HN user

icedata

36 karma

Product Manager, mobile/web/embedded, lately for the entertainment business.

Posts1
Comments54
View on HN

I worked with Seymour Papert when he was chairman of Logo Computer Systems. Also the author (with Marvin Minsky) of Perceptrons, an early book on Neural Networks. Really ahead of his time.

We never even tried email marketing at my current company. At my previous one we had a lot of issues (boss didn't believe that spamassassin would block our efforts, he was wrong (we weren't initially using an email marketing platform)). Now I am using Waalaxy, which does linkedin and email prospecting (I only use Linkedin). Since I rarely accept unexpected connection requests myself, I was quite surprised at the effectiveness of Waalaxy, about 10% of connections requests accepted out of 1000 sent, several meetings booked, now doing phone followup on the remainder of connections.

At LCSI we had assemblers and debugging tools for 6502, x86 and others written in LMI Lisp, which we used to create several popular commercial versions of Logo.

Magic Leap 2 4 years ago

Having worked with Steve for a while, I can assure you that he believes he was ripped off. Only a judge can decide for sure.

We tried it the other way. I worked for a decade at Logo Computer Systems, where the principal designer of Scratch used to work. Eventually schools tired of teaching kids text-based coding.

I completely agree. I live in Canada, and run a weekly Zoom call on startups etc. We have quite a few members from India, Latin America and elsewhere and I find it useful to get their perspectives. I even have callers from China (you need to change the Zoom data center config to permit this). These are people that I met on WeChat groups (unfortunately not a realistic option outside China for most right now), and some former students. We try to stay away from politics, but interestingly there is a wide range of points of view from Chinese callers.

Bad Emacs Advice 5 years ago

I just printed out the pdf version of the book. I found a shop that would bind it for me and print it double-sided.

I also use git to make backups of my org-mode files. I made a simple script in git bash for windows to commit changes to local repo and then push to a remote repo. I did this because I discovered that dropbox was no longer versioning my org files as I expected. Not sure why but I'm way more comfortable with a local and remote git repo. I run the script several times a day. There are libraries for emacs that can automate this process but I haven't bothered.

Key point here is that the VA donated the land. In the 20's in Germany, many homes were built on land donated by various churches. Churches, groups like the VA and others own a lot of land, if they can be convinced to help out it would make a big difference.

I deployed the open-source version of Canvas for use at a summer course at a university in Beijing (it was done remotely). Just getting it installed was the hardest part. We hosted on Alibaba in Hong Kong (no web site license required there). Support for the open-source version comes via IRC and was actually quite good. Show-stopper was a rapidly growing log file (due to a persistent error I couldn't figure out). Eventually had to create a cron job to regularly truncate it. Apart from that it was pretty solid. The other tricky thing was getting outbound email to work (not very well documented). Persistence pays.

Recently, in large parts of the Greater Toronto Area, it has not been legal to rent out rooms in your house. It was and is legal in the original city of Toronto and other municipalities that were later incorporated into the megacity. There is a proposal before city council to legalize it across the city, but so far no decision has been made.

Same thing happened to me with Digi-comp II, although I was the kid and I thought that I had screwed up the assembly. The model printed on the cover had wooden bars and looked a lot more reliable, but the production model was plastic and not reliable at all.

Later Logo development took place at several firms, including LCSI in Montreal (I worked there for ten years). Later versions were cross-assembled on Lisp Machines, and later on on Apple IIGS with 4 MB of ram (custom lisp version).