The hidden ways that architecture affects the way you feel - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170605-the-psychology-behind-your-citys-design <comment><USER3> > Another VR study, published this year, concluded that most people feel > better in rooms with curved edges and rounded contours than in sharp-edged > rectangular rooms – though (tellingly perhaps) the design students among the > participants preferred the opposite.

I always wondered why rooms tend to be rectangular pretty much all over the world. Googling for that suggests that it's a price thing, but I'm not convinced, since expensive homes still seem to prefer rectangular rooms.

Even contemporary buildings, with extremely weird and non-uniform facades, still tend to be grid-based on the inside.

I would be really interested if this preference study was also done in the real world, not just in VR.

Another related universal thing, why do we sleep with the head towards the wall (as opposed to the center of the room). Googling suggests a deep security measure, since the wall prevents attacks from behind you, which are the hardest to defend against.

Feng-shui deals with these kind of issues, if you move beyond the superstitious layer (have a turtle for money, ...)

By reading feng-shui books I learned to get a bit more intune with my inner feelings (the chi/qi), so now, if I sit in a room with no apparent exit, or with a cluttered path to the exit, I can pin point the insecurity feelings emanating from my subconscious.

<comment> d-sc I work for an apartment development company. To build round walls would be prohibitively expensive and impractical. Every part of your pipeline from building materials to tools to furniture is designed for linear-walled rooms.

<comment><USER4> Furniture is definitely an issue.

When I was in Singapore in the early 90s, I remember my family looking at a rental unit in the Draycott towers. It was super cool looking, but lack of places for furniture to go is what nixed it.

For the curious... exterior and interior:

[https://www.singaporeexpats.com/singapore-property- pictures/...](https://www.singaporeexpats.com/singapore-property- pictures/properties/draycott-tower/01draycott-tower.jpg)

[http://draycott.weebly.com/uploads/1/7/5/5/1755412/3811624.j...](http://draycott.weebly.com/uploads/1/7/5/5/1755412/3811624.jpg?600x424)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I agree in regards to intricate façades, which I tend to find beautiful and inspiring, particularly Beaux Arts style. I'm actually a bit bummed that small, intricate details seem to have gone out of fashion in today's architecture. Some newer buildings may be interesting at the macro-level, but still feel lacking when it comes to small details.

I also feel that way about residential architecture, where intricate façades seem to have faded away in newer homes. Even grotesque McMansions feel comparatively tame in comparison to say, an Edwardian or Brownstone style home.

Pointing cost as a reason made sense back then, but now feels counterintuitive, as we have so many more materials and ways to mass produce intricate details today that we did back then - 3D printing, CNC, etc. - <USER2> don't see why a Victorian style neighborhood couldn't be built today without the intensive labor costs it used to take to make those details that make those homes so beautiful.

<comment><USER6> I'm with you. I've thought a lot about how technology could be used to increase the amount of detail in architecture (rather than decrease it), but I'm not a designer, and my daydreams never go anywhere (I think you just can't beat old brownstones and 17th century Dutch houses. They're not even that ornate, but the quality of materials were high). New construction in my city looks like cardboard boxes taped together, and that's for a $1,000,000 house.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _If the façade is complex and interesting, it affects people in a positive way; negatively if it is simple and monotonous_

Humans prefer humanistic architecture, with fractal visual complexity and natural materials. Modernism tossed it all out, then the post modernists recognized that that was a horrible mistake, but decided it was too uncool to just go back to what people actually liked.

If you are interested in a short US-centric read on how the whole thing went down, read this:

[https://www.amazon.com/Bauhaus-Our-House-Tom- Wolfe/dp/031242...](https://www.amazon.com/Bauhaus-Our-House-Tom- Wolfe/dp/0312429142)

Post WW2 architects have a lot of human unhappiness to answer for.

<comment><USER6> Not an architecture expert, so maybe somebody can help me out, but the early modern architecture was often still complex and humane (I'm thinking 1930s - Amsterdam School and WPA post offices). Only later did modernism become an excuse for big, cheap, and ugly.

<comment><USER8> Modernism -- i.e., the Bauhaus, the International Style, and Le Corbusier -- was always about big, cheap, and ugly. The Amsterdam School was Expressionist, not Modernist; and nothing's more anti-Modernist than a pretty painting on a wall, even if it's in a visually arresting 1930s style.

But that said, the Amsterdam School and the WPA work were beautiful, and I'd never heard of them before. Thank you for mentioning them! I'll be sure to look into both in a lot more detail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My first few thoughts on reading this:

1\. Cool, I've always wondered the same thing whenever I visit DC. I wonder what it would be like to walk to/from work with big, grand architecture all around and if it would change my mindset if I saw it every day, it certainly does when I visit.

2\. While its interesting to consider, this feels like an optimization for a system we don't even have working yet. There are so many ills to deal with in our societies that I feel like its not something that is worth spending much public time or effort on (research it all you want by all means). I hate to feel that way because when people deride NASA/space research/pure research it frustrates me because they aren't mutually exclusive with solving earth problems (fix our planet before we try to go to mars!), but I can't help but feel like this could mostly improve life for people who are already living pretty good too. I'm conflicted about actually putting this into practice.

<comment><USER8> On your second point, the poor suffer from Modernist architecture. The projects actively bred crime, by encouraging isolation and demoralization -- Pruitt-Igoe was actually dynamited, and its inhabitants were much more peaceful and civilized after they were moved to normal housing. (And they'd been much more peaceful and civilized before being moved into Pruitt-Igoe, too.)

The rich, and the prosperous upper-middle class, can live where they like and enjoy traditional architecture (look up New Traditional construction), but ordinary people are stuck with ordinary buildings, which are awful under a Modernist regime -- or under our current Postmodernist regime of cheap pull-up sheds adorned with ticky-tacky.

<comment><USER9> Interesting, do you think modernist architecture itself breeds problems or do you think the economic conditions bred the crime? I get the feeling that the architecture was used in some cases specifically to group together people that they wanted to get away from the upper and/or middle classes and consolidate together, but I wonder how much of that can be attributed to the actual architecture itself. I don't feel like we can know that until we have a more equal society or at least one where straight poverty isn't as much of an issue.

<comment><USER8> I really do blame the architecture, not the economic conditions, which were more or less constant before, during, and after Pruitt-Igoe. (And I certainly don't blame race, which was also constant before, during, and after Pruitt- Igoe...)

From Wikipedia ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe)), Pruitt-Igoe was a slum-clearance project, intended to provide more hygienic, healthier, cleaner, less crowded, and generally better living conditions for people who were already living in the area. The hope was that it would integrate its inhabitants better into the economy, and help everyone living there -- both black and white -- to get ahead in life. The project was actually really well racially integrated for 1950s Missouri: blacks lived in buildings named for Pruitt (a black ace pilot in WWII), whites in buildings named for Igoe (a white Congresscritter), but they were all in the same vicinity. Presumably this reflected the composition of the slums Pruitt-Igoe was replacing, since the inhabitants of the old neighborhood (called DeSoto- Carr) were moved into Pruitt-Igoe as the old buildings were torn down. (No need to pity them for being expropriated: the inhabitants didn't own the buildings, and slumlords don't deserve much sympathy.)

