tehwalrus

21st Century C is very very good.

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920033677.do

Enjoyable to read through, covers tools as well as the language, and a very good reference of good practise. It covers the basics and then goes into depth on a few of the things C is supposed to be bad at, demonstrating good ways to work (strings, threads, OOP, libraries).

I have a copy on my bookshelf at work, and have been referring to it extensively this week (exposing a C entry point to a C++ world...) It has steered me away from some fairly silly things a couple of times!

It does disagree quite strongly with the article though.

The thing is, you've just spent a month watching this pair of eyes follow you around the room, and this face very slowly get the hang of smiling (initially it is only when they are defecating).

When they get to the stage of being able to hold objects, this is a major event. When they get the hang of putting stuff in their own mouths during teething, rather than screaming until you let them bite your finger, is another, similar world-changing event.

This was a mystery to me too, before. Now I understand, and am even mildly interested in other peoples' babies (since I have one to compare them with.)

Parenting also has another similarity with D&D: your adversary is surprisingly intelligent. (when they're grouchy, they'll see through your hacks very quickly and scream until you do it properly, however tired you are. A "hack" in this instance might be giving them the same toy to chew again, rather than a new one from the mat.)

Hmm, thank you for the warning. Was it a mechanical one? I fear for my WASD! I have plenty of spare plastic dome keyboards in a box. Now I have a real excuse not to throw them out!

I have both this "to learn" list and an ever expanding bookshelf (which grows faster than I can read the damn things, mostly thanks to recommendations in HN comments).

Being 5 months into the parenting adventure, I seem to get a few hours a month on each side project at the moment! It really does make you prioritise. (And work harder on things I can do on my rail commute than other tasks).

I haven't got to the "wants to play with me" part yet, just the "oh man, I just spend half an hour staring at the baby being cute" stage. :)

The problem of how to assemble the coalition in the first place remains unsolved, indeed. You also need buy in from a major player in each bloc, as you suggest. I believe my original idea was for it to start small (but diverse), and grow over time with success.

My entire scheme is to strike down the convention that someone is only put on international trial after they have lost a war and been captured (I would like justice to be done without having a war first.) this may not be possible, but is surely worth a try.

Re: citizenship, I strongly believe that these feelings of belonging are learned, indeed are engineered in us in much the same way as a religion. My objection is that, observing the emergent behaviour of a system where everyone is under either of these spells, they lead to undesireable behaviours (aggression, proselytising, belief that evil acts are justified, sometimes even committing the evil acts willingly). Both of these systems were, hypothetically, supposed to make people behave better, not worse!

> whomever ran that army would be the defacto leader of the world

That is specifically why I don't permit an executive. This isn't one army, it's an alliance of armies. They were (in my original proposal, not in the comment above) controlled by a council of heads of government who had to take (arrest) suggestions from the chief prosecutor of the international court, but were forbidden to take other actions collectively.

In fact, I recall suggesting that such a group of allies would promise to use force only to defend direct attack on their own borders, and to execute arrests.

> We're organized as nation-states in the first place so we can protect (generally) and pursue interests based on some sort of shared goal or value.

I'm not sure I was ever offered a choice of whether or which nation to join, nor given any arguments for it. The reason(s) for their formation are certainly not rational - they are an emergent phenomenon!

> the UN

The UN is a diplomatic mission, which aims to give nations who come into conflict a neutral space in which to talk to one another like grown ups (or, often, not like grown ups.) It is a fundamentally different goal to an organisation which aims to use the traditional enforcement of rule of law to coerce those with political power to act within at least some behavioural boundaries.

> Coming to an understanding between 8 Billion on who should be able to arrest them is extremely difficult.

Actually, again, this hypothetical force only has arrest power over international crimes - specifically, crimes which are committed by people wielding state power. This includes members of governments, civil services, uncivil services (police, army), and so on, but most definitely not civilians.

(An interested edge case I considered was the idea of an impromptu Texan militia who attempted to invade Mexico. I can't remember whether I decided they had designated themselves a pseudo-state or not by doing it. The same reasoning about whether jurisdiction should apply also works for most terrorists, anyway.)

I agree with you, sort of. Specifically, I will admit that there are some cases where something some people would call war is justifiable.

Sadly, I'm not a billionaire. And privatise is a strong word - I think governments do a crappy job of it and I'd like to try! (I have stood for election, but winning while being nice is hard. note: I haven't stopped trying.)

I have written about this in the past.

I believe I proposed something like a "no executive" world government, where you had international laws, defined by treaties, and a commitment by some treaty signatories to "arrest" any state actor which broke them. If this coalition of "world police" (which are, of course, armies) were powerful enough, I believe this could lead to less lawbreaking by governments (from the USA to Zimbabwe). Note, the commitment is not to start wars/invade, but specifically to arrest e.g. presidents or generals. You can't do this without an army, but the objective is considerably different from invading, neutralising any opposing forces, and securing a place.

