I’m reminded of various applications such as Calca, Soulver, numi, NaSC, Qialculate, etc. that offer a similar functionality. However, most of them tend to use “standard” mathematical notation, precedence, and associativity, and ascii text. Other software, such as Mathematica, has the ability to let you write and edit visual equations, and then perform computations with them.

Worth noting that s-expressions avoid a lot of legibility problems discussed in the article. If we look at the first example under the “providing immediate feedback” section where traditional notation looks like:

50.04 + 34.57 + 43.22 / 3

this would be expressed as:

(+ 50.04 34.57 (/ 43.22 3))

which would be hard to confuse with:

(/ (+ 50.04 34.57 43.22) 3)

A lot of people seem to have the impression that s-expressions are harder to read than traditional syntax, but I find the opposite to be the case. With s-expressions you have simple and predictable rules that remove a lot of mental overhead around figuring out what the code is doing.

I’ve become more and more disillusioned with NixOS over the past couple of months. Packaging things that aren’t available, or even updating existing packages, has so many little undocumented gotchas that (I guess) they assume you’ll figure out reading from reading gh issues or random blog posts. It has actually stopped me working on a few different projects because it’s not worth figuring out how to package something.

However, I don’t think I can go back to a traditional distro after tasting the stability and convenience of something like NixOS. Has anyone here tried both NixOS and GuixSD. or perhaps switched from one to the other?

Guix seems so much better documented from the brief read though I’ve given it after seeing this. The docs just have so much detail.

Also, I’d much rather learn a real language like scheme for making packages than the rather incomprehensible (at least to me) language that Nix invented.

What are the downsides of Guix that I just haven’t seen yet?

I don’t buy it because the real protocol is what you read and write from the file, not that you can read and write files. And if the “file” is a directory, what do the filenames you read and write from/to it mean?

So is there really any difference between open(read("/net/clone")) and net_clone();? The author seems to say the former is more loosely coupled than the latter because the only methods are open and read on the noun that is the file…. but really, you are stating exactly the same thing as the “verb” approach (if anything, I’d argue it is more loosely typed than loosely coupled). If a new version wants to add a new operation, what’s the difference between making it a new file that returns some random data you must write code to interpret, and a new method that returns some data you must write code to use?

The internet search experience suffered a setback when the major browsers abandoned the separate search box for the combined address/search box. Only FireFox retains this feature, where your default search engine is the first choice in a list.

In the days before Alta Vista became better than Yahoo, and then Google crushed all other search options, there were meta-search engines that combined, filtered, and formatted results from several search engines of your choice. IIRC Magellan was one of these. I’ve toyed with the idea of reviving this idea for my own use. Google and Bing are pretty similar, but not perfectly similar, and provide different results depending on whether you are signed-in or anonymous. DDG usually provides different enough results to be important. There’s a lot of room for innovation in meta-search.

Finally there are still all sorts of specialized search options. In this category I would start with Amazon and Wikipedia. There are also sites like noodle.com, specializing in education related searches.

For those unaware, https://startpage.com is excellent and has great privacy policy. I actually prefer it to DuckDuckGo these days because I feel its default search is of higher quality.

Reminds me a lot of the Google from 10-15 years ago.

It took me a few moments to realise/remember that this is a chapter from Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (despite the fact that it says so in the paragraphs near the top, buried inside somewhere).

I am vaguely reminded of The Birth & Death of JavaScript.

I found the question pretty interesting but the discussion of the (hidden) solution too long (everything after 3 seem to be a rehash of 3).

State a timestamp in the future (distant enough for the email to reach everyone before the timestamp) and select a random public event at that time (or the first one to occur right after it).

I think this was stated many times on reddit with bitcoin hash id as the public event.

Example: If its 9:10 now, write an email with “take the bitcoin id that appears after 9:25 and apply <transformation to get it to a random number between 1 and 20>” and send it now. Wait. Look at the ID.

Edit: actually on Reddit a lot of solutions of this form were suggested like solar activity or stock prices.

I’ve talked to some people in and close to this industry and it feels like we’re a good 15 years away from autonomous vehicles. The other major issue we’re not addressing is that these cars cannot be closed source like they are now. At a minimum, the industry needs to share with each other and be using the same software or same algorithms. We can’t enter a world where Audi claims their autonomous software is better than Nissan’s in adverts.

People need to realize they won’t be able to own these cars or modify them in any way if they ever do come to market. The safety risks would be too great. If the cars are all on the same network, one security failure could mean a hacker could kill thousands of people at once.

I really think the current spending on this is a huge waste of money, especially in America when tax money given to companies to subsidize research could be used to get back the trains system we lost and move cities back inward like they were in the earlier 1900s. I’ve written about this before:

http://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-solve-the-transportation-problem/

Personally, I would not be opposed to such a tag, and would not mind seeing interesting, physics-related links here. However, I do think it would be a rather severely off-topic tag at lobste.rs, and perhaps this is a reason to not create it.

“When people who can’t think logically design large systems, those systems become incomprehensible. And we start thinking of them as biological systems. And since biological systems are too complex to understand, it seems perfectly natural that computer programs should be too complex to understand.”

