I agree with most of his points. I stopped reading Slashdot because I didn't like how the voting affected my interaction with the site, and I went cold turkey on Reddit and haven't been back (or even missed it) for maybe a year now. Maybe I should ditch my HN account too. Other than as an experiment in how to craft an inoffensive comment that will be accepted by the tiny subset of humanity who lurk here, it doesn't really have much benefit.
What a shame there's no "delete account" option. Should I do something unutterably awful to get pg's attention (accuse him of murdering kittens or raping puppies or writing software in Visual C++?) or shall I just do as the OP did and change my password to something unmemorable? If I change my email to a random mailinator account, that will make password recovery impossible too, I suspect.
It's kind of crazy that there's no "forgot password" option. I can understand not allowing account deletion, because you don't want to break conversations by having someone's comments mass-deleted, but not having a password retrieval mechanism is just foolish. Amateur hour incarnate. This does not look like a system designed by someone who's making a real commitment.
I've wondered the same thing. He returned under the same username, so it looks like he recovered his password somehow. Matt is a Y Combinator alumnus, so it's possible he talked to PG directly.
It's an intriguing idea, but like the correlation between margarine consumption and divorce, or the rise in global warming and the reduction in pirates, it needs more than intrigue. Perhaps the Grauniad article will give it enough publicity that it will be studied and meta-studied, and who knows? Correlation may imply causation this time.
As another commenter here pointed out, it's preferred, not correct. This is the old prescriptivist vs descriptivist debate, as seen among linguists. (Disclaimer: I am not a linguist. I just read Language Log.) If you're fretting about the correct this and the proper that (prepositions at the end of sentences, "whom" instead of "who", and so on), you're a prescriptivist, and you may (note, I said may) be making up rules where no rules are needed. I prefer descriptivism (as in: "nauseous" now means the same thing as "nauseated", which is different from its old meaning of "nausea-making", because that's how it's used).
(Edit: "different to" sounded wrong. I could never remember which way that goes.)
As an aside to your edit, I have also seen "different than" used more and more often of late. I'm not sure if it is an Americanism that I was just unaware of. It's not that "different than" is wrong, it's just different from what I'm used to!
In Year Eight at school, I had an English teacher who liked to mix things up a little. One time, I was answering a question in class, and I used "different to" or "different from" or something -- maybe even "different than", I don't remember now. The teacher told me to stand up, then explained that there was a right form and a wrong form for this, and got everyone to pick sides -- "than" here, "from" there and "to" over there. Then I bamboozled him, because I noticed that the smartest girl in the class, a gorgeous lass who gloried in the surname of Snodgrass, had picked a different side, so I reasoned that she was more likely right and defected to the same group. The teacher was deeply annoyed that I apparently didn't have the courage of my convictions; my point, which I understood instinctively even at that age, was that embarrassing a student to make a point was a totally shit way to educate people, and if he was going to place such a high premium on game playing in class, he could call me Kobayashi Maru.
To this day, I still can't remember which is correct - "than", "from" or "to". But I can remember the look on his face, and the fact that after that he stuck with slightly less aggravating teaching methods.
I believe that "different from" is most common across all dialects of English: http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxdiffer.html (Note: This only compares UK English and American English, not "all dialects".)
For the most part, I don't think these kinds of issues are caused by disagreements in linguistic philosophy. Most people are taught language in a way which encourages them to think in a prescriptivist way, and they simply never learn about descriptivism.
My theory was that the govt wasn't letting him back in the country because someone saw the Hitch Hiker's Guide movie and decided to enforce a minimum standard...
The former government (centre-right Labor party) promised FTTH or FTTP (Fibre To The Home/Premises) but that was scrapped when the slightly-less-centre-and-more-far-right Liberal party got in and proposed FTTN (Fibre To The Node). The "Node" is a box at the end of every street, from which the existing (and rotting) copper network would theoretically connect to each home. Needless to say the idea is profoundly stupid.
FTTH is still available if you want to pay thousands of dollars for your connection, of course. We call this FTTR: Fibre To The Rich.
