HN user
So awesome. I've been watching the Data Haskell initiatives with a lot of interest, ever since it started. Haskell is such a great language that it deserves to have a good data science ecosystem.
If you want to make a keyboard more efficient, QWERTY is a very poor choice. QWERTY was designed in the nineteenth century, for mechanical typewriters. It was designed to be inefficient, so that the typewriters wouldn't jam up. As a result, we have such features like: placing the E key such that you have to move your left hand to reach it. E is the most frequent letter of the alphabet for the English language, and putting it anywhere but the home row is nonsensical. What is on the home row instead? A semicolon.
What you've done here, amazingly, is made QWERTY twice as inefficient, by requiring two touches to register certain keys.
To summarize:
- QWERTY: Bad
- QWERTY Mini: Worse
- QWERTY Mini Pro: Still worse, but now costs you money
As with the "Zen of Python" or countless other "Zen of X" treatises, the connection to Zen or to Buddhism is tenuous if it exists at all. As far as I can tell, this author believes "Zen" to mean a collection of short, syllogistic aphorisms. Tim Peters is not a "zen master," like this author says, and has even said about the "Zen of Python": "If I were to change anything, I'd drop the reference to 'Zen.' That wasn't part of the original, and was added by someone else."
Using the word Zen to mean something else—simplicity, calm, a collection of aphorisms, or whatever—only seems reasonable if you've never studied Zen and have no more than a surface-level understanding of what it's about. Could you imagine any other religion being used to describe some aspect of programming? "The Islam of Python." "The Baptist Christianity of AI." These sound ridiculous. It only seems like a reasonable thing to do with Zen because Zen is being caricatured here.
I'm upset that there are 700+ courses across 70+ languages, but none is my language, Esperanto, the most successful international auxiliary language of all time, with an estimated 2M-5M speakers worldwide. I'm unable to select Esperanto as the language I want to learn, nor as the language I already speak. This is the kind of thing Esperantists have come to expect of language learning resources which support a low number of languages, but when there's an app which supports 70+ languages, and Esperanto isn't one of them, it feels like a deliberate omission.
There are tons of great reasons to learn Esperanto, but one is its propaedeutic value: learning Esperanto for a year, and then French for a year, leaves you knowing more French than if you had studied only French for two years. Some cite the ease of learning it (I learned it to a conversational level in about two weeks), and some the intuitive grammar (only 16 grammar rules, no exceptions). Whatever the case, the value of learning Esperanto is huge, even if you have no plans to become active in the Esperanto-speaking community.
It's great that Lairner allows one to learn endangered languages and minority languages—I'm learning Irish, for instance, which only has ~200K native speakers, most of whom are in Ireland. Learning Irish (and other Celtic languages) is immensely mind-expanding, and it unlocks a rich literature and culture. But the original literature and culture of Esperanto is even more vast, rich, and international, and is not restricted to any geographic area.
Another issue I want to bring up is the unnecessary conflation of language with geographic region. In Lairner, languages are given flags of nations, as if there's a 1:1 map of language to country. That is a really bad assumption. Languages go beyond the borders of nations. Just think of Basque, for example. Or Esperanto. (And Esperanto has a flag!)
A Turkish speaker can't learn Basque, by the way, using Lairner. Basque is not a language which is supported at all, as far as I can tell, and Turkish doesn't seem to come up as a possible L1 language for most languages. The site says "700+ courses. Every combination." But there is not every combination. To learn Irish, for instance, you have to already know English or German. There's no Chinese -> Irish, or Japanese -> Irish.
If it were me, I'd feature Esperanto as the language everyone should learn first. Then I'd ensure that, using Esperanto, you can learn any other language. That way you wouldn't have to write lessons for every language pair, only X -> Esperanto and Esperanto -> X.
It's incredible what knowledge we'd have, if it weren't for Christianity and the Dark Ages it engendered. There are tons of palimpsests like this, like the Archimedes Palimpsest, in which the beginnings of calculus was invented, almost two millenia before Newton, but were scraped off to make yet another Bible. Imagine what the West could have accomplished if monks weren't so busy erasing science and math.
Without deep OS support for this kind of thing, I can't imagine it will feel anything like a native experience. There are already much better touch screen experiences with years of development behind them, in the Linux, Windows, Android, and iOS platforms. There's no need to have a janky hacked together version for macOS to try to make it to the same thing.