Of course, persuading people something like this is a good idea, your actual question, is just about the hardest problem I've ever thought about solving. I still don't really know where to begin, but I'm interested in teaching people epistemology before other things, as a means to halt the "post truth" stuff (which has been going on for years, not only recently!)

By the way, if anyone wants to work on these idea with me - I'm calling the concept "World Peace, Inc" in my head - please get in touch with me (clues in profile). I'd love for this to be my job rather than the hobby I don't have time for.

> If these actions are being done domestically against US citizens, with no just cause sure I will get upset, but that has yet to be seen.

May I just ask, why does this distinction matter? Why do you believe the world should be divided into "people who were issued bits of paper by my overlords" and "people who weren't"?

I never understood this division in other people's heads. It leads to all sorts of philosophical problems, like for example people believing that war is ethical.

I don't think so. Do you? Does the gp?

I like the idea of decriminalising marriage, but it does mean that anyone can define marriage however they want. This brings same sex/different sex marriage into parity, if you do it according to the principles you espouse. So it still doesn't make sense.

Universal constants changing slowly over the lifetime of the universe is one of the things I remember quite well from undergrad physics. Not as anything that has been proven, but as a meachanism to try and fix some of the astrophysics measurements.

Of course, the radius of the universe has clearly changed with time- this could mean that a0 did or that c did.

Yes but even in the upper register you still need to lshift by one or two bits depending on the constant IIRC. Five had me shifting by (1 or 2), and seven by (2 or 1) I seem to recall. I can't remember what property of the number determines the size of the shift though.

Is this the trick where you multiply by the two's-compliment inverse instead of dividing? That was the coolest thing I learned when I spent a few days coding assembly.

I can't see the shift that you normally need after pulling the result out of the overflow register though. My asm is a little rusty though.

It is certainly dangerous to play sounds to someone to try to trigger specific memories. This could prime them to give false information, entirely believing it was true.

Which is a shame, because it's really important to expose the sort of evil that happens at these places.

If that were true, people with really boring jobs would have higher wellbeing, all other things being equal.

Actually, there might be some truth in that.

That wasn't what I said at all. I simply said they both look pointless when you try to measure their mechanical inputs and outputs.

I actually think the stock market is much less valuable than computer games, economically speaking.

But since productivity (GDP) includes stuff like making games and gambling on stocks, I'm not sure it's a number worth maximising. Wellbeing is a number worth maximising though.

Computer games, and the stock market, initially look pointless.

Games are, as the article puts it, frivolous toys, and the second-by-second stock market is a zero sum game casino. (Buying stocks is emphatically not investing in a company, except tangentially. It is principally a speculation on the price of an asset, and no money actually goes to the company when you buy stock through a broker).

In fact, they both do have some economic outputs, although their value is quite hard to measure:

Games are entertainment. They provide escapism and fun when we are bored or sad. This improves our wellbeing.

The stock market's output is difficult to see, but it is there: they compute the value of stock. Why we need to know the value of stock to such fine resolution in time, I do not know. But we're spending all those quants' brains finding it.

Thank you, that's actually pretty awesome :)

The biggest difference from 12 years ago is invisible though- it's the news feed curation.

It used to be that you'd see the latest things from your friends and pages. Now you see what Facebook thinks you'll want to see from your friends and what some pages paid to advertise at you.

If you haven't liked something by that person in a while, you're unlikely to see anything by them if you only log in once every few months. And if you thought you'd see updates from a page after subscribing... well, you will if the page keeps paying for adverts.

Disclaimer: I don't use Facebook anymore, if I'm wrong please correct me!

Sure, but the ancestor comment mentioned "typography". I've never heard that used to refer to hand-written stuff (although, perhaps in the past hand-designed stuff.)

But actually being able to do it with your hands is nothing more than a party trick. Skill in a vector editor is key, and some domain knowledge, but surely not actually hand writing beautifully?

Do you have a link to a blog post about your setup? If not, would you consider writing about it?

I tried to use a Cyanogenmod phone over the summer without google play services (I couldn't get it to install).

I used the Amazon android store, which has many of the same applications as the play store. However, most apps I installed crashed on first launch due to (I assumed) lack of play services.

It was a very crappy experience which lasted only about a week before I switched back to a handset where the gapps flash worked correctly.

Thank you for posting.

(The link is a very detailed blog post about why this migration is happening, and what alternatives to GitHub were considered).

I wonder if the author would consider genetic programming (generating random code and executing it to compare it against a fitness function, sometimes used in computer game bots) an example of their "missing paradigm" - it fits the description they give.

Perhaps part of qualifying as a lawyer should involve writing code against someone else's annoying API, just to give them a taste of how the law is for the rest of us.

The description in the Worldly Philosophers is my main source: that in Das Kapital he flips between ranting and precise mathematical language quite sporadically.

It is my understanding that he was the first to predict economic cycles of boom and bust, too.