mlangdon's comments

mlangdon | 8 years ago | on: The Netherlands has become an agricultural giant

You are missing the key quality for which industrial scale produce has been selectively bred over the past century: shippability. The ability to be placed in a box and moved thousands of miles without falling apart is the paramount quality of mass produced produce. Go to a farmer's market, be anything but delicate with a large heirloom tomato and you will understand what I mean.

mlangdon | 8 years ago | on: Inside Facebook's plan to eat another $350B IT market

The big difference here is that states can simply buy access to, e.g., a Cisco Nexus and attack it from inside and out until they find a vulnerability in NX-OS, let's say, a malformed CLI-via-HTTP call.

Whereas, what software does a Google switch even run? What's the architecture, the APIs? You basically need someone inside Google, or for one of these things to fall off a truck. Way more involved and expensive than the 10k you might spend on a Nexus to throw it your lab and set your hackers on it.

mlangdon | 9 years ago | on: Yahoo discloses hack of 1B accounts

This is technically true, which is the best kind of true. Swap in nationalist, chauvinist. It's utterly clear what was meant by racism above, in spite of your semantics.

mlangdon | 9 years ago | on: Peter Thiel To Join Trump Transition Team

The onus is on him to stop inciting (and personally inflicting) violence against women, Muslims, Latinos, and more. That's what's dividing the country. I'm not going to rely on Democrats to lead any kind of thought until they grow a backbone.

mlangdon | 9 years ago | on: Peter Thiel To Join Trump Transition Team

Prove it. Let's see some tax returns. In the absence of evidence, it is reasonable to assume that he is heavily in debt with no liquid assets and effectively poor.

He paid a 7 dollar boy scout fee for his son from his "charity."

mlangdon | 10 years ago | on: Linting Prose in Emacs with ProseLinter

This is very cool. You had me at David Foster Wallace.

I'll be trying this out:

1. As a sublime plugin for my next blog post. 2. As plain old Python as part of a mass scrape-spellcheck-stylecheck of the corporate website.

mlangdon | 10 years ago | on: ‘You Could Look It Up’: The World Before and Since Wikipedia

Here[1] is (I believe) the originating article.

Meanwhile, the first really popular version of Oregon Trail came out in 1985[2].

Ultimately I just meant it as a jaunty shorthand for the intergenerational window in which I was born. If you were also born then and this does not jive with your experience, it's going to be okay, eventually.

[1] http://socialmediaweek.org/blog/2015/04/oregon-trail-generat... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oregon_Trail_(video_game...

mlangdon | 10 years ago | on: ‘You Could Look It Up’: The World Before and Since Wikipedia

It's approximately 1978 though '82. Basically the last generation that has a living memory of the before time, but grew up riding the crest of the wave of everything that happened over the past 30 years, technologically.

Or, people who played Oregon Trail on Macs and Commodore 64s in grade school.

mlangdon | 10 years ago | on: ‘You Could Look It Up’: The World Before and Since Wikipedia

You seem fun!

There's a deeply sarcastic culture of fake rules at my company, in which groove this fake rule fits precisely. Lunch time is generally understood as a time of bullshitting, conviviality and foosball. Every time we have to wait 30 seconds to find out, e.g., how many apple seeds you can eat without killing yourself, we are all richer for it.

mlangdon | 10 years ago | on: What “Worse is Better vs. The Right Thing” is really about (2012)

This is what I'm saying, only if you think unfettered free marketeering is an unalloyed good would you propose that the antithetical position is that the market is evil.

If I say I want restrictions on the market so that our planet is still liveable in 2100, I am not saying the market is evil. I'm merely stating my moral (in that there is a value judgment) position in contrast to the "free" market moral position. If I say that unfettered markets lead to evil, I'm merely contending with that value judgment, not whether there should a market in general. There's an incredible amount of space between a rampant libertarian market and Communism. It's childish to pretend otherwise.

mlangdon | 10 years ago | on: Convert curl commands to Go code

Very cool. Flags I commonly see/implement (curl to Python or Ruby usually) include -o (download) and -k (ignore ssl warnings -- you might want an warning comment if you implement that one).

mlangdon | 10 years ago | on: Alda: A music programming language

Before even bringing in synthesis, my biggest request would be more control flow (beyond the goto).

Loops, if statement, variables and incrementers. Maybe a "key change" we can up X semi-tones after a keychange keyword without rewriting the notes.

mlangdon | 10 years ago | on: Alda: A music programming language

This was exactly what I was looking for. A survey of the available options.

I looked at supercollider before you answered and found the syntax kind of attractive. Sort of scala-ish, though maybe I am misremembering Scala from that one programming test.

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