And, strikingly enough, the initial design for the neighborhood would have been a success. High rises aren't the Devil when they're integrated into the urban fabric (otherwise present-day Manhattan would be a nightmare); Pruitt- Igoe was meant to be a mix of high-rises, mid-rises, and two- to four-storey walk-ups, until cost cutting came into play and they ended up with towers in a park.

Since the same people had the same economic conditions before, during, and after Pruitt-Igoe, and since they committed more crimes during Pruitt-Igoe than before or after, I think it's fair to say that the architecture, not the economic conditions, was at fault.

<comment><USER10> I have a similar theory that bad posture causes depression.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> rm_-rf_slash Ithaca, NY, may not have the most remarkable architecture, but I am always amazed at how beautiful the city looks from the hilltops.

Crucially, there are few buildings above two stories in the many blocks between the downtown area and the south shores of Cayuga Lake. There are so many trees in between that one could be forgiven for thinking that a major section of the city is little more than a forest or a densely wooded park, when viewed from above.

</comment><comment><USER11> The UC Davis "Death Star" [0] is one of those buildings, it was meant to encourage human interaction but ends up just building dread. Terrible building.

[https://localwiki.org/davis/Social_Sciences_and_Humanities_B...](https://localwiki.org/davis/Social_Sciences_and_Humanities_Building)

<comment><USER12> I'm actually a fan of the Death Star. For me, it was one of those places where you could turn a corner and get a completely different perspective. And it was decently fun to LARP in. I was in the sciences so I never spent much time there, but I like the uniqueness of the building. I just wish it was a little more unique, using other colors and textures than plain gray concrete.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Anyone interested in this subject matter would be smart to consult Gaston Bachelard's seminal work 'Poetics of Space'

For anyone creating in VR, this book should be required reading. But, I haven't heard anyone working in VR acknowledge it. My background is in art, and I have held this book as just short of sacred throughout my practice.

</comment><comment><USER14> Mentioned at the end of the article is desire path and of course there is an active subreddit with tons of awesome pictures: [https://www.reddit.com/r/DesirePath/top/?sort=top&t=all](https://www.reddit.com/r/DesirePath/top/?sort=top&t=all)

</comment><comment><USER15> One should read The Nature of Order by Chris Alexander and / or The Timeless Way of Building

</comment><comment><USER16> Am I the only one who read the article in the voice of Roman Mars?

<comment><USER17> I read your comment in his voice

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've been reading a book called _The Edifice Complex_ by Deyan Sudjic that is related to this idea. I'm only part way through, but it's already provided some fascinating examples of how very powerful individuals have used architecture, often to an extreme degree, to intimidate and to project authority when others have come to visit them.

</comment><comment><USER6> "Happy City" (mentioned in the article) is a terrific book, and surprisingly down-to-earth.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm tempted to send this to my boss in support of redesigning our 90s-esque cubicle farm.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is why earth buildings can be so healing psychologically.

</comment><comment><USER20> So, what I'm reading is: "Architects to phase in eye-candy as they find out bare walls to be unedifying".

Is this an overly cynical reading of the article?

<comment><USER8> Bare walls plus eye candy just gives you Postmodernism, which isn't much of an improvement over Modernism. The goal is to build genuinely smaller buildings, or buildings with a wider range of uses. (Think of how the Empire State Building has shops on the first few floors and offices above, and its stepped- back construction lets it blend in with more standard six-storey facades.)

<comment><USER20> Diverse urban landscapes is something that I can get behind, but the issue (as I see it) is that there's something else at play here. Mixed-use, for instance, is already well justified as an urban policy by contemporary urban economics. Designing streets in such a way that they're easier to navigate is something that is already well motivated by contemporary behavioral agent- based modelling of urban landscapes (besides being an idea which is probably as old as urban planning itself).

It's the idea of some immediate psychological response to the environment like that of the stress level of a passerby to a facade that bothers me, because it reminds me too much of stuff which IMO hasn't been particularly useful in urban planning, such as the broken windows theory. There's no immediate inference that can be made from the immediate psychological response of a passerby to the behavioral response of a urban population to the same environment over long periods of time. There plenty of neighborhoods in this world that might _look_ like shit but which aren't actually shit, and most often neither do the plainer houses in a given neighborhood house people any worse than their neighbors. But in so far as lots of money might be wasted trying to "solve" these issues, the whole idea to me sounds to me like a massive red herring.

<comment><USER8> Massive blank facades, of the sort that this study condemns, can't occur in a diverse, mixed-use urban landscape; so I think this study has gotten to the right answer.

Still, I see your point: are they getting to the right answer in the right way? I like the idea of breaking up blank facades, but I agree with your point that an area can look ugly or frightening to an outsider but fairly pleasant to a local -- and that if this way of doing things grows beyond the blank- facades question, it could become a serious problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> American buildings always feel a little odd to me. My guess is that this is related to them using feet and inches and not the metric system.

<comment><USER22> I'm not sure I understand your assertion here. How would unit of measure make a difference to the feel?

And, I'm assuming this same oddness of feel extends to older buildings pretty much everywhere?

<comment><USER23> I think they're suggesting a subconscious perception of the subtle differences in sizes that result from building with round numbers in metric vs imperial (e.g. 1 meter is different than 3 feet). This is interesting, but seems less likely than the more dramatic differences in architectural styles, materials, regulations, and zoning.

<comment><USER24> Paper sizes might be a better example of this since the only difference is the dimensions. Something about the relative dimensions of A4 paper just looks nicer to me.

(I know the ISO sizes are based on the golden ratio, but I think this probably has more to do with me being a lawyer practicing in the United States. PerhapsUS-Letter and Legal sizes subconsciously read as "work" to me and A4 reads as exotic.)

<comment><USER25>
      > the ISO sizes are based on the golden ratio

No, 1:√2. (A golden rectangle divides into a golden rectangle plus a square; an ISO rectangle divides into two ISO rectangles.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Racket-on-Chez Status - <AUTHOR> https://blog.racket-lang.org/2020/02/racket-on-chez-status.html <comment><USER2> What I wonder is whether the Chez base might massively improve Racket's concurrency capabilities.

In Common Lisp, one has pthreads-like concurrency capabilities which seem very well suited for fine-grained parallelism as well as for server tasks. I am thinking in such things like parallel backtracking and optimization algorithms for robotic control or board games, for example.

