jlgreco (u/jlgreco) - Readit News

jlgreco commented on Custom Colors of HN news.ycombinator.com/topc... · Posted by u/coconutrandom

kyro · 11 years ago

For those with enough karma, I'm curious to see what custom logos you've chosen to replace the Y. And for users who've been here for more than 8600* days, how frequently do you use the direct messaging feature?

*Edit: 2500 days. Read the wrong stat on my profile. So much for pulling a quick one...

jlgreco · 11 years ago

Is that a thing? I don't seem to be able to do that with 18k+, so if it exists there are only a couple dozen people that can.

jlgreco commented on The strict Pragma is a Cultural Marker modernperlbooks.com/mt/20... · Posted by u/Mithaldu

keithwinstein · 12 years ago

Cool, I hadn't read Olin's take.

However, the cited rationale can't really be revisionist of what RMS told Olin, because it was published in 1981, about 14 months before Olin came to MIT in 1982.

It appears verbatim in RMS's paper, "EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable, Self-Documenting Display Editor," A.I. Memo 519a, ftp://publications.ai.mit.edu/ai-publications/pdf/AIM-519A.pdf (March 26, 1981). He doesn't mention an efficiency justification in there.

The whole document is also fascinating for including RMS's nascent but not-fully-baked early thinking about free software.

jlgreco · 12 years ago

Hmm, good catch, I didn't notice when that was published.

jlgreco commented on The strict Pragma is a Cultural Marker modernperlbooks.com/mt/20... · Posted by u/Mithaldu

geocar · 12 years ago

Richard Stallman gave an excellent use and rationale for dynamic scope in the EMACS manual:

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html#SEC17

One of my favourite things about perl and CL is the ability to have lexical (my/let) and dynamic (local/special) scope in the same program depending on what is clearer.

In fact, it comes up often enough that programming in a language lacking dynamic scope (e.g. basic, JavaScript, or python) feels limiting sometimes, and I end up emulating it (settings+extend, observables, etc).

jlgreco · 12 years ago

That rationale may be a bit revisionist, here is Olin Shivers' take on RMS's justification for elisp's dynamic scoping:

"Some context: Common Lisp did not exist (the effort was just getting underway). MIT Scheme did not exist. Scheme was a couple of AI Lab tech reports and a master's thesis. We're talking the tiniest seed crystal imaginable, here. There was immense experience in the lisp community on optimising compiled implementations of dynamically-scoped languages -- this, to such an extent, that it was a widely held opinion at the time that "lexical scope is interesting, theoretically, but it's inefficient to implement; dynamic scope is the fast choice." I'm not kidding. To name two examples, I heard this, on different occasions, from Richard Stallman (designer & implementor of emacs lisp) and Richard Fateman (prof. at Berkeley, and the principal force behind franz lisp, undoubtedly the most important lisp implementation built in the early Vax era -- important because it was delivered and it worked). I asked RMS when he was implementing emacs lisp why it was dynamically scoped and his exact reply was that lexical scope was too inefficient. So my point here is that even to people who were experts in the area of lisp implementation, in 1982 (and for years afterward, actually), Scheme was a radical, not-at-all-accepted notion. And outside the Lisp/AI community... well, languages with GC were definitely not acceptable. (Contrast with the perl & Java era in which we live. It is no exaggeration, thanks to perl, to say in 2001 that billions of dollars of services have been rolled out to the world on top of GC'd languages.)"

http://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html

(emphasis not my own)

That whole page is a good read, particularly if you are a fan of Shivers' writing style.

jlgreco commented on Automatically reject buggy pushes with git hooks. stavros.io/posts/pep8-git... · Posted by u/StavrosK

hahainternet · 12 years ago

Automatically frustrate and annoy your contributors! Make people never want to work with you!

