sandwell

It sounds like a Ventian Snares track. Love it.

That might have been me! There were one or two M stations there. I heard a couple of stations calling CQ. Very difficult to pick out signals without any filtering.

73 de G4IYT :)

Very cool. It does get a bit chaotic when there are a number of people keying. If there was the ability to add a narrow filter then it could be usable for a QSO (radio contact)!

There are some other apps designed for having QSOs - VBand[1] and Vail Repeater[2].

Finally if you want to learn to use morse code on the air check out Long Island CW Club[3]

[1]: https://hamradio.solutions/vband/ [2]: https://vailmorse.com/ [3]: https://longislandcwclub.org/

> The problem was that Emine's cell phone was not localized properly for Turkish and did not have the letter <ı>; when it displayed Ramazan's message, it replaced the <ı>s with <i>s.

So it was the wife's phone that changed the meaning of the message, not his.

Also a Nix/NixOS user/contributer. I feel like Nix+nixpkgs could become the universal packaging solution adapted to build deb, rpm, etc packages.

Through nix-env it even already has the idea (albeit discouraged) of imperative package management like apt.

Having spent a while with NixOS, running containers for user applications seems like using a cannon to kill a fly. The 'simple' alternative is to drop FHS altogether - which containerization is kind of doing in a roundabout way by isolating the app filesystem from system fhs.

As for it being for developers only... I get that perspective. Debian/Ubuntu packaging is also hard, AUR packaging has its quirks. A lot of this is hidden behind the package manager, wheras with NixOS it is more obvious.

The killer idea for NixOS would be to make package management for Joe Q Public as easy to use as apt while. Tools like MyNixOS[1] are emerging which might bridge that gap.

[1] https://mynixos.com

Agree with the final part of this article that "programmable" configuration languages like Nix and Dhall are the way forward.

I've spent a lot of time writing YAML for Ansible, Cloudformation, k8s, Helm, etc. Some of the issues this article mentions are pitfalls but once you get a bit of experience with it, you know what to look out for.

I've also spent and a lot of time writing Nix expressions, which is much more "joyful" IMO. Seemingly simple features like being able to create a function to reuse the same parameterized configuration makes life much easier.

Add in a layer of type safety and some integration with the 'parent' app (think replacements for CloudFormation's !GetAtt or Ansible's handlers), the ability to perform basic unit tests, then configuration becomes more like writing code which I consider a good thing.

Kodi and Plex provide a way to play pirated content, but Netflix and their competitors still dominate.

They have an incentive to provide easy access to their media, so pirating is always going to be more complex, which will be a barrier to the majority.

Yes, Kodi and Plex have got that covered, and no risk of bricking your TV.

> Maybe the space is just more fragmented?

Android is pretty darn fragmented though.

I expect that aftermarket firmware would be an issue for content providers. For example, is Netflix going to allow third party firmware developers to create an app to access their content? They will already have contracts with content distributors like Lionsgate that mandate DRM in their own apps to prevent piracy.

If your aftermarket firmware doesn't support Netflix, Prime, HBO, etc then it might have limited appeal. Browser based apps might get around that in a limited way.

As for printers, I think of them as loss leaders to generate ink sales.

Don't know either space particularly well so might be wrong.

It's on the roadmap, can't do pinball machines without legs >.>

I wonder if it is possible to generate a ROT8000 quine, that is a phrase like "hello world" which yields a semantically matching phrase in some other language?

Nothing to do with me >.>

I love that effect. My JS changed a lot once I grokked LISP, and I finally understood why there was a Haskell course on my degree track.

One of the most rewarding training experiences was giving my old Haskell textbook to a junior team member and watching his (at the time .NET, w/LINQ) code change over the course of a few weekends.

Makes sense. I have a ZX Spectrum on my workbench and a copy of Sinclair Forth somewhere, maybe it will click for me in a more restricted environment.

> People claim that once you learn Forth, you start programming Forth-style in other languages like C, Python etc.

Sounds very much like my experience with LISPs. Probably just need to dive in and try it. Thanks for the detailed response.

I've seen a lot of embedded Forth stuff recently but I don't get the appeal. Clearly there is some benefit over writing assembly, but why is it preferred over portable C, or even higher level languages such as Python on more powerful mcus?

FWIW I felt the same way about LISP for a long time until I fell in love with it via Emacs. So please educate me!

> Is the core issue that council websites are using real-time bidding for their ads?

Yes. These websites are used to support a variety of public services, e.g. disability, poverty, drugs, or alcoholism services.

Brave believes that sending tracking information about people accessing this information is a breach of privacy.

