HN user
Guess there's no accounting for taste,
That's exactly it. Taste, you either have it or you don't.
NeXTSTEP was good enough to pass the Steve Jobs taste test. Outside of Apple products, I double anything you consider "aesthetically pleasing" could say the same.
> IMO, this is an indictment of the structure, more so than the individual.
1000% agree.
So you agree that it's the structure of the organization that's at fault, not Andrew Yang?
Andrew eventually stole the pac's name and branding - Humanity Forward - put everyone out of a job
"Not left, not right, forward" had been Andrew's slogan throughout his presidential campaign. The PAC may have come up with it (I have no knowledge either way), but it is as much Andrew's branding as it is the PAC's.
As to putting everyone out of a job, I had no idea that Andrew, or any candidate, could guarantee someone a lifetime job once they joined his PAC.
Andrew's presidential bid ultimately failed. There's bound to be disappointments all around. But your allegations ring hollow base on this comment alone.
He clearly doesn’t have a record of success as an executive, either in private or public sectors.
You could say the same thing about Obama in 2008.
He seems like a nice guy. If he wants to get into politics, why not start as a city councilor or something?
Nice job damning with faint praise there, well done!
Guess what, he's already in politics. He ran a wildly influential campaign for the Democratic presidential candidacy, and was a top contender in the NYC mayoral race. How many people "wanting to get into" politics could claim to have done that?
I can't think of much I would trade from now for something in the Jobs era. I can do without
the rich Corinthian leather
Taste, you either have it or you don't. Steve certainly did.
the PowerPC,
The Mac switched to Intel in the Jobs era.
and the colored plastic
Again, all Mac laptops and desktops switched to Aluminum in the Jobs era.
It seems to me you're going out of your way to not give credit whom (Steve Jobs) it's due, why is that?
Maybe XML could be the right tool for some jobs, it's just that the entire industry have searched for these jobs for the past two decades, and very few have turned up.
In other words, it's a solution looking for a problem, and it's still looking.
GUI construction? XML is the wrong tool here again, but not for lack of trying. Tech powerhouses Google and Microsoft got caught up in the hype as well. The results, the Android API and XAML, speak for themselves, negatively.
XML is like democracy
No it's not. Please don't bring politics into technical discussions, it clouds your judgement.
android.R.layout.simple_list_item_1
The Android API is primarily geared towards constructing GUIs declaratively in XML, and as with anything infected with the XML plague, it's a huge bloated mess half of which is braindead useless.
I honestly can't blame anyone for screaming in horror and running away to ReactJS, or just anything else.
Tabs that look like real-world tabs aren’t just a decorative style. They’re a visual metaphor. My brain likes visual metaphors. It craves them.
As the preeminent Apple commentator at the time, Gruber said nothing when iOS 7 dumped rich visual metaphors for a barren flatness.
So waxing poetic now about one minor change in one app is just comical.
Realistically, this specific change, from tabs to buttons, is not that big of a deal.
He's simply delusional if he thinks the tabs before Safari 15 looked like tabs, or that the active tab was unambiguous.
Apple is just polishing a turd, how much damage could it have done?
Just as I suspected, you did know the history, you were just feigning ignorance.
So I suspect you do know the relevant internation laws as well. But allow me to quote myself:
The UK recognizes the PRC as the successor regime of China, and thus the rightful owner of all that's due of the UK to China under the various treaties between them.
You are free to live in your make-believe world in which Kowloon and HK island were never part of China. The rest of us? We live in the real world.
Have you been to, read about, or seen any news about China in the last, oh I don't know, 50 years?
Or did you make up your mind about China during the height of the Cold War era and you're never going to change it no matter what?
It is called handover in English, but somehow in Chinese it is return to china or hand back to china.
The UK recognizes the PRC as the successor regime of China, and thus the rightful owner of all that's due of the UK to China under the various treaties between them.
Somehow? That's how.
Only New Territories belongs to the them, not Kowloon or HK Island
Kowloon and HK Island had always been Chinese territory. The British defeated China in a series of wars, mostly for the right to sell opium in China, and took them as spoils.
When China became strong enough to defeat the British, they wanted them back, and there's nothing the British could do except handing them back.
Funny how that worked out, wasn't it?
My advice? Read up a little on history.
I think you're being downvoted because the title of the post is The "Granny Knot", and your wording sounds like you're saying Ian claims he invented the "Granny Knot".
But obviously you're talking about the "Ian knot". My wife taught me this knot about 20 years ago. She grew up in China and had been tying her shoelaces this way since primary school.
Ian claims to have invented the knot in 1982. Now it's conceivable that the "Ian knot" took the world by storm and spreaded to China quickly, but seeing it's the pre-Internet era, I highly doubt it. I myself had never heard of it until I saw her do it.
So it's likely Ian independently discovered the knot, more so than him being the first person to ever come up with it.
Did you come up with this knot yourself 45 years ago, or did you learn it from someone else?
BTW I upvoted you.
I do the same, don't even need a shoe horn, and my heel tabs hold up just fine.
Seriously, who has time to tie their shoelaces everytime they put on their shoes?
I can't stand it either. But I think I'm beginning to understand it.
It seems that's the way it works for competition in the consumer market. Consumers respond to the coolness factor in a major way. Microsoft probably felt that they had to try to keep up.
As near perfect as Windows 2000 was, compared to Aqua it was also perfectly ...boring.
Come to think of it, XP wasn't even a bad start given the less than two years it had in development. The real tragedy is that Microsoft couldn't do any better for the next two decades. Windows 7 was worse, 8 even worse, 10? hopeless.
Maybe it's time Microsoft throw in the towel, admit that they have no taste[0], and go back to the Windows 2000 look. They lucked into it somehow, and it still holds up better than anything else they have tried.
One can always hope.
[0] https://www.cnet.com/news/steve-jobs-our-favourite-quotes/
If Microsoft had "stopped" at Windows 2000 (like it has ostensibly "stopped" at Windows 10), and had focused on refining that piece of near-perfection
I for one, wished for the same thing.
Alas, once Apple came out with its shiny Aqua UI (which I must say was beautify in a totally different way), Microsoft was too insecure not to try and match that. They failed miserably in Windows XP, which felt rushed, forced, and contrived. But it certainly looked more colorful.
Even if it looks 'ugly' by today's standard
No it does NOT. It's beautify because it's simple, yet consistent and clear.
Today's "standard"? That's the ugly one.
It's not just the FOSS community, look at how non technical people react every time gmail, outlook or excel makes a tiny change to the UI (not to mention big ones).
Nice try Google/Microsoft developer! I'm pretty technical, your sh*t change is still sh*t.
I remember a time when updates from gmail, outlook, or excel improved upon the previous version, sadly that was about 15/20 years ago for Google/Microsoft, respectively.
I checked it, and the case you linked, out.
So there is a similar law in the US, even though it's not named "National Security Law". And you can be prosecuted under that law.
How different is it really, from the situation in HK and the national security law?
"do" is a terrible keyword.
Not at all. "do" helps a lot to make the code read like English and thus more understandable.
"Do your homework" doesn't imply a loop either.
But "for these subjects, do your home work" does.
Nor does "This could take a while"
I never claimed that "while" alone is any better.
It should not be a shock that the english language doesn't naturally have a single word that can express both a condition/duration as well as a command without any other helper words.
I never asked for a magic word. To the contrary, I was lamenting the lost of the helper word "do", making the "for" alone nonsensical.
Do is superfluous. Everything in an imperative program is a request to do something.
I disagree. I think "for...do" makes things much clearer than "for" alone.
There you need the word "each" to convey that it's a loop.
I'd certainly agree that "for each" is much better than "for" alone.
There you need the word "every" to convey that it's a loop.
I'd certainly agree that "for each" is much better than "for" alone.
It's only natural if you already know that a for-statement is a loop.
"while" is no better without the "do".
"Clean this item and put it away. Then do that for every other piece of cooking equipment."
Without the "do" it's nonsensical. And that was exactly my point.
It's kind of sad that "for" is the keyword programming languages settled on for the loop construct.