It strikes me as a little unimaginative to want to improve on smartphone software keyboards but (1) stick with QWERTY, a layout designed to be inefficient, and (2) require multiple taps to enter some letters. It seems like you've invented a way to make smartphone typing even more of a pain than it already is.
I've used dozens of notetaking tools over the years. Some cloud-based, some markdown-based, some flashy apps, some plain-text, some open-source, and some closed-source. My takeaway from years of jumping between them is this: don't use closed-source notetaking software. Just don't do it. Even if your data is in markdown files, on your own computer, you're still probably stuck with proprietary markdown extensions, and at the very least, you're stuck with muscle memory for the app's UI that you'd have to translate to some new system eventually. Startup companies come and go, on a monthly basis. Developers move on to shiny new projects. You can't take that risk, or any other security risks, with your personal notes.
... many current and former professional educators have taken it upon themselves to do their own research. Some then wrote books collecting their findings. These books tend to be insta-dismissed as the ravings of crackpot loonies given their alarmist titles and appearances. But they are typically very well written, well researched, and full of primary sources for their claims. So many sources, in fact, that they make for good jumping-off points for more in-depth research.
This sounds like the frustrated research log of someone lacking research skills. An undergrad-level annotated bibliography from someone interested enough to gather sources, but undiscerning enough to tell the good ones from the bad.
Falk and Wade suggest the scribe incorrectly transcribed two key words
A typo is a typographic error. This is a scribe incorrectly transcribing from one manuscript to another.
Those of us that use Nix don't have the problems you complain about. Just write (or vibe-code) a flake.nix for each project, and you can have arbitrary versions of whatever language (Node, PHP, whatever), arbitrary environment variables, port setups, and whatever else. Add in Direnv and you don't have to do anything but `cd` into your project directory. Then simply add an extra output to create a Docker image for your project.
The idea of paying double digits annually for a service that's basically a weaker version of Nix, and which lacks Linux support, is absurd.
It might not be a new area of inquiry, but the insight seems reasonably novel. If you read the article, it's about how Symbolic Show of Strength (SSS) beliefs are predictors for belief in misinformation. That speaks to something more granular about the psychological mechanisms behind the spread of misinformation. "Repeating known falsehoods is about declaring tribal allegiance" instead speaks to the existence of the phenomenon, more generally.
That's not a flying car, it's just a small airplane. For it to be a car it would need to be able to drive on roads. With, you know, wheels and stuff.
While folks were building improved ls, cat, and so on, and jq for manipulating JSON data, Nushell has been happily doing all this in a consistent way and making it easier, to boot. I'm surprised to see Nushell missing from this list.
Nushell.
I saw that this was on GitHub and I totally thought this was going to lead to a repo of some sort which solves this problem. But no. It was just complaining.
I keep punctuating like it's the 20th Century.
I keep punctuating like it's the 18th Century, myself;—compound points are my favorites:—like the colon-dash compound, AKA the "dog's bollocks."
it's absolutely undeniably that the Buddhist cannon is full of batshit insane stuff, just like any other religion
Buddhism is not like Christianity, where the source of truth is a book or a canon, and that the book must be believed in order to subscribe to the belief system. Speaking of Zen, at least, it's one of the foundational tenets that it's "a separate transmission, outside the scriptures." In fact, there's a lot written about how Zen isn't a religion at all, at least not in the Western sense, with beliefs, faith, and doctrines. You don't need to believe anything to be a Zen Buddhist. So even if the "Buddhist cannon" has "batshit insane stuff," who cares? Shakyamuni was a great teacher, but that doesn't mean that he can't be wrong.
I think it's more honest to say that you practice meditation with Buddhist characteristics than to say that you're a real Buddhist if you don't have the time of day for spirits and deities
You might be under the impression that Buddhism is somehow theistic or dualistic. But the Buddha, for one, outright rejects mind/body dualism, which therefore rejects the possibility of spirits and deities. Some traditions, like Tibetan Buddhism, have tantric practices like deity yoga, which involve visualizing deity-like figures, but even then, there's no presumption that these deities actually exist, in some kind of spirit realm. But even if there were Buddhists who believe in "spirits and dieties," again, who cares? It's not like you have to believe anything to study and practice Buddhism.
My main point is that, if you're writing about meditation, or meditative practices, that either originated with Buddhism or were developed through Buddhism, it's fairly disingenuous to completely divorce it from its context.
