Once I went to Stanford to attend Donald Knuth's Annual Christmas Lecture. During the talk he wanted to show some search query on google. What he did next was interesting. He typed yahoo.com in a browser's address bar and then searched for google on yahoo's search to reach to google!!
When I worked at Encyclopedia Britannica in the late 90s the two top queries on our portal (at the time it was ebig.com which then became eblast.com and then britannica.com) were "yahoo.com" and "sex". I brought this up at a executive level meeting after someone spent several minutes talking about how people came to our site to do serious research on the Internet. It made for a nice awkward silence.
Definitely not a joke. Well, perhaps that specific instance is, but at Yahoo! many of the most common search terms were domains; one argument had internally for not putting cursor focus in the search bar was precisely because people just used it as if it were the address bar, and the appetite to support that use case was low. (Source: ex-Yahoo! staff, albeit not in search and with a fallible memory).
Because even the people who invented modern computing and have a complete understanding of how the internet works, are still vulnerable to the bad habits that dictate our ability to use the internet.
I think what he is also saying is that Yahoo had a built in buffer, that they had to work really hard to fuck up. Because even Genius's turned to Yahoo to Google things for a long time.
Also anytime a genius can't do a basic task it is "interesting". Viral sites like Buzzfeed love spreading stories about how Steven Hawking couldn't figure out how to use his Comcast remote control.
I totally agree Knuth is a genius, but he does not look like an early adopter at all. He does not use email and I would not be surprised if he does not have a mobile phone (not even a non-smart one).
I think that if I had seen him typing google.com in the yahoo search bar, I'd have just thought: of course.
That's an interesting take. I never thought that he didn't use email because he was behind the times. I thought he used email for a period and then gave it up in 1995 (or something ridiculously early) like that because he was so ahead of the curve he could see where it was going and didn't want to waste his time.
> I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.
My point was that he does not really care. I'm sure he still follows very closely some advancements, but he is not the kind of people I expect to be very informed about the new IDE, Javascript framework or web standard, for example. He is happy programming in a chalkboard.
It totally could have been. But if I'm focused on giving a presentation, I've been known to subconsciously do some dumb things when on my computer, so it could have been him just not devoting any attention to what he was doing.
All bhuddist philosophy takes the understanding of your impending death, and the background fear of it, as absolutely critical to determining meaning in your life.
I can not highly recommend enough "The Meaning of Life : Perspectives from the World's Great Intellectual Traditions". It's one of The Great Courses and I found, extremely easy to listen to. The topics covered range from the Bhagavad Gita, to the Book of Job, to Stoicism, to Daoism, Confucianism, Bhuddism, and all the way into modernity (Hume, Mills, Kant, Tolstoy) and post-modernity (Nietzsche).
A pervasive theme of ALL cultures with a philosophical tradition is the necessity of living one's life with the moment to moment realization of one's death.
I like Nietszche, Emerson (especially 'Self-Reliance'), Walt Whitman and the Tao Te Ching. For fiction Zorba the Greek and Dune are two of my favorites.
I like Emerson's Circles essay. It's helped me maintain some humility many times.
Kant's CI for ethics.
Tao Te Ching for perspective and focus.
Nonviolent communication by Marshall Rosenberg for confrontation and interpersonal communication. The concept of NVC and, through its negation, violent communication underscores so much of what's currently going on in the world.
I think a big factor is that many people here are surrounded by people who are steeped in Biblical culture, yet living objectively terrible lives. The dominant religious narrative of any culture is inevitably corrupted by temporal pressures.
Also, while I agree there are many valuable lessons to be learned from the Bible, the New Testament is not a book for people who strive for wealth, and HN attracts strivers. Not to say you can't be a Christian and strive for wealth, but the striving is going to come from some other part of your life, and it's going to force you to compartmentalize Christian values to some extent. Seneca, on the other hand, was unapologetically wealthy, and his philosophy was consistent with that.
A particularly important read concerning the meaning of life is the book of Ecclesiastes. It tells of Solomon’s great experiment of finding meaning in knowledge, pleasure, wealth, accomplishment, etc..
I am often bewildered by those who pour a great deal of energy in planning for retirement and ignoring the fact that they will soon thereafter be pushing up daisies. Death awaits us all.
I pour a lot into retirement because I don't want my final days to be a time of financial hardship or to be a burden on my children.
Today, I can easily move around, feed/wash myself, and but that won't be true forever. Putting money away for later gives me some measure of confidence I'll be able to pay someone to help me when the time comes.
Why not kill yourself when you get too old to wash/feed yourself? I'm being serious. I've asked myself that many times and can't find a good reason why not.
