The theory was that the numbers were issued sequentially and they only kept them around because there was some "prestige" around having a low number. Not sure if that's true, but they did end up changing to a regular Visa card not long after. These cards only worked at that retailer and were originally issued long before the Internet.
Mocking the signs at Facebook started literally the day after they appeared suddenly in the 1601 building. "Break fast and eat things", and so on. There was a very fancy print shop on site and we would work up spoofs on the same equipment.
A large percentage of programmers of a certain generation got their start in the graphic design world.
In the early 2000s, back at the beginning of the world, Yahoo's web code used ^A and ^B for field and record separators to avoid having to escape commas and quotes and newlines. That was probably the last time I ever saw ASCII control characters used as intended in the wild.
There is no technical reason why CSV should have won out, except that keyboards have a comma key and almost never a ^A key.
That's a huge technical obstacle for most people though. The whole point of XSV formats is to be human editable. There are better formats for computer-to computer records. If you can't the core delimiters on a keyboard, your format is going to lose out despite any of us other benefits
It's an editor issue then. "Back in the old days", people used to understand how to input ^A and ^B. Showing these characters is also only a mere addition in the character set.
Sure, there is inertia to change, but even rich text format is/was supported by windows.
Being unable to deal with this is a lazyness of the developer that spilled into the user being unable to deal with it.
This is nothing a user can't be trained on, and I'd argue it makes more sense than weird escaping sequences in the event you actually do want a ",".
P.S.: But then again, with proper editors the escaping issue vanishes - and no, I do not mean IDE's. Lots of people decided it was worth it to support rtf, I figure the decision to support 2 additional characters is way easier in a user friendly way.
That doesn't need to be an obstacle, a graphical editor that lets you click a button to add a row/column exists for nearly every other tabular format. It only matters if you want to edit the file using a plaintext editor. If the format were popular, shortcuts would be created to enter the delimiters in many plaintext editors too, which is a chicken/egg problem but let's not kid ourselves into thinking it's not a solvable problem.
If you're using a bespoke editor anyway, why are you restricting yourself to a texty format? XSV formats inhabit this weird space halfway between data exchange and human readable. They're a compromise. If you go full data exchange you might as well use something even better suited for the job.
You don't really have to have a bespoke editor, you just have to display the control characters sanely in an otherwise normal plaintext editor and add a shortcut or menu item to insert the control characters.
H. P. Lovecraft is a good example from literature. He was profoundly racist, even beyond the cultural norms of his time. However, as he has long since passed away buying and amplifying his works do not further his views and causes.
A modern counterexample would be J. K. Rowling. Where supporting her works and properties does directly contribute to furthering her prejudices in a very real way.
buying and amplifying his works do not further his views and causes
i'd rephrase that. it does not support the artist to allow him to continue spreading his views and causes, but it still draws attention to him, and potentially lets people learn about it. even this discussion here. i would not have known about lovecrafts or rowlings views if it weren't for reading about it on hackernews some time ago.
however an even more important concern is how much of these views are woven into the stories. as such it is important to at least be aware. i have ignored harry potter until now but my kids are getting interested, and so i am keeping a close eye on what they are watching for that reason.
First thing is to differentiate with how long the person is dead.
For example, when I accompanied my daughter class to a museum last year, there was a sewed reproduction of the Minotaur by Picasso (the artist exposed was a woman and this was just a collaboration she made with him). To say the least, the history behind the work is not the most glamorous. Would you explain the context to a 7 years class? But Picasso is so close in time, that his direct descendent have financial interest in exploiting the artistic legacy.
Now if you consider some artist like those who made graphic arts in Lasceau cave, of even someone as close and individually nameable as Katsushika Hokusai that died before the world wide madness of "intellectual property", that's a very different matter.
> But Picasso is so close in time, that his direct descendent have financial interest in exploiting the artistic legacy.
I wouldn't be concerned by this specifically. His relatives likely suffered from him being a jerk, I don't mind them at least benefiting from his work. I'm more concerned about Picasso being put on a pedestal.
I don't think I would be against exposing his art with the whole context though.
There can still be a moral concern if the artist is seen as a (role) model / genius and consuming / promoting their art causes the artist to be seen as a model for longer, potentially making it look like what they did is okay or forgiven given the art. We totally need a strong signal that doing good art doesn't forgive or allow being a jerk so jerks are not encouraged to take this path.
Another thing to have in mind: beside moral concerns, often, you can't separate the artist form the art because the art reflects the artist; you'd miss out on the interpretation of the art.
