The way to think about it is that you're processing a list, where the first argument is an operation, and the subsequent arguments are numbers to add. Clojure, and other Lisp based languages use this structure (a list) for representing everything - both data and functions. It turns out to be a very simple yet endlessly flexible and extensible concept.
I was looking for an Org-Mode type solution for vscode, and was surprised to find that it's basically no longer being actively developed! [1]
Really surprised by this. I would have thought there would be at least a small and thriving community of people that want to use org-mode, but with vscode. What gives?
Might be because org-mode outside of emacs has little worth, while markdown is more dominating. On emacs you have gazillion tools and apps enriching the org-sphere, which for vs code you would need to replicate all by yourself. And the format itself is just not good enough to survive on it's own IMHO.
The format is only a small part of org-mode. It's an outliner with lots of functionality. If I had to guess, I'd say you either use the full Emacs implementation or an app like Dynalist. A partial implementation in VS Code just doesn't have much of a market.
I use Dynalist, but would love to use FOSS for something this important (I dont use Emacs because it's hard on the eyes and seems to lack all drag and drop support).
Does org mode generally support the kind of infinite nesting Dynalist does? Mostly seeing documents with it and the vscode plugin not even coloring after level 5 anymore indicates to me "no".
Dynalist is great. I'd use it, but I've been burned enough by "free" plans in the past, and $100 a year is a lot more than I'm willing pay when org-mode is available for free. Plus I have to be online to use Dynalist.
I can't speak for the VS Code plugin, but I'm not aware any limits on depth in Emacs. I can't say I often go more than four deep. If you mean zooming (the killer feature of Dynalist IMO) it's possible in Emacs. You can turn the current subtree into its own org file.
I might try out Org mode at some point on desktop, but I also need something for mobile. I know Orgzly exists, but it seems quite clunky. When I'm in jotting-down mode I can add a bullet point every few seconds and I get the feeling that Org mode just isn't quite designed for that.
> You can turn the current subtree into its own org file.
As in "you can not just zoom in within a file"? That'd be super annoying when wanting to focus on one thing quickly.
Regarding being burned by free plans: I don't know how it works for them economically, but in general they seem like incredibly generous and wonderful people. Full export in a plain text format and OPML are one click in the app/CURL request with the right cookies to dynalist.io/backup away. They're quite responsive and nice on Twitter. When the service was down for a few hours pretty exactly a year ago (that means no sync, but the desktop app still works with local data) they gave everyone 2 weeks of premium as an apology (the main benefits are inline pictures and a sideways tree view, so it's not that appealing).
Maybe they'll make me pay at some point and I think it's worth about 5€ per month to me, beyond that it'd get me uncomfortable considering how polished, but fundamentally simple the service is. If there was such a plan I'd actually get it just to support them, since the service is quite amazing.
Long-term I'd like to have a FOSS app that can do more complex graphs than just trees, with different views and such (imagine a relational-type list of things that you can categorize by different attributes), but Dynalist is by far the best thing I have seen so far.
I fear Org mode just quite doesn't fit my use case, as I think it also doesn't save whether a node is collapsed or not.
That's sad but understandable. I started using org-mode via the Android app Orgzly, then I used vscode to edit the files Orgzly produced. I found that the vscode solution wasn't able to do everything I wanted, so I switched to Spacemacs.
During 1999-2000, I helped hundreds of people learn how to use Flash. I was, looking back now, probably one of the top experts on Flash 4 at the time in the world. The twist - I was a 15 year old living in a tiny African country called Lesotho.
Lesotho is pretty isolated from the world. Nobody even knows it exists. Living there, Silicon Valley might as well be on Mars.
However, we used to get issues of Wired Magazine from South Africa, and these came with shareware CDs. These CDs included 30-day trial editions of Macromedia Flash.
Flash was amazing at the time. Being able to create interactive animations blew my mind. I learned Flash 4 completely inside and out. I knew every single feature, every single quirk.
Of course living in Lesotho, there was nothing I could really do with all this. Most people around me didn't even know how to use computers. Flash was several layers of abstraction away from that.
So I used to spend all my time on Yahoo Chat's Web Design chat rooms. Mainly hanging out with nerds in the US. We used to have countless people drop by in the rooms every day asking questions about Flash. Mainly people working for web design agencies in the US. I was the resident Flash expert. Flash questions always were referred to me.
