I have written down all these thoughts are as ‘remarks’, short paragraphs, of whichthere is sometimes a fairly long chain about the same subject, while I sometimes makea sudden change, jumping from one topic to another, – it was my intention at first tobring all this together in a book whose form I pictured differently at different times. Butthe essential thing was that the thoughts should proceed from one subject to another in anatural order and without breaks.After several unsuccessful attempts to weld my results together into such a whole, Irealised that I should never succeed. The best that I could write would never be morethan philosophical remarks; my thoughts were soon crippled if I tried to force themon in any single direction against their natural inclination.– And this was, of course,connected with the very nature of the investigation. For this compels us to travel over awide field of thought criss-cross in every direction.

I have written down all these thoughts are as ‘remarks’

Nash’s Magazine:   (about) Nash’s Magazine—UK; Apr. 1909-Sep. 1937 (532 issues); merged with The Pall Mall Magazine, Oct. 1914, as Nash’s and Pall Mall Magazine, separated again May 1927-Sep. 1929, re-merged, Oct. 1929 as Nash’s—Pall Mall Magazine; Eveleigh Nash, London (1909-1911), Hearst’s National Magazine Company (1911-1937); monthly; standard format, on pulp paper until Feb. 1910, when better-quality coated stock introduced, with more illustrations; became a large-format slick in 1923; mostly fiction, including Algernon Blackwood, William Hope Hodgson, Oliver Onions, Marie Belloc Lowndes (“The Lodger” Jan. 1911).

Fairburn, William Armstrong, et al.: Merchant Sail

Woodroffe, John George, Sir: The Serpent Power

Time and Tide

New York Times Book Review

Meeke, Mary: Count St. Blancard

Hays, Mary: The Victim of Prejudice

Denison, Charles W.: Old Slade: or, Fifteen Years Adventures of a Sailor

E are thinking and talk-ing a great deal now-a-days about placing theright man in the rightjob, about puttinground pegs in roundholes and square pegs in squareholes, and this subject is one ofthe most vital problems that con-fronts us all, whether we workfor others or employ men to workfor us.

As seen in the table above, namespace URIs tend to be long and cryptic, with lots of punctuation and case-sensitive text. In this instance the W3C has compounded the problem by adding dates to ensure that the namespace URIs are unique, as if it were likely that the W3C would create another "XSL/Transform" or "xhtml" namespace in the future. While namespace URIs may be guaranteed to be unique, they are also guaranteed to be impossible to remember. Quick, without checking, can you remember if the namespace URI for W3C XML Schema ends with "xmlschema", "XML/Schema", or "XMLSchema"? Was the namespace URI for SVG allocated in 1999, 2000, or 2001?

If HTML had been precisely defined as having to have an SGML DTD, it may not have become as popular as fast, but it would have been a lot architecturally stronger.

Phillip Hallam-Baker who "wondered about a tag being added to the get protocol to indicate where the text was being accessed from

There is a set of formats which every client must be able to handle. These include 80-column text and basic hypertext ( HTML ).

Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau

attach(target = PocketCastsStarsExport, modules)

PocketCastsStarsExport.UPDATE_ENDPOINT = ( `https://api.pocketcasts.com/sync/update_episode_star` )

I’m gonna go out on a limb and suggest Pratt would not have fared well in the #MeToo era.

Written inPython, Cython

Eventually, there will be different ways of paying for different levels of quality. But today there some things we can do to make better use of the bandwidth we have, such as using compression and enabling many overlapping asynchronous requests. There is also the ability to guess ahead and push out what a user may want next, so that the user does not have to request and then wait. Taken to one extreme, this becomes subscription-based distribution, which works more like email or newsgroups. One crazy thing is that the user has to decide whether to use mailing lists, newsgroups, or the Web to publish something. The best choice depends on the demand and the readership pattern. A mistake can be costly. Today, it is not always easy for a person to anticipate the demand for a page. For example, the pictures of the Schoemaker-Levy comet hitting Jupiter taken on a mountain top and just put on the nearest Mac server or the decision Judge Zobel put onto the Web - both these generated so much demand that their servers were swamped, and in fact, these items would have been better delivered as messages via newsgroups. It would be better if the ‘system’, the collaborating servers and clients together, could adapt to differing demands, and use pre-emptive or reactive retrieval as necessary.

Bluesky and Mastadon don’t feed off our engagement

The first is the extent of power concentration, which contradicts the decentralised spirit I originally envisioned.

