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JoeAltmaier 47 minutes ago | next [–] Here in the US midwest beavers are shot and their dams dynamited wherever they are found. The majority of the US used to be endless chains of mosquito-infested beaver ponds, the entire length of every stream and river. Nearly uninhabitable by people. The extinction of the beaver is what made the US agriculturally useful. There's not a single landowner I know, who wants a random pond flooding their field, road or house. For better or worse, the age of the beaver is definitely over. At least in the US. reply
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Mar 18, 2022 22:03
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fritz posted:For better or worse, the age of the beaver is definitely over. At least in the US. except at your moms house
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Mar 18, 2022 22:17
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thowaway673y 3 hours ago | parent | next [–] RMS is no normal human, he can match with 5 or 6 100x programmers from symbolic company which they have admitted. reply
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Mar 20, 2022 11:26
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gurjeet 1 hour ago | root | parent | next [–] Just a note that this comment, and the thread below it (hopefully excluding the one you're reading), produced zero value to the readers of the thread. Writing these comments must've taken a lot of care and energy for the authors of the comments. But because the whole thread was essentially just a quarrel, and speaking over each other, all that effort was wasted. Restraint: I believe this is the HN way. Hold back your comments, think about how many people are going to read it. Now think if your comment will add value to the lives or knowledge of those readers. If the answer is "No", then please exercise restraint, and try to overcome your desire to say something smart (or, intentionally, dumb) just because you have the opportunity and the time to respond. Disclaimer: I have no relationship with HN, apart from being just another user. So my claims of "the HN way", should not be taken to mean that I know anything about HN, or the community.
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Mar 20, 2022 11:27
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fritz posted:thowaway673y 3 hours ago | parent | next [–] what the gently caress is "symbolic company"
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Mar 20, 2022 11:39
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NihilCredo posted:what the gently caress is "symbolic company" symbolics, one of the companies which spun off from mit ai lab to build lisp machines during the 1980s ai bubble rms hated them for various reasons and part of why he decided to create the gnu project was to eat their lunch with free software symbolics outlived stallman's attempt to kill them but could not outlive the fact that the whole lisp ai thing was floating on reagan admin darpa crazy money and there was insufficient commercial demand for any of it
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Mar 20, 2022 12:02
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oh and the thing about "rms is no normal human" is mythology claiming that rms singlehandedly wrote gnu equivalents to the work of N symbolics programmers. i've seen someone eviscerate that claim with facts but don't have a link handy
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Mar 20, 2022 12:09
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BobHoward posted:oh and the thing about "rms is no normal human" is mythology claiming that rms singlehandedly wrote gnu equivalents to the work of N symbolics programmers. i've seen someone eviscerate that claim with facts but don't have a link handy doesn't need much eviscerating, i think we all know the relative effort of designing a new thing for a commercial product compared to implementing the now-documented api in the laziest way possible.
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Mar 20, 2022 12:33
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RMS: a normal human
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Mar 20, 2022 13:09
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Cybernetic Vermin posted:doesn't need much eviscerating, i think we all know the relative effort of designing a new thing for a commercial product compared to implementing the now-documented api in the laziest way possible. also while rms did meaningful contribute to coding gnu in the early days, it's not like he wrote it himself
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Mar 20, 2022 16:59
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hypertele-Xii 1 day ago | root | parent | next [–] > "Fail to overthrow"? Are you kidding me? Have you seen what happens to dissenters in China? Nothing worse than has happened to dissenters in every single country on the planet that overthrew absolute monarchy with farming implements throughout history. Short of military intervention, now impossible due to nuclear war, it is the duty of every nation's citizens to democratize their government, or else they are complacent and enabling. And hey, I get it, rebellion is scary. Compliance is comforting, relatively speaking. But don't demand pity points if you choose to accept subjugation. hypertele-Xii 1 day ago | root | parent | next [–] > especially when you live in a comfortable state and have nothing on the line. ...after successfully overthrowing two competing monarchies, winning a civil war and defending against invasion? Heck yea I'm comfortable and my people bloody earned it. To say there's nothing on the line is an absolute disregard to world politics. Have you read the news lately? Basically nothing would bring about world peace faster than a chinese democratic revolution, hopefully accompanied by a russian one. > How in the world would know anything about the fears people Why would you assume that I don't? Fear