HN user
But how do you press "shift+home" or "shift+pg up" to select a line or page? I tried this on Asus laptop 10 years ago, and IIRC it didn't work.
Another combo I use sometimes is "ctrl+shift+home/end" to select the text from cursor position to the very beginning/end.
I like it being low-profile. That's why I didn't buy ErgoDox.
So all the best wishes to the author.
But there are some tradeoffs why I probably not buy it.
1) I'd suggest a column of home/page up/page down/end (top to bottom in this order) on the right side, like some laptop makers do. They're very convenient. That's absolutely necessary for text editing or navigating in various windows. (Sure one can use combos, but then you must stick to the keyboard all the time.) Del/backspace probably also should be different keys.
2) Missing menu key also requires you to take mouse sometimes. Laptops can get away with touchpad. But with the minimal keyboard, that requires user to hold it more and use combos, you must leave the keyboard and take a mouse to open a context menu.
A general philosophical question (not a negative comment to this particular keyboard): do we really still need key rows to be shifted 1/4 of width, because keys needed arms underneath in the late 19th century?
It probably meant that the railway was for kids as passengers.
But also, in Russian language, "child" doesn't imply someone younger than teenager, it does include adolescents too. There is a distinct term for "adolescent", but no distinct term for English "kid" or "toddler" except for some regional variants.
Hence, "childrens' railway" is the most broad term for it. Also, naming it "adolescents' railway" sounded more complex in Russian, a bit awkward, and would make visitors wonder: "do they allow little kids to ride?"
Regarding running the railway, there are very strict limitations what adolescents can do and what they can't do. IIRC, they can't control the fuelling of the vehicle, and some other arbitrary operations. Probably, they can't drive the engine, but just sit next to an adult driver.
Respect for the link to John T. Gatto, he was a great thinker, I even translated one of his essays from a link posted here a decade ago.
It does. It's bought by the Russian Mail.ru group.
In 2016, I went to an interview in their office, and the interviewer made me an excursion around it. At one place I saw big ICQ logo with sign reading "ICQ Project Department".
- Wow, it still hasn't died?!
- Shhhhh! Don't say this so loud, the guys get very offended! - said the interviewer.
The office itself was spacious, with free snacks and drinks, including free fresh juice -- I remember a perfect set of 4 people sitting together, some holding those free juices -- a guy and a girl sitting on small either couchettes or stools, and two more sitting next to them a bit higher on the window, and together looking like sat down to make promotion pictures for some sort of bar. I joked that this was staged just for me.
Then, there was a nice sightseeing place: an imposing rotating armchair next to panoramic glass, to make photos with Moscow in the backdrop. When you enter or exit the office, you walk along a tennis-field-size playground, with people playing, surrounded by a net to catch stray balls. The interviewer joked that of course all this play was also staged just for the interview.
Regarding ICQ, I guess, the project is kept by the corporation for nostalgic reasons -- it was the default messenger in exUSSR in the 90s and 00s.
Maybe he was just sarcastic?
It’s a no brainer that a person cannot be equally oriented both in linguistics and in geology. ... So it would be quite possible to declare an amnesty to the Professor at this place: they say, an offense undoubtedly took place, but it does not pose a particular public danger.
He has written a big book on evolution of Earth and theories around it. [1]
It includes a whole chapter on plate tectonics, the preceding theories, and how plate tectonics itself was gradually accepted. In the book, there's also a large review on other scientific problems, like where the Sun gets energy from, why the Earth has magnetic field, where does internal the heat of the Earth come from, etc. Lots of "how do we know that..." questions. A great review, highly recommend.
So he's 100% aware what status plate tectonics had in Tolkien's time. I think he also mentions that as a linguist he wasn't a geologist, and could draw the land whichever way he imagined.
[1] Kirill Yeskov. History of Earth and Life On It. (in Russian) https://readli.net/istoriya-zemli-i-zhizni-na-ney/
no, just my mistake, corrected, ty
Here's Kirill Yeskov's own explanation how he wrote it, Google-translated: https://fan-lib-ru.translate.goog/e/eskov/text_0150.shtml?_x...
I should add that Kirill Yeskov is a paleontologist and science popularizer. Here's his own explanation how he wrote "The Last Ringbearer": one of the reasons he mentions is that Middle Earth was impossible geologically:
https://fan-lib-ru.translate.goog/e/eskov/text_0150.shtml?_x...