Reversible_Object-Oriented Intertgfeters

A company as big as Intel could obviously write its own OS if it had to

the Berkeley license provides the maximum amount of freedom to potential users

Inrupt's success will depend on good execution

Programming models, user interfaces, and foundational hardware can, and must, be shallow and composable. We must, as a profession, give agency to the users of the tools we produce. Relying on towering, monolithic structures sprayed with endless coats of paint cannot last. We cannot move or reconfigure them without tearing them down.

Newcomers had a low-cost entry point

The software crisis doesn't just apply to the profession of building software, but to anybody that uses software. Users have little to no control, save for things afforded to them by the author.

curious developers can no longer build software without scaling mountains

It is no longer easy to build software

This is safe to do, because it doesn’t affect any state machine transitions, but merely preserves original 0x00 bytes and delegates their replacement to the parser in the end user’s browser.

Cook, Steve J. (1994) The World isn't Software. Journal of Object-Oriented Programming, 5 (9).

feed-published-at is not a standard HTML attribute. validators will complain about it. but i couldn't find an alternative i liked.

I like to call it inverse vandalism (when vandalism is destroying things just because one can, then inverse vandalism is making things because one can).

again

how do I get to this number between 0 and 1? Well, by simply reading on in the spec. There is some some pseudo code, which is easily translatable to Javascript (which I'm doing here in form of a literate program

We decided that we would like to see better documented code included within web pages for convenient browsing. The motivation behind this peculiar aim is to be able to include high quality documentation alongside working code, hopefully making it easier for programmers to produce more maintainable, readable programs.

In the time we’ve spent together working on this, a strong team culture has formed. The culture is highly optimistic and everyone has a “can do” attitude.

Just write the stupid dispatch manually and get on with the real work.

They never end up in the terminal, because that is a huge jump in complexity, usability, and frustration

the right knowledge to make a full-stack app

what I call the command line wall

writing code for its own sake

we need to stop harassing normal nurses, teachers, and therapists to code

I'm not saying everything Mao did was great, but this was a pretty good program. I'm sure he had very little to do with it.

I actually don't want to talk about how advances in AI will affect professional developers. With all due respect, we have it pretty good.

Even those of us who are professionals don't always have the right knowledge to make a full-stack app for ourselves.

showing historical borders or tidal patterns

He painted a vision of applications that could be used by dozens of users rather than thousands or millions. This is an absurd target population both then and now.

what I've called the barefoot developer

most of these notebooks run entirely in the browser

This approach of interleaving documentation and source code is called literate programming and was first proposed by Donald Knuth in 1984. He argued that all code should be written in these linear, readable documents. See Chris Granger's Eve project for a beautiful example of mixing prose and code.

"Computational notebooks"Listed as a notebook interface on Wikipedia, which seems like a much worse name to me. have emerged as one of the best solutions to the problem

there's no infrastructure to guide them step by step through what the code does and in what order

When you want to show someone a single function or a quick experiment, it's too much to ask them to install a bunch of command line crap.

A response of sorts to commit robbery.

our founder, Dan Whaley, transitions to the role of President and Chief Product Officer

some non-technical people are just scared of any monospaced writing with syntax highlight

what I call "SQL-by-mouse"

there is also an honesty problem when contents change or update without record

The ratio of time spent on precedence parsing in compilers to utility feels very low

because there is no compilation step

I went back to Dmitry and asked him if my understanding of “everything is a table” was correct and, if so, why Lua was designed this way. Dmitry told me that Lua was created at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro and that it was acceptable for Pontifical Catholic Universities to design programming languages this way.

Take three different translations of any book – say, The Brothers Karamazov or Madame Bovary – and compare them to see how many times they have entire sentences exactly the same.  Never, or almost never.

basic necessities, like electricity or a quiet place to study

plus a strict Content Security Policy ruleset which disallows scripting

secure

data:// urls

WACZ - Web Archive Collection Zipped - is used by the WebRecorder project, which seems to be an active effort to create an open standard for web archiving, though you wouldn't realize it by the design of their website. I almost thought it was also a dead 1990s effort until I saw the August 2022 update.

Pretty cool.

