russellallen

I'd place a big Citation Needed next to the whole Enlightenment = Sober clothing thing. Sounds like a big oversimplification. Sure there was a reaction to baroque excess but placing it at the foot o the Enlightenment is a bit just-so-story for my tastes.

It's fascinating how many comments here seem almost offended that someone had the affrontary to dislike a technical improvement on artistic grounds.

Bugger, apologies for iPad induced downvote.

It was just a password to online news articles, not to my bank account...

As someone who has also just cancelled my credit card because of these morons, I feel your pain.

Well done, Anonymous. You've hacked into an independent online news service, destroyed their business, probably permanently shut them down, stole money from their readers and will now release all their correspondence with their sources. Fuck you. I was a subscriber - I suppose I should now go back to getting all my news from Murdoch.

This is a blow against the freedom of the press and a blow against a free and open society. There is a reason why we should as a society respect journalists and their sources. I hope the perpetrators are prosecuted and jailed.

Maybe if you are going to slag someone off you should be bothered looking for the tweet you base your slander on...

Hmm. A little underwhelmed so far.

Yes indeed. I think it is time to take a break from Hacker News for a couple of days until it blows over.

The rise of Linux on the server and desktop was wonderful to watch and I find it depressing that increasingly it looks like a single moment in time, a 90s thing like John Perry Barlow and uncensored net feeds.

And Richard is right - the real threat to open systems is not so much the obviously closed systems like Apple but the almost open systems like Android that are open enough to release the valve on community pressure but that aren't open enough to give us real freedom and control.

On the plus side, things are still in flux. For example, Inferno is now available to run on top of the free Android Linux kernel: http://www.android-dev.ro/2011/09/17/hellaphone-inferno-os-f...

The reason you care about it is because it affects Node. I'm more interested in V8 than Node to be honest.

They're running up against a V8 limit.

Its interesting that we've managed to build a society where people consider it normal that the most fundamental activity possible for maintaining that society requires potentially sacrificing position and status.

As a thought experiment, try explaining the above post to a 13th century feudal Lord.

PDF: http://selflanguage.org/_static/published/organizing-program...

Copies of most of the Self papers in PDF can be downloaded from the official Self language website: http://selflanguage.org/documentation/published/index.html

Project Gutenberg is a vision of what the future could be if we choose. RIP Michael, you done good.

That probably would have made sense to me if I already knew how the Linux Graphics Stack worked...

I don't know, but it does seem to be sometimes evangelised with more fervor than I'm comfortable with. Us v Them is always a suspicious narrative.

Even in this article, stuff like:

Finally, in 1983 the US Air Force sponsored a review of NASA's estimates of the probability of shuttle failure. NASA's estimate was 1 in 100,000. The contractor used Bayes and estimated the odds of rocket booster failure at 1 in 35. In 1986, Challenger exploded.

makes me uneasy. The rhetoric is too clearly marked.

You know, I really enjoy drinking sugar water. It's one of my enjoyments in life.

Definitely. If done in the same general style as your lambda calculus one I think it would be a great resource.

This is more of a meta-comment, but it is always interesting seeing links like this (here on Hacker News and elsewhere) which attract a fair number of upvotes, but no comments.

Perhaps we're all afraid of looking stupid... easier to discuss Job's retirement or something less scary :)

Anyway, to drop down a metalevel, this is fabulous but also interesting for what the lambda calculus doesn't talk about - concurrency and more broadly time. I'd like to see more pages like this but which come from an actor model of computation or some other process calculus.

> To put it in perspective, DeltaView is (at most) $175 bundled with other software. To a lawyer, that's an hour of billing time at most.

You're undercharging :)

But apart from that you're exactly right.

Looks nice but... What does this get me that the inbuilt comparison feature of Word doesn't do, apart from making me give you copies of all my legal documents?

Every day I open, edit and share legal contracts and other Word documents. They're usually up to about 120 pages long, with reasonably simply formatting. They usually have marked up changes from about 2 to a dozen people.

Every six months or so I check out OpenOffice/LibreOffice to see whether the documents I'm being sent survive the open/edit/save cycle.

Every time so far I end up with a document with widely differing formatting from the original.

So at least for me, LibreOffice isn't suitable for my usage patterns.

I imagine other people are the same.

Not a monetary con, but giving them a T-Shirt that says one thing, knowing that underneath it is another contrary message...

Forget for a moment that we're talking about people whose beliefs we (presumably) strongly disagree with and imagine another scenario - say youth at a Democrats rally are given T-Shirts with Obama on them, take them home and find that after a wash they have a pro-T-Party slogan. I would think that pretty unlikely to change anyone's mind. They're more likely to be pissed off.

I can imagine the Exit people watching the concert and giggling at their clever prank. Cute prank, amusing, but as a technique for persuasion?

Conning people doesn't seem like a good way to get your message through to them.

Great stuff. I'd love to see people use FPGAs to create new oddball architectures too, really weird and fun stuff and not only recreate the past.

These articles always compare Hurd to Linux. I'd love to see a comparison with Minix3 or Genode/L4 instead.

We already do documents for clients in electronic form where possible. The limitation usually is outside bodies such as banks who insist on 'wet ink' signatures.

It does reduce fussing, for example when signing a multiparty contract, but it doesn't fundamentally change or services.

Standard contracts were always available and any decent lawyer has their own precedents, but part of what the client is paying for is how to use those precedents.

Just like standard open source software is available, but people still pay developers and sys admins...

This does look cool, but I'm torn - I find something really attractive in its antithesis: beautifully designed purely mechanical watches that only do one thing and do it without electronics or batteries or Bluetooth connectivity. Self contained, intricate and simple at the same time. This watch will never have the same aesthetics even if it does have a Dick Tracey vibe to it.