chbarts

> If you think your hands are clean in any of that, then you are sorely mistaken.

Oh yes, original sin. Wonderful. That makes sense. Can I buy some plenary indulgence from you, or is it a 'salvation by grace' thing now?

> They are representative of the state of the world in that we still allow them to go on.

The world once allowed the Black Plague and religions based on human sacrifice to 'go on', as you say. Darfur and North Korea are nothing compared to those.

Are you insisting that Darfur and North Korea are representative of the world as a whole? Do you really have that little conception, child?

> I think the idea that humans are getting smarter and nobler is hogwash.

OK, find me a duel and a bear-baiting match in America and I'll believe you. Otherwise you're just mindlessly cynical, like any number of other teenagers.

> I'm not sure if Americans "expect to be bailed out all the time," but I do know that we expect as consumers not to have our rights trampled on arbitrarily.

Right. Personal responsibility means companies must be held responsible if they don't follow ethical standards, something that goes strictly beyond obeying the law. Personal responsibility is thus the foundation of a free market.

http://us.metamath.org/

Do you know about Metamath yet? It's something similar to what you want, but it's all in a single program as opposed to being web-based.

Can I be the first to say, "About time!"

> Once you realize that the caged animal has more in common with you than any other specie, you start to put yourself in his place.

The same applies to chimps, and then recursively down the chain from other apes all the way to bacteria.

I thought this would be a riff on the 'machine that goes "ping"', but no, it's completely insane.

Wheel of morality, turn turn turn, tell us the lesson that we should learn.

The 'Noble Savage' myth is the last vestige of racism still taken seriously by educated Westerners. It seems harmless enough, because the stereotype is positive, but it's still an assumption about moral character based on race.

> Without their culture, community, and absolute freedom to roam the planet and carve a corner for themselves, they would be another zoo/museum curiosity, a biological anomaly paraded before us for pennies.

By this argument, we should destroy all zoos and let the species in them die off. It's counter to all biological knowledge.

> Even if a sizable population of them were granted full human rights and a habitat, they would forever owe us their existence, and their debt to humans would hang over anything they achieve for themselves in terms of growth and survival.

So? How is that different from the debt you owe your parents?

> Our future generations will also treat them as an experiment gone awry, should they ever threaten the slightest human interest.

This happens to minority ethnic groups all the time. Look at the new Arizona immigration law.

> It's hard enough watching dying racial and linguistic minority groups; their last remaining few members made into coursework for "our" undergraduates.

So... trying to understand ourselves is morally wrong? It's horrible to preserve our dying ways as best we know how?

> Bringing back a Neanderthal is to kill him twice, after granting him a brief purposeless life for our own edutainment. Let them rest in peace.

This applies equally to the California condor and the panda. We should just let all endangered species rest in peace, I suppose.

This library thinks Franz Kafka and Charlie Chaplain were the funniest people ever, particularly as epitomized in The Trial and Modern Times, respectively.

> Nope, these are actual guidelines Microsoft uses to make hiring, promotion, and compensation decisions. city41's comment is 100% accurate about how these things are used.

So... it's edgy humor in the form of a terrifying practical joke? Maybe Andy Kaufman didn't die after all.

Dr. Dobb's is certainly closer to being dead than 8-bit microcontrollers are. It ceased publication as a standalone magazine in February 2009; it's now online and a monthly section in InformationWeek called Dr. Dobb's Report.

Jack Crenshaw's book Let's Build a Compiler http://compilers.iecc.com/crenshaw/ is probably too far to the pragmatic end; it essentially walks you through the process of writing a recursive-descent compiler in Pascal for a Pascal-like language that generates code for the m68k. No separate parser and lexer as such, but he does teach you how to turn those kinds of ideas (regexes and EBNF equations) into code more-or-less directly in your head. In short, it was just about perfect for someone who wanted to whip up a nice little compiler for a foogol on a late-1980s DOS box without paying for or finding any tools beyond Turbo Pascal.

It's entirely possible to use the techniques in the book to, say, whip up a compiler in Ruby that turns an inconvenient data format into JSON. The real utility of doing this by hand in 2010 is, however, debatable.

> Of course, Scott Adams has been at this for years and having to come up with a new joke each day for that length of time would be rather challenging.

Definitely the case. This comedy degradation happened to Garfield and Peanuts as well, and it hit Peanuts especially hard because, well, it's Schultz. He was doing genius work in the 1950s-1960s, refining a lot of the medium traits we now take for granted.

Both Garfield and Dilbert were a lot weirder in their early years, had larger casts, and more diverse settings. In one of the early Dilbert plotlines, he discovers dinosaurs hiding in his home after a computer model tells him they can't all be gone. Not exactly genius, but better than anything Adams is making now.

The decline of Peanuts was especially sad. Schultz was a trouper and did the work until he physically and mentally couldn't anymore, and the decline showed painfully. Buying the huge Fantagraphics collection might be beyond your budget, but if you get a chance to flip through it by all means do so.

The foregoing illustrates why The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes were ended early. It also illustrates just how resistant to change newspaper readers are: The reason strips are allowed to sit and fester for decades when TV shows are off the air in a few seasons is due entirely to the fact papers will lose circulation if they cut the wrong strip.

> I plan to be one of those parents that don't own a TV.

The modern equivalent is denying your kids Internet access. According to a (somewhat) recent Variety article, the median age of TV viewership is 50.

(Yes, I do trust Variety to get entertainment news right.)