Zippy

whoever came up with Apple's property list format didn't really understand how XML and/or SGML-like tags actually worked. Does it make sense to you that p-lists have stuff like <key>WebResourceData</key> instead of simply just <WebResourceData> ? It's like they were confused

rather than separating out the various media types - css, images, icons, etc., the browsers just dump them all into a single folder

a CSP header on the index page to prevent malicious scripts from running

Linux is the only OS that actually pays attention to a text-file's MIME type

just think how happy TBL will be to finally have Phase 2 completed after 30 years

Using a standard set of semantic HTML and CSS as the underlying markup for documents solves these problems

nearly impossible to version using git

Rich text, such as bold and italic, among other examples, shouldn't be optional or considered extraneous to language. The fact that computing technology has gone so long ignoring these essential parts of communication is bewildering. You can send a text message from your phone including a variety of customizable emojis in various skin tones, but basic text formats used for literally hundreds of years are either impossible to enter, or lost in transmission. There's more than subtle a difference between, "You really should do something," and "You really should do something". Having to write out ideas using plain text with weird symbols such as _ this _ or * this * is truly a loss, and in the 21st century, completely inexcusable.

You really should do something

The problem is that HTML can now do so much, that any attempts to create a consumer-focused app to edit it soon get unfocused and unusable.

Controversy and chaos is good for their platform

You can whip up cover letters in no time using ChatGPT! Just paste in your resume text, position title and company name and ask it to write a cover letter for you. It summarizes your skills really well in context of the position and company. Such a time saver. Like everything else AI does lately, it's absurdly good and in Ryan Reynold's words, "mildly terrifying." I have no idea who actually reads cover letters

Software is a brutal industry and appearing to be unintelligent can harm your career badly

social dynamics in tech jobs punish people who say things like, “Uh, this is too complicated to me.”

most of the coding trouble I’ve ever gotten myself into was mainly a result of thinking I was smart

Safety Tip Always use === (triple equals) and !== when testing for equality and inequality in JavaScript.

a quick introduction to what happens when you run the basic Git commands

we write functions as functionName rather than functionName(); the latter ismore common, but people don’t use objectName{} for objects or arrayName[] for arrays,and the empty parentheses makes it hard to tell whether we’re talking about “the functionitself” or “a call to the function with no parameters”

Its performance is not very different from the system versions of grep, which shows that the recursive technique is not too costly and that it's not worth trying to tune the code.

The occurrence of a do-while instead of a while should always raise a question: why isn't the loop termination condition being tested at the beginning

A Window object represents the actual window of the web browser.

So What Would a Static Site Generator for the Rest of Us Like Like?

Not a web developer? Sucks to be you. The vast majority of the static site generator tools out there are run from the command line, powered by things you've never heard of like Node, Grunt, or Babel.

can build a site in a jiff using any number of site builders like Jekyll

Wirth himself realized the problems of Pascal and his later languages are basically improved versions of Pascal -- Modula, Modula-2, and Oberon. But these languages didn't even really displace Pascal itself let alone C -- but maybe if he had named them in a way that made it clear to outsiders that these were Pascal improvements they would have had more uptake.

"=" to mean assignment and resorting to a special symbol for equality, rather than the obviously better reverse

Pascal largely lost to its design opposite, C, the epitome of permissiveness, where you can (for example) add anything to almost anything

Englebart

I spend an inordinate amount of time helping the kids set up their build environments

in Java, the vulgar Latin of programming languages. I figure if you can write it in Java, you can write it in anything

You can do this with recursive descent, but it’s a chore.

My process is very simple. They are way more technical than me. I start off by entering everything into Word

There’s not much of a market for what I’m describing.

"I've been thinking about the problem with division of labor for 7 years now, and I think I've boiled it down to two sentences. Why division of labor is disempowering: 1. (the setup) Power = capability - supervision. 2. Division of labor tends to discourage supervision."

Division of labor is an extremely mature state for a society. Aiming prematurely for it is counterproductive. Rather than try to imitate more mature domains, start from scratch and see what this domain ends up needing."

Experts without accountability start acting in their own interests rather than that of their customers/users. And we don’t know how to hold programmers accountable without understanding the code they write.

In a healthy community people do their reading in private, and come together to discuss what they read.

(Sounds a little antisocial, sure, but you can imagine good reasons.)

I think librarians, like all users of web-based information systems, should be unpleasantly surprised when they find that their systems haven't been engineered in the common sense ways that make them friendly to ad hoc integration.

peak

Over thirty years later, in 2021, we finally got to see some of the original source code for the World Wide Web. In June of this year, Berners-Lee put an NFT (non-fungible token) of nearly 10,000 lines of the code up for sale at Sothebys.

getting into a position to think

However, after finding the magic number, unzip does not check if the comment length correctly describes the comment that must follow. Rather, unzip only checks to make sure the comment length is small enough to not cause an out-of-bounds read beyond the end of the zip file. This means that unzip tolerates arbitrary data append to the end of a zipfile without even so much as a warning. The zip file spec does not allow this arbitrary data

The only way to find the End of Central Directory Record is to do a linear search backwards from the end of the file, but even that is not guaranteed to find it. This is because the comment itself can be anything; it can be any bytes; it can even contain the magic number we're looking for.