In the 2000s Flash rightly got a lot of flak. I'm not sad it's gone. But it was really something special, especially in the late 90s.
Flash is the reason why I'm a programmer today. It was Flash which kindled my interest in computers and made sure I spent hours playing around with it and then other aspects of computers.
That era of discovery and expression was something special.
I had a similar experience. I learned ActionScript pretty early on (around age age 16 or so) because it was easier to get something visual built than any other thing I had used, while still feeling like "real" programming.
AS3 is actually quite a pleasant language to work in, and while I'm glad that I don't need to muck with Flash plugins anymore, I do miss how easy it was to get something built when I was just bored and wanted to make a new toy.
For me, nothing has really come along to replace Flash in regards to the "tangible" feelings you get. JS and WebGL and Canvas and whatnot are great, and definitely lead to better results in regards to the user experience, but I feel that they're a lot harder to "pick up and play".
Also, it was really easy to reverse engineer a flash file. One could just import the .fla file into flash and see a lot of stuff that was going behind the scene - assets and action scripts were easily available to explore. This was my favourite way to get better at flash; I would go to templatemonster.com and browse through all the cool flash websites they had, then navigate to the temp folder of IE and then copy paste all the .fla files into my own personal folder for later dissection.
Same here. Neil Cicierega and Weebl's crazy antics are what got me interested in basic programing way back when I was 12-13. From there I started doing more and more complicated things in Actionscript. Sure I didn't learn any theory and produced awful code -- but I got a conceptual idea of programming that has helped me feel comfortable tackling new languages today.
Making a dance video to Monty Python's "Camelot" song is what made me learn about sprite sheets and motion techniques. It encouraged me to start googling different camera angles to figure out how to frame my shots.
That's why I love seeing kids playing with Minecraft, as it contains many of the same elements that I was playing with when I was a kid. Now if we could only get them into Dwarf Fortress, THEN we'd be talking. :) Speaking of which, that steam launch is supposed to be soon.
Flash is also what got me into programming. I started by making incredibly shitty knockoffs of stick figure videos on YouTube in flash mx 2004, then realized it also had the power to make games, and it went from there
Curious and feel free to ignore, what was your screenname on the yahoo web design chat rooms? I also hung around there a lot around that time using one of those embarrassing screennames made by teens and their favourite songs (renegade_master)
I was one of the people constantly wishing flash would die. Although I am happy the open web won that battle, I was always hoping and am sad that nothing based on open standards came to replace it.
Lol, hey renegade_master_uk! I was ashido (and various permutations of that name) in those rooms. I jumped ship from server-side to go work on Flash applications in the early 2000s, then back to JS near Flash 9/10 (when the writing was on the wall), then back again to server-side.
There is still a huge amount of amazing content in flash, tons of games and movies on sites like newgrounds.
The older ones are fully self contained games, some of which are amazing, in a single swf file that works in all major operating systems (The newer ones started side loading data from servers though.)
I hope there will always remain ways to play those.
Was there a "computing hotspot" where you were at the time? I think with all the school issues (and university issues) in South Africa it would be cool to have sort of (physical) computing libraries with Raspberry Pis or something like that–a sort of enabling environment where independent kids would at least have the resources necessary to build an eventual career for themselves (perhaps unwittingly at first).
I am South African so yes, I don't have any imperial ambitions in that regard. But having said that, Lesotho is rather dependant on South Africa (as OP hints). My question was really whether he was an outlier or whether his friends or immediate environment had a lot of (aspiring) coders.
In Southern Africa in general there was probably < 5% internet penetration back then.
Tiled. We’ve built a truly no-code/no-new-design-tool interactive experience builder. Https://Tiled.co
What people don’t often realize with flash was that the output was a file. Tiled is taking a similar approach in that we are “documentizing” interactive experiences. We call the output a microapp (think .swf) and these can be experienced as an embedded experience (both native and browser-based), offline/online, through their app or other platforms.
Yes - City would be great for people doing stuff around activities, events and local places. But Country would be more powerful for e-commerce I suspect (my usecase).
Stories like this are often instigated by someone inside the organization with an agenda. They reach out to a journalist, give some quotes anonymously, and put them in touch with others in the company that are allies and will also give supporting quotes.
