Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | oraknabo's comments login

You could maybe tie Nabakov's humor to Gogol or Bulgakov, but he doesn't tell complex stories like Tolstoy or the longer Dostoevsky books. Maybe Pale Fire is like Notes from the Underground or Crime & Punishment in a way, but his work isn't really traditional Russian Lit. Nabakov's got as much in common with Joyce & Pynchon as any Russian writers.


I can't imagine trying to manage this on an e-reader. If the notes popped up in a window over the text it would be an ideal way to experience the book, but every epub reader I've ever used makes jumping around a pain and I have a really hard time even hitting the index links on a touchscreen.


Pale Fire is, without a doubt, my favorite thing Nabakov ever wrote. I've been through it at least 5 times but I don't feel as if I've ever fully read it cover-to-cover like other novels. It's just a rough draft of an epic poem (of specious quality) and a bunch of publisher's notes, but it's always intriguing and surprisingly funny.


It is sandwiched between Pnin and Speak, Memory

But I really love Invitation to a Beheading. he wrote in three languages!


"The ex-grad student had poisoned the compiler to poison itself when it was recompiled"

I had something similar to this story happen to a PHP site on shared hosting in the early 2000s that at the time seemed like some kind of cursed magic it was obfuscated so well and reasserted itself every time I tried to edit it out. Luckily replacing all the source files solved it (though the breach itself was a deeper issue). I can't imagine if the problem had gone to the level of the PHP interpreter itself or even deeper how long it would have taken me to find it back then.


I don't know why, but I really like soapstone teaspoons.


I will counter that with.. timesaving negativism.


I’ve seen better.


That one has real meaning too. Being naturally inclined to mentally run through all the worst case scenarios for everything has definitely saved me time over the years.


Over the long run, minimizing the maximally worst cases works.


For people looking for how far back prior art goes, Looking Glass developed an ECS for the Dark Engine on the Thief games (& Irrational used for System Shock 2) in the late 90s.

The version Unity's been building with DOTS was, I believe, being headed by Mike Acton, who's been advocating for years for everyone in the industry to abandon OOP and switch to data-oriented systems. I wonder what he thinks about this.


How did I read that sentence and 1) not question whether this was a real organization and 2) not catch that reference?

Big thanks for pointing this out.


This has to be a joke. If not, the writer seems to be confused by the difference between additive & subtractive color systems.

I admit to not really having any idea what they are getting at in their proposed replacement system and don't see any way it could be helpful in predicting how colors mix in either paint or monitors.


Right, you say additive and subtractive, I think of it as emmissive colors vs reflective colors. That point seems to get ignored.

Some of this is interesting-- like every color is a frequency. But human vision systems are probably not innately tuned to perceive every frequency along a chunk of spectrum with an equal weight. Training and cognition probably influence our acuity in certain parts of the range.


> like every color is a frequency

Hot pink isn't a frequency. It does not appear in the visible light spectrum. You can only produce it by combining multiple "impure" frequencies. You generally produce it by combining a spike of low-frequency red with a spike of high-frequency violet.

Human eyes try to "triangulate" a complex spectral analysis into an absolute position in a colour space, that colour space is the surface of a sphere or torus or something, and hot pink is "between" red and violet. Three-coordinate colour space is very much an artifact of humans, and how human eyes/brains work.


A sub-manifold of the Real Projective Plane RP2


It's not just cognition but physical limitations of our eye.

Through the effect of cognition and training are wastly underestimated in my experience, like look into what the color brown is.


Precisely. That’s also why our screens use RGB emittors: that’s the frequencies our eyes have sensors for.

Pictures shown on a human screen must look really weird for a species with different color vision than us...


It's clearly satire.


I agree, and very good satire it is. They had me going for a minute.


Fiber has been one of the top factors in my own weight control. I've been vegan since the mid 90s, but was slowly adding extra pounds each year. I decided to go on an "if it doesn't have fiber, don't eat it" diet a few years back and lost 60 lbs in 6 months. It massively cut down the sugar and oil in my diet and has consistently helped me control my blood sugar.

One thing I learned is that satiety isn't just about the meal you just ate or how full your stomach just got. If your blood sugar spikes, no matter how big a meal you had or if you ate 4000 calories in one sitting, you'll be hungry again in 3 or 4 hours. Eating a high fiber diet, I can just eat one meal a day or even skip a few days of eating without ever feeling the kind of gnawing hunger I used to get within a few hours of having a full meal.

Aside from blood sugar, fiber is also important because high fiber foods, especially ones with any water content, are usually the lowest calorie density foods and you can eat much larger quantities than you can with highly processed foods. You have to be more careful of highly dehydrated ones like whole grain crackers and dried fruit, but they're still far better and harder to abuse than chips & candy.


I switched from PERL & ColdFusion to PHP back in 2000 and stuck through every version up to 7 for web app development. I've built apps in both Python and C# (mostly game projects) but never got comfortable with either as a web development language.

It was only when I started working in Go a few years back that I was able to completely walk away from PHP. There is literally nothing I was doing with PHP that I can't do in a more satisfying way with Go and I like compiling everything into a single binary when I'm ready to deploy.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: