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rudolfwinestockon In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence

How can an essay like this not mention David Foster Wallace? So many of the sentences in Infinite Jest were absolute doozies.

rudolfwinestockon No, negative masses have not revolutionized cosmology

Although it's attributed to him, William of Ockham did not come up with Occam's Razor.

My metaphysics teacher showed me a line in the Summa Contra Gentiles where St. Thomas Aquinas enunciated the same idea behind the Razor almost a hundred years before Ockham did. Sorry, I don't have the reference handy. Furthermore, the Wikipedia article on Ockham's Razor traces the basic idea all the way back to Aristotle's Posterior Analytics.

rudolfwinestockon The Errors of TeX (1978-2014) [pdf]

Here's the entry for 14 March 1978:

> Came in evening after sleeping most of day, to get computer at better time.

> Some day we will have personal computers and will live more normally.

rudolfwinestockon Paradoxes of Material Implication (1997)

Keep in mind that Aristotelian logic did not stop with Aristotle. It kept developing through the Middle Ages and even into today. Now, it's called term logic. Fred Sommers made tremendous advances in expanding syllogistic logic into something more versatile than what Aristotle worked on.

rudolfwinestockon Q: Run SQL Directly on CSV Files

“Any file is a database if you awk hard enough.” —Bryan Horstmann-Allen

https://twitter.com/neilkod/status/914217352564137984

Furthermore, no thread on CSV files can be complete without mentioning this infamous bit of fact-trolling: the ASCII standard has had unit- and record-delimiters baked into it from the beginning.

https://ronaldduncan.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/text-file-form...

rudolfwinestockon Astronomers discover super-Earth around Barnard's star

Honestly, nothing much will happen. Self-plug, ahead.

http://winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Alien_Life.html

Long story, short: It would have to be sentient life in order to get any long-lasting attention. In the recent past, plenty of scientists were sure that simple life (e.g., lichens) existed even on Mars. The general public didn't go nuts over that. So finding simple life—for sure, this time—wouldn't change anything this time around, either.

rudolfwinestockon Linux on Dex

Everyone knows what Microsoft did to the PC market in the 1980s. Everyone knows what the Unix Arts & Crafts movement wants to do to computers today.

Open up the bootloader and computers become commodities (modulo some special cases). The makers of those commodities become hostage to whatever platform becomes most popular on those computers.

Instead of thinking in terms of "freedom," one should think of this situation in terms of power.

rudolfwinestockon A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

When people complain about being deplatformed, they're just saying "the platforms that accept me aren't popular enough".

What happens when you or those who share your opinions don't get accepted by the popular platforms?

rudolfwinestockon Interim OS: minimalist OS influenced by Lisp machines and Plan 9

Previous Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10222934

rudolfwinestockon Forgotten Greats of Science Fiction

That reminds me of a story which I read in Ray Bradbury's collection, _The Illustrated Man_.

The captain of a rocketship (that's the word used) is obsessed with finding a supposed miracle-worker. They land on a planet where the locals tell them of a man who healed a child's broken arm with just a touch. The captain demands evidence and is presented with a painting of the child with a cast around his arm. The captain derides the painting, saying that it could be fake, whereupon his next-in-command points out "Photography is an unknown art on this world."

That's right. They have faster-than-light space travel, but image manipulation is unthinkable.

rudolfwinestockon China’s Re-education Camps

No, it's not. It's Communism.

Granted, the difference isn't much in terms of human rights.

I don't have the reference handy, but I remember reading about a priest who had the dubious distinction of having survived both a Nazi concentration camp as well as a Communist concentration camp. In his opinion, the Communist camp was worse. In addition to the hard labor, other physical hardships, and the ever-present threat of death, the Communists added brainwashing. “At least the Germans didn't try turning you into a Nazi.”

Don't forget. Cuba and Vietnam have the same system in operation. Ask anyone in the exile communities in the United States.

rudolfwinestockon Building a Kickass Portfolio

Here's my site: http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/

It used to be in AngularJS, now it's vanilla HTML & CSS. Mostly typography with just a little bit of animation.

rudolfwinestockon Taskbook: Like Trello but for the Terminal

There's an extension for Org Mode for Visual Studio Code.

https://github.com/ajtoo/vscode-org-mode https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=tootone....

There's also an Android app called Orgzly which supports Org Mode files.

http://www.orgzly.com/

rudolfwinestockon BPG Image format

Note that the author of the linked page is Fabrice Bellard. He created a PC emulator in JavaScript.

https://bellard.org/jslinux/

He's also made several other impressive hacks: https://bellard.org/

rudolfwinestockon NASA Finds Ancient Organic Material, Mysterious Methane on Mars

The Manhattan Project resulted in a product. That product changed geopolitics. The discovery of alien life wouldn't produce a product and would not change geopolitics (unless those flying saucers really do exist and are nearby).

Nobody asserts that the discovery of alien life would produce a product. Instead, pundits carry on about “the implications for our understanding of our place in the universe” or some other such rot. That's the focus of commentary on alien life and that's what I critiqued in that essay.

rudolfwinestockon NASA Finds Ancient Organic Material, Mysterious Methane on Mars

I'm not impressed. Alien life is over-hyped. I wrote a few words on the topic and these findings do not make me change my mind.

Fair warning: this is a self-plug.

http://winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Alien_Life.html

rudolfwinestockon The Beginning of the Monte Carlo Method (1987)

Monte Carlo has been called "integration by darts." This is a play on words of the better-known "integration by parts" method of undergraduate calculus.

rudolfwinestockon Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

From ten years ago: https://www.computerworld.com.au/article/207799/don_t_use_em...

rudolfwinestockon Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads

The cursor stays in the viewport because, deep down, Emacs still thinks that it's outputting to a 1970s-era ASCII terminal.

See this https://www.facebook.com/notes/daniel-colascione/buttery-smo...

“Internally, Emacs still belives it’s a text program, and we pretend Xt is a text terminal, and we pretend GTK is an Xt toolkit. It’s a fractal of delusion.”

For years, James Gosling, author of the first version of Emacs that ran on Unix (the ancestor of GNU Emacs), has been begging people to stop using Emacs.

Emacs is in a race, not against Vim, but against VS Code and Atom for which editor can be more easily customized. In the long run, it doesn't look good for Emacs.

rudolfwinestockon It’s COBOL all the way down

I've noticed that people only speak well of COBOL when Grace Murray Hopper's name occurs nearby.

I suspect that this says something about COBOL.

rudolfwinestockon Gaming's most fiendish anti-piracy tricks (2010)

Burger Time for the Apple ][ was apparently a pile of copy-protection triggers with a mediocre video game attached to it.

https://ia801505.us.archive.org/33/items/BurgerTime4amCrack/...

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/01/1982-burgertime-drm-was-har...

rudolfwinestockon Getting randomness from an Apple device with particle physics, thermal entropy

This reminds me of SID, the custom sound chip on the Commodore 64. It was a hybrid digital/analog chip, so the sound which it produced wasn't consistent between chips due to thermal entropy effects. El33t h4x0rz took advantage of this by making the SID output a bit of white noise into a CPU register rather than the speakers in order to get true random numbers.

rudolfwinestockon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (August 2017)

Location: Treasure Coast in Florida (Vero Beach)

Remote: Yes

Willing to Relocate: Yes

Technologies: React, Bootstrap, AngularJS, vanilla JavaScript, jQuery

Résumé/CV: email if needed

Email: rudolf at <host name given in previous line>