In which he also mentions another famous book:
"It would hardly occur to anyone to seriously analyze the functioning of the ecosystem of a barren desert inhabited by predatory worms the size of a multiple unit train that feed on walking excavators and then sweat psychedelics: fantasy is fantasy, what do you want from it?"
He also wrote a great book on the Earth evolution and life evolution, in which he also explains how science works and worked earlier, and what were older theories, and Popper criterium as well.
Here are some of his lectures for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEp7o0-w-uU
..and an interview with some charts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdyW9V10IEQ
(unfortunately, auto-translated automatic captions aren't readable, giving just an idea of what the talk is about)
True for complex systems, but West Roman empire didn't "collapse" instantaneously, nor within a year/decade.
If I remember correctly what I read on it, the actual date is arbitrarily taken for didactic clarity, and it's the date the capital moved to another city. But the kingdom still called itself Roman, so contemporaries didn't quite notice the difference. BTW, this is how modern Romania got its name -- smaller kingdoms in the former empire called themselves the glorious Rome.
The curious detail is that Barbarian leaders actually wanted to become king of Rome and to be acknowledged as equally civilized, rather than merely sack and loot it. Some of them were actually legioneers, if I remember it correctly. So it's not clear if a legioneer sacked Rome and set himself as king, was the new state still Roman or already not.
He probably means what the osm2pgsql import tool creates.
I wonder how come gas stove, an artifact of the 20th century, became a "traditional" thing?
The way people cook on gas stove is just one of many ways it can be, and I'm sure in year 1900, cooking on coal was rather different, and gas must have been an improvement, but also met with skepticism, and probably laments about the lack of charcoal smell or taste.
Gas isn't a tradition written in stone. It has serious issues like hot surfaces and higher chances of burning your skin, scurf on the pans, benzopyrene in the air, and risk of suffocation, heating of the indoor air, etc. Personally, I switched to induction for all these reasons.
It looks like the only downside to induction is that some users need walls hot (I don't) and need cooking to continue if they raise the pan up. I think this is doable with different forms of the oven, and with thicker iron pans: iron absorbs EM waves, it conducts heat well, and it will add thermal inertia. These pans will be heavier, but IMO that's a small price for all the benefits of induction.
Back in 2007-2008 I, an economics graduate, was snubbed by developers, even though I showed a working prototype and examples of works since 1998!
DB developers also snubbed, even though I asked to show a working database app made at analyst position.
I showed a hand-made website with Javascript and PHP backend, and they snubbed that I didn't use frameworks.
Finally, in 2009 I got a web dev position with humiliating remarks. Only at the next company, a small web studio, the chief dev said "great, because if you did it by hand, it means you know the internal gears better than the framework guys", hired me and taught me some frameworks, which I learned quickly.
I understand that people are afraid they'd have to babysit the new developer, but I showed them lots of things, and it still didn't matter. Maybe they were afraid I'd leave their shitty job, IDK.
So, some standard framework used in the industry is a must. Plus, if a company is bigger than 20 people, snobs start running the hiring process.
Nowadays, well, if you want to slightly change the field of work, you're given a huge task to build a whole app, and then are nitpicked at insufficient comments, not clear code, not making useless classes, not using useless async, and so on. Nobody looks at your github project where you have those features. I guess, a single child-less guy could do this in 3 nights on RedBull, but I don't think I could. I'm quite discouraged.
Did I talk about forced labor in this comment above? I said: in later times, such clashes with bureacracy made people lose their entire career.
They weren't necessary sent to work camps. Some were just fired and couldn't get hired. Later, in 1950's & 60's, you would be effectively banned from career. Sometimes librarians would paint black their name if they were in references section. Since 1960's victims of these political battles could go to other institutions, probably at less important position.
This practice continued all the way till the collapse of the USSR, I heard of such stories in Moscow universities, and in the Academy of Science.
Note that in the USSR, political questions and false accusations were often used to torpedo career competitors or to have vengeance at those who were more successful. Almost nobody in this story or in other cases were political dissidents. They didn't go out to protest or speak up on the political freedoms or other matters.
