timka

I've seen people criticizing Go for not being correct enough, e.g. for its way of handling dates among other things. But I think Go has a saner balance of correctness vs. simplicity. I don't like being forced to do stuff correctly all the time.

I somewhat agree with your point on having an explicit way to indicate JSON input. OTOH, in practice I'd rather prefer having a section about limitations in the docs.

IMO Nickel looks better in this regard as it allows you to use typing only when it helps. Plus, it has contracts that complement the type system.

I'm familiar with this point of view. I think maybe a third of Polish people share it, another third don't give a damn about Russians, yet another third think that it's vital for Poland to have healthy relationship w/ Russia. Even fore purely economical pragmatic reasons.

After the destruction of the USSR Poland became sort of a showcase. As a limitrof sitting in between Russia and Europe Poland can't afford always being pro-European or pro-Russian. It's being pro-Polish which means finding the right balance at the moment. Simply put, as long as Bruxelles has resources to support Poland Poland stays pro-European.

Seems like this year may be quite interesting in this regard.

You're missing the point. I am mainstream. I'm 42, I've had enough of underground but totally understand it since this is where I came from. And this totally normal.

I don't have to stay teenage for the rest of my life.

I was a teenager during the 90s in Moscow and share none of your sentiment.

Yes, we lost the Cold War. NATO won. Understood.

We got child prostitution, heroine epidemics, kids inhaling acetone vapors from glue to get hi in basements, together with so called 'democracy'. Also lost significant part of science and industry, free education and health care.

Something's terribly missing from you "harmony". Sorry, but this seems like ignorance.

The Ural federal district is the testing site for the ASBI (АСБИ).

What blackouts are you talking about? I'm in Moscow. Never heard of that.

This is HN not PN. I do realize HN is full of libertarian spoiled youth (and spoiled not-so-youth-already including myself) but I don't want to teach anyone how to live.

The time will show.

I do understand libertarians. I personally was really unhappy to see more and more "regular people" getting internet access since the late 90s. Now the Internet is full of crap. I have trouble finding stuff that was easy to find in, say, 2010.

I do miss "the underground days" of FidoNet. And underground is total denial of the mainstream. But the Internet is not just the mainstream, it's the infrastructure now.

I grew up in Moscow in the 80s-90s and my passion for computers somewhat saved me from the street influence but OTOH I did have the Anarchist's cookbook, for instance, precisely b/c of the computers. Absolutely unregulated. That is I'm sort of the early kind of spoiled kids.

Most Russians had enough of 90s with child prostitution, heroine, skinheads etc. They just want unspoiled kids to continue rebuild the country they lost in 90s but better. They don't need BLM/LGBT/whatever extreme stuff in the mainstream. There's place for that and it's called underground.

Also, I think English-speaking Internet may be viewing modern Russian at least as oppressive as the USSR but this isn't true IMO. They have learnt the lesson and do realize that prohibiting and classifying almost everything is not the way. As well as basing regulations, policies and even international affairs on ideological principles.

That's is the system is very much interested in the existence of underground. It's similar to how enforcing customs regulations totally has turned out to be too expensive and bad for economy. Some expert in the area said that ~10% of smuggling is a healthy balance.

Another example. I once talked to a guy from Sochi who told me that during the preparation of the 2014 Olympics some local hippies were approached by special "people in civilian clothes". The hippies have been told something like: we know you grow shrooms and weed, and that's OK, no worries, but we need you to stay away off during the Olympics.

Yet another example. While visiting the village where my grand-grandfather was born I heard that they got their own potheads and shroom eaters, in the next village or something. Everyone knows about that, police included.

Dumb enforcement never works well for such things. Just remember how desperately the Russian Empire was trying to make the Ashkenazi cultivating the land. The government gave them the rich black earth in Novorossia. That worked perfectly for many of the Germans and the Greeks but not so much for the Ashkenazi. The government didn't want to understand that this just wasn't something Ashkenazi would like to do.

Also, I think most of those young kids thinking they're protecting freedom of speech are just acting like offended children how ran away from home. For how long can they survive? Even if they can, is it good for them? The Soviet Union was a very parentalistic system that everybody was fed up with. People thought that with the destruction of the Union they'll only get freedom. In reality the not only got freedom but lost many things they were taking for granted like free health care and education, science and significant part of the industry.

Writing this from Moscow over private OpenVPN instance hosted on Hetzner by a friend of mine. Sometimes it stops working. It's been like that for a couple of years like that.