is a very universal human emotion. You appear to be assigning some sort of special consideration to these people, as if their particular blight is somehow exceptionally elevated beyond the understanding of mere mortals. > But I suppose these potential dissenters just need to be reminded that they need to be more brave, like you! Considering how littered history is with people rallying behind individuals who simply encouraged them, yes, that's incredibly actionable advice. > child slaves in the Congo You realize you are comparing an entire industrialized nation of people to children? > Subjugation isn't a choice. Well, maybe it isn't if you consider suicide an alternative to subjugation. And yet here we are, freely and openly discussing this after our ancestors succeeded in rejecting their subjugations ultimately without perishing. You really should look up Gandhi. He freed all of India from British slavery literally by just saying "no" and taking one for the team. He was assassinated, sure, but India is now a democracy. reply
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Mar 20, 2022 18:02
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fritz posted:You really should look up Gandhi. He freed all of India from British slavery literally by just saying "no" and taking one for the team. He was assassinated, sure, but India is now a democracy. ahahahahaa of all the genres of hn posters, i think the history experts are the funniest
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Mar 20, 2022 18:11
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQxKURvE9iI
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Mar 20, 2022 18:12
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Truman Peyote posted:ahahahahaa for real
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Mar 20, 2022 18:19
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lollin at the beaver genocide guy, that is top tier hackernews content 
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Mar 20, 2022 18:20
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fritz posted:...after successfully overthrowing two competing monarchies, winning a civil war and defending against invasion? Heck yea I'm comfortable and my people bloody earned it. Trying to figure out which country he's talking about, without cheating by looking up his profile, and I'm kinda drawing a blank. Can't think of many countries that had competing monarchs in recent history. Mexico maybe? The emperors were from different dynasties but they didn't fight each other. Edit: ok I looked it up, he's from Finland. That's one very loose definition of "overthrowing" he's using right there. NihilCredo fucked around with this message at 18:27 on Mar 20, 2022 |
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Mar 20, 2022 18:21
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graycat 1 day ago | parent | context | next [–] | on: US schools can subscribe to an electric bus fleet ... Yes, without any really careful data, I've guessed that electric could be cheaper. But already??? Really???? Or are we talking some subsidies??? So, in the OP, now I see: "A 2020 study conducted by Atlas Public Policy for Washington state indicated that falling battery costs and rising manufacturing volumes should bring electric school buses within total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) parity with fossil-fueled buses by 2030." Hmm ... 2030??? Then I notice: "While most of its projects have started small, CEO Duncan McIntyre sees the Montgomery County project — now at 25 electric buses and set to expand to 326 over the next four years — as the model for the future." So, from 100 * 25 / 326 = 7.669% we're talking so far a little less than 8% of the fleet. So full EV (electric vehicle) has a way to go. Now I'm wondering .... Now I notice near the beginning: "Billions of dollars of federal and state grants and incentives are flowing to U.S. school districts to help them electrify their fleets." "Billions"? Now I understand! Same as usual: (1) Always look for the hidden agenda. (2) Follow the money. Next, the bus fleet is in Montgomery County, Maryland. I used to live there. Relatively wealthy place! Lot of money! Lot of interest in social issues! Close to DC, the main money pot! Next, what's this with a fleet of 326 busses??? What the ...??? So many busses? Are they in the school business or the bus business? Sounds like could run quite a good school system just for the costs of 326 busses. In my school, grades 1-12, there were no busses. 97+% of the kids went on to college -- not a bad school system. The year before me, three guys went to Princeton and two of them ran against some third guy for President of the Freshman Class. In my year, MIT came recruiting. The guy who did go to MIT -- I beat him by a little on the Math SAT. Must have been an OK school. Kids got to and from school on their own, rain, shine, hot, cold, ice, snow, or clear. One good way was to WALK. Another was a bicycle. But, no school busses. Want to save money on 326 Diesel busses? Good. Here's a way, and get to save on not just 8% of the fleet but all of it, and get the savings tomorrow and don't have to wait until 2030. Uh, and save $billions. How to do this magic, more amazing than anything electrical??? Easy: Junk all the busses. Done. Lesson: No matter how productive the US economy might be from automation or whatever, various interest groups can get with government and waste the gains. E.g., there in Monkey County, a lot of the people were, likely are, living in apartments they RENT. They'd be MUCH better off OWNING a single family detached house. Next, I just got a direct message from Darwin: The birth rate in Monkey County is less than 2 per woman. Sooooo, the population is shrinking. The people of Monkey County who want busses instead of schooling are going -- I have the word right here -- extinct. If the government were wasting less, there could be more motherhood, and the moms could work out how to get the kids to/from school without 326 busses.