PS. Don't do this, ensuring test success is one thing. Requiring PEP8 validation is dumb.

jlgreco · 12 years ago

Ideally anything that you reject for should also be conveniently baked into the build system so that you can do things like `make validate` before pushing to save yourself the embarrassment.

jlgreco commented on Automatically reject buggy pushes with git hooks. stavros.io/posts/pep8-git... · Posted by u/StavrosK

donall · 12 years ago

I feel like pre commit is better than pre receive.

jlgreco · 12 years ago

pre-commit would be a bad idea. You would have to ask all of your developers to install the hook, instead of just installing it on your 'official' repos and it would quickly become a nuisance to developers who liked to create temporary commits with no intention of ever giving them out to the rest of the world. These developers would quickly become annoyed at the pre-commit hook, turn it off, then you would be back where you started (except now you would have a false sense of security).

I do agree that pre-commit isn't the best choice though. I prefer update hooks; I find they are simpler to write and easier to read.

jlgreco commented on Study Suggests Link Between Dread Pirate Roberts and Satoshi Nakamoto bits.blogs.nytimes.com/20... · Posted by u/coolswan

feral · 12 years ago

> - SN is fairly humble.

You are talking about some one or group who took great care (including in all their dealings with other early bitcoin users) to maintain their anonymity - which is really hard to do, in the face of the sort of scrutiny that SN has had.

Its at least plausible that, along with the name, other aspects of the SN persona were explicitly constructed.

There's all this myth around who SN is. A lot of people seem to believe SN is a benevolent crypto researcher working in their bedroom, for the benefit of humanity, with no profit motive in sight. I mean, sure, I hope that's the case too, but we should remember that we don't actually know very much at all.

jlgreco · 12 years ago

A braggart might construct a humble persona, but would a true braggart maintain such a persona for long? If they could, is there really any basis for calling them a braggart in the first place?

Being a braggart seems fundamentally incompatible with "not bragging", for years on end, about your greatest accomplishment (and barring the possibility that SN is somebody very famous, say, Putin, it is almost certain that bitcoin is the most famous thing that SN has done). Not in a "Scottish, but doesn't wear a kilt" way, but in a "Scottish, but does not live and was not born in Scotland" kind of way.

jlgreco commented on Bill Gates funds creation of graphene condoms extremetech.com/extreme/1... · Posted by u/robabbott

tokenizer · 12 years ago

Thanks. Good point on the trains, completely missed that.

I guess levitating a live frog seems more interesting to me however. To be able to use magnetics to simulate gravity for humans safely, is IMO, a huge barrier (of many) to space travel/living one day.

jlgreco · 12 years ago

My understanding is that they do use such magnets for microgravity experiments. Here is a cool video on diamagnetic levitation from the University of Nottingham: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nod54HFkH0o

jlgreco commented on Show HN: Medical marijuana product search harvestigation.com/... · Posted by u/alexu

alexu · 12 years ago

It's designed for quick cross-store comparison shopping and finding suitable replacements. All sites above are designed for browsing stores.

jlgreco · 12 years ago

The presentation is pretty good (fairly minimal, which I like), but I think that some autocompletion in those search forms would go a long way. Things like showing autocompletes for town names or strains.

jlgreco commented on Show HN: Medical marijuana product search harvestigation.com/... · Posted by u/alexu

jtreminio · 12 years ago

I believe there is now one business in CO that has their permits :)

jlgreco · 12 years ago

Hmm, it looks like you are right, but I think they can't start actually selling until January 1st. I'm not quite sure there.

In Washington it will still be a few more months, since anything sold recreationaly needs to be grown explicitly for recreational use, and that process cannot start until the permits are issued (I believe they have until the end of this year before they are required by law to start issuing permits to grow (or sell)).

jlgreco commented on Show HN: Medical marijuana product search harvestigation.com/... · Posted by u/alexu

lizzu · 12 years ago

Is it legal?

jlgreco · 12 years ago

Barring the possibility that you are in a jurisdiction with unusually draconian drug laws, sure it's legal. This site is just telling you how much different strains cost at different businesses where you can legally buy them (currently, if you have a prescription). The site itself isn't selling weed.