The article talks about Ted Nelson's demo about hypertext. The first version of the demo was using Nabokov's Pale Fire book. This first version of the demo has been lost. The article is not saying that Nabokov's book has been lost, but that the usage of Nabokov's book as a demo for hypertext has been lost.
> the usage of Nabokov's book as a demo for hypertext
I get what you are saying, but should just point out that the Kindle version of the Penguin edition provides hypertext links from the poem to the deranged narrator's commentary. I remember reading a paper edition sometime back when, and being able to flip via hypertext is definitely superior to paper page flipping. And I'm someone that loves paper books.
This is a truly amazing and very, very funny book. If you haven't read it, you are really missing out.
Interesting, I have the exact opposite experience with flipping vs linking when it comes to books like _Pale Fire_. It's a lot more difficult for me to read the end notes on kindle, especially when it cross references more than one other end notes. Just couldn't keep my head straight as where I had been already. I had to buy a paper copy of _Pale Fire_ after fidgeting on my kindle (which I usually prefer) for a while, and I just kept two bookmarks (one in the poem section, one in the end notes section), and find other end notes ad hoc. The physicality of the pages helped me navigate back and forth.
I think hypertext is best for things like Pale Fire, where the linked text is long (it is a novel, after all), but I must admit that I like paper footnotes are good for things like the SF novels of Jack Vance, so you stay on (more or less) the same page, and you can ignore (or even re-imagine them) if you like.
It's one of my favorites. But I prefer to reread with two bookmarks, just as I did when I first encountered it (and just as I did with Infinite Jest years later).
Fun fact for me personally: because I am lucky enough to know a zookeeper who was in charge of the ambassador animal program at a major zoo, I have direct personal experience that cheetahs purr when you pet them.
You're right. They're smaller than you probably imagine (about the weight of an average Labrador). That's still definitely big enough to be a problem if they felt threatened, I'm sure, but the animals my friend was in charge of were raised to be around people for outreach purposes. That particular cheetah, for example, had once been on the Today show.
West is plenty notable on her own, but in THIS particular crowd here at HN, it's probably fun to note that her dad was first-wave computer engineer Tom West, who was a big part of Tracy Kidder's SOUL OF A NEW MACHINE.
There are lots of data manipulation tasks I've run into at client or customer sites where, if I had my druthers, I'd use perl or python -- but there's no way to get those in the environment. But Excel is there, and Excel has VBA and a strong API.
If you internalize how Excel works (which is to say: you use the native concepts and don't just leap to how you might do it in perl), there's great power available there. I've written things in Excel with abstractions and class structures I'd be proud to have implemented in "better" languages.
I've also seen "normal" end users discover this power, and find it a tremendous boon to their day to day working life. (This was also true 35 years ago with Lotus macros.) People who would never think of themselves as programmers still have muscle memory for Alt-F11.
It was... weird. I had a friend who was working there, and I needed a gig. At the time, in the city I was in, this constituted a pretty big advantage.
The role would've been customer facing but technical, which is where I've spent my career. I answered some reasonable panel questions, and then they had me give a preso on any technical topic I liked. I'm good at that, so I aced it.
Then we got to other questions: specifically, questions from me.
"Are you currently profitable?"
They were not. This, in and of itself, isn't a problem, but it leads to the next question.
"At your current burn rate, how many months of operating cash do you have on hand?"
(murmuring) "Two, but our founder funds us as we need it."
"Are there specific milestones that are tied to additional capital infusions, or any formal agreement, or is it all just at his discretion?"
"It's discretionary but he's very committed to the company."
Having already had negative experiences with one-rich-dude companies, I thanked them for their time and left. I was VERY surprised when they called me a couple weeks later to MAKE A SERIOUSLY LOWBALL OFFER, which I literally laughed at. At least the dude who made the call seemed to understand the company was insane.
My friend jumped ship shortly after. He had more tolerance for Weird Startup Shit because of family money, but it got too weird even for a guy who didn't need the income, if that tells you anything.
Paralleling Linux and MacOS is pretty simple, but the last time I tried to make the same config work properly in Windows it was a nightmare b/c of the path issues.
In the past when I've seen someone extolling Windows/Linux compatibility for something as complex as a detailed Emacs setup, they were using WSL or one of the wrappers like Cygwin rather than native Windows compiles of the tooling.
For whatever it's worth, I've always only ever used the native Windows build of Emacs, and I've never had any awful problems sharing my config between Windows, Linux and macOS. I'm sure I had to expend at least a bit of effort to make this work initially, but it wasn't enough for the process to stick in my mind, and the ongoing effort doesn't feel like it's added up to much.
(I admit it's added up to more than zero though! Keeping (require 'cmake-mode) working reliably on Windows and macOS has proven a minor annoyance, and fonts seem to require a degree of system-specific attention.)
The problem is the dependencies, getting hunspell installed and finding the dictionary files for example. I normally only get a new computer every few years and each time stuff like that is a new pain. And dont even start with treesitter, i cant compile anything on windows and always end up using prebuild dlls.
I have some conditionalization for windows, but not that much. While I haven't used Windows as a daily driver since Windows 8, I have to use Windows for to maintain a port on Windows, and I use Emacs there and it's fine.
I would 100% support measures that inhibit corporations from owning residential property.
Apartments are probably a special case, but I'm not entirely convinced the age of giant corporate complexes is a good one.
I also don't necessarily mind if a PERSON owns a house and rents it out (e.g., to spend a year somewhere else, or because it's a lake house or something), but I get suspicious of they own a bunch of them and make it a business. Denying corporate status would discourage that.
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