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Mar 20, 2022 19:02
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I mean I guess it would be better if kids could walk or bike to school but I'm not sure the solution to that is (checks notes) more single family detached homes.
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Mar 20, 2022 19:08
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"monkey county" 
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Mar 20, 2022 19:21
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I guess I shouldn't be surprised that graycat is a fan of get-back-in-the-kitchen casual sexism.
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Mar 21, 2022 00:27
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fritz posted:thowaway673y 3 hours ago | parent | next [–] omfg nms this bullshit (also they were being polite, they straight up caught him directly copying and pasting code) (just like he just slapped his copyright on source code from UniPress emacs aka gosmacs, which is the reason it used to be hard to find versions of GNU emacs before a certain point in history)
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Mar 21, 2022 01:05
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BobHoward posted:symbolics, one of the companies which spun off from mit ai lab to build lisp machines during the 1980s ai bubble “various reasons” he hated them because he wasn’t allowed to both work for LMI and see Symbolics’ changes to the base CADR code, and they also didn’t give him a job offer also Symbolics only hired a couple people away from the lab too, despite his characterization of them “raiding the lab and taking everyone”
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Mar 21, 2022 01:11
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BobHoward posted:oh and the thing about "rms is no normal human" is mythology claiming that rms singlehandedly wrote gnu equivalents to the work of N symbolics programmers. i've seen someone eviscerate that claim with facts but don't have a link handy that’d have been one of the founders of Symbolics, Dan Weinreb (RIP), who shortly before his untimely death did some correcting of the record via his blog other Symbolics folks I’ve talked with remember things Dan’s way rather than Stallman’s
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Mar 21, 2022 01:13
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The airplane understander has logged on dcanelhas 8 hours ago | prev | next [–] I wonder if one could build a couple of aircraft carrier for commercial airliners and post them out in the Pacific somewhere to get shorter ETOPS-compliant flight paths. I also wonder how much fuel is spent carrying fuel and if emissions wouldn't be lower if they would fly shorter legs on fumes and do frequent refueling stops
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Mar 21, 2022 04:37
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mrmcd posted:The airplane understander has logged on this is extra funny because the concept that starting and stopping something repeatedly is less efficient than doing the same amount of work in a single go is a concept that should be graspable even with terminal programmer brain
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Mar 21, 2022 04:47
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BobHoward posted:oh and the thing about "rms is no normal human" is mythology claiming that rms singlehandedly wrote gnu equivalents to the work of N symbolics programmers. i've seen someone eviscerate that claim with facts but don't have a link handy it wasn't GNU equivalents, it was EMACS equivalents. And you can see a lot of features present in Geneva, in EMACS today
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Mar 21, 2022 05:07
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The reason he succeeded was literally because EMACS is, and always has been, a trashfire with very little coherent conceptualisation behind it other than "i like thing. i put thing on lisp core made out of C kernel"
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Mar 21, 2022 05:08
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Truman Peyote posted:this is extra funny because the concept that starting and stopping something repeatedly is less efficient than doing the same amount of work in a single go is a concept that should be graspable even with terminal programmer brain "as with python, any performance constraints will be irrelevant because flight is an io-bound operation"
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Mar 21, 2022 05:15
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the rocket equation does apply to planes, and there are distances for every aircraft past which it becomes more fuel-efficient to take stops, despite the losses from landing and taking off again. there's a graph for the 777 on the wikipedia page for fuel economy. how fuel-efficiency translates to practical viability depends on a ton of stuff, most importantly the cost of fuel; airlines do frequently cancel long-range flights when fuel costs go up fortunately for pilots who do need to make a stop, instead of forcing us to build an aircraft carrier with a flight deck that's strong enough to take a passenger jet's weight, well over a mile long, and wide enough for planes with 200ft wingspans to taxi around on, our planet's mantle has seen fit to be very leaky rjmccall fucked around with this message at 06:04 on Mar 21, 2022 |
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Mar 21, 2022 05:55
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Also depends on the local fuel market. You'll often see planes tankering with enough fuel for several legs when the passenger stops in between are in remote places that are hard to get fuel to (which translates to fuel being relatively expensive). You know, like if they were in an artificially-constructed environment in the middle of the ocean with literally no fuel producers or other consumers around.