It's not even about washing/feeding yourself. I simply don't want to have to work all my life. I'd like to spend my days reading, watching movies, traveling, eating out, etc.
To your question though, I find that as I get older life is increasingly more interesting. I suspect that will be the case regardless of whether I'm hobbled by my body.
Also, if I have grandchildren I can imagine wanting to hang around to see them grow up.
The Book of Job might be one that the Stoics could appreciate, as in it Job is robbed of every worldly good, his health, his friends, and his family. Though they'd probably point out that if only Job had practiced Stoicism he'd be able to meet all of these privations with indifference.
If you like Job you should seek out the play J.B. by Archibald MacLeish. His take on the story is that Job in the end forgives God, making him superior in some way to the God he loves so much, which is a view of the story you don't often hear.
Yeah the Bible is typically overlooked these days. Even most Christians probably don't read it. And many of the type who discovered Seneca or Dogen through a self-help blog probably take pride in how intelligent and "rational" they are (for flowing along with the dominant current of our culture ha) in rejecting Christianity. But the Bible is literally just a library of different writings, the whole point of which is to give a complete picture of life, to furnish the imagination with stories and characters and lessons. Proverbs is a place to start I guess, though I'm hardly the person to ask. I remember liking the Gospel of Mark as a kid?
> edit: For those of you down voting me for whatever reason, can you at least contribute to the discussion and explain how my answer was a poor one?
> The bible is one of the greatest stories ever told containing a myriad of different ways at looking at life.
By itself, it wasn’t a very compelling comment. You made no effort to support your position. Given that the Christian bible is considered to be a religious text first and philosophy second (if at all), you should have made a case for why it was relevant in this context.
The Essays of Montaigne. While it is a massive time, he wrote in so much detail into his own thought process, we are given a peek into his mind. He also digests thousands of aphorisms, maxims, parables and quotes from the classics and the works from antiquity. I have heard people referring to it as a sort of a secular Bible. I recommend the translation by M A Screech.
The bible reveals that the basic problem humanity has is not lack of a robust life philosophy but rather that we're inherently sinful and thus deserving of death (physical and eternal). That's an offensive message.
It then explains that the remedy to the judgement we deserve is believing in Jesus Christ, who by bearing that judgement, causes our sin to be imputed to himself and his righteousness to be imputed to us. Accepting this requires us to admit we are totally helpless and at God's mercy. That's an even more offensive message.
In the current era, I think the bible has gotten enough press. Far fewer people have read Seneca than the bible - and the bible permeates US culture. It's like telling someone learning about IT who's only ever worked with Windows to keep right on developing their Windows background. It's not awful advice, and it's not comment worthy.
But there's so much about Windows that the average end user doesn't know - just like there's so much about the Bible that the average American doesn't know. If you want to learn about operating systems, NT is genuinely worth taking a deep look at, for both the successful and unsuccessful things about it, and "I've been using MS Word my whole life" isn't a reason not to look at NT. And even if you just want to work at the operational level, running a Windows environment with AD / Group Policy / etc. is so different from maintaining your personal Windows laptop
The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain De Botton is a very approachable introduction to Socrates, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne, Shopenhauer, and Nietzsche and the practical takeaways from their teachings.
Please just re-read your comment replacing Facebook with either your phone service or email service or USPS. What you said applies to all these three. People are complaining because Facebook gives the perception of connecting people but fails without notifying.
I'll answer here but it's relevant to most comments I got.
True, we can have friendships which are not in meatspace as someone said here. And it's also true that even people you don't meet much could be meaningful friends.
It's also true that Facebook presents it's self as a social network for connecting with our friends and this.might be seen as a failure in that respect.
All that said, Facebook is a product, as a user you have the responsibility to use it wisely considering it's obvious limititations (i.e. nothing is perfect).
If we consider we (the users) and Facebook to be in a customer-provider relationship , then they failed. But not morally, just professionaly, meaning, they provided a not perfect product.
I just dont think we as users are Facebook's customers, we are the product.
Even if we were, I still think the overall responsibility for our relationship with our friends is ours.
I think what irked me the most was the use of this Facebook-algorithms-hurts-society template when it really isn't appropriate. No algorithms wouldn't change the outcome of this event. Without Facebook OP would still don't know about her friend's condition in real time,ormaybe at all.
Usually this template is used to show effects of Facebook's algorithms on society that would never have happened if not for it's algorithms tuned for profit.
If anything, this mindset that finds blame in Facebook s algorithms for an unfortunate but non novel event, is a much more interesting social effect.
Meaning, the total natural delgation of responsibility to a company that uses you as product is pretty mind-blowing.
