nescioquid

As a lay-person who likes to read about bugs, I've come to expect the qualifier "true" to connote something special about bug's "mouth parts".

>I'm not a headphone person but always have music playing in the background on speakers — often at a fairly low volume so it is easily ignored...<<

Given the number of self-exonerating qualifications in that statement, I think that deep down you know that people who play their music aloud in the office should be shot.

Note how one opinion provides the warrant for the other.

To add to your comments on travel, reading position, lighting, some books are just too large or heavy to lug around or even hold for long periods. There are a number of door-stopper books that I otherwise just wouldn't have read because of this.

If the medium makes the difference between me reading a text rather than not reading that text, I tend to think that makes it functionally "better".

There is a story about an inventor who approached Trajan[0] with plans for new construction machinery that would require far fewer laborers. Trajan's response was incredulous: if he used the new construction equipment, how did he expect he would manage to pay everyone? I.e. the construction project was itself a beneficium to those it employed.

[0] Could be another emperor -- I just have an association of this story with Trajan's markets for some reason.

Consider that you may be eavesdropping on the sort of self-talk the author engages in. The clear reasoning mixed with vituperation makes me suspect he probably beats himself up. There is a lot of worry over being mistaken and stupid.

I'm unfamiliar with the author, so I could be way off base.

People often screw around over the piano keyboard, usually an octave or so about middle C until an idea occurs. Brahms likened this to a pair of hands combing over a garbage dump.

I think a creative person has no trouble generating interesting ideas without roving over the proverbial garbage heap. The hard (and artistic) part is developing those ideas into an interesting work.

Make it three. I'm on the third battery for my darter pro: twice so far, the battery has swelled up and made the keyboard buckle. System76 support consists in selling me replacement batteries at a serious markup.

I've decided not to install the third battery, so I have more of a desktop now.

My impression is that the term came from Make magazine marketing/PR/branding.

I think that we say "maker spaces" rather than "hacker spaces" probably has a lot to do with the success of Make's branding efforts.

It's also the sound a gun makes when it's fired (in German). There's a pipeline-related joke in there somewhere.

I would guess most people interested in the quiz would be familiar with betacode (which this looks like, sans diacritics).

edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_Code

That sounds like a Fagan review. I haven't been involved with one either, but I think some of the forces that drove people to do them have been weakened.

When you are shipping code that you won't be able to update easily (i.e. cheaply), you try to remove as many defects as early in the process as possible. CI/CD and web delivery seem like they would blunt the motivation to go through a Fagan review for most software developed these days.

I would imagine that some form of this still happens in safety-critical systems (or more likely the state of the art has advanced from this).

Eumenides trousers?

woosh

In the early 20th century, arguments against eugenics included pointing out that natural selection works through environmental pressures. Selecting for traits we value currently may well paint us in a corner should the environmental pressures change in some way.

I guess that might hint at a fly in the ointment to drive the plot...

My thought is that one didn't simply travel alone on horseback, but with a group and baggage, and I wouldn't expect servants to be mounted. The animals help with the baggage. You also would want a group since there are highwaymen and freebooters on the road.

I seem to recall oxen speed being about 12 miles per day.

I recently reread the first few chapters of The Castle and was surprised find such a different novel than what I remembered as a teenager: it was funny.

My German is better now than when I first attempted the novel, but when I was younger I took everything so much more earnestly that I was immune to the humor. I think it was mainly that I regarded irony as a complaint, rather than a punch line.

You're probably a conscientious person and from "the inside" it maybe feels like you're procrastinating. But taken on your own account, it just looks like you don't actually have a problem with procrastination and are able to prioritize and manage your tasks.

> [Procrastination] certainly can cause negative outcomes, but I wouldn't say that's my default expectation.

I think that, by default, you have better results with more time, but that doesn't mean inadequate with less. On the other hand, there's a kernel of truth in the witticism: "If you wait until the last minute to do a thing, that thing will take one minute to do".

I'm not the one getting down-voted.

This caught out the current Show HN poster, so I imagine the comment could be useful to future Show HN posters.

Besides, the comment wasn't unkind to the present poster and is actually kind to future posters, so the admonishment and down-votes seem unwarranted.

I shared the urge to avoid loop until I read Pascal Costanza's Highly Opinionated Guide to Lisp[1]

> Seemingly, the intended way to use the LOOP facility is to just "guess" a way to express an iteration and see if it works. If it doesn't you can either look up the specifics ...

Since then, I do just guess at the syntax and it strangely does what I want most of the time.