However, threads are notoriously difficult to handle cleanly and safely in larger programs. Here, Clojure (which in my eyes is a very Scheme-like Lisp) offers a very elegant solution with its concurrency primitives of Futures, Atoms, Agents, and STM. After some experimenting, I believe they are very, very attractive for many concurrent server tasks (like a web server), but not that well suited for computing-intensive parallel algorithms like the ones I mentioned above, which I am highly interested in. Part of the reasons are that such algorithms can become quite GC-heavy. Also, the Clojure compiler has limits on how much primitive types can be passed as parameters in one functions. This means that a complex backtracking algorithm in Clojure can still be two orders of magnitude slower than in C (which is somewhat disappointing, but one has to remember that Clojure was not designed for this).

Racket has had, so far, only limited concurrency capabilities. It had Futures, however they could easily become blocked by GC. It also has Places, which are a very safe and clean solution of splitting parallel computations into separate processes. However, I think that places are not the first choice for heavily parallel algorithms with strong interdependencies.

Now, Racket can run on top of Chez, and Chez has fine-grained concurrency capabilities on top of pthreads, which seem to be on par with Common Lisp. Also, Racket has strong support for functional and side-effect free programming, including some data structures. In my impression, this seems to open a wide range of new possibilities, including providing look-alike primitives for Clojure's Futures, Agents, and Atoms. I would be very interested to know more whether this impression is correct.

</comment><comment><USER3> Will it work on top of GNU Guile[1] as well? It became very fast since 3.0 version with the introduction of JIT[2].

[1] [https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/](https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/)

[2] [https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/news/gnu- guile-300-releas...](https://www.gnu.org/software/guile/news/gnu- guile-300-released.html)

<comment><USER4> It is difficult because there are a lot of minor details that has been added to Chez Scheme or to the patched version of Chez Scheme that is used by Racket.

For example ephemerons, that need some magic to cooperate with the garbage collector. [https://cisco.github.io/ChezScheme/csug9.5/smgmt.html#./smgm...](https://cisco.github.io/ChezScheme/csug9.5/smgmt.html#./smgmt:s26)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Question from someone who knows barely anything about the Scheme ecosystem:

It seems that the one of the motivations for starting this effort, besides performance, was to move away from a C code base. Is Chez Scheme primarily written in Scheme?

<comment><USER6> I think the reason is more maintainability, when basing on a solid and faster other Scheme. It's much easier to write in terms of that other Scheme's primitives, than writing a C core, avoiding all kinds of C typical bugs. Furthermore, many improvements in Chez Scheme will carry over to Racket and the 2 communities might join forces in improving Chez and thus Racket in effect.

What that other Scheme is based on is a secondary consideration. Chez Scheme is also said to be implemented very well, however.

<comment><USER7> Iirc Idris2 went straight to running on chez since Edwin was so impressed by chez scheme and it's runtime.

<comment><USER8> The result is super fast: if you use if after using Idris1 you'll be blown away by how much quicker it type-checks. I'd never have thought a Scheme could perform noticeably faster than Haskell, but maybe most of the improvements are just due to algorithmic improvements made during the rewrite.

<comment><USER7> I never played with Idris2, but I recall running some idris1 programs using the chez scheme backend instead of thebc one and got instant 5x speedups. Across the board.

Not that it wouldn't be possible to make the C code fast. It is just that the chez backend was a one man job.

<comment><USER9> Thank the Chez Scheme developers for an absolutely fantastic compiler, and also Idris for being designed so that it's possible to feed any of the IRs to the particular backend. There's not much of an impedance mismatch between Scheme and Idris lambda output, so the overhead is small. I could have made it a bit better if I had represented Idris lists and bools as the corresponding scheme types, instead of being mapped as all the other types by their structure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is there an update on what Racket decided to do with the proposal to deprecate the existing language syntax?

Racket was a great tool to teach people lisp and initiate them into that paradigm.

Is the main syntax still good for long term use?

<comment><USER9> They changed the name of the project from Racket 2 to Rhombus to make it clear that it was not about replacing Racket.

And even in the original announcment it was stated " * `#lang racket` is not going away and will always have its current parenthesis-oriented syntax. In the same way that Racket still supports `#lang scheme` and `#lang mzscheme` and even `(module <name> mzscheme ....)` and even top-level programs, the Racket compiler and runtime system will always support `#lang racket` programs. We believe that Racket's `#lang`-based ecosystem makes it uniquely positioned for trying new language variants while preserving and building on our past investments."

They have only made that statement stronger since then.

<comment><USER10> So will the current Racket language continue to be developed, as in new features, bug fixes and regular releases _after_ Rhombus is released?

Renaming doesn't help the case much here, if Racket's future is abandonware.

<comment><USER10> A bit of Googling landed me here: [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/racket- users/-x_M5wIht...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/racket- users/-x_M5wIhtWk/V47eL30HCgAJ)

From there:

Phase 1: Brainstorming (months)

Phase 2: Iterative Design (years)

Phase 3: Conversion (months or years)

Phase 4: Transition (years)

I am a nobody in front of people like Matthew Flatt, but this feels like Seconds Systems Effect taken to its extreme definition: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second- system_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect)

Plus as a former Perl programmer having watched Perl 5 lost almost everything, chasing a never to have come to reality Perl 6. I can say, given all this, the future of Racket as a language, for its core uses and users is pretty much _dead_ in the years to come. Like dead totally. Racket doesn't even have as much the share of dev mind share or a resource like CPAN at its disposal. Languages like Racket will fade away into oblivion a lot more quickly.

It can be hard to see this in all the enthusiasm in the early stages of the project. But when you embark on multi year project journeys. People's priorities change, people get into health crises, lose jobs, move on to better projects, recessions happen. Core teams that started these projects change so much, newer one's pretty much give up and see no point in it after a while. Many people prefer a perfectly working tool improved over time, than a pie-in- the-sky idea that will never come to see the light of the day. While all this is happening, your existing language, libraries, dev mindshare, tooling suffers. Merely supporting small time fixes means nothing, because no one likes to use a tooling in hospice care. Your core dedicated set of users, who did most of the evangelism for your cause move on to newer tools and languages, for the obvious reasons that they don't see their future with existing tool they like, the newer one is taking for ever and isn't even the same goodness as the current one. Once you lose those users, the newer users you wish to attract from the crowd of Java and Python programmers won't even bother to try, why should they? They have something proven to work in production with tooling, libraries, books, and production success stories for decades.

That is when you realize you lost both your old and new language.

Racket was awesome for what it was. An awesome lisp, a top successor for Common Lisp and a playground for experiments and initiating people into Lisp.

It's not late. Probably it's time to stop right now.

<comment><USER9> Racket (and PLT Scheme before it) has always been a bunch of languages, keeping a few different syntaxes and semantics around isn't anything new. I don't get why having another take on the surface syntax should cause all that much anxiety.

<comment><USER10> Because you are not exactly running Rhombus as a side toy language, but as a successor to Racket. This requires Rhombus to eventually replace Racket. Anything less than this and it makes Rhombus a non-successor to Racket. While at the same time much needed resources to make Racket win, will go to making Rhombus happen. Even if Rhombus comes along, it won't have any of the current Racket goodness to begin with. Rhombus will take years to just exist. Meanwhile precious resources for improving Racket to a better Racket over the years will be taken by Rhombus.

Net result is a stagnated Racket, and a non-attractive Rhombus.

Plus C based languages have their winners already. Racket is a kind of a winner in the Lisp family. With Clojure it makes the only other choice. Now if you change the syntax, you are going after users who don't really care what you have to offer, at the same time, you are taking away what your existing users like.

<comment><USER11> Racket is not like other languages.

Racket is a language with _first class support_ for building languages on _top_ of it. And so no, Rhombus does not need to be a "successor" to Racket. It does not need to "replace" Racket. It _will_ have all the current Racket goodness to begin with, because _all_ of its semantics will come from Racket - they will be the same language. Nor will it steal valuable developer attention - a bug fixed in Rhombus is a bug fixed in Racket, anywhere except the syntax parser. They will share all core libraries. The whole point of Racket is that #langs are mutually compatible. And the stress test of using Racket in earnest for what it is actually _designed_ for will make Racket better, not worse.

Consider PyonR [0]. This is a similar and yet _much_ more ambitious goal than Rhombus - Python as a Racket #lang, with 100% compatibility with Racket _and_ Python including external modules. And yet, it's a one-man project, written as a thesis and now pretty much abandoned. Writing Rhombus, a mere surface syntax for Racket, should be much easier. The hard part isn't writing it, it's deciding what it should be.

The Racket team are the only ones that I can see who are taking all the "write your own DSL" Lisp hype and actually trying to apply it in a structured way.

[0] [https://github.com/pedropramos/PyonR](https://github.com/pedropramos/PyonR)

<comment><USER10> Well PyonR is not a replacement for Racket. It's something totally a different project altogether. Rhombus is supposed to replace Racket. We could have PerlRacket or AwkRacket or RubyRacket and none of it should effect Racket, because you are using Racket as a language to build things, not exactly using RubyRacket as a replacement for Racket.

This is how it rings to my ear. Racket as is, is in some way frozen when it comes to features and big changes. Rhombus is where the next set of awesomeness will happen. Lispers who happen to be core users of Racket have no use at the time for non-existent Rhombus, and its not Lispy so their whole use case ends here. Racket won't be continued to developed in the same breath as Rhombus, so Racket is also dead here. C based language devs have a lot of good stuff already, so they don't need Rhombus either.

Eventually this could lead to the exact situation Perl was in the 2000s. The core development was frozen for 5+ years. The language usability just fell year over year. Perl 6 took forever to even start with the implementations. Pugs, then Neitza, then Rakudo. Eventually they came to a point, where they announced Perl 5 development would just run parallel as a separate project compared to Perl 6. By then a lot of dev mind share was lost to Python/Java. Now neither Perl 5 nor Perl 6 have significant mind share. Perl 5 certainly has lost a lot of its users.

Also in general trying to be everything to everybody is a bad idea in general. Ask Parrot VM people. It doesn't work the way you expect. You won't solve anyone's specific problem, and it takes forever to get done.

<comment><USER12> > This is how it rings to my ear. Racket as is, is in some way frozen when it > comes to features and big changes. Rhombus is where the next set of > awesomeness will happen.

You still seem to be misunderstanding how Racket and #lang's work. Rhombus and Racket will be the _same_ language, but with different parsers. Big features of Rhombus will be added by adding those features to Racket.

Languages in Racket are not developed independently of each other, they all share the underlying language machinery.

<comment><USER10> >>Rhombus and Racket will be the same language

Exactly the point, one will have to bring Rhombus to Racket's feature parity, which by the link I posted, and the Racket people themselves acknowledge will take several years to happen. That much dev resources have to be dedicated to build a new language which will have the same feature parity as Racket. This effort could be expended to taking Racket forward. This is non trivial effort.

At the same time, you are hoping to attract users from Java/Python land(Who very likely won't come, given where your language will be(absence of killer libs, frameworks, books, q&a support etc)). While turning away existing lisp users. This ultimately becomes a disaster.

One of the biggest selling points of Racket was that it was continuously being worked on, unlike CL whose spec is frozen(putting it mildly, the real word would be _abandoned_ ).

Looks like Lisp has a lot of self destructive tendencies than anything else. Competition seems to be non existent. But Lisp communities just can't agree to work on things. A super massive pivot that just won't fix any real problems to existing users, adding very few incentives to new users, plus act as a resource drain, and cause your perfectly fine existing language to stagnate.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20503742](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20503742)

A similar argument is made in the above thread.

Regardless, of all this serious software also commits itself to things like stability and takes backwards compatibility seriously.

<comment><USER4> It will take years (if it is even completed) but it doesn't mean that Racket will not be advancing meanwhile. Most of the discussion is in angry[1] comments in GitHub written while drinking coffee in the morning. In these 6 months, I guess the lost development time was only 1 or 2 weeks distributed in small chunks. If I can extrapolate linearly, the delay will be only 6 months (but some parts may take more time, for example rewriting the documentations).

The idea is that the libraries written in Racket will be usable in Rhombus and that the libraries in Rhombus will be usable in Racket. Racket already ships with multiple internal languages, so one more is not a big difference. [2]

Note that some constructions that are special cases that must be implemented by the language are just libraries in Racket. For example most of the implementation of `for` and `match` are in their own library, and even more weird things like at-expressions is just a library [https://docs.racket- lang.org/scribble/reader-internals.html](https://docs.racket- lang.org/scribble/reader-internals.html) Some of them may need some tweaking to make them more idiomatic with the new syntax, but most of the implementation will be useful as is.

[1] Most comments are nice, but let's add some drama to make the story more interesting.

[2] Some languages have more impedance mismatch and need some macro magic to make sharing easy. In some languages sharing libraries is straightforward.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why is it called "Chez" scheme?

<comment><USER14> Because it's now based on « Chez Scheme » ([https://scheme.com](https://scheme.com)).

<comment><USER13> I meant, why was "that" scheme called "Chez" scheme?

<comment><USER15> All about it on "The development of Chez Scheme" paper, written on its twentieth anniversary.

[https://legacy.cs.indiana.edu/~dyb/pubs/hocs.pdf](https://legacy.cs.indiana.edu/~dyb/pubs/hocs.pdf)

<comment><USER16> I don't see the name explained in that document. It does mention ' _C_ -Scheme' and ' _Z_ 80 Scheme' so maybe _C_ he _z_ is a sort of interpolation of those?

<comment><USER17> In French chez means "at the home of (used in imitation of French, often humorously)." This always rings this bell in my mind when I hear this word.