I learned Turbo Pascal in an MS-DOS emulator running on old green-screen Burroughs smart terminals, circa 1987. I knew the terminals had some sort of graphics capacity because their font changed when they left VMS mode and started emulating MS-DOS, so I wrote a program to rummage around in memory until I found where the font designs were stored. Then I wrote a font editor that changed the standard font whenever I logged in, to a design based on my own handwriting. After that, I took a leaf out of the Microbee computer's books and emulated hi-res graphics: I wrote a program that printed all the ASCII characters from 33 to 255 in a rectangle, set their font definitions to all zeroes, and then selectively set individual pixels back on according to a pattern that assumed the exact layout of characters. Implemented line, circle, flood fill and a few other graphics primitives. Fun!
One of my first "public" programs that I made was written in Turbo Pascal and was a read me style app for a demo group (I wasn't anywhere near capable of doing what the rest of the group could do - but at least I found a way to contribute) - I used a custom made font, had a scrolling buffer etc - always nice to take a stroll down memory lane.
Pretty sure it was the way hi-res graphics worked on the VIC-20 too -- 22 characters by 8 pixels per character = 176 pixels wide, multi-colour mode where each block of 8x8 pixels had a background and a foreground colour. Deeply freaky.
The Vic also had a mode whereby you could make "double height" characters (halving the number of addressable rows), so when you typed "a", it would emit (iirc):
a
b
and when you typed "b", it would emit:
c
d
When I was about 8, I fooled with this peeking and poking pixels so that "a" and "b" bitmaps where the top and bottom halves of a double-height "a", through to the end of the alphabet. I imagined that this would make it easy for my grandparents to use computers. Never mind that they couldn't type, had no interest, and would never remember commands like "load $,8,1".
On the ZX81 and ZX Spectrum, they called them "User-Defined Graphics" or UDGs. I think I wrote a pixel-flipping grid font editor for characters on every computer I had access to! The ZX81, the ZX Spectrum, the Apple II (once I noticed that one of the games I had (Taipan?) hooked the text output routines into a hires character generator), and eventually various x86 programming environments, although there you were editing bitmaps, not changing the character generator source. :-)
Alright this is the most awesome post I've read all day :) I really need to get to work putting together the kit Microbee that's currently sitting on my other desk....
Are you old enough to remember daisy wheel printers? Basically, the computerised equivalent of a typewriter, with the individual letters on a daisy-like wheel that spun around under computer control to produce slow but "letter quality" printing. When I showed people my handwriting font, they were very impressed and asked if my printouts would be in my handwriting too. Given that the only printers we had were daisy wheels, I suggested that perhaps this would not be happening.
Some daisywheel printers could be coerced to print high-resolution graphics, by repeatable printing a few zillion periods and using the variable line spacing and tab settings.
'Fast' was not a word one would use to describe them, though, even compared to the matrix printers that took minutes for each page of high-resolution output.
Coming back to the original post, I wrote a proof-of-concept Braille output program for a daisy wheel printer. Basic idea was: take a line of text input, eg "hello". Convert to Braille ("⠓⠑⠇⠇⠕"), but reverse the dot patterns to make "⠪⠸⠸⠊⠚"). Sandwich a sheet of paper towel between two sheets of paper, feed it into the printer and print the reversed dots using "." and space, micro-positioned.
Theoretical result: raised dots punched into the paper by the daisy wheel, able to be read by a blind person.
Actual result: the proportions were wrong for reading, and most of the time the paper jammed on the roller because of the padding.
Looks like you right click on a cubelet to make it active, but in Firefox under Linux that pops up a right-click menu. Double-click would have been a better choice for that functionality.
Logic says that someone who spends more time in front of a computer is less healthy than someone who spends less time in front of a computer. I think it's solid enough logic that the onus is on you to provide evidence to the contrary. But hell, geeks should be able to find actual evidence; that's what geeks do.
everything else being more or less equal , the person with the lifestyle of 6 hours a day will probably be less healthy than the person on 30 minutes a day
What a shame there's no "delete account" option. Should I do something unutterably awful to get pg's attention (accuse him of murdering kittens or raping puppies or writing software in Visual C++?) or shall I just do as the OP did and change my password to something unmemorable? If I change my email to a random mailinator account, that will make password recovery impossible too, I suspect.