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osswid

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Go to telehack.com and type 'notes'.

It's not comprehensive, but will give you a taste of the flavor of what Usenet was like.

  In the days when Sussman was a novice Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.  "What are you doing?", asked Minsky.
  "I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe."
  "Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.
  "I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play"
  Minsky shut his eyes,
  "Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher.
  "So that the room will be empty."
  At that momment, Sussman was enlightened.
 -- AI koan

But why is this bad? Let people choose how to spend their money how they want. On geo, on food, on trips, on saving..on whatever. Pay them for their work, let them allocate their spending as they wish for their own priorities. Why does it matter where they live, or where groups cluster? Seems like a fear-driven response.

I’m Leaving IBM 7 years ago

IBM's 3 year vest schedule on cash retention packages was 10% at 6 months, 10% at 12 months, 30% at 24 months, and 50% at 36 months. So half of your retention pay happens on the 3rd year anniversary.

Salesforce is a publicly traded company with a market cap of $16B, with $2B in annual revenue.

The gap between the reality of their place and power in the market they enjoy, and the commentary here is ... surprising.

Wow...this is seriously cool. I like how the old threads are preserved in the newsreader interface. There is also something about having the clock advance in "realtime" that makes it more fun to run that just skimming through the old archive.

Nice work Joey.

There are about 25,000 hosts, mostly mined from old uucp maps. You can login to the hosts or finger @them and see users logged in who posted from them at the time. Try e.g. finger @sgi.

From http://telehack.com/telehack.html

"Telehack is a simulation of a sylized arpanet/usenet, circa 1985-1990. It is a full multi-user simulation, including 25,000 hosts and BBS's the early net, thousands of files from the ero, a collection of adventure and IF games, a working BASIC interpreter with a library of programs to run, simulated historical users, and more."

Linked list patent 16 years ago

Nobody "invents" lifeforms. They hack a few strands of dna cobbled together from other sources and wait until a batch actually grows.

Which is what the plants do all by themselves. Copyright, maybe. But not patent.

Just Let Basic Die 17 years ago

One of the nice things about Basic was that you didn't need to know how to use a text editor to program in it. Line numbers and the LIST command got you started. vi and emacs are a bit much for the wee ones. You can use a simple text editor, but there's still the concept of files, saving, extensions, vs. the integrated environment that a microcomputer Basic provided.

<power on>

10 print "Hello, World."

RUN

Doesn't get simpler than that.

How to read a book 17 years ago

I used to revere books, but after buying one too many that would have been better at article length (and often started out as such), I've become more guarded with the time I'm willing to invest in a book. Some books are worth a re-read, but an increasing fraction that I encounter now aren't worth a first.

"The 48 Laws of Power" is an example. I originally read this as a magazine article, which was great. I excitedly bought the 452 page book of the same title when it came out, but unfortunately it didn't cover much more than the magazine article I had already read; it was just book length.