lispython

A veritable hero of our times boasts a mere 688 followers on his Twitter account: https://twitter.com/RobertMMetcalfe (as of the dispatch of this message).

You should use "favorite" (a new feature) instead of upvote.

Nice metaphor.

Hi Alan, I'm an editor at Programmer Magazine in China[1], could you allow me to translate your answers into Chinese, and share with readers in China?

[1] http://programmer.com.cn/

Recalling those past days, is there any idea that not yet really played an important role, but to be forgotten?

Especially we are losing the initial generation of programmers.

Hi Alan,

Have you ever made serious mistake? That if given an opportunity, you would start over with a different approach.

Hi Alan,

Comparing how you think about doing research now with how you thought when you were starting out, what is the biggest change in your thinking?

Both of them remind me Plan 9's "single most important feature"[1]:

all mounted file servers export the same file-system-like interface, regardless of the implementation behind them. Some might correspond to local file systems, some to remote file systems accessed over a network, some to instances of system servers running in user space (like the window system or an alternate network stack), and some to kernel interfaces. To users and client programs, all these cases look alike.

And Rob Pike once said[2]:

When I was on Plan 9, everything was connected and uniform. Now everything isn't connected, just connected to the cloud, which isn't the same thing. And uniform? Far from it, except in mediocrity. This is 2012 and we're still stitching together little microcomputers with HTTPS and ssh and calling it revolutionary. I sorely miss the unified system view of the world we had at Bell Labs, and the way things are going that seems unlikely to come back any time soon.

[1] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/plan9.html

[2] https://usesthis.com/interviews/rob.pike/

Last year, I had a talk with Stephen Wolfram, he said that, for him, the most important secret helping him solve problems is "some version of confidence or arrogant". That make him never fear any difficulty, but this arrogant inevitably behave in some other aspects of his life, and affect people's impression of him.

Then, his writing style never bother me again.

This remind me Plan 9's "single most important feature"[1]:

all mounted file servers export the same file-system-like interface, regardless of the implementation behind them. Some might correspond to local file systems, some to remote file systems accessed over a network, some to instances of system servers running in user space (like the window system or an alternate network stack), and some to kernel interfaces. To users and client programs, all these cases look alike.

[1] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/plan9.html

About two years ago, I had a chance to ask Eben Upton if there would be a new platform like Arduino and Raspberry PI, what characteristics the new platform should have? And he said:

There's scope for something very powerful (almost PC-like) in the $70 price range. If I was starting a new venture today, this is where I'd aim.

There is very powerful project like Bunnie Huang's Novena [1], but just the board will cost $550.

[1] https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/novena

Language is still a barrier for developers in China to understand and discuss the technical world, so we developed this application. The daily page view of this website is about 25k, and we add a few features we think important but HN is missing:

- Markdown support, even pictures could be added in comment

- Sub-forums, so one could follow (or ignore) particular topics

- Read comments without living the homepage

- Optimization for mobile device

- Social features, e.g. AT or FOLLOW particular ID

- New submissions will randomly appear in homepage, so we don't need to count on up-votes immediately after submit

compatible to CJK characters

Could someone explain what does this mean?

The only future for journalism might be reader revenue. Without it, everyone in this field were in danger of becoming a public relations or advertising company disguised as journalism.

I'm an editor at Programmer Magazine in China (http://special.csdn.net/programmercovers/), as a coincidence, after 14 years operation, we just release the last print issue last week and withdrawal towards the electronic version only. I think we share the similar experience and feeling about how the tech medias evolved recently.

But media is still a very active field, if you have read the New York Times innovation report that leaked earlier this year, you may get a mixed feeling that with the risks, there are still opportunities to build an independent site with in-depth articles, code, algorithms, and reliable product reviews, which quality media should have.

But unfortunately, most decisions were not made by the ones who love this career, have ability and skill to lead the change, and do not fear to face the risks.

Tufte talk about his advice and examples of Book Design here:

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...

