers, are not themselves built to be manipulated in a casual environment. They're not built as part of a casually programmable environment. They're bits.

If you had a stack of books in English and Arabic and wanted to categorize them, you'd grab them and put them in their piles without thinking about it.

A blog post is nothing but bits. The only reason it's an English or Arabic post is that every program that touches it is required to, and agrees to, sniff it at a very low level and pretend that it's a blog post. The inside of a blog post looks exactly the same as the inside of a check register, and it's a huge leap from the bits that they are to the pseudo-objects that all relevant programs agree to pretend that they are. There is no casual middle ground, and so there's nothing that can be casually picked up and manipulated. You're a wizard, or an ardent apprentice, or you're nothing.

I think a real casual programming environment would look much less like app-centric VBA, or Excel (mentioned elsewhere), and more like Squeak (mentioned elsewhere). But it would work best if all the things on the system, at least the things that aren't dangerous to expose, are fundamentally casual objects. The browser window should be casual, as well as the post plugged into it.

URLs should be shortened and expanded in the browser, according to an RFC scheme. No third party and they live as long as the RFC's implementation does.

I would prefer to hover over a link and have my browser tell me where the link goes, not relying on some third party.

You make some excellent and interesting points, but don't discount the number of smart, competent hacker/technologists who are also ardent believers in specific religions. I believe they are a significant if quiet minority.

I think he's got 3) down.

Your ten minutes are up.

I just tried to use your site. I created a board, claimed it (and created an account).

The response page to claiming the board said "Success: The claim has been filed. It will normally be processed within 24 hours (probably much sooner)." I'm not going to wait much longer than five minutes to try something new, yet you put up this roadblock that would seem to depend on human action. That's not going to scale.

I think this might be the eventual URL for the board:

https://plainboards.com/!Plainboards query on Hacker News/

I created it to see if we at HN could briefly eat your dog food; since it's a discussion site, I thought it might be interesting for HN to carry on part of the discussion/critique of your site on your site.

But when I posted the first thread, I got this response:

"Success: Your thread submission has been successfully added to the system and will be checked (and hopefully accepted) as soon as possible, often within hours or the same hour. You can see its status at any time and (possibly depending on preferences) you will be notified via a PM."

You're inadvertently right: this is ridiculous.

If I'm going to use any forum-like site, I want to create a "board," and possibly an account if absolutely necessary, and then I want the site itself to get out of the way.

In general, if I can't use a site instantly, then it's instantly forgotten.

My opinion is that you have some serious re-thinking to do.

Posted with the sincere desire to be helpful.

P.S. After about 20 minutes of stumbling around on your site, I see this on my account page: "You currently don't own any boards."

Dude.

Edit: Just checked the PM message area (I think), where I think I'm supposed to be notified when the board or messages are "approved."

"Your private conversations (globally)

Nothing here. Nice and tidy."

30 minutes.

I lean a little more toward liking the landing page than not. It's not great, but I like the simplicity. Maybe a bigger default font size would be good for me personally, but that's a small problem that I can easily solve.