Crawl-Space Computing by Lawrence J. Dickson [1]

Posting it here since the author has kindly allowed me to share this file with my colleagues in order to familiarize them with the ideas laid out in the book. Also, seems like the paper version is no longer available on Amazon, so I don't see any other way. Especially since the author's goal was to leave a heritage.

[1] http://pros.to/wide.pdf

UID mapping?

Lawrence Dickson. Anyone?

In Russia the chairmen are interested in kickbacks which they won't get with OSS.

Also, it seems that the situation with education in general is still better that in Brazil at least in some regards. In 2014 I worked in São Paulo and had a difficult time communicating with a taxi driver. I was trying to ask him to at least write the amount of money we have to pay for the ride on a slip of paper. Later a colleague explained that illiterate drivers are quite common.

In general Brazil felt mostly like home to me. Maybe Brazil is a version of Russia where homeless people don't freeze to death in the winter :)

The OSS community that I grew up in speaks English and the software world is largely based on English. I really enjoy reading nicely written source, well commented in good English, with concise naming (again in English). And we're forced into a situation where programming languages are based on English. And I also enjoy even more writing not purely technical higher level documentation in Russian, expressing general ideas and approaches.

Russian developers with little or no experience in international environment often suck even at naming things in proper English, especially methods/functions. How many times have I seen grammar errors in APIs? But some of those guys are really great engineers who just aren't that much into spoken languages. Some of them aren't great writers even in Russian.

Yes, sometimes the source they write will certainly insult someone else's sense of beauty. But is there anything we can do about it? We can do something but still some people just aren't good at languages. I think we should just accept that it and stop worrying. And those whose sense of beauty is being insulted should think why they choose to use their knowledge and abilities as a weapon against their teammates or as a decoration to create a false sense of superiority. Pretty sure many of them do this out of their inner insecurity or because of attachment (unhealthy perfectionism, insulted sense of beauty).

Also I think that projectional (structural) editors may change this situation or at least give us some insights on how natural languages affect the way we structure our software.

In mid-00's I used to be frequent at a pub that was popular among expats and oil and IT industry professionals. I met a guy from the US there who was a professional translator and interpreter. He once told me that when he has to translate a business letter he finds Russian really cumbersome but when it comes to poetry he finds Russian so beautiful that English will never sound close to that.

Also he gave me his copy of Stephenson's Snow Crash. When I complained that it was so hard to read he answered that for him reading Lermontov is also a struggle. What a guy!

Unfortunately it's impossible to fully elaborate my position here in the format of HN comments but I don't think the way you're talking about is really possible. The system is broken so badly that it cannot be fixed from inside by adding more of its rules. It has to be changed entirely. Figuratively speaking it's sort of like Goedel's theorem.

Have you had an opportunity to discuss their views on privacy and the currently established political culture in the US with those in their 70s and 80s?

This is true. But 'the government' (I'd rather say agencies and services) mostly doesn't care about us unless we do something 'special' and you basically can't hide from them. The big tech is always interested.

That's complicated indeed. When I start thinking about who can track me (wi-fi, bluetooth and RFID scanners and surveillance cameras everywhere, my telecom provider, banks, public transportation, gmail etc., browser fingerprinting…) I just don't see any practical way to ultimately hide. Add the fundamental lack of trust to any device using ICs (evidence-based, field verifiable) and it becomes just insane.

In practice I just use a dumbphone and turn on my smartphone only to get a taxi (Yandex) or maybe see if my bus is coming (again Yandex). But my wife has her smartphone always on spying on us, not to mention all my colleagues. Also on my laptop I do use Yandex market, maps and read articles on Zen…

I can imagine that deep awareness of digital security issues may make one's life better in some situations but there's always a risk of becoming too much of an activist here. I think I'm quite geeky already.

I tend to think that it's not the govs tracking us that we should care about but the big tech. Yandex is one of them.

When I was learning C++ in late 90s in the university the DOS environment I was using didn't have the i18n configured properly. My teacher noticed that I was trying to use Russian transliteration for comments and she suggested to 'just use English'. That solution didn't seem obvious to me at all.

Also some other day she suggested someone else to install Linux at that student's home PC. I followed that advice too and learned a good bunch much of my English by reading man pages.

'A hacker is someone who enjoys playful cleverness'.

That's about it. Unfortunately, they can't just play their toys and get payed for that. Or can they? Well, at least not where they're currently employed.

Also how old are they? For how long they think they'll be able to retain such mental abilities and motivation?