So let me get this straight: HTML was originally built to have markup and style both in the same containers, and it was clunky and hard to maintain, so CSS was invented, to abstract away the styles so that content and style could be separate. And that worked pretty well. And then someone came along and said: you know what would be great? Removing all the useful abstractions and going back to the HTML 1.0 way of putting it all in one container. And rewriting HTML in JavaScript to make it less maintainable. And so on. Am I getting this right? Correct me if I'm wrong.
Even more ironic that the text of the Project Gutenberg license—for a public domain work!—is several times as long as Wordsworth's text.
It's not great design. It's a dirty hack that might work for some people, but is a non-standard practice that abuses JavaScript to achieve a certain effect. Overriding scrolling behavior might work if you're scrolling with a mouse or trackpad at a consistent speed, that that might even work for a majority of the site's visitors, but for others it breaks. If you press the PageDown key to get to the next page, it doesn't work. If you scroll half a page down using another key combination, it doesn't work. If you use a text-based browser, it doesn't work. I didn't test it using a screen reader or other types of browsers, but I can't imagine it would work that well there, either.
This blog post, and the one it references, on the jhanas[1], belong to this weird genre which is basically in the vein of Buddhist writing, but without more than a passing reference to Buddhism, its scholarly tradition, its terminology, or its taxonomy. Here's Nadia:
The word jhana comes from Buddhist scriptures, where they were first described. However, as many meditators like to point out, jhanas predate Buddhism. ... I am not a Buddhist, nor would I describe myself as a meditator.
She seems to be taking pains to extract Buddhist techniques from Buddhism, and discuss them independently. Even if these practices predate Buddhism, Buddhism is the system of thought that contextualizes them, and has been developed and enriched over thousands of years, to provide a systematic framework for understanding them. This is especially true of Zen Buddhism—the word "Zen" is even derived from "jhana."
It'd be like if you tried to describe the properties of sulfur dioxide or something, without acknowledging that an entire academic discipline—chemistry—has been doing that for centuries. You don't have to "be a Buddhist" to study Buddhism, any more than you have to be a chemist to study chemistry.
That's a really weird headline. Looking for new software? Buy new hardware!
Meanwhile, you can install Linux on your existing laptop for free.
As a student of Zen Buddhism, I'm always a little bothered to see yet another thing called "Zen" that has virtually nothing to do with Zen, or Buddhism. The authors seem to think that "Zen" is a synonym for "calm," even though calm abiding is only one small aspect of Zen. If you read any of the classic Zen literature, like the Gateless Gate or the Blue Cliff Record, you'd come away with the impression that Zen is very active, vital, and vigorous.
But with a name like Zen, I at least expected the browser to be one of those tabless ones that encourage you to focus your attention on the present task, by enforcing one web page at a time. Or a text-based one, like w3m, that removes graphics to allow you to focus on the words. While the Zen browser interface is a little cleaner, with fewer buttons and things, that doesn't necessarily translate to "calmer." Calm is what you bring to the browsing experience, not what you take away from it.
Most versions of Zen are made-up export products designed to flatter Westerners. Kind of like the samurai movie honor bushido stuff.
I don't think so. If you go to a zenkai or a sesshin held by a western zendo, and then go to one at a Japanese temple, you won't notice too many differences, apart from the language. Many American zen teachers trained in Japan at some point, or their teachers did, and they brought these practices back more or less verbatim. In fact, in many American zendos, students chant the same sutras, _in Japanese_, as in Japanese zendos. Plus, there are regulatory bodies, like the Soto Zen school, that certify affiliated western zendos as authoritative. It's not made-up, it's hardly an "export product," and it certainly isn't designed to flatter anyone.
That seems like a rambling, self-published book by a Vajrayana practitioner with an axe to grind against Zen, for some bizarre reason. But there are plenty of real books about the rise of American Zen, or Buddhism in the west, that are well-researched. _Zen in America_ by Helen Tworkov is one.
Japanese people think Buddhism is a thing you do at funerals.
Not at all. Buddhism, and Zen especially, permeate Japanese culture very deeply. Japanese aesthetics, architecture, landscape design, visual art, calligraphy, the tea ceremony, and the martial arts, have all been strongly influenced by Zen. And it's all over pop culture, too—just think of how pervasive Daruma dolls are—that's Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen. Sure, Buddhism is at funerals, but it's everywhere, else, too.