An example: Je suis allé chez Steele et Sussman roughly translates to: I went to the Steele's and the Sussman's homes</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Indigo, a Canadian Chain, Is Reinventing Book Selling - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/books/booksupdate/indigo-books-canadian-chain.html <comment><USER2> Things like this make me feel very out of touch. I went into Indigo the other day with my kids to use some gift cards from Christmas, with the idea of getting books to take on a short trip. We ended up in what felt like a bizarre home goods, toy store, book store, quasi-junk pile store. There was shit everywhere. My kids needed constant reminders to look for books, not junk.

Everything was plastic, cheap, very disposable, and very much intended for conspicuous consumption. Some part of me feels like we've fallen very far if literature, one of the pinnacles of human accomplishments, can only be sold if you can also buy the kind of garbage that's rapidly filling our oceans and landfills as well. There is a bizarre dichotomy between books - the things that can potentially last a lifetime and satisfy countless readers - and the impulsively purchased and remarkably unnecessary items which will be bought and lost or disposed of within a year.

I might be overly pessimistic about it. I want my kids to have more wholesome experiences when it comes to the type of media (especially books) they consume. I'll keep taking them to the library the majority of the time, and otherwise, go to local book shops which just sell books. If they still exist.

I feel a little bit like Abe Simpson. "I used to be with 'it', but then they changed what 'it' was.". Maybe Indigo is just fine.

<comment><USER3> You do seem a bit pessimistic and I'm not sure that your negativity is entirely warranted in the case of Indigo. The products they stock are certainly not high-end, but nor are they dollar store crap.

Most of the items are decent and some are quite nice. I've seen very nice blankets, good quality stationery and related items, board games, and the sort of mid-quality art/nerdy things that you tend to see in the gift shops of museums and art galleries.

None of it is stuff you "need" which may be causing your reaction, but if you were to buy it, you wouldn't throw (most of) it out a week later.

<comment> 52-6F-62 Yeah sort of agree here.

I don't head over there often, but I use a tea mug from that place every day in the office.

I used to like visiting those stores when they were "Chapters" whenever we'd visit the city (read extent-suburbs) as a kid. It was especially exciting when we didn't have internet or up-to-date computers and I'd get to browse the multitudes of computer and music magazines. Always left me jealous. I think that place had a bit better of a thing going—it was less frenetic.

That said, the buying power of Indigo makes it a worthwhile place to search for a book if you can't find it locally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I watched this happen over the last 20 years and its an important development.

If you remember the 80s and 90s, you may remember lingering in bookstores because they were a focal point to daytime city life. Before online dating, you would meet women and men there, and that was the whole point. If you ask any man of a certain age from a city who the "bookstore girl," was, he will have a memory, if not a story for you. It was a big part of city culture.

What Reismann (and her predecessor, Chapters) did initially was bring suburban big box stores into the city and wiped out a lot of the street life and culture, and with it, small publishers. In effect this polarized the market for fiction, where literary fiction today has been reduced to "content," and a lot of unctuous posturing funded by grant money.

However, after hollowing the market out, Reismann branched out with Indigo and kind of re-planted, where her stores are once again places for people to linger. They are placed near movie theatres, so it was something to do while you waited.

The formula that Indigo is getting right is, like us in software, it's about generating retail traffic. You need a funnel to drive conversions. To do that, you need to attract women, who draw men, and the frisson that keeps them coming back is what turns the engine over. Let's face it, Indigo isn't a Cabela's with books because that's not how you get that retail traffic engine to turn over. It's more like Anthropologie meets a craft shop.

I don't like shopping at Indigo, but that's not the point. As a man I go there because I can get a new release or something relatively mainstream faster than amazon can deliver it, and crucially, I can get exposure to that element of social randomness and optionality that is completely absent and destroyed in cities now that everyone carries a slot machine in their pocket. The most interesting future from my view will be the one that gets people actually talking and connecting again the way we used to in bookstores and cafes.

<comment> barry-cotter > What Reismann (and her predecessor, Chapters) did initially was bring > suburban big box stores into the city and wiped out a lot of the street life > and culture, and with it, small publishers. In effect this polarized the > market for fiction, where literary fiction today has been reduced to > "content," and a lot of unctuous posturing funded by grant money.

The MFA was born in 1940. Form before content is not a product of Borders. The same kinds of people read pretentious literature worldwide and the same kinds of people write it. It's like avant-garde theatre, it's the same everywhere. Literary fiction is no more because of Borders than fantasy or detective fiction is. People aren't completely useless at realising that there are clusters in the kinds of books people like to read, even without computers. Those clusters are genres and literary fiction is one of them.

<comment><USER4> The big box model killed small bookstores, then demanded that to access their new market, publishers print in sufficient volumes to stock all their huge stores, and then when they didn't sell all of the copies, the stores returned the unsold books to the publishers and that collapsed them.

The big box store killed the more sparse and diverse shops that sustained the market for niches like Nobel, Booker, and other prize winners. Litfic is mainly character driven over of plot driven, so to say it's all pretentious would be a bit much. The result was that Indigo came to resemble a kind of landfill of discarded ideas, where the good stuff got lost in the effort to find it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Barnes & Noble is doing something like that, in the sense of having a good sized section of the store devoted to things not books or reasonably connected to reading.

The kind of things B&N has there are (all of these are probably incomplete since I'm mostly going from what I've noticed):

• A bunch of different kinds of games. Board games, card games, dice games from a variety of types (strategy games, role playing games, party games, for example).

• Puzzles. Assembly, disassembly, interlocking, take apart, and other such infuriating things. Rubik's assorted things and similar. Jigsaw puzzles.

• Collectables and branded stuff, such as action figures, bobble heads, key chains, plushies and such for assorted popular characters from Disney, Marvel, DC, Studio Ghibli, Star Wars, Harry Potter, and others. Even some food, such as "Bertie Botts, Every Flavour Jelly Beans".

• LEGO. A bunch of sets and kits, both generic and themed.

• Toys. Quite a bit of these are STEM related, such as simple electronics kits and simple robotics stuff, microscopes, telescopes, anatomy models, and more.

It's actually a pretty good and interesting selection.

</comment><comment><USER6> I used to spend hours in Chapters / Indigo. Now half the floor space is devoted to overpriced crap, and I never go there.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. The amount of books at these stores has drastically dropped, and they rarely have what I'm looking for anymore. The crap they do have is now devoted to targeting a demographic I don't belong to. It's hard to argue with their success, but it's just no longer a store for me anymore.

<comment><USER8> What kind of crap? Is it like B&N where half the products are toys, trinkets, and random Harry Potter memorabilia?

<comment><USER9> Pillows, throw blankets, candles, incense, stuffed animals, ornaments, coffee mugs. Indigo is essentially now a chain selling "the reading experience"—everything you need on/near a couch (or bed, or bathtub, or dining table) to have a comfortable day sitting around reading a book. Including the book itself, of course. These (both the accessories and the books themselves) are marketed as "gifts for people who read."

They also sell some card/board games (and even, oddly, a rather large collection of tarot card decks), stationery (notebooks, journals, calendars), _some_ greeting cards (but not a whole aisle of them), and a few other things that aren't quite accessories to books, but make more sense from another interpretation of their paradigm: "expensive, medium-to-high-quality paper products that nobody would be likely to buy for themselves, and which therefore make good gifts when you want to make it clear that you didn't just buy them something from the dollar store and/or Walmart." In other words: _bougie_ paper products.

Oh, and—separately again—their childrens' section, as well as containing books, contains toys, but only those that could (perhaps loosely) be referred to as "learning toys." Indigo wants to supplant traditional toy stores as the destination for adults trying to shop for a gift for a child, with a different approach—rather than stocking the toys the _kids_ want, they stock the toys that _adults_ think would most _benefit_ kids to play with. If you recall the kids' section of early ThinkGeek—before they became a HotTopic-alike "cultural branding" store—it has that same kind of feel: gifts you could get your niece/nephew, that would both make the kid excited, but also make their parents appreciate the purchase (rather than resenting it for how much it's distracting the kid from their studies or, potentially, damaging their house.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm none too fond of the evolution bookstores into coffee shops and sellers of bric a brac but quite frankly a landscape devoid of any semblance of a bookstore is a frightening alternative which has been realized in many communities. I also realize that I can't have it both ways, sniffing out the second hand bargain on Amazon or Ebay while bemoaning and fearing the fate of the local chain store. Accordingly, I'll occasionally pay full price at a physical retailer and hope that it adds to their bottom line.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'll start with my gratitude that a Canadian bookseller has found a way to make their bottom line work and afford locations in high-rent areas that stay open late. Also, I'd say their staff are generally attentive and helpful. Thank you for this, Indigo.

BUT... I have given Indigo too many second chances on their non-book merchandise so their new defocussed focus makes me cringe. I've had to do many returns, embarrassing gift returns, because of poor quality crap. Two "literary" mugs, on separate occasions, whose messages started to wash off after several uses. A "literary" quote pillow whose stitching came undone within months. A smart-seeming not-cheap boardgame with wooden pieces that _could_ have lasted a lifetime time if it wasn't for crappy quality control that left the pieces painted with grossly offcenter markings that you can't unsee while playing. Sure, they sell some highish-end consumer electronics, which seem really out of place, but then that's an area where their staff are out of their depth when I've asked questions.

Too many merchandise strikes for me. So you're out, Indigo. I'll only shop there for books now. Which means I cringe and put on tunnel vision as I'm forced to walk through all their non-book plastic futuretrash.

Their model is obviously working for them and for most people. So I recognize I'm probably just a retro bookstore grouch with unrealistic expectations. And I recognize book margins may not be great. But maybe instead of selling barely-relevant disposable garbage, they could help their bottom line by moving just outside of the _highest_ rent locations? (Multi-story retail on Robson Street in Vancouver, really??)

Books endure. Most of their new crap doesn't. Still feels awkward.

<comment><USER11> It really makes me wish that the older Chapters banner wasn't being retired. Same company but when you went to a Chapters you knew it was just going to be books and a smattering of other media. The conversion of pretty much every Chapters location into another Indigo is one of the reasons I tend to do most of my book shopping exclusively with Amazon now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "It may seem strange for a bookstore chain to be developing and selling artisanal soup bowls and organic cotton baby onesies. But Indigo's approach seems not only novel but crucial to its success and longevity"

This is the Amazon model. Start with books and move onto other items. Great for them, but not novel or innovative.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, but it's not. Ever since Amazon.ca really established their presence here, there's not a lot of reason to buy from Indigo unless they're heavily discounting something.

Their selection is generally meager compared to a lot of other online stores here. Honestly, every time I pass by a Chapters/Indigo, I'm surprised they're still around.

My guess is that they still get a lot of bricks and mortar customers who want instant gratification with a dead tree book purchase (provided it's a popular, stocked title).

<comment><USER14> Two times I go to the Indigo near me: a) wander around after I get a coffee at the attached starbucks, and 2) my kids have giftcards to spend from birthdays/christmas.

Only once in the last year did I have a focused reason to hit them up, I wanted to get a certain book for my kid to start reading together THAT NIGHT.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Glad to hear they're finding a way to make money.

My impression is that Indigo is a seller of physical books at a time when reading is increasingly going online, so they are turning into an odds-and- ends store for the people Stuff White People Like was written about.

It's as if people started drinking less and less coffee and Starbucks slowly morphed into a kitchen-gear store.

<comment> 52-6F-62 > _Stuff White People Like_

Funny enough, also Canadian (well, written by a Canadian)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The way they layout their stores is also very attractive. It's impossible to pass one of their stores, and not go inside to browse, even when you don't plan to buy anything. Only one other store has the same effect on me and that's Apple Store.

</comment><comment><USER17> I have two young kids and we probably did 50% of our Christmas shopping _in_ Indigo last year, the rest being on Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER18> Updating your business model to stay afloat; I don't see anything wrong with this.

I think the major issue currently with books is that most people only listen to audio books or podcasts. As well as books take up physical space. I regret to say that I too have been buying less physical books because of running out of room on my bookshelves! I used to be very proud of my ever growing personal library... Now I'm unsure if the investment was worth it.

</comment><comment><USER19> > "Cross-merchandising is Retail 101, and it's hard to do in a typical > bookstore,"

This doesn't seem that different from Barnes & Noble. About a third of the floor space in our local B&N is book-adjacent collectables (Harry Potter memorabilia, Funko Pops) and another quarter is stationery.

<comment><USER11> There's quite a gap between collectables and made-for-use lifestyle items like pans and knives and craft kits and so on and so forth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> They closed the only bookstore they had in my town and moved to a mall (Coles), it's a place now to buy pricey stupid gifts and popular books too I guess.

</comment><comment><USER21> imo It's the best place to find interesting gifts for family and close friends in my city.

</comment><comment><USER22> "Last year, all my friends got reading socks" If one of my friends gave me "reading socks" I would laugh in their face. If they had reading socks I would probably rethink my friendship with them.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, "reading socks" sounds sort of like "lovemaking hat'. Huh? Why would you need one?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> ...by ceasing to be a bookstore.

<comment><USER24> You could call it a "reading store" now I guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> So proud of the Indigo team.</comment>


SoundHound Just Debuted a Crazy-Powerful Personal Assistant - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/06/soundhound-hound/

<comment><USER2> NLP Demo [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1ONXea0mXg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1ONXea0mXg)</comment>


Todo.txt: Future-proof task tracking in a file you control - <AUTHOR> http://todotxt.org/ <comment><USER2> Throwing my failed side project into the ring as well - Ultralist[1][2] is very similar to todo.txt but has a bigger focus on Due dates. I use it every day.

The CLI portion is fully baked and works great, but the webapp and syncing part never really gained traction.

[1]: [https://ultralist.io/](https://ultralist.io/)

[2]: [https://github.com/ultralist/ultralist](https://github.com/ultralist/ultralist)

<comment><USER3> This looks really cool, might have to start using it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Some alternatives: devtodo[1], taskwarrior[2], and org-mode[3].

[1] - [http://swapoff.org/DevTodo](http://swapoff.org/DevTodo)

[2] - [https://taskwarrior.org/](https://taskwarrior.org/)

[3] - [https://www.orgmode.org/](https://www.orgmode.org/)

<comment><USER5> But why. What are the advantages and disadvantages?

<comment><USER6> I've not used the others, but org-mode is capable of everything described in the linked site, and a lot more. It's a text format (so from a future-proofing perspective, similar). The task tracking system is fairly straightforward, if you _just_ wanted tasks you'd have something like:

      * TODO Call mom               :phone:
       DEADLINE: <2019-08-24 Sat>
      * DONE Ignore dad

You can create custom workflows, (details in the manual):

      * TODO Do something
      * WORKING Doing something
      * DONE Did something

Or perhaps you're a kanban fan?

      * BACKLOG  CR 1
      * ANALYSIS CR 2
      * CODE     CR 3
      * QA       CR 4
      * DEPLOY   CR 5
      * DONE     CR 6

(Extra whitespace added for formatting here.)

You could create somethnig akin to a workbreakdown structure, and have org prevent marking parent activities done until children activities are done:

      * IN-WORK CR 1
      ** DONE Analysis
      ** DONE Develop acceptance tests
      ** IN-WORK Code
      ** TODO Peer Review
      ** TODO Release

And all those are headings, you can put text underneath them.

      * IN-WORK CR 1
      The customer wants us to stop storing passwords
      in a plaintext file.

If you use it for meetings, as I have, you can do something like this:

      * TODO Some Meeting
      DEADLINE: <2019-08-23 Fri>
      ** Agenda
      - [X] Introductions
      - [X] Presentation
      - [X] Discussion
      ** TODO Actions
      *** TODO Fix typos
      Accidentally typed /x/ everywhere I meant to type /k/
      *** TODO Email minutes

All the todos are integrated in with the notes, references, and other documentation. The full context is available. When I'm reading a book, I break it down into a todo per chapter, and record notes in the appropriate chapter as a way to monitor progress. When I'm writing a program, I try to develop the spec and other things inside of org files as well (conveniently works with literate programming, but I can't use that at work, couldn't sell it, but I use that for personal projects).

Downside: Some mobile viewers that can also edit the files, but full org capability is really only available in emacs (as best I can tell, is there a fairly feature complete implementation besides that one?).

<comment><USER7> You sound like you know quite a bit about org-mode. I recently started using emacs again and want to also give org-mode another shot.

IIRC last time I gave up on using org-mode for todos/notes because the experience on Windows wasn't as nice as on Mac (Mac for work, Windows at home).

Orgzly is good enough for Android imo. Do you have any experience with emacs+org on Windows, and any tips if you do?

I'm also curious about your kanban example. What are CR 1/2/3/..? Are they some sort of tag, or just the name of that item? Would you just move (refile?) a task from CR 1 to CR 2 for example?

Last question - do you use one instance of emacs for both notes/tasks and regular code editing? I enjoy reading examples of other peoples workflows because it helps me realize what I didn't know I could be doing better.

<comment><USER6> I use emacs+org on my work computer, which is Windows. It seems to work pretty well. I have not used the mobile apps in a while so I can't comment on them. The main issue on Windows is where it decides to stick your .emacs file. Your "home" directory is "C:/Users/username/AppData/Roaming", which is not the most practical location. So I use this option:

      (setq custom-file "fileshare-or-other-path/config.el)
      (load custom-file)

All my customizations live in that config file, and having it on the network share has made it easier to move between systems.

"CR" means "Change Request", the way we term high level feature changes (additions, alterations, removals) from customers (as opposde to bugs or other things). We give them unique identifiers (usually a combination of a system identifier and unique number), but in a project we usually just refer to them either by a short description of the capability or "CR ##".

The Kanban example was more a quick demonstration of how you might use a custom workflow, it's not something I've actually used. Having to coordinate with others is not a strength of org-mode, I can't get other people to use it. So we use other project management systems at work. But for my own things, I often do have a custom workflow set up to indicate what I'm working on, or what it's status might be.

I do use one instance, the first thing my config file does is:

      (server-start)

I can launch new clients and they all connect to the same server. I also make extensive use of frames, and added a quick way to cycle between them stealing the Command-` key from macOS (where it switches between windows in the same application):

      (global-set-key (kbd "M-`") 'other-frame)
      (global-set-key (kbd "C-`") 'other-window)

Much more convenient, for me, than the standard way. This makes switching between different sets of activities pretty easy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I like the motivation behind it but it's still too complicated typing "t add" with quotes blahblabha. I aptly fit the description in the introduction, but so far my best experience (by far) has been using OSX Notes.app.

First I pin the note so its always at the top, then I use automatic * bullet points.

First, I have items in bold which are critical and waiting on me to get done TODAY

Then I put an empty space, and i put non-bolded items which are waiting on me, less critical, and can be done in a week or month.

I also dont do any 'crossing off' or anything like that. I just immediately delete it when its done, and try to see those bold items go away

I use alfredapp.com bound to control+space and then type "n" for notes and hit enter, and my todo list is right there, usually with the cursor where I want it.

I rebound caps lock to space for even more efficiency in vim and when using alfred (with my pinky)

</comment><comment><USER9> I've been using this for about a year now, and having tried out many many others over the last 20 years of IT and management. Taskwarrior was ideal when managing departments, as I was tracking 200-500 tasks at any given time.

Now that I no longer manage people or large projects this works excellent for me. I use todotxt.net for Windows, I forget what I was using when I used to use macOS, I think just vim. In windows if i'm doing some sort of batch operation I open it with notepad++ (I manage a someday.txt and horizon.txt to keep focused).

The android app is excellent, with quick widget shortcuts to add tasks, including a panel. I very often when browsing reddit, or whatever else, will "share" anything i'm interested in and then process and sort them later. Things without a context are considered my "inbox".

When I add a due date, the due date actually gets entered into my calendar as a reminder (This is EXCELLENT). Since everything is synced, it doesn't matter if I enter this from a text editor or not, the android app sees it and does the entry. I use dropbox for sync for now, which is not ideal, but I can't be bothered at the time to get my workflow setup on my sync app of choice.

<comment><USER10> I've been trying use this -- but the sync from linux is tough. Been using rClone from the laptop to push changes to gDrive but doesn't seem reliable. I need to manually remember to push the file. If the file changes on the phone and on the desktop, there is no way to auto merge them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This looks great for simple stuff and awesome that they have a neat end-to-end product ecosystem.

I essentially do this with org-mode in emacs, though I don't have a special mobile application to edit it and sync with dropbox -- I know that others actually use orgzly[0] and similar tools.

[0] [https://github.com/orgzly](https://github.com/orgzly)

<comment><USER12> Did you use beorg[0] for iOS? [0] [https://beorgapp.com](https://beorgapp.com)

<comment><USER13> Beorg works very nicely. I recommend it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> open-paren I switched to this format a few months ago and I love it. The file is kept in a Google Drive folder and synced to all my devices. Aditya Bhaskar's Todo.txt for Android app[0] is probably the best app there is for it and is my preferred way of interfacing with it. I haven't gotten the hang of the CLI, and the configuration documentation isn't great. When I use it on a computer I just use a text editor, but it isn't as nice.

The only con I've run into in the few months is that there is no built-in support for re-occurring tasks, but I've moved around that by adding a manual tag like "repeats:every-saturday" or "repeats:last-sunday-of-month" and then changing the due date to that instead of hitting "complete"

[0] - [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.c306.ttsup...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.c306.ttsuper)

<comment><USER5> I prefer simpletask for Android.

<comment><USER14> I use Simpletask too. I still wish for a bit more out of it, but I appreciate the tag/project list and the UX over the official todo.txt Android app

<comment><USER15> I would be very interested to know what your additional wishes are. Could you raise some feature requests at github [1]?

[1]: [https://github.com/mpcjanssen/simpletask- android](https://github.com/mpcjanssen/simpletask-android)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm going to take this for a spin. It's similar to what I've done with a vimwiki todo file, but, Dropbox and app integration will be nice.

I still really miss Google Inbox's reminder functionality, that was the perfect Todo app for me.

</comment><comment><USER17> Related, fully using the power of simple text file system to keep track of my stuff

Adding command and corresponding script:

logadd whatever

echo %date% %time% %* >> log.txt tail -n1 log.txt

Retrieval command and corresponding script:

loglist whatever

grep -i %st% log.txt

This allows me to save thoughts, notes, stuff I am doing and want it noted, a phone number, whatever, and can retrieve it down to minute and second or to type of entry etc. Very helpful when sometimes you need to recall around when you were doing X thing. Works as a to do list as well. The tail in there is to verify that my entry was written.

</comment><comment><USER18> For lightweight task tracking I prefer Moo.do. I prefer outliner tools in general to easily zoom in and out to subtasks, and it is also possible to add pictures anywhere in the tree structure. It also does have dark mode and other fancy features to integrate calendar and mail to your todos but I don't really use them.

<comment><USER19> That might be a great product, but I don't see how it is a substitute for todo.txt - it appears to be a regular closed web app with a freemium business model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> When I was using Linux full time I used todotxt. It worked nicely with Vim on my workstation and native mobile apps on the phone. Since I switched to Macbook with iphones I'm satisfied with the native Reminder and Notes apps from Apple that are automatically synced across my devices.

</comment><comment><USER21> I've used todo.txt for several years and have been really happy with it. I've tried various tools, including Trello, Remember The Milk, Evernote, Todoist, and more, and I still come back to todo.txt primarily due to its simplicity.

</comment><comment><USER22> What I want is a Linux GUI tool, that on a hot-key pop-up and allows me to quickly add comments/task/edit using only keyboard, and then when I hot-key it again, it hides in the background. Any recommendations?

<comment><USER23> I expect Linux terminals can do this: iTerm on mac has a "Hotkey Window" mode, which drops down a terminal when I press Option-Space. In (one of the panes of) this I keep a text-mode emacs open for time logging. I generally use it only for that, so it's always open at the right place. org-capture can also work well to quickly save notes.

For more substantial notes work I typically switch to the appropriate virtual screen, switch to the GUI-mode emacs there, and if needed use a hotkey to jump to the appropriate org file.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This looks great, but I'm all in on OneNote now, super happy with it.

</comment><comment><USER25> Nothing beats a plain Google Docs doc IMO. Synced everywhere, historical revisions (more useful than done.txt as I can see things I deleted/changed as well), it just works for me.

<comment><USER26> I really tried to use Google Docs for a few years until I felt overwhelmed by the privacy considerations of putting my entire life "in" Google.

I know it just works, I even know no-one is really mining the database to see what time my vets appointments are. But I couldn't shake the nagging doubt of giving one internet company "all my stuff".

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> As soon as you add features to more than a one item per line list you've added useless friction.

Unless you've got org-mode then its OK

</comment><comment><USER28> Why is this better than just using some service like Rememberthemilk which I have been using?

</comment><comment><USER27> Use a fucking text file

</comment><comment><USER29> todo.org is also a powerful one :)

</comment><comment><USER30> >a file you control

>on Dropbox

pick one

</comment><comment><USER31> So this is a third party application (or one of several) I can download and install to make editing a text file sitting on my desktop easier and more accessible? Easier and more accessible than, say, opening it in Notepad? I apologize if I'm being snide, but I don't understand the use case here. This just seems like one extra step on an already very simple process.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the use case is pretty clear and simple, and somewhat appealing: You can use a todo list app of your choice, with whatever features you like, without getting locked in to a proprietary format.

Haven't used it myself, but if anyone has experience and/or recommendation for clients, I'd be interested to hear. It looks like it's been around for well over a decade.

<comment><USER32> I've followed Todo.txt from the beginning. It's an interesting project because it started without code, as just a Lifehacker post (back when it was very popular) about GTD-esque formatting for text files [0]. The actual application was built later [1] to simplify creating/querying todos in the files.

[0]: [https://lifehacker.com/geek-to-live-list-your-life-in- txt-16...](https://lifehacker.com/geek-to-live-list-your-life-in-txt-166299)

[1]: [https://lifehacker.com/geek-to-live-reader-written-todo- txt-...](https://lifehacker.com/geek-to-live-reader-written-todo-txt- manager-173018)

<comment><USER33> It appears to share some qualities with bullet journaling.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


May Your City Never Become San Francisco, New York or Seattle - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/26/upshot/happy-new-year-may-your-city-never-become-san-francisco-new-york-or-seattle.html <comment><USER2> Worst of them all, Vancouver, with none of the economy present in other expensive cities.

Fuck this miserable place.

<comment><USER3> Vancouver BC is the San Diego of Canada, being the furthest south, West Coast location in Canada.

San Diego has its prices propped up by this & the large amount of military forces stationed there (plus Qualcomm somewhat).

Vancouver seems to have quite a few branch offices from the likes of Amazon and Microsoft, plus homegrown companies like Telus and Absolute (maker of the LoJack and Computrace embedded malware on most laptops & desktops).

<comment><USER2> well I lived here 20+ years

Our housing prices are propped up by money laundering. Our biggest industry is real estate itself.

Our tech scene doesn't even show up on radar while Toronto does. MS doesn't hire locals, mostly foreigners who can barely speak eglish. AMZ here is a sweatshop according