Simultaneously a straw man and a false dichotomy. Not written by someone who understands logic?

I love this concept.

One challenge is that one can always read all the pages. It would be great flavor if this shipped with like… 20 times as many pages. Things like random letters, accounting statements. So you can also experience the whole “sifting through a lot of stuff” thing, and perhaps landing on an interesting bit somewhere. Maybe even having this actually ship as several distinct sets of books, for example.

EDIT: You might want to check out Her Story for some interesting ideas in there as well. A bit harder to execute upon on paper, but is a very interesting mechanism for non-linear storytelling.

Have a peer-to-peer web, but keep the concept of servers in addition to it. It’s no better a solution than currently exists, but at least it offers potential redundancy (fueled by popularity, but perhaps some other metrics can be devised, as was hinted towards the end of the article) instead of the current lack of existence that information has a tendency to vanish into.

Additionally, I’d like to point out that things such as paywalls or pizza delivery would still require servers that are not data-addressable, because they are services and not information that can be copied and distributed (at least, not without a clever reworking of how the service works). Servers are here to stay for the time being, and a peer-to-peer web most likely won’t change that dramatically.

Alfred, iTerm

I can never get a concrete reason why to use these over Spotlight/Terminal.app. There used to be a significant difference, but today I can’t think of a compelling reason.

Edit: Ditto for flu.x

One would simply have to type ‘Cartesian closed categories and the price of eggs’, etc – which is a lot more intuitive than typing \title{Cartesian closed categories and the price of eggs} (not to mention \documentclass{article}), as in LaTeX one must.

Each of these has an equivalent action that needs to be taken. Where in LaTeX you write \title{}, in a word processor you click the button to make a title (that may or may not be labeled nicely by default). \documentclass{} rather resembles the “Choose a Template” page that appears in many popular word processors. Granted, it’s writing a command as opposed to clicking a button, which seems to be the major usability difference here.

When it comes to stopping people from creating documents in purple 28pt Comic Sans, teaching them all to use LaTeX is a lot less efficient than stating that you will refuse to read anything that doesn’t match the style guide. (Teaching them to use word processors properly might also help.)

Yes, stating a specification and letting people use whatever tools they prefer is easier than teaching people to use any particular tool properly.

LaTeX does less to prevent authors from getting on with writing documents than TeX does. But if neither of the two existed, and you had to come up with something, right now, in 2016 – would it really be a markup language?

There is a good chance that the answer would be yes. The majority of programming languages tend to stick to plain text documents, due to a variety of reasons (some of these ideas apply). A document formatting (and typesetting) language would not be too different, which is what TeX is.

If perhaps the answer were no, then it would be a standardized data format (those also have a tendency to be plain text, or eventually be encoded in plain text, by the way), which would allow you to use whatever user interface your heart desires (and your mind and hands are able to create). This is also what most word processors do, except they don’t want to agree on a format, and each makes their own.

The MIT Research Science Institute argument isn’t much better.

I completely agree here. Those three MIT RSI arguments seem like bullshit to me. As the author said quite nicely: “Comparing good use of LaTeX with poor use of word processors is unfair”.

But that isn’t how most people want to write. Most of us would rather have a piece of paper or a screen that is covered in the words and punctuation marks that are actually going to appear in the finished piece than a screen covered in markup like \parencite[see][]{bennett_2002}.

This seems to be what the author is most annoyed about. They’re not writing about why LaTeX is bad for writing prose, as much as they are arguing as to why WYSIWYG or WYSIWYM is better for writing prose than markup. To which I can heartily say, there are WYSIWYG and WYSIWYM editors! See this table sorted by “Editing style”, and perhaps also take a look at this.

LaTeX was invented so that nobody would have to write prose in TeX, which is too hard for ordinary mortals. The above were created so that nobody would have to write prose in LaTeX – which is not too hard for ordinary mortals, but still a fairly bad idea.

LaTeX is very easy to write ordinary prose in, but it is not the most beautiful way to represent it. I agree with the author that markdown, or a word processor, may be easier to learn to use. However, I disagree that LaTeX is worse at letting me focus on my content than a word processor: the same metadata is required for both, and require learning how to use them properly; the only thing that changes is the user interface.

And I would like to finish by saying that TeX is not too hard for ordinary mortals, because even though typesetting is the first priority, writing content is the second.

It seems vaguely similar to ls++.

Hy is a fun and heretical little language, betraying both Python ideals and LISP ideals. :-)

And I think its really cool how it seamlessly integrates itself into the import mechanism.

I’m curious: Why share it now? Is something bubbling within the Hy community, has it just never been posted before and now is as good a time as ever, or did you just learn about it?

Hmm… Curta calculators in decent condition are going for about $1300 on eBay.

If somebody were to start a crowd-funding campaign to make a (assemble-it-yourself kit?) replica, I’d surely back that. Until then I’ll have to be satisfied with my slide rules and abacii.

I am reminded of APL/J/K and similar languages. Being primarily array-oriented, this is a very natural way of thinking in such languages.

Similarly, I believe numpy likes operating on arrays at a time, and let’s you vectorize functions.