The biggest problem might be compatibility, old computers (common in China) only contain fonts that have low quality Roman parts like SimSun (http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%AD%E6%98%93%E5%AE%8B%E4%...) but this font is default Chinese typeface in Windows.

The newly designed fonts in recent years for Chinese have much better Roman parts which are already distributed by operating system or could obtained for free:

- Microsoft YaHei in Windows http://www.fonts.com/font/microsoft-corporation#product_top

- Hiragino Sans GB in Mac (http://blog.jjgod.org/2009/06/04/updates-on-font-changes-in-...)

- Source Han Sans free from Adobe (http://blog.typekit.com/2014/07/15/introducing-source-han-sa...)

Many Chinese websites have already using one of them as their default font. There are also a dozen of commercial Chinese fonts which contain higher quality Roman typeface (although could not catch up most classic ones).

And for professionals (like book publishers or designers) in China, they often combine one Chinese font and one Roman font in their product for better result. (e.g. FZNew ShuSong + Sabon for Serif).

Previous discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4016421

And for who may interested in the idea behind chording keyboard, Bill Buxton wrote an informative chapter in his book http://billbuxton.com/input06.ChordKeyboards.pdf

Butterick’s Practical Typography might be a good starting point http://practicaltypography.com/opentype-features.html

Here is John Carmack's response from twitter:

For the record, I am coding right now, just like I was last week.I expect the FB deal will avoid several embarrassing scaling crisis for VR.

I can't follow the volume of tweets today, so if you want a real answer to something, try in a couple days after things die down.

I have a deep respect for the technical scale that FB operates at. The cyberspace we want for VR will be at this scale.

I suppose I will get a FB account now, so that may lead to some writing a little longer than tweet length...

Some of Raskin's idea is really like what Emacs does. Ian Bicking once wrote an article THE vs. Emacs. http://blog.ianbicking.org/the-vs-emacs.html

Your saying is unfair.

They already did the teardown work well from their article, why criticize them like you care about the appearance but not the idea.

There's a more than 100 pages's thread talk about GUP failure after two years use in Apple Support website. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4766577

This country is tightly controlled by the government.

The Internet is an example. The GFW (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Shield_Project) surveillance all connections in China like NSA but since 10 years ago and people are used to it.

Even large payment companies in China (like Alipay) could do litter about economic innovation, they have to obey the rules set by the government and bank.

Any big company in China could challenge these rules by using a method which independent of any central authority in the future? I don't think so.

Jiasule is just a little company (service) Baidu acquired August. This decision is probably made by this independent company, not by the main company Baidu. And other services Baidu provide doesn't accept Bitcoin.

I couldn't imagine any big company in China will officially accept Bitcoin in the future at all.

It is said that:

    A copy of the GNUstep Live CD with GNUstep and all applications pre-installed on an instance of the latest version of Debian Linux.

    Estimated delivery: Feb 2014

Maybe it's really a good news for Oculus, but if anyone here feel a litter melancholy?

Armadillo Aerospace run out of money and hibernate (2013), id Software had been acquired by ZeniMax Media (2009), id software President Todd Hollenshead has quit after 17 years of service (2013) and there's a long time without really big new Game.

Now John Carmack some kind of working for another company…

Chording keyboard may get popular in the future.

Wearable Computing researchers usually use a chording keyboard for typing. You could see how this work with Emacs in real life by Thad Starner (a technical lead on Google's Project Glass) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_V2i_7oX8mw

You could also watch Carmack's keynote from YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNWAcEu1jpU

Beautiful story, but when think about the details it may misleading.

If the only object or the judgment criteria of the quantity way is quantity, and without any deliberate practice (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Practice_(learning_method)#Deli...) why the students finally not just only develop a way to produce high quantity product?

It's not the same way MacCready solve Henry Kremer's problem (http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/the-wrong-problem/), although looks similar.

Neal Stephenson is in the original list, but he is switched to Scrivener now. http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidewalt/2011/09/19/neal-steph...