Ironically, this reform was started under the previous 30-year president, "father of nation" Nazarbayev in 2018 or '19, and was halted under Tokayev. Some signs in the streets were converted before the reform was finalized, but not all. And now if you deal with e-government website, everything is in Cyrillic. Kazakh UI of the website is still in Cyrillic too. I haven't seen a single Kazakh price tag in Latin yet.
I live in Russia, and I am really worried. De-professionalization of the defence and foreign affairs ministries are obvious to anyone with a bit of critical thinking. Just look at our negotiators: it's led by the ex-minister of Culture, a "historian" with a fraudulent PhD thesis, and manager of the military history society, which invents it's own reality.
The foreign affairs speaker constantly uses insults, just as the minister Lavrov.
Russian space agency is run by a PR and foreign relations guy, who never managed anything more substatial than a modest political party, and now is just doing freak show on Twitter.
My major hope is that the elites alliance will start to rattle and falls apart, and maybe they dispose Putin, like Khruschov in 1964.
Sociologist Greg Yudin explained what the leadership might think in an article[1] (he wrote the same on Facebook in Russian on January 19).
TL/DR: Putin and the exKGB elites are dissentful of the cold war lost to the US, see NATO as a direct threat (even though military generals don't think it is), and the internal dissent with Putin seems to them inspired from abroad. They were shocked by Libyan rebel and by the Ukrainian in 2014. Of course, the only thing they do is brute force, and every step they make only makes the conflict more real.
Regarding the common folk, here's a survey[2] from December or January. TL/DR: they accepted the propaganda's POV that it's all the West's fault. When shown evidence of earlier military build-up, they'd suggest it was fake news.
[1] https://www.thebigq.org/2022/02/23/what-are-the-reasons-behi...
Or it could have been the point of crystallization of all the ammassed dissent of the 90s and free market reforms.
Now, I forgot to mention that all this "they're bad" sentiment is part of so-called post-imperial syndrome. Many are really dissentful.
Also, I'm old enough to remember the popular dissent with the USSR in the late '80s. We as kids would repeat the adults' discussions about how bad the country was, and our parents weren't political dissidents at all, just common dwellers, absolutely non-ideologized. Many wanted friendship with the West. Only very ideologized communtists wanted to keep the status quo when the USSR collapsed, and obviously even secret services where Putin served wanted to open the country and the economy and did not resist the collapse, nor support the GKChP coup.
The economic crisis of the '90s and the war in Yugoslavia where what changed people's minds. I remember seeing a woman carry a white plastic bag with large US flag on it, probably in 1991 or 1992, but that became unthinkable in 1999-2000. Even a liberal pro-Western TV presenter Parfyonov showed some sort of dissent in his historic program when he described the events of 1991.
Those years many changed their minds about the past, and went all way from complete discontent with the communist regime to believing that it was good and that it was destroyed intentionally.
A Russian here under a throwaway account. I've seen very few open supporters of the military invasion on social media. But most Russians, reached by TV or social media propaganda, carry on 3-5 factoids regarding Ukraine that somehow invalidates Ukrainian position completely.
For example, just from today's talk (face-to-face):
* that Ukrainian forces supposedly committed crimes in Donbass region -- when I ask who in particular and how, these people fail to answer. When I say that they had full right to suppress armed riot of Girkin & co, they switch the topic.
* that the government were illegally overthrown in 2014. I challenged that with the fact that Yanukovich's own party voted to introduce an president interim and start new elections.
Both times I pushed the interlocutor and asked if I lied, and they have nothing to say, nor have more facts, but jump between topics all the time, switching from facts to questions -- like "did they start living better?" or "what about those who died in Odessa protest?" I guess this demagogy is enough for those who want to justify their stance, and to claim own moral superiority.
I asked if they support the invasion, and they say they don't. I'm sure they'll have to make up their mind, but I'm afraid people can choose whatever more convenient to feel ok.
A recent sociological surveys made in January showed about half of population being on Putin's side, even 40% of those in political opposition to him. Sociologists confronted people with evidence of Russian military buildup, and respondents usually answered that this was "Western propaganda" and tried to avoid further discussion.
I can't read minds of the elites and secret service generals who constitute the Security Council, but it seems this is partially what they think -- secret services are very suspicious of everyone and treat everything as a threat. This leads to believing in conspiracies, and justifies agression.
As for me and many others who value the open world borders and don't want back to USSR, I'm most worried that we're going to be under severe sectoral sanctions, with many industries in serious crisis, like in the 1990s.