A big reason of income gap is opportunity gap. We keep widening the opportunity gap by adding 'fast lanes' to people who can afford it, rather than improving the situation for all. In this particular case, perhaps, there is no short term solution to improve for all but it makes me little sad anyway.
It is a common case for other iOS device(s) though. iPad in a family is usually shared across family members. I do wish apple add this feature in iOS, for iPads at least.
Yep. Two iPads for 3 family members here. It's enough, but you have to remember on which one you left your stuff. If it could seamlessly recognize who picked up the tablet and switch to their stuff, no matter what ipad it was originally on, that would be magic.
I wouldn't even mind having a sync server in the house (a desktop mac, maybe) to help with that.
Yes, I'd really appreciate being able to hand my iPad to my daughter knowing she can only access her apps, and ideally for a set period of time. They seem to have this working reasonably well within macOS users.
Remove minimum wage and people are not going to work for 1cent per hour. Further, this is a finite world, with finite resources and finite people. Not every business is viable even without an enforced minimum wage.
Have you ever looked at the possibility where one's family has to move every year or so because landlord decided to increase rent to 'catch up' with market. This is what it looks like in communities where lot of people wants to move in but no rent control. One can move in but will not have any stability.
There's a lot more "catching up" to do in a highly rent-controlled market (assuming you're not subject to rent control). For the same reasons "market rate" is artificially high (as pointed out by the linked article), the "market rate" goes up by a very large percentage each year. If all units were market rate, the market rate would not be increasing by nearly as much.
I live in Somerville, MA, which does not have rent control. My rent has gone up by at least 10% every year for the past 4 years. This is not sustainable.
No, it isn't. Unless inflation is at least 10% as well - and wages keep up.
But imagine if Somerville did have rent control. The minority of units on the market would have rents go up by much, much more than 10% a year, and people who need a new place would be screwed. This is what's happened in SF.
I moved into an apartment in Westchester, NY two years ago. My landlord keeps increasing the rent by 20% every year. It is owned / managed by a large company which owns many apartments in the area; they just keep inflating the rental prices.
I can't deal with this anymore, as a result I have to move out now.
I see nothing wrong here. It's his apartment, and it's market. Want stability -- buy a house, (PS: I'm myself renting for a cheap price because of rent control, but I admit it's a bad system).
It's his apartment, but such high increase is not in line with the market prices, inflation and wage growth.
They are simply banking on the fact that moving for tenants is costly, time consuming and could affect kid's school. Moreover, they only gave me 3 days to decide if I want to renew or move out. They gave the renewal offer 33 days before lease end, and I have to give a notice of 30 days if I want to move out.
Last year, I fell into their trap and gave into the substantially increased rent; but now what they are asking is at least 30% higher than market.
I lived in an apartment complex where the owner raised the rent $50 every month. Rent was $850 and by the time I left it was at $1250. Best to get a lease and not rent month to month sometimes.
Not sure if you tried following for input/output multiplexing -
* Create 5 panes, one for each server
* Ctrl-b :setw synchronize-panes
This should synchronize the input to all panes i.e. type in any
one and it will be sent to all 5. to turn it off, just run the same
command again.
I don't know if tmux has equivalent synchronize-windows.
I guess you are lucky. I had a fall which could had taken me to ER. It happened when I was relatively new to road bike and tried to enter a drive way like a car. Wheel of my bike trammed along the road and sidewalk (about 2 inches high). I lost balance, took a fall on concrete sidewalk. Right side of my helmet took the hit. The impact was severe enough, it was dark (not pitch dark) in front of my eyes for next few seconds. However, I was able to bike back after 15 mins of rest. I can't imagine doing that without the helmet.
Let me be more clear. My point wasn't "don't wear a helmet", my point was the state doesn't need to pass a law to make helmet wearing compulsory. If the government was serious about making cycling safer it would provide better cycling facilities such as protected bike lanes and bike boulevards. People should be able to make the helmet decision themselves.
With that said, I'm really sorry about your accident. I'm glad the helmet protected you and hopefully your fall didn't dissuade you from future cycling. As you get more comfortable riding, your chances of having a freak accident like that will become less and less.
Thanks. I do agree better infrastructure will make bike riding safer. In my opinion helmet is to bike what seat belt is to car.
In general, I'd agree that people should make their own decisions and government do not need to make laws. But I have met couple of families who do not care about seat belt, even for their kids! How do you make such people understand the value of seat belt? Helmet is perhaps in similar situation. Not everyone is able to understand the value of safety devices and as a society we don't want them or their kids to get injured. Making something a law allows other to help such families - we can simply call out "it's a law"