Especially since they are publicly funded, so UK citizens are paying to have their data transmitted to unknown parties and advertised at. Oh, and if you don't pay it? Fuck you. The government will send bailiffs to seize your property to pay the bill, or imprison you for up to 3 months.

Disappointed that there is no easter egg revealed for dialing 8675309.... But cool nonetheless.

Strange hobbies indeed. The latter part of your comment is reminiscent of the goal of the MAME project:

> MAME's purpose is to preserve decades of software history. As electronic technology continues to rush forward, MAME prevents this important "vintage" software from being lost and forgotten. This is achieved by documenting the hardware and how it functions. The source code to MAME serves as this documentation. The fact that the software is usable serves primarily to validate the accuracy of the documentation (how else can you prove that you have recreated the hardware faithfully?).

Those guys are doing a very good job of "documenting" a specialist subset of systems, even without support from vendors.

The most insidious cases are those where bad processes are developed around bad software, leading to a vicious cycle of co-dependency.

I once worked for a reasonably large business that ran all of their invoicing and stock management through an MS Access project. The whole thing was wacky. half the business logic was implemented in VBA. The other half was stored procedures, but there was no obvious pattern (predictably, anything that involved a task the DB was optimised for was written in VBA). "Deployment" consisted of saving to a network drive and waiting until everyone opened it again in the morning. Data integrity seemed optional and inconsistent. The symbol naming convention could be described as cryptographic. The only documentation was a comment over each function stating the original developer's name and a timestamp. It had a proud splash screen stating "Developed by Dave Davidson" that was shown for 5 seconds on startup - this was of course completely simulated and there was no reason to have a splash screen. I could never quite fathom the magnitude of this guys delusions of grandeur or why they would want to put their name to it.

The worst part about it all was that for the most part, it worked. The parts that didn't work were well known to the people using it and worked around. So processes were developed around it, and over time these became so deeply ingrained in the teams using it that they couldn't imagine working any other way. Most of this consisted of taking telephone orders, printing off the invoices that were generating in Access, and then rekeying that information into an accounting system (for efficiency purposes of course, these printed copies were passed to another team member with notes scribbled on the original document. Mistakes were commonplace and accepted as a CoB).

Part of my role was to implement a web based ordering system. We did a reasonably good job but of course had plenty of our own WTFs. The biggest pain was integrating this with a particular team. They could not imagine a process that did not involved printing off orders and rekeying. After a while we realised that the reason we got so much push back was that once fully integrated, our system would make half of the team members redundant.

With support from management we went ahead, and over time the wrongs were righted. When I left there was still a deep level of distrust in the new system. Mistakes that were daily occurrences in the old world were "proof that the new system won't work". Orders were still printed "just to make sure I don't lose it". New bugs were treated as if the sky were falling. I would spend more time managing expectations than writing code. But we got there in the end.

Buggy software can be fixed. Buggy humans are an entirely different kettle of fish.

Wow, I switched to Emacs earlier this year and have not encountered dired mode before. This is fantasic!

Project looks great, have yet to try it out but it's more or less exactly what I have had an itch to build for the last couple of weeks after having an unsatsifactory experience trying to automate lighthouse across a bunch of sites.

What's next on your roadmap? Where/how can enthusiastic devs best contribute?

Dijkstra met Mike Fellows (who co-authored the original CS Unplugged with Tim Bell) early in Michael's career, who originally quoted this, but it's often misattributed to Dijkstra as he is slightly more famous!

Tim Bell was on Changelog podcast #302 talking about CS Unplugged and mentioned this at some point.

You don't need a strong math background. I got through a few books (PDSH included) and a couple of MOOCs on data sci/ML over the last couple of years with high school level math skills + some extra reading. Not everything is explained in minute detail but there are plenty of other sources to supplement it if you want to go deeper.

And by extension, QBasic's PRINT statement. 0/10.

This is a great post, and overlaps somewhat with a project I'm working on (scraping and classifying large amounts of text).

I know it's not the focus of the post, but was there any particular reason why you went with the MultiNomialNB classifier? I've been getting pretty good results recently with LinearSVC which seems to be a lot faster and in my case a bit more accurate too.

An interesting metric for a future post might be how your proxy compares with scrapy + httpcache middleware.

I completed Andrew Ng's Machine Learning course on Coursera over this summer and thoroughly recommend it. The course is free unless you pay for the optional certificate.

Andrew's course makes extensive use of GNU Octave which is also free (you can use Matlab), but the material is easily transferable to other environments.

Andrew spends a lot of time explaining how and why the algorithms work, so you are fully prepared when it comes to implementing them for the assignments, rather than just showing you how to call a method or use a wizard.

This course will help you understand the mathematical principles behind the ML techniques that are covered, which I found particularly helpful.