It seems that a library like this has a lot to prove because a) it doesn't provide a new capability, b) it adds a project dependency, and c) creates yet another way to do a standard task. If you really don't like the loop macro, you probably don't need much persuading, but I would have liked to have seen more discussion on the these trade-offs.

[1] http://www.p-cos.net/lisp/guide-v1.html

Giving your friend the benefit of the doubt, sometimes one gets the wrong perspective from a careful, qualified statement.

W. Sidney Allen wrote Vox Graeca[1] and Vox Latina which are well-known works which detail both what we know about pronunciation as well as explaining how we came to know these things. We surely don't know everything and scholarship evolves, but it is hardly like what you seem to be suggesting.

It is interesting to know about some of the sources: ancient grammarians wrote about pronunciation, people poked fun at how other people talked in letters, epigraphers sometimes made mistakes on the order of "could of".

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/classi...

This seems obligatory: https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Coffee.html

The argument is actually more about insight. You can't have insights about things you don't already have in your head. Insight in this context is noticing some new relationship between two facts.

There was a slang term "refrigerator thoughts" that described someone staring into the refrigerator while thinking of a show plot and realizing there is a plot hole, a disturbing implication, etc. In any case, that's an example of insight. Hopefully we have these spontaneous realizations about less trivial things as well.

The more stuff you've got in your head, the more insights you'll have, which drive more questions whose investigations puts yet more stuff in your head.

I don't think you can split it. The critical piece is actually getting information into your head in the first place.

This morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas; how it got into them, I'll never know...

If there is a standard library for GNU Make, one would expect it to be part of the GNU project.

That the GNU project enforces a certain naming convention on projects doesn't oblige you in any way to avoid that naming convention, but adopting that convention when you are not part of the GNU project creates confusion.

You might diffuse/disclaim the confusion up front. I notice your github repo has three archive files, no license, and no readme.

Your library is called 'GNU Make Standard Library', but it doesn't look like it is at all affiliated with the GNU project.

I don't know what GNU/FSF's position on this sort of thing is, but if your project isn't part of the GNU project, I wouldn't go around calling it "GNU Make Standard Library".

From https://www.gnu.org/help/evaluation.html:

What it means for a program to be a GNU package

Making a program GNU software means that its developers and the GNU project agree that “This program is part of the GNU project, released under the aegis of GNU”—and say so in the program.

First, I don't have a dog in the fight between parent and GP. Secondly, you're balking at a foundational commonplace in Western music.

Musical perception shares pathways with speech and it is believed this is also why certain timbres seem more expressive or interesting to us than others (that's over my head, but I first encountered that claim in the teaching company lecture series on mathematics and music). Let's consider that the first music must have been vocal or percussive, and that music making is innate to humans. Let's also consider that our hearing has to be able to finely distinguish sounds in the frequency range our voices can produce. This is why we don't make musical instruments only cats and dogs can hear at the very least -- our musical instruments have significant overlap with not only the sounds we can hear, but especially those we can produce vocally.

In terms of Western music, earliest polyphony was vocal. Contrapuntal technique likewise arose from vocal music (and this yielded our common practice harmonic tradition). I think every counterpoint manual since the renaissance (at least the ones I've read from Zarlino to Fux) begins with a discussion of the idiophone to establish the concepts of consonances and disonances based on proportions and then abruptly gets on with the business of counterpoint, where the ideal of the voice is mentioned whenever instrumental music is brought up. Additionally, there are special cases in counterpoint that arise from (or are explained as having arisen from) the sort of embellishments vocalist were fond of making (e.g. nota cambiata for one example). Not to beat a dead horse, but I even recall reading a fugue manual from the 1700s discussing an instrumental fugue and pointing out that the first note of the subject is longer, being a mannerism from vocal fugue writing (singers felt more secure if they could sit on the note a little at the beginning of an entrance).

Every single manual I've read on instrumental performance has stressed achieving a vocal quality. This is really deeply baked into Western music.

It seems they could have made the same investment without the misrepresentation - or are you trying to say the misrepresentation itself is shrewd?

No chess player ever wants to play a child. If you win, congratulations, you beat a child. If you lose, you were beaten by a child whom everyone will conclude is smarter than you.

I never can decide, but I think you have made the correct point. For me, it was "four twenties, nine and ten", which was only funny because one said "sixty, nine and ten". I dunno, I love it and it terrifies me.

The first time I went abroad, I was in a wine caveau and paying the teller. When she said the price, my mind went blank -- pitch black. She said "five" impatiently in every language I spoke -- even latin -- and I kept wondering, yes, but what and five?