deerpig

12 ms·

1.
by deerpig 6y ago
The ideal line length for text layout is based on the physiology of the human eye… At normal reading distance the arc of the visual field is only a few inches – about the width of a well-designed column of text, or about 12 words per line.
2.
by deerpig 6y ago
I disagree, perseverance is not the same as goal-seeking for goal seeking's sake, or at least, it doesn't have to be. Twenty years ago I set a thirty year goal, literally bet my life on it. It wasn't until two years ago that
3.
by deerpig 6y ago
Physical Review D is not a light weight journal. You don't get published there unless you are being taken seriously in the scientific community.
4.
by deerpig 6y ago
And "stochastic superoptimization" sounds so much cooler than their original term; "super-duper random improvement."
5.
by deerpig 6y ago
Yahoo, when it was a single page with a couple of dozen links. I think that was before there was a browser for Windows -- I was using the Omniweb browser on a NeXT Color workstation. I still miss the original Wired and later Wired News.
6.
by deerpig 7y ago
So it's sort of the opposite of Field of Dreams, which often results in vaporware. Just because people come, doesn't mean they know what they want or know how to express a problem or need that could be solved and result in a viab
7.
by deerpig 7y ago
It's in elisp? Of course it is. It's emacs!
8.
by deerpig 7y ago
Great music. I want one.
9.
by deerpig 8y ago
Site is down for me....
10.
by deerpig 8y ago
I have a slightly newer Infinite Reality R10000 sitting beside my desk here in Phnom Penh. A professor in Berkeley gave it to us and somehow we managed to get it to this side of the world. It uses enough power to run an apartment block an
11.
by deerpig 8y ago
SGI famously converted one of their Crimsons (which was a commercial failure) into a fridge and beer tap...
12.
by deerpig 8y ago
I've noticed that over the last few years it's become increasingly difficult to do things with US based services (especially banking) if you are outside of the US. And this goes double if you are a US citizen with no ties to the
13.
by deerpig 8y ago
Sounds like a pun from the Wake. I would be surprised if it wasn't. I loved the Wake. Only read it once all the way through but I dip into it from time to time. It's a fantastic place to find memorable phrases that make good pa
14.
by deerpig 8y ago
Gitlab requires a lot of resources. We have a local Openstack cluster and were running GitLab on a small instance. It was a beast. Moved to a larger instance and it works beautifully even over the Internet from another ISP.
15.
by deerpig 8y ago
This just makes me sad. When class material, which is supposed to be the antithesis of closed and proprietary is treated as property, then there is something very wrong with the educational system you are working in. Education is about sp
16.
by deerpig 8y ago
You aren't kidding about it being hard to find anything about that paper. I tried finding it a couple of years ago and just spent an hour now and had no luck. Thanks for the link I hadn't seen that before...
17.
by deerpig 8y ago
When I was a kid we had the whole set. I assume that it was something tied together with Britannica -- we had an early 60's set. I tried to read them but the font faces were so small that they were terrible reading copies. If memory
18.
by deerpig 9y ago
The breakup of Ma Bell required a regulatory breakup. Bell Telephone was just too entrenched to break up on decentralize on it's own, short of a collapse. No amount of innovation outside of Bell Telephone could have broken it up. TBL
19.
by deerpig 9y ago
> It's byzantine How so? Can existing tools achieve the goals that SOLID is trying to deliver? Distributed is hard, but it's not impossible. The Whole Internet has become so centralized that it's about due for something t
20.
by deerpig 9y ago
Not simply that the West bought more. China refused to accept anything except silver and gold in payment for their Tea. There is only so much silver and gold so they looked for something else they could trade for and found that there was
21.
by deerpig 9y ago
In case you weren't being snarky, the article was talking about Claude Levi-Strauss who was a French Anthropologist, not not the maker of jeans... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_L%C3%A9vi-Strauss
22.
by deerpig 9y ago
> China is 92% Han Only because the government keeps redefining what is Han. I lived in Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Ghongzhou for over ten years. There were Hakka, Canton and Chui Chow people but few ethnic Han. That has since changed as f
23.
by deerpig 9y ago
He really pushed identi.ca, there was a nice community there back in the day. It became a bit of a refuge from the noise on twitter. I had my identi.ca account in my sig file up until a couple of years ago. But I have largely lost intere
24.
by deerpig 9y ago
>The article mentions some exceptions, but it's a completely different playground. Rumi, Lao Tzu and Buddha were using their teachings as a practical instructions, rather than theories aiming to prove anything about the world. Is ph
25.
by deerpig 9y ago
So you would prefer JFK to have said: "We choose to send robots to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, because they are easy and cheaper and faster..." It's worth reading the whole sp
26.
by deerpig 9y ago
I am charged with the task of returning a university that used to be a research school before the Khmer Rouge to be a national research university. Professors are paid a little over US$500 a month by the government. Staff often have to bu
27.
by deerpig 9y ago
Here in Phnom Penh, for all intents and purposes there are no rules of the road. So there are no sidewalks. Sidewalks are for rich people to park their monster second-hand imported American gas guzzlers. Going up the wrong side in the wr
28.
by deerpig 9y ago
That is likely based on the Japanese story of the dog Hachiko, (sort of the Japanese version of Lassie) the dog who waited for his master at the train station every day. And when the master, a university professor, died while at school, th
29.
by deerpig 9y ago
It costs more to live the same lifestyle you had from your home country. If you cook and eat local food, don't indulge in expensive imports, use fans instead of aircons 24/7, drive a moto and not a car etc. Too many expats move
30.
by deerpig 9y ago
Literate programing is used to tangle text and code. You tangle the document and the code blocks are pulled out to create a working program. But Orgmode's Babel, iPython and Wolfram's Computational Essays are literate computing,

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