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Mar 21, 2022 06:15
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rjmccall posted:the rocket equation does apply to planes, and there are distances for every aircraft past which it becomes more fuel-efficient to take stops, despite the losses from landing and taking off again. there's a graph for the 777 on the wikipedia page for fuel economy. how fuel-efficiency translates to practical viability depends on a ton of stuff, most importantly the cost of fuel; airlines do frequently cancel long-range flights when fuel costs go up I always wonder what a transpacific ETOPS divert to midway is like. for example do the 40 people that live there have food for 300 visitors showing up at random? how long are you stuck there? 6? 12 hours? longer?
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Mar 21, 2022 06:20
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hobbesmaster posted:I always wonder what a transpacific ETOPS divert to midway is like. for example do the 40 people that live there have food for 300 visitors showing up at random? how long are you stuck there? 6? 12 hours? longer? My understanding is that a rescue plane is usually in the air before the plane with engine issues lands at it's diversion airport. It will pickup the passengers and take them to the closest real airport so the airline can reroute them. Only the pilots and mechanics might be hanging out for a few days or longer that it takes to fix the plane and get it back to a maintenance base. edit: And, I guess, your luggage might be delayed because they will probably keep all that in the cargo hold and bring it to you a week or so later, rather than try to unpack and sort it at a random diversion airport. mrmcd fucked around with this message at 13:29 on Mar 21, 2022 |
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Mar 21, 2022 13:26
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do they usually just have spare planes sitting around for stuff like that?
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Mar 21, 2022 13:43
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xkriva11 1 hour ago | prev | next [–] Neil Postman: "Puffs of smoke are insufficiently complex to express ideas on the nature of existence, and even if they were not, a Cherokee philosopher would run short of either wood or blankets long before he reached his second axiom. You cannot use smoke to do philosophy. Its form excludes the content.” Every time I see a Twitter post like this, I remember this quote. reply ah yes, Native Americans couldn't do philosophy because they could only communicate with smoke signals. that is a very not-racist take. also, from the replies to this post is a philosopher definitely communicating in weed smoke signals: willcipriano 6 minutes ago | parent | next [–] This is a better way of expressing a thought that I've had for a couple years now. Indulge me in this thought experiment. Religious figures and scientists both argue over how the universe was created. Religious explanations often posit that some sort of higher power created the universe but fail to provide the story prior to that. The same is true of science with its big bang. I argue that these stories perhaps tell us about the early universe, but not how it was created. Now think for a moment, can you construct a sentence that is at all logical, that doesn't move the goalposts or do any linguistic trickery, that could possibly describe where our universe came from? Don't worry about it being true, just a reasonable sentence that obeys the laws of cause and effect? I believe that human language has not yet reached a point where it could describe anything like that. If that has true we have debated for centuries about a question that even if an individual knew the answer they would be unable to express it to anyone else. reply 
Mr.Radar fucked around with this message at 15:36 on Mar 21, 2022 |
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Mar 21, 2022 15:32
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graycat 14 hours ago | parent | context | next [–] | on: Windows needs a change in priorities Except for some details, I really REALLY like Windows. Really what I'm liking is computing, and Windows is a big part of that because I selected Windows instead of Linux. Over the years there have been some changes: So, we have new hardware, some HUGELY important new communications standards, a huge effort on computer security, etc., and it is crucial that Windows has kept up with the changes. I like that. And I like that I can still run my favorite old programs: Since I do all I can with plain text, my most heavily used program is my favorite text editor KEDIT. And I really like hierarchical file systems so really REALLY like Microsoft's NTFS (new technology file system) and do a lot of tree walking, searching, copying, deleting, etc. But Microsoft went for an unstated philosophy of a graphical user interface (GUI) where (a) there is a metaphor of direct manipulation of desktop objects and (b) commands and operations are to be learned by experimentation without documentation. I can see some utility there, otherwise I still like command lines because the documentation tends to be better, it is more clear just what is going on, and I can script, automate some of the operations. And I get to write software, e.g., in .NET, ASP.NET, ADO.NET for my Web site startup and whatever else seems worthwhile. So far, I like .NET. I do wish Microsoft had explained, just explained in