This article feels like an article designed to pressure Marc Lore to leave.
Losing $1B on $22B in revenue, after just 3 years of really starting this bet is nothing!
> One other factor to keep in mind, though it’s unclear if it contributes to the Foran-Lore tension: In past years, Foran’s annual performance bonus has been heavily tied to the operating profit of Walmart’s US business, which includes the e-commerce division that Lore runs. Walmart’s US operating profit hasn’t, however, factored into Lore’s annual bonus.
Lore is operating like a startup, not focused on short-term profits.
Meanwhile, Walmart's US CEO, Greg Foran has his compensation tied to annual results, which include Lore's operations.
If accurate, this reads like Incentives 101, and it reflects poorly on Doug McMillon, Walmart's overall CEO.
Maybe it's my limited experience, but it always seemed to me that the people that shop at walmart genuinely enjoy the idea of shopping at walmart (going to the physical store to get a good deal on a product) and aren't the type to buy walmart products online.
Their products aren't even that good, surely more of them aren't going to hold up to online competition either.
I also never got the feeling that walmart shoppers are "i need same day delivery" types. they're in it for the bargains. You tell them an option is going to be slightly cheaper, they'll go for it.
I feel like they should keep the focus on their brick and mortar stores and forget about trying to compete with amazon.
Walmart has been known to put pressure on brands to reduce the cost of their products. Sometimes they can find the cost savings in the economy of scale of doing business with Walmart. Sometimes they find cost savings by making a cheaper product.
Buying something from Wal-Mart is far from a seal of quality.
Same! I received a 20,000 mAh store-brand battery from WalMart a while back, and it works really well, was a good value, and can run a Pi forever. Same goes for the HDMI -> RCA adapter of theirs that I literally asked my mom to get (she's not technical, and managed to get exactly what I needed, which is great!)
Yay, WalMart! (And Best Buy, for that matter- their online pick-it-up-in-five-minutes option is amazing.)
That's an outdated stereotype. I think they're really moving in the right direction.
Their deliveries are on point, the self checkout works perfectly, they're even a store pick up service where you just pull up to designated parking stops and the attendants load up your trunk with order which is ready by time you arrive at the shop.
It's a lot harder to get your product on a Walmart shelf than having it listed on Amazon. There's an existential quality assurance when you buy from Walmart than Amazon.
I always felt like people go to wal mart just because it has everything and it's cheap. And their products have always been fine for me. Recently bought a ton of stuff there for my first bike and no complaints.
Nope. I shop at Walmart and hate the experience of going to the store. I just hate it less than the counterfeit products on amazon or getting ripped off elsewhere.
1996: -$6.4m on $15.7m sales || 1997: -$32m on $147m sales || 1998: -$109m on $609m sales || 1999: -$605m on $1.63b sales || 2000: -$863m on $2.76b sales || 2001: -$412m on $3.12b sales
In 2002, as a forced result of the dotcom crash and stock market plunge (their ability to continue to fund such red ink was in question), they had to expedite getting to operating break-even and turned off the spending spree they were using to get big artificially fast. They turned a $64m operating profit in 2002 on $3.9b in sales. Positive operating income climbed to $440m by 2004.
Not really. They were profitable, they just invested heavily in infrastructure (warehouses) and developing new services (AWS).
Amazon lost about $2 billion in their first six years of operations.
And Walmart's online presence would be profitable now if they weren't investing heavily in infrastructure (20 fulfillment centers trying to catch up to Amazon's 110) and new services (online catalog to match Amazon's).
That's a really big claim. No, technically they were not profitable for several years. Then, in the last 10-12 years, you are right that they invested heavily in R&D and everyone knows that one story.
Title is incorrect. This is not on Mechanical Turk. Tasks like this are not allowed on MTurk as per TOS. The original tweet author says so on the thread.
>heads up that this is NOT from @amazonmturk! black hat SEO/shady reputation management techniques like this are strictly against amzn's policy. this is from a competing micro task site
The title makes it seem like intentional click-bait, given this.
As a child in primary school (in Lesotho, southern Africa): when a teacher left the classroom everyone was supposed to silently complete work. To enforce this, one student would be appointed "name taker". This person would write down the names of anyone who spoke while the teacher was out. Punishment for being on the list was often physical.
One day I was made the name taker while the teacher was out. Most kids stayed quiet, but two other segments emerged: the scycophants and the outlaws.
The sycophants would attempt to "help" me identify noise makers by pointing them out. In exchange they would hope to be safe from the list, and would use that immunity/privilege to lord over other kids.
The outlaws were kids who, once they were added to the list, talked and joked freely, knowing that they were doomed anyway. They felt they were fearless, and they goaded others to join them.
I've always remembered this experience, for how quickly a group of children organized themselves into social dynamics that echoed human systems more generally.
Oh, that looks familiar. But I still can’t tell if that was a good thing in terms of social experience or just a misuse of our behavior. Neither is it clear if a teacher knew what s/he doing or was just lazy.
I usually refrained from these activities, but most interesting was that physics teacher took few well-learning people from our class and suggested to create homeworks and then evaluate everyone’s success on it (scores were official). Social heat raised pretty quickly and two of us refrained from that openly. The punishment was that we went to the passive group. Obviously we got A’s, since we were good in physics. For a few that seemed like an act of heroism. Though it wasn’t really – we should have say fck it from the beginning.
Another case was that a teacher who knew me personally asked me to watch for another problematic class. I was around 16 back then and it was somewhat clear that once someone’s name is on the list, I couldn’t prevent them from doing anything. Nobody did make it there, but it was a pretty hard game of authority leverages and group behavior. I wasn’t much stressed, but... it is interesting experience since in a school you rarely have tasks that have no clear answer. 2+2 is 4, F is ma, but there is no answer to what you do with people to make them
obey the rules. (edit: grammar)
Thanks for making me remember all that! (And for leaving that neverending zimbardo/milgram discussion at the bottom)
If I were appointed name-taker in that situation, I would never actually take any names, only ever reporting that everyone remained silent.
Reporting someone for punishment, even if deserved, would only ever come back badly on me. (Unless I'm missing some incentive for reporting someone, in which case I need to ask what would deter me from wrongly reporting someone just to get the reward.)
Your suggested approach was exactly what I did when I had gone through a similar system in Myanmar as the OP described above, where lazy teachers leave managing the class to students among themselves.
Stay as neutral as possible so that it doesn't bite back at you when the name-taker is someone else. It worked for the most part because my classmates would start recommending me to be the name taker and in return, I told them to not make too much noise when talking during teacher's absence.
It's not that simple. There are two very different kinds of "ratting out":
1. Reporting a crime to the police so they can check and sort it out if needed. This is extremely prevalent in Western societies and seems predicated on trust in the police to do the right thing. Examples: people reporting screams for help they overhear from a street; drivers reporting erratic behavior of other drivers on the road.
2. Knowingly reporting a thought crime to overzealous authorities that will severely punish for that crime, sometimes knowingly falsely, sometimes for your own benefit. Example: telling your local uchastkovuy that your noisy neighbors were doing anti-soviet jokes in the hope of getting rid of them.
In a lot of post-soviet countries there was a lot the latter and none of the former (in fact, a lot of Russians think the former is "ratting out" and is immoral). In Russia there were numerous cases of people being killed or raped in places where dozens or hundreds could hear the screams for help, with no one actually calling the police. On the other hand, you can be pretty sure that shady stuff happening on a Western city street will lead to police response.
It's kinda hard to tell where the exact boundary between those two kinds of behaviors is, especially lately with all the pushback against drug prohibition (is reporting someone smoking a spliff in Stockholm moral?). But it exists.
The "you don't rat" mentality is also very prevalent in ghettos or "the street" (as well as in left-wing activism circles). A well written account on it is the HBO series The Wire.
I think it's pretty commonly understood that integrity can include not compromising your values in the face of consequences. Often, the value against lying is fairly weak compared to other values. In fact, contemplating lying to authorities to prevent another's (often unjust) punishment is a pretty common topic in explaining different philosophical systems.
It's really just a variation on the trolley problem.
> I've always remembered this experience, for how quickly a group of children organized themselves into social dynamics that echoed human systems more generally.
Which makes perfect sense when you remember than children are, in fact, human.
I had a similar experience in primary school in Spain (though punishment was never phisical).
The incentive is that if the class is made of, say, 30 kids, you are appointed once and then suffer through the appointments of the other 29 kids (a little less in practice since known troublemakers won't be put in 'power' for obvious reasons). There are plenty of opportunities for mob punishment if your mates don't feel you're being fair.
>I had a similar experience in primary school in Spain (though punishment was never phisical).
Same in Italy, though I never recall any actual punishment (not physical nor on paper) was ever administered on the base of these - let's say "opinionated" - reports.
The blackboard was divided in two columns by a vertical chalk line, on the left one would write at the top "good" and on the right "bad".
It was mostly a game (I believe it was intentional to just keep us kids busy while the teacher was briefly away) and a way for the kids to exercise in knowing the names of all the kids and reading and writing them, the "name taker" would start writing all the kids names and surnames on the "good" side.
Then he/she would write among the bad ones someone (for whatever reason), who would try to convince the "name taker" to delete his/her name and re-write it on the "good" side.
After a few minutes the blackboard was full of deletions/rewrites on both sides.
The teacher already knew anyway which one were the "good" and which one were the "bad" ones and at the most made a verbal reprimand (of two types) to the kids that were on the "bad" column finally:
1) "I knew you were going to ...., why don't you stop it for a change" (to the ones re-known as troublemakers)
2) "I am surprised you did ...., you won't go far by doing this" (to the ones re-known as being tranquil)
The N-1 could name-take the name-taker on the same day if they can achieve consensus before the teacher comes back.
The N-1 simply have to wait for the teacher to come back, then explain that the name-taker was abusing his position, hoping the teacher will release them from punishment for name-taking the name-taker. AFAICT, there's no incentive for the N-1 to lie about whether or not the name-taker was taking advantage of them.
What incentive is there for them to unify against the name-taker if the name-taker was being fair? N-1 people aren't just going to cry wolf in synchrony, because they don't trust each other. Can't a set of untrusted nodes still achieve consensus assuming more than half are good players? It's unlikely that over half of the class consists of class clowns.
Am I summarising this right ?
There's an order given by your teacher, some kids break it and will continue breaking it from that point on, some faked cooperation, and the rest of the kids were just silent.
Is this really an organisation, in the sense that one "group" is trying to reach a goal ?
For instance the "fearless" kids don't seem to have anything to care about to me, and don't need to join forces for anything.
Same for the "sycophants" who could be alone or a number of people, it wouldn't change their behaviour.
Or the rest of the kids who could be sleeping, it wouldn't change much for them.
Perhaps to put it in a different way, what was your main takeaway from the situation ? it seems you had more insight that what is conveyed here.
I do vaguely remember "good kings" and "bad kings" ... some kids were forgiving and more than fair, and others were vindictive. So not everyone gravitated towards tyranny and some did report "nothing happened" more or less.
It could be viewed as egoism though, when at specific angles. What win is? That everyone chit-chats instead of learning on a regular basis? Is your teacher a foe? You make friends of who?
It is hard to define a long-term win. In my story above we two refused our position not because we didn't like to create homeworks. In fact, what we did wasn't much different from school books; we even categorized tasks and watched that they weren't too hard, leaving only a couple of pieces that required some thinking. What we didn't like was scoring our friends, non-friends and whatever these relationships were back then. But still I think that seeing how they learn and provide a feedback is, well, a slightly better than just throwing books at them and wait for a success. Our class actually knew some physics as a result. It is a social price that was questionable, not a learning process. Despite being viewed as a 'good guy', now I don't have strong relationships with any of my then buddies anyway. Sum up? Our teacher could be not as unthoughtful as it seemed.
tl;dr while everyone is on their own, someone has to think of the group as a whole. It doesn't mean you all end up in a better place, but at least you tried and had an opinion instead of a denial. People are pretty forgiving if your intents are good-natured.
I had a page up on the iwarp.com domain too from the late 90s! http://counterwave.iwarp.com/ -> it was pure Flash (Flash 4) so it doesn't really even work anyway. It was so much fun. I miss those days.
1. There is no way governments will just let an unregulated currency take over in a meaningful way.
2. Thus, the current Bitcoin rally is simply speculation and is being driven up by those who will profit the most from it (which is fraudulent in the way the Tulip mania was fraudulent).
I get that he's the CEO of the horse and buggy company dismissing cars, but I don't think he was that tone deaf.