A few happy prison owners, a few happy cartel kings, and a lot of happy DEA agents and police officers who will never be out of work.

> I was actually talking about the chemical mixes that are actually toxic / poison that are being brewed in trailers in the rural areas or kitchens in apartment complexes. I wasn't writing about addictiveness.

Right. Well, legalization will help that as it is, in fact, illegal for a legitimate company to sell some unknown poison when it is claiming to sell drugs of a given composition and purity. Also, meth labs as we now know them will become economically impossible if it's possible to get meth legally: They are the perfect, absolutely perfect example of the kind of high-risk/high-reward behavior that is only worthwhile if you have gigantic margins subsidized by the DEA and local police.

> Killing someone while drunk should be considered premeditated.

I agree.

> Some of the current drugs out there need to stay illegal. Not because they get you high, but because they are toxic.

OK, I'll replace 'toxic' with 'potentially more addictive and dangerous than weed, alcohol, and nicotine' (Tobacco is damned addictive but it doesn't seem to cause antisocial behaviors.), because otherwise what you said makes no damned sense.

Go back to the late 1800s: People could buy cocaine and opium over-the-counter at drugstores. Laudanum (also called tincture of opium), a common patent medicine, was made from 10% opium and 1% morphine dissolved in alcohol. This, too, was available over-the-counter. America was prosperous, growing, and certainly not universally addicted to drugs.

So, why do you think going back to that regime would be dangerous? What evidence do you have that contradicts my historical analysis?

> Drug violence is rarely about cartels vs cops -- more often it's cartels vs cartels and dealers vs dealers.

Precisely the point: If the cartels come to intimidate grandma, she calls the police, because her operation is legal and the intimidation is not. The police, because her operation is legal, then go after the cartel and shut them down.

Additionally, contract laws and theft/burglary laws and so on work in grandma's favor, because the legal system is at least potentially on the side of her legal operation. This alone greatly reduces the need for violence.

> Not your usual textbook exercise.

Textbooks do seem to exist as if the Internet weren't usable, don't they? At most they seem to have a few URLs to the publisher's and author's websites. It's actually kind of sad, as if textbook authors didn't trust themselves to outdo what people can find online. Zed does not seem to have that problem.

> Make it one huge html file

Make this one option. The other option should be one HTML file per chapter (or subchapter, or thereabouts) for the people who want to use the browser's bookmark functionality to pick up where they left off.

> no headers and footers on every page

Footnotes, OTOH, are fine if you make them links in both directions (to the note and back to the body text). Both HTML and PDF can do this, and it makes it so much less of a pain in the ass to actually read the things when you know you won't get lost.

Nedit http://www.nedit.org/ might be too much like ass for you, but it's pretty simple in the default state and isn't just a GUI wrapper around a character-terminal editor.

Take a look at the data file (/usr/share/misc/units.dat) some time. It's an interesting little declarative non-Turing-complete DSL, in addition to being a handy reference manual.

Best Practices, n.: Making the same mistakes everyone else does.

However, what are the odds of someone being able to make special-purpose machines to do everything COTS boxes are used for, and making those machines as fast, cheap, and reliable as COTS systems are now? Some things seem obvious (x-ray machines, lab machines) but accounting and record-keeping? Going back to adding machines and purely manual filing is not an option in a large hospital, especially if it has to maintain modern standards of patient care over a large patient population.

The problem with this is that it assumes it's always safe to destroy a drive, as opposed to the scenario where the mere fact you destroyed storage media is enough to implicate you.

The other problem with this is that the NSA is paranoid, and paranoia doesn't necessarily move with the times. This relates back to the first thing: If it's cheap and safe to destroy drives, and you are storing secrets, why not? That does not mean you need to destroy drives, which is what this conversation is about.

Wearing a belt and suspenders does not mean belts are prone to failure.

> What is your evidence for that claim?

Common usage, which you can see as easily as I can. For example, do news agencies typically use FBI or F.B.I.? Do they typically use UN or U.N.?

> That is, what is the evidence that current professional editors are on record as saying that the quoted advice is old-fashioned and not to be regarded?

You again misunderstand the role professional editors (and, by extension, style guides) fill. They enforce what's commonly known as a 'house style', which may be influential outside of a given 'house' (company or newsroom) but is not authoritative in any sense anywhere but that single location. Language is not defined by books: it is described by them.

> (This subthread started, after all, with an HN participant noting that editors were FOLLOWING the quoted rule.)

That comment was deleted before I got to it.

> I think without Wintel, probably we would've had more competition and innovation in the area, and cheaper/faster machines.

Maybe. Or maybe we'd just have locked on to CP/M-86 and Digital Research, which was just as tied to x86.

However, it's impossible to tell if someone like Gates would have risen to the top. Gary Kildall was not Bill Gates and, for that reason among others, Digital Research never became Microsoft. Corporate culture and philosophies matter.

> the authoritative source of rules

No, it isn't. It is influential, not authoritative.

And, in this instance, it is outdated.

> I think we'd be better served with simply issuing z-scores and normalizing grades completely, so there's some real context.

So should we punish people based on who happened to be in their class with them? That makes sense if you're picking cofounders or sports teammates or something else that probably doesn't really matter, but the entire point of school is to teach. It is not merely preparation for the job market, although some jobs still require a modicum of education. It is not a social club where you network your way into a startup. It is not a way to display your superior intelligence.

Schools are good or bad based on how well they teach material, not on how well they thin the herd or propel their students towards some illusory goal.