Sometimes the artist put too much of themselves in the work. For example: I tried reading Orson Scott Card's Iron Man comics and there was just too much homophobic nonsense throughout.
i stopped reading the ringworld series by larry niven when i found that he kept repeating how sex was used to seal a business transaction. it added nothing to the story and just seemed like wishful thinking from the author.
i can't blame them for it. it's only natural. when i write there is a lot of my personality in it too. in part that is the point and in many cases it is what makes a work worth reading. unless it makes the story unreadable like in our examples.
I read the whole series and don't remember this at all, even a single example let alone appearing so repeatedly that it became noticeable and annoying.
I'm not saying I don't believe you. Whatever it is you're talking about is probably in there.
I'm saying maybe you were just super sensitive to something that was actually insignificant.
that's possibly true. it wasn't in all of the books, but at least in the one where i stopped reading. and it was insignificant because it served no purpose in the plot. what bothered me was not the reference to sex but the fact that it made no sense in the story and that it was treated as something as casual as a handshake and it simply felt like it was the authors personal fantasy.
and if i may say so, i suspect that in general reference to sex is so common that many of us don't notice. it doesn't bother me but i simply don't care for it when it's not a significant plot element. i grew up without any exposure to this kind of theme.
I agree. We all make our own decisions. I won't say someone is wrong for making a different decision. For me, there are people who's product I won't use because they are a jerk and I don't want to contribute to their financial success. But if that same jerk was one of the creators of a commonly used language that is ubiquitous I won't avoid it because that person doesn't financially benefit from it.
If a murderer creates a file system/energy source/mouse trap that is effectively better than all of the alternatives, and generates value to the world, what he did in his personal life is effectively moot. There is no ethics problem involved in choosing the best solution to a problem, when that solution exists.
If financially supporting said murderer allows them to continue to possibly murder more, then I would say there is a moral dilemma. Less so when the murderer is in jail and unlikely to ever really benefit from your using said solution.
Which gladly rarely happens, so often you still have sufficient choice. Now, if it turns out Euler sabotaged some bridges and caused deaths, you'd still have a hard time avoiding using e.
But for software? It's usually rather easy to find alternatives. And ReiserFS never was an exception here.
The idea of “stochastic death” is a dangerous and unhelpful escalation of rhetoric that amounts to an excuse to call someone a murderer because they said something you disagree with. It’s the idea that Biden was somehow a “partial murderer” because he said something that might have, possibly, maybe, influenced a wacko to attempt an assassination on Trump. If we start calling everyone a type of murderer, it cheapens the word, dishonors the victims of actual murder, and hardens hearts with hate and fear of the dreaded Other when what the tribalists need most is a little mutual understanding.
Bill Gates multi decade marriage came to an end after his closeness with Epstein became public. I don't think anyone stopped buying ms software because of it.
Ok, he no longer works there, but I'm sure he still benefits from it.
If a video were released of Bill with a minor then I'd expect Microsoft to take a huge hit. Though it'd have to be irrefutable video. Because we've seen other Epstein accomplices thrive despite circumstancal evidence, like a certain real estate mogul.
Another n=1, but it depends. Outside interruptions when I'm on a tear are horrible. I don't often distract myself with a full-featured computer. In fact I often spin off into "research" or fiddling with fonts as a way to let my background brain do its work. I do a fair amount of editing on my phone (!) when on transit or generally goofing off.
From "tearing paper", a continuous ripping action, giving rise to the english idiom "he went on a tear" .. as in "started partying and didn't stop" or "started coding and didn't stop".
It's quite interesting looking in to it. The verb "tear" has had a meaning of vigorous haste/rushing since the 16th century so the "on a tear" idiom from the 19th century likely comes from the notion of haste rather than pulling apart material.
I believe "on a tear" was mostly used to communicate a sudden violent action rather than continuity e.g. "stock goes on a tear" not because of a steady continuous rise but because it undergoes a sudden violent change of state from flat-lining to vertical. You might be a "tearabout" or a "tearaway" if impetuous, reckless or hard to control.
I can imagine idioms like "tearing up the track" are pleasing in two meanings of the word e.g. that a horse might "tear down the track" in both haste but also in how torn up the track is from their hooves. Same with a speeding car in the days of dirt roads.
However, in modern use, especially about "productive" behaviours, I think it has lost some of the violence and gained more of the continuity sense supported by the pleasing visual imagery of e.g. scissors gliding through wrapping paper.
As a native English speaker I was aware of the older meaning, however as someone that often "quickly explains english" to ESL folk and|or non-Commonwealth English backgrounds I went with "tearing paper" as a starting point as it felt more likely to be familiar.
This is consistent with your last paragraph re: modern usage.
I've got a much thumbed multi volume OED edition on my shelves .. it's boggling how many words have half page or more entries with multiple meanings and historical backstory.