simple text, just what the heck .NET CORE was. By now I've come to a guess that .NET CORE is irrelevant to me and I should f'get about it -- would have been nice to have had some EXPLANATION. For the future of GUIs, that seems to be just Web pages, i.e., HTML. For me, the above is the view of Windows I find most important. For the future, I hope that Microsoft does not mess up that view. To have me a happier customer, Microsoft should concentrate on one word, DOCUMENTATION. I can understand that Microsoft has some middle managers who want to add things to Windows or change Windows to improve it. Now, for changes such as I mentioned above, SURE. Otherwise, please sit down: Each new version of Windows I find to be, in one word, a pain. The changes are not improvements but PAINS. E.g., with the old version of Windows, after hundreds of hours of work I finally learned and documented for myself how to get routine things done. Then with the changes, I have to invest many more hours just to be able to continue to get routine things done and for no gains at all. Sorry Microsoft middle manager: To me you are like TV producers, what they try for, I don't like; what I like, they don't try for. E.g., as far as I can tell from a command line window Examples: > runas /noprofile /user:mymachine\administrator cmd is wrong. Just wrong. It doesn't work. First, set aside that from this "example" can't tell what is a constant and what is a variable. So, try all possible combinations. Second, still, nothing works. Nothing. Go for 1, 2, 3 hours trying everything. Did I mention, nothing works? This is grotesquely bad computing. Just awful. Want to make things better, fix things like that. But it's worse: Go out on the Internet and can find lots of documentation of that command. Some of the documentation has lots of double quote marks. Nothing worked. Hours; nothing worked. We're talking mud wrestling here. Eventually I got the software to request my administrator password, but that was as far as it went. This isn't my work. Yet my time, effort, energy are soaked up, repeatedly, over and over, by such system management mud wrestling documentation problems. Eventually I guessed some of what was going on and found another path that did work. It's not fully clear just why that worked, but it did. Documentation? I took some good notes, and apparently they are better than anything from Microsoft or readily available on the Internet. The main bottleneck in my startup is the bad documentation that leads to wasted effort in this mud wrestling. What fraction of my effort goes to such stuff? Essentially 100% -- I can't get back to my real work due to a continuing list of such disasters. They are taking up ALL my time, just mud wrestling from bad documentation. For Windows, Firefox, Acrobat, etc., sure, important security updates and otherwise I'll consider updates in functionality maybe twice a year, maybe once a year, or once each 2nd year. Except for security, bluntly and quite broadly I don't want your updates but will consider some, say, occasionally. As you force updates on me, I get TORQUED, become a VERY unhappy customer. E.g., Adobe went too far, essentially taking over my PC, at startup, with updates I don't want, with popups, with "Do you want to ...", and yesterday I deleted everything from Adobe now "Dead to me.". Firefox will read a PDF (portable document format) file, at least the ones I want read, a little better than Acrobat. Adobe, with me, you went too far and BLEW IT. I have big hopes for the future of computing for myself, Microsoft, the computer industry, the economy, and civilization, but I want do to my part, get on with it, and there is no room in that work for me to click "NO" tens of thousands of times to popup windows stopping my work until I answer some "Do you want to ...", and there is no excuse for the system management mud wrestling from bad documentation. At one time Microsoft was very interested in "developers, developers, developers!!!". Well, I'm trying to be one. Then I hope to be a good customer for Windows Server and SQL Server. And on Windows XP and Windows 7 I got 100,000 lines of .NET code running apparently as intended. But now I've lost YEARS of time in system management mud wrestling from bad documentation. I can't be a good customer of Windows Server if you have me stuck in a mud hole wasting time. reply
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Mar 21, 2022 21:53
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hn thread: As you force updates on me, I get TORQUED
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Mar 21, 2022 22:25
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fritz posted:graycat 14 hours ago | parent | context | next [–] | on: Windows needs a change in priorities I kinda wanna log on and suggest Slackware to him. lmao
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Mar 21, 2022 22:29
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hn thread: it's no fun to compute
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Mar 21, 2022 22:37
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graycat really is like cheat codes for this thread
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Mar 21, 2022 23:41
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had a big lol at quote:And I really like hierarchical file systems so really REALLY like Microsoft's NTFS (new technology file system) and do a lot of tree walking, searching, copying, deleting, etc.
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