If you get into it more seriously, I vaguely understand it's mostly a religion that tells you not to have sex.
Maybe you're thinking of Christianity? Unless you're a monk, attitudes towards sex are fairly liberal in Buddhism. There are bodhisattva precepts that caution against misusing sex, but nowhere does anyone tell you not to have it. In fact, it's largely unconcerned with it, let alone "mostly a religion that tells you not to have" it. Western religions are very concerned with telling you what to do and not do, but Buddhism is concerned with liberation.
Have they invented anything at all? You've already been able to do this with basically any mobile linux distro, as far as I can tell. At least, on the best-supported devices. You don't need a custom OS for it.
What's absurdly ironic about these smartphone addiction apps is that * they're smartphone apps*. They require you to use your smartphone in order to use them. Far more effective, I imagine, would be anything else at all: ditching your smartphone, replacing it with a dumbphone, doing an unplugging retreat, doing a "dopamine fast," or simply taking up a new hobby that's more healthy, like writing or reading on paper.
the existence proof of this is the sheer number of other desktops that imitate the design
That's where you're wrong. The desktop environments that imitate Win95 elements do it to provide something familiar for their users. The KDE team is not sitting around going, "you know what was designed really well? The Start Menu!" In fact, many of the desktop environments you mention (GNOME Flashback, Cinnamon) were a conservative reaction to the new GNOME 3 design which broke from the Windows aesthetic. The Wikipedia page for Cinnamon, for instance, says it aims to "follow traditional desktop metaphor conventions" and aims for a "gentle learning curve." They're explicitly choosing familiarity over innovation.
The Start menu was a _superb_ piece of design
Not really. It achieves a reasonably clean look, but at the expense of excessively hierarchicalizing programs and documents. GNOME's Activities panel allows you to click "Activities" then click the program you want to run. Even better, you can just tap the Super key, type a letter or two of the program, and press enter. On Windows 95, I remember trying to launch a calculator, and clicking Start, then clicking Programs, then clicking Utilities, then clicking Calculator. In 1995, lots of people were complaining about the Start Menu, how clunky it was and how it slowed down common tasks. GNOME 3's approach is better, as is MacOS's Launchpad, as well as lots of other desktop launchers.
billions of people use desktop interfaces modelled upon it, representing the combined work of thousands of developers, reimplementing it in dozens of languages.
The idea that pervasive ideas are somehow good, just because they're popular, is a well-known logical fallacy called Argumentum ad Populum. The Start Menu was never good. It was just popular. One does not follow from the other.
I know there's a place for distros like these, designed to be familiar to users of Windows or MacOS, but to me it shows Linux at its laziest: where exciting new ideas in system and UI design are skipped over, in favor of bad design ideas from 1995 (looking at you, Start menu). On MacOS and Windows you're stuck with whatever OS UI those respective corporations decide you get—the Apple menu, the Start menu, floating window management, and so on—and there's nothing inherently good about those paradigms; they mostly just exist for legacy reasons. On Linux, you have the freedom to customize everything, and to so it just seems sad that so much good development effort is going into building systems that value familiarity over innovation.
Put differently, I find it sad when user-friendliness is valued over user-centrism. Linux is full of software that is user-centric more than user-friendly: look at Vim, for instance, which is famously difficult to quit, yet is designed to be ergonomic and efficient in a way which puts the user first. The Vim philosophy (modal editing, ergonomic arrow keys, etc.) has even been extended to web browsers (Qutebrowser, for instance), and to window managers (i3, sway, etc.). These types of programs, in my opinion, are where Linux really shines.
Most people commenting here, however, describe this familiar/innovative or friendly/centric dichotomy in terms of user archetypes: "techie" and "normal" people. That feels unnecessarily essentialist, implying that "normal" people aren't curious enough to learn something unfamiliar, like a new style of user interface. But if we always assumed that, we'd never have had any innovative interfaces at all: mouse-driven desktop interfaces, smartphone touch screens, or any of it.
Of course, Linux distros are diverse enough to have something for everyone. I just think that conventional, familiar ones like this represent a missed opportunity.
walk up to any computer
Windows users seem to think their OS is ubiquitous. But in fact for most hackers reading this site, using Windows is a huge step backwards in productivity and capability.