Yeah, I look up etymology because I love how there are millennia of human culture condensed in a word as it migrates and evolves across classes, cultures and languages. Will it be Norse, Germanic, Latin or maybe Dravidic? Will it have been loaned from x to y to z and then back to x with new meanings?
I had hoped it might have come from reading rapidly in the days of uncut pages where you have to eagerly tear each new page to read it. But no, lol.
A SIM card is an often-overlooked "what you have" second factor, yes leaving aside phone company social engineering hacks.
I made the mistake of buying an iphone on a trip to US, which is eSIM only. The tech works fine --Google Fi is a pretty good example-- but I later traded that phone for the exact same "international" model, traded even plus cash, to get my slot back.
I discovered French drains while trying to dig a hole for a fruit tree a while back. The land was on a hill and about 30cm down I hit this huge pile of dirty gravel. Ok, so maybe someone filled that spot with gravel. Sunk another hole a bit farther down. More gravel, etc. It took me longer than i'd like to admit to figure it out.
Turns out it was the main drainage for the whole neighborhood. Heh. Moved my tree to the side and it thrived on all that lovely water.
Tree should be far away from the drain line. The roots will eventually grow into the pipe. Tree roots are incredible at finding water sources. Even a drop-at-a-time drip from a water pipe will be completely root wrapped in a few years.
Funny, that happened to a neighbor. There was this teeny crack in a pipe, and a tree root had squeezed into it then ballooned into this alien creature that blocked the drain in an attempt to suck out the water.
Fertilizer would be welcome, pesticides less so. Fortunately, one doesn't really need pesticides on lawns, particularly if one doesn't have a dislike of non-grass species (like clover, which helps with fertilizing anyway).
That might depend on where you are. In my part of the US, fertilizer runoff is causing very serious problems. This is mostly from farms, of course, but domestic lawn care is a major source as well.
The push around here isn't to get people to stop using it entirely, but to follow proper practices that minimize the runoff.
I live in a very high tick area in upstate NY, and I've never seen this. I certainly don't do it and have had no problems. Now, if I wander just off the lawn into the woods, I better be wearing my permethrin clothes.
About ten years ago I got my hands on some of the last production FusionIO SLC cards for benchmarking. The software was an in-memory database that a customer wanted to use with expanded capacity. I literally just used the fusion cards as swap.
After a few minutes of loading data, the kernel calmed down and it worked like a champ. Millions of transactions per second across billions of records, on a $500 computer... and a card that cost more than my car.
Definitely wouldn't do it that way these days, but it was an impressive bit of kit.
I worked at a place where I can say, FusionIO saved the company. W e had a single Postgres database which powered a significant portion of the app. We tried the kick off a horizontal scale project to little success around it - turns out that partitioning is hard on a complex, older codebase.
Somehow we end up with a FusionIO card in tow. We go from something like 5,000 read QPS to 300k reads QPS on pgbench using the cheapest 2TB card.
Ever since then, I’ve always thought that reaching for vertical scale is more tenable than I originally thought. It turns out hardware can do a lot more than we think.
The slightly better solution for these situations is to set up a reverse proxy that sends all GET requests to a read replica and the server with the real database gets all of the write traffic.
But the tricky bit there is that you may need to set up the response to contain the results of the read that is triggered by a successful write. Otherwise you have to solve lag problems on the replica.
You can get up to, I think, half a thousand cores in a single server, with multiple terabytes of RAM. You could run the entirety of Wikipedia's or Stack Overflow's o Hacker News's business logic in RAM on one server, though you'd still want replicas for bandwidth scaling and failover. Vertical scaling should certainly get back in vogue.
Not to mention that individual servers, no matter how expensive, cost a tiny fraction of the equivalent cloud.
Remember the LMAX Disruptor hype? Their pattern was essentially to funnel all the data for the entire business logic onto one core, and make sure that core doesn't take any bullshit - write the fastest L1-cacheable nonblocking serial code with input and output in ring buffers. Pipelined business processes can use one core per pipeline stage. They benchmarked 20 million transactions per second with this pattern - in 2011. They ran a stock exchange on it.
Back when the first Intel SSDs were coming out, I worked with an ISP that had an 8 drive 10K RAID-10 array for their mail server, but it kept teetering on the edge of not being able to handle the load (lots of small random IO).
As an experiment, I sent them a 600GB Intel SSD in laptop drive form factor. They took down the secondary node, installed the SSD, and brought it back up. We let DRBD sync the arrays, and then failed the primary node over to this SSD node. I added the SSD to the logical volume, then did a "pvmove" to move the blocks from the 8 drive array to the SSD, and over the next few hours the load steadily dropped down to nothing.
It was fun to replace 8x 3.5" 10K drives with something that fit comfortably in the palm of my hand.