Ever since its counterpart "do" was dropped from the for-statement, it's just been utterly nonsensical. I mean how on earth does the word "for" convey a loop?
With the recently designed languages like Go and Swift taking so many cues from the Pascal side of the ALGOL language family, how nobody thought to pick up "repeat" or "loop" is simply beyond me.
I'm glad you are so sure.
Maybe the new national security law of HK is less than the Platonic ideal of a perfect law. Is it also fair to say that you think the National Security Law of the US is bad too? Since chloerei stated that it "is broader and stricter than China" and you didn't refute it. Can you elaborate on that? Since it's your own country and you should be much better informed to comment on that than on the HK law.
Thank you for your reply.
That's an impressive list of credentials. But it confirmed my suspicion: you don't speak Cantonese, Taiwanese, or Mandarin.
> You probably don't speak any Romance language outside of English, do you?
(1) English isn't a Romance language. It is a Germanic language. Romance languages are direct descendants of Latin.
(2) I actually do speak Spanish, and I studied Latin for 11 years.
I stand corrected.
> you would know there's massive overlap between them, phonetically
Languages sounding the same in no way makes them the same language or closer together linguistically. A great example is the vowels in Spanish and Japanese are identical to one another, purely by coincidence.
No. I meant that the same word (or more precisely, character) in Cantonese, Taiwanese, or Mandarin often sound the same or similar, not often enough that they are mutually intelligible, but often enough. Again, you'd have to speak at least two of these to know that.
(1) Literally the definition dialects vs separate languages is mostly derived from mutual intelligibility.
Let me guess, some euro-centric linguists came up with that definition. It's probably a fine definition in the study of European languages, but it's by no means the only definition.
I will concede, however, that judging by this definition, these Chinese dialects may be more distant from one another phonetically than the Romance languages.
What you are forgetting (and what those euro-centric linguists failed to account for) though, is the shared written form of the Chinese language. Even when a word sounded wildly different in Cantonese, Taiwanese, or Mandarin, they all know it's the same word.
why it pretends minorities don't exist in China
That's a straight up lie. China has long celebrated diversity and the 55 or so ethnic minorities. These minorities even get special privileges, e.g. not being subject to the one-child policy imposed for decades on the majority Han ethnicity, preferential placement in schools, etc.
Indeed, promoting Mandarin Chinese among Hong Kong students has been a political task for the Hong Kong government since 1997... The Hong Kong government launched a scheme 10 years ago to incentivize schools to use Mandarin instead of Cantonese in Chinese language classes.
Promoting and incentivizing? What unspeakable evil? Honestly how is this worse than Quebecois or Puerto Ricans having to learn English?
the PRC wants to pretend that there is one China and homogenize the people of China into a single entity.
China is what it is today because of the shared language, culture, values, heritage, and history. It behooves you to understand that, instead of simply being outraged because China claims your wife's homeland as part of its territory.
Instead of an ad hominem,
That touched a nerve, didn't it?
Let me guess, you don't speak any of these Chinese dialects: Cantonese, Taiwanese, or Mandarin. Because if you did, you would know there's massive overlap between them, phonetically. Are they mostly "mutually unintelligible"? For sure. But to claim that they are more distant from one another than the Romance languages? Complete and utter bullshit.
You probably don't speak any Romance language outside of English, do you?
I agree that always sending content-length would be ideal, if it didn't come with the extra work and costs on the server that you mentioned.
Chunked encoding is simple enough to implement, avoids all those issues, and would allow a Gemini server to serve more requests faster given the same resources, or to run on hardware with more limited resources such as embedded. So I think it's well worth the slight cost in simplicity.
I share your concern.
Since the response body is not encoded, there's no safe end-of-response marker byte(s) to use.
So content-length seems like the way to go. But knowing content-length ahead of time is difficult for dynamically generated content (CGI is supported after all), so they also need something similar to HTTP chunked encoding, which does complicate things a little.
I understand that keeping the Gemini client simple to implement is one of their design goals, but I don't think the same is true for the Gemini server. So I hope that they would consider adding these to the protocol. They could probably stuff the content-length or the word "chunked" in the <META> string.