dpkendal

As a learner/non-native speaker of German, please don't abolish the only way to tell the vowel length of an unfamiliar word.

Did we read the same paragraph? The problem with his first thesis was that, though he presented a brilliant and original result, he didn’t show that he’d studied enough prior research.

Nothing to do with schmoozing, everything to do with scholarly integrity.

SEEKING FREELANCER (Remote or Berlin, Germany)

Abecedary Limited

We’re looking for someone to help us integrate SAML authentication into a Python/Flask web app (as a Service Provider, wanting to authenticate against IdPs). There is already a full authentication system in-place — all that needs doing is integration with SAML-based SSO.

Knowledge of Python or Flask is not needed but extensive experience of SAML — and, ideally, the UK Access Management Federation and/or comparable schemes around the world — will be needed.

Expected completion within 1–2 weeks.

Contact <hiring@greensdictofslang.com>.

Freedom of speech is not freedom from criticism.

“Sorry, you wrote this and we don’t like it, therefore you’re not invited to this conference on an irrelevant topic” or “… therefore we’re not going to a conference to which you were invited” is not valid criticism of an idea.

SEEKING WORK

Berlin, DE.

Remote possible (preferred).

12 years experience, 5 professional, in Python and Ruby web development, with popular frameworks (Rails, Sinatra, Flask). Additional experience in PHP, JavaScript, etc. Open-source work is at https://github.com/dpk and https://gist.github.com/dpk

See http://dpk.io/contact for details of how to get in touch with me.

Perl 6 uses rationals by default. They have the advantages of being base-agnostic, able to accurately represent any recurring digit expansion accurately regardless of eventual base, and also faster (since, especially if you normalize (convert to lowest terms) lazily, most operations are just a few integer instructions with no branching, looping, or bit-twiddling involved).

The difference is in how the result is converted to a string, not in how the result is produced.

This was published so he can get community help with finishing it: http://www.crockford.com/javascript/encyclopedia/preface.htm...

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_National_Biograp...) follows a similar model to the SEP to deliver on the comprehensive/authoritative/up-to-date trifecta. Unfortunately it’s paywalled, unlike SEP, but it’s certainly the best biographical encyclopedia I know of because of this.

Unicode has things for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-width_non-joiner

And customization is done declaratively, not imperatively.

It’s not certain yet that this is an antedating. OED editor Jesse Sheidlower calls it ‘putative’: https://twitter.com/jessesheidlower/status/64305138542510899... and slang lexicographer Jonathon Green concurs but finds it probable: https://twitter.com/MisterSlang/status/643060037221515264

If it is, it’s big news. But bear in mind that ‘John le Fucker’, recorded 1278, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_le_Fucker) would be a further antedating from a personal name if it were somehow to be confirmed as a use of the word.

The Unicode case-mapping algorithm is customizable by locale (e.g. uppercase i is İ in Turkish). A application which needed long s (for German Fraktur, for instance) could use a custom locale.

My mistake, I meant O(2 ^ n) indeed. Regardless, having exponential time complexity in terms of the regular expression (which is usually controlled by the programmer) where the processing is done at compile-time is much better than having exponential complexity in terms of the input string (which often comes from an untrusted source) where the processing is done at run-time.

Not true. Finite automata (NFAs, DFAs) can match that pattern (and any pattern that doesn't involve backreferences or lookaround) in O(n) time where n is the size of the input string. DFA implementations are worst-case O(n ^ 2) in the number of states of the regular expression, but this is far better in most cases than the exponential worst-case time in terms of the input string offered by backtracking implementations.

See https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/ for information on finite-state-machine implementations of regexp matching.

Why not store the log files in an FM-index? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM-index)

Bears repeating: this does not affect stable versions of FreeBSD. FreeBSD-CURRENT is the development version.

Indeed, the W3C's work on HTML5 is irrelevant. It exists only for the purpose of giving the W3C-qua-organization the appearance of being involved in the further development of HTML.

Which is exactly what djb says about Germany. It doesn’t affect public domain status.

Provably false. http://cr.yp.to/publicdomain.html

“Multics Emacs proved to be a great success — programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his office started learning how to use it. They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off. They read the manual, discovered they could do useful things and they learned to program.” — http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html

You also assume that programmability implies complexity, which is the argument I tried to refute …

You seem to be the only person in this thread who has grasped this idea; though instinctively to me it feels another formalism like LC is the wrong way to go.

Bret Victor is working on some amazing stuff right now. I suggest his talk Drawing Dynamic Visualizations to see how he’s making programing more direct and less “code”-ish: http://vimeo.com/66085662

“If you believe that you have never tried to teach a class of non-programmers.”

No, you’re trying to teach them with the same kind of tool that I call ‘clumsy and unsophisticated’ in the article.

“Apple have made a lot of efforts to bring programming to the common user: Hypercard, Applescript, Automator. They are abandoned because no-one was interested in using them.”

In many ways HyperCard was still too difficult, but it was a great tool. Many people did use it to make simple programs, and some became programmers from it. I’m not arguing that everyone should learn to program to the level of being able to create and sell apps; HyperCard is a good example in that sense.

AppleScript is a failure because it’s a terribly difficult language even for most working programmers. Its designers completely failed in that respect.

Automator is not programming.

I am a programmer, writer and musician, but I don’t find any of them easy.

Programming is unique, though, because the tools you use to do it can also be used to make the task in general much easier.

Funny, that's exactly what people used to say when OS X came out, right after Steve Jobs came back …

It may not be wrong, but it still looks wrong, or antiquated at the very least. Reading a book that still uses extra space after a full stop feels like reading something from the time when it was fashionable to put a space before an exclamation mark or a question mark.

The period alone is enough to indicate a full stop; an extra space is redundant. Like needless words, one should seek to omit needless punctuation wherever possible.

A comparison of Linux and FreeBSD is a legitimate, interesting question, but I don't think this is the place to raise that issue.

The open-source community is strengthened by its diversity. Linux may be more popular, but that's no reason to weaken another, similar project by not supporting it financially. Personally, I use FreeBSD and I like it. I also know that Linux is available as an alternative, and I like to know that should I ever become dissatisfied, I have alternatives I can switch to. Supporting the FreeBSD Foundation is one way that you can feel safe in the knowledge that there'll always be an alternative to Linux should you become dissatisfied.

Please don't let one project be hindered by another project's success.

http://media.rubyonrails.org/video/rails_take2_with_sound.mo...

This sort of thing is not new. I think the first one was qmail: http://cr.yp.to/qmail/guarantee.html followed shortly by djbdns: http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/guarantee.html (which was awarded in 2009: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.network.djbdns/13864)

Dovecot also has a similar guarantee: http://dovecot.org/security.html

As does Mozilla: http://www.mozilla.org/security/bug-bounty.html

Even Facebook is in on the game: http://www.facebook.com/whitehat/bounty/

Bug bountying in general of course started with Donald Knuth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth_reward_check and has recently become moderately popular as a strategy for increasing open-source code quality: http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2011-09-05-lessons-learned-f...

The Underground Railroad. Prohibition. Hush-A-Phone. The Communications Decency Act. Crypto export regulations.

Breaking DRM.