What about other aspects of their lives? Friends? Children? Sports? Travel?

You may say these are none of your business, but I think you see what I mean. It's a matter of 'personal growth' and you as their lead can't force it. Wisdom is sometimes really painful to acquire. In this case they fall into a cognitive bias by not being aware of what others are able or unable to do. And even just recognizing that on a daily basis already has great hack value. But on the other hand that would be an achievement someone would only recognize after the fact and therefore it won't look attractive at all before the fact.

And also what does the manager you report to says about all that?

Gleb Uspensky, The Power of the Land (Earth/Soil)

I heard Vladimir Lenin was keeping this one at his desk.

Where's the hack value?

The title is truly misleading. Yes, natural scales sound good and we already know that. Gradually thickening an arpeggio or sequence makes it interesting for some time.

This is not what we expect when we see such a title. I'd except maybe some interesting microtonal or timbral effects. Even though microtonality rarely sounds 'good' since it's way too far from natural overtone scale.

OTOH, I know an IT professional, a computer nerd, who types using his two index fingers while looking at the keyboard.

Some people do have very difficult relationship with their bodies.

There is hope. Well, sort of. Services exists because of the unprecedentedly large middle class that's been created artificially by using currency emission to stimulate consumer demand and thus grow the economy ('raegonomics'). But it's been quite a while since emission stopped working and started to give the opposite effect.

This[1] Russian guy explains the roots of the situation really well (just ignore the title, it has nothing to do with Russia and sanctions). BTW, this is the first time I see him speaking for English-speaking audience since I know him (12+ years).

[1] https://thealtworld.com/scott_ritter/impact-of-sanctions-on-... [1]

How old are you?

Fair means inequal.

40+. Have been viming since 1999-2000. SublimeText + vim mode has been my weapon of choice since like 2012-2013. It works out of the box and is the most compatible with my muscle memory (tried VSCode's vim emulation, RealVim, PyCharm's vim mode — hell, it's 120 chars per line by default). Onivim2 seemed promising but it's still not there.

What I really like in Vim is not Vim itself, but modal editing, mouse-free navigation, staying at the home row. Ideally I would like this model to be universally available across my environment. Like MacVim but everywhere. Plus, a trackpoint at the home row (really loved IBM ThinkPad).

Home row is great but it's so much addictive that you want it everywhere, but I still haven't found a universal way. I bought a UHK[1] and learn how to use it and Karabiner elements complex modifications.

Also these days I tend to think that physical navigation (characters, words, lines, paragraphs…) is really not what I should think about when working. So lately I've been exploring helix and projectional[2] (structural[3]) editors.

My younger colleagues are sometimes so awkward in terminal so I've been thinking about investing some time into setting up a well tuned and documented shell environment for them somewhere. I think I'd start with this awesome article[4].

[1] https://ultimatehackingkeyboard.com/ [2] https://www.alexeyshmalko.com/20200830010958/ [3] https://github.com/yairchu/awesome-structure-editors [4] https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/keyboard-shortcuts-ev...

You're right, the 'regular' people form the base of a society. But purely biologically they aren't capable of implementing a system for governing the society. This is b/c a hard working brain consumes up to 25% of total energy which is very expensive. Therefore we tend to find shortcuts that allow us to avoid that much of brain activity. And as brain wants to be 'happy' (chemically) which biologically means good food, reproduction and dominance.

Thus geniuses may be considered a biological anomaly since for some reason they act against their biological nature by stressing themselves considerably more than 'regular' people.

Also see my comment above regarding detecting geniuses in a scientific evidence-based way.

Hopefully, implementing Serge Saveliev's idea of cerebral sorting would give a way to detect geniuses in an evidence-based way. Unfortunately, this is still technically impossible (MRI resolution is still too low).

Another issue is that many would like their kids to become one of the geniuses, even if they're fake, as long as this gives them some advantages. Such people would reject the idea of cerebral sorting. Also, according to Saveliev, for ideological reasons neural science in the West hasn't advanced in mapping brain fields and sub-fields (postmortem slicing and photographing) as much as in USSR. That is even if one gets both Saveiliev and an hi-res MRI scanner from the future, the whole idea of sorting would be considered unacceptable for similar reasons.

What exactly do you mean by Russia funding the green anti-nuclear movements? Exactly who did this?

All that green agenda, Kyoto and Paris stuff, affects Russia very badly by basically cancelling its fossil fuel export earnings. Just look at those who lobby the green agenda in Russia like Chubais.