stepvhen

I would have to check, but the resources on lex/yacc that I remember would make a point of their usability at scale. Generally it would be unlikely to wrote a faster lexer than what lex could do, but very likely to write a better parser than yacc. However writing a small lexer and/or parser _quickly_ would be easier with those tools than hand rolling one almost every time. Its great parser generators are still being developed and improved, and its fine to point out issues, but this article misses the point by a wide margin.

The author's math works out to a bit over 2 hours a book. I assume this was elided because thats wild to expect.

I would have been more convinced if the author posted their list of books, with page and/or word count, and math'd from that.

For what its worth, my speed is between 1 to 3 minutes a page, depending on size and subject matter. At best, 2 hours would get me through a novella, a moderate sized book of poems, or maybe one of Plato's dialogues. That actually sounds right. But most books are longer than that.

in situations like this "one bad cluster of comments" isn't considered a mistake or a lapse in judgement but a symptom of what a person actually thinks. RMS more than likely did not form those opinions on the spot and then forgot he had them afterward. and RMS has a public history that is congruent with those opinions and how he presented them.

im sure it leaves a bad taste in a lot of mouths what the leader of GNU has done and how he thinks.

The "Hard CC" isn't a power move its how things get done. I constantly check in to make sure I'm doing my job right and when I am and the problem isn't fixed, its time for it to be someone else's problem.

source: working in Support.

> maybe even playing with colors to indicate if verbs form a train or other composition. I understand that is a quite different problem from just substituting @: with o̲.

With regards to how different of a problem that would be, J's syntax is context-sensitive. If you were to accurately identify trains and forks, you could not use regex, and would probably end up implementing a subset of the J parser.

If you only read one book, I suggest Don Quixote, the Grossman translation particularly, if only for the higher quality footnotes (compared to Lathrop's which is very well translated but poorly commented). The advantage here is DQ is really like four or five books of various types, and has a Yale Open Courseware series attached to it, so for any chapters you want to know more about, the resources are at hand. Through this book you can learn so, so much about literature.

But also, watching Don Quixote and Sancho's friendship develop is heartwarming. It was a book written for entertainment first, and just happened to be saturated in intense philosophical and literary quality.

i actually just finished reading it last night. probably one of the best bits of fiction ive read.

i think you might be making metaphysical claims, while the topologist is not. moreover, in topology, things dont.become other things or kinds of things; they stay as they are and the (simplified) statement "a staw is a donut" means "a straw is similar to a donut in that they share certain qualities." there is never any actual stretching of an object to change its metaphysical identity, that is a virtual process (and one that has rules and restrictions) that is used to help humans wrap their head around the concept of homotopy.

is for->fer Utah? I'm in Indiana, born on the West Coast, and I dont know where I picked that up. I have also started to morph "car" and similar in the direction of "kerr," and (most embarrassingly) instead of "robot" in conversation ill say "robit." I havent been able to find out from those around me, or hear the same changes.

FWIW, from what i remember facebook's redesigns were never just a visual thing. they always added and pushed some functionality, made some things much harder to find, or quietly removed things entirely.

A similar thing happened when Last.fm did their huge redesign. The new website was all js now, and they quit all support on the forums, messaging, pretty much all the old ways of communication between users. And for me, that was awful, since i was a part of a music collective that communicated primarily on those forums. After that everybody dispersed.

So outrage at a redesign is not always unfounded or silly. Web companies tend to hide things in them.

For literary fiction, literary friends and book reviews. Also, anytime you see a name come up again and again, look into getting a something they have written. I bought Dostoyevsky because I kept seeing him come up (worth it).

Find small/independent presses that do cool things; even independent presses as large as New Directions will have a certain culture you can base opinions off of and figure out if its worth your time. Note that if its an imprint of one of the Big 5 theres no way to know if the book is gonna be worth it based on that.

And read books in translation. By virtue of being translated you already know its worth somebody's time, bad books arent often translated. And often they are hella good.

Pretty sure most folk in Hamlet get a bad deal in the end, and Hamlet's brooding and whining doesnt outweigh that. Ophelia literally goes mad and is driven to arguable suicide. Everyone that mattered dies, and if that is outweighed by Fortinbras and his good fortune in the end. Hamlet is Icarus if anything, since it only goes well for him for a moment while everybody else is on a downward spiral.

Think of it this way; the last time you cooked this dish there was way too much and youd prefer not to do that again. This would help.with that problem.

I guess it also makes more sense for baking than cooking.

Perhaps I missed it, but i didn't see anything about physical copies, i.e. it seems this is focused (exclusively?) for the ditigal reader. Is that the case?