What if there are multiple newlines?

Available Formats CSV

HTTP Extension Framework

it's a miracle actually it's not you know even if somebody's copying something it doesn't mean it's not America it could still be a miracle I'm not precluding a miracle there I'm just saying somebody copied

No more bugzilla and GitHub morning triage.

Reading text with a simple, clear, uncluttered layout without any animation or embedded videos or sidebars full of distracting, unrelated extras. If you use the "Reader Mode" in your web browser a lot and you love it because you think that 99% of the time it makes webpages ten times easier to use by throwing out all the useless clutter and just giving you what you want

thanks to the complexity of JDSL it took days to do coding work that should only take minutes

“Let me know if you have any more questions,”

all you have to do

Scott laughed. “You wouldn’t want to ‘just’ run it.

the non-technical interviewer’s comment that it was all “built on top of Subversion” which he assumed was a simple misunderstanding

For full and authoritative description of this object, see the University of Texas Library Catalog.

My work is part of a larger effort to reframe what we think about Victorian life

Since it’s a JavaScript package, I had to resign myself to introducing an optional dependency on Node.js

Get 4 hours back every week.

Every time I changed labs and computers during my postdoc years, I had to spend a day or two to reinstall everything I needed

When the designer on the team, who also writes CSS, went to go make changes, it was a lot harder for them to implement them. They had to figure out which file to look in, open up command line, run a build step, check that it worked as expected, and then deploy the code.

I hate npm so much. I had a situation where I couldn't work on a project because I couldn't get the dev environment running locally.

“Various people asked to do various things with it, and they referred them to this guy who didn't respond,” Brand says. “And so it was just frustrating for decades.”

What’s a callback? I’ve never truly understood that

This comes as an inevitable consequence of the fact that we changed the world once, and are lining up to do so again.

No author WANTS to mark emphasis or important text.

Can you say that EVERY SINGLE TIME I want bold text that will match the semantics of <strong>? If that's true, then it shouldn't be called <strong>, it should be called <bold>.

curl (including libcurl) ships a new version at least once every eight weeks. We merge bugfixes at a rate of around three bugfixes per day.

There’s an idea in the science-fiction community called steam-engine time, which is what people call it when suddenly twenty or thirty different writers produce stories about the same idea. It’s called steam-engine time ­because nobody knows why the steam engine happened when it did. Ptolemy demonstrated the mechanics of the steam engine, and there was nothing technically stopping the Romans from building big steam engines. They had little toy steam engines, and they had enough metalworking skill to build big steam tractors. It just never occurred to them to do it.

When Ra is active, you’ll see a persistent disposition, in otherwise intelligent people, to misunderstand trade or negotiation scenarios as dominance/submission scenarios.

Nastasya Philipovna, in The Idiot, demonstrates this kind of anger; when she meets the man who embodies her moral ideal, instead of reaching out to him as a lover, she is outraged that he’s being shabby and noble and ignoring the “way of the world”, and she actively ruins his life. It’s not that she doesn’t appreciate goodness; it’s that it freaks her out.  People ought not be that good. It disturbs the universe.  Myshkin is missing something — it’s not clear what, because if you look at his words and actions explicitly he seems to be behaving quite sensibly and moderately — but he’s missing some intuition about the “way of the world”, and that enrages everyone around him.

The presence of such features can beoutright dangerous if a web application is used for controlling a medical system or a nuclear plant.

My NGVCS dream implies defacto centralization.

It'd be a hell of a lot easier to contribute to open source projects if step 0 wasn't "spend 8 hours configuring environment to build"

The natural conclusion of most tools for thought is a relational database with rich text as a possible column type. So that’s essentially what I built: an object-oriented graph database on top of SQLite.

drowned in an ocean of banality

Organizing collections with the filesystem is difficult, because of the hierarchical nature of the filesystem

the higher the activation energy to using a tool, the less likely you are to use it. Even a small amount of friction can cause me to go, oh, who cares, can’t be bothered

And yet I don’t use them.

Mutability as a liability

In 1945, Vannevar Bush proposed the idea of memex, a hypertext system.

They are added as simple, unidirectional links by the original authors of whatever it is you’re reading. You can’t add your own link between two pages on New York Times that you find relevant. You can’t create a “trail” of web documents, photographs and pages that are somehow relevant to a topic you’re researching.

On the web, documents aren’t yours. Almost universally, what you read on the internet is on someone’s else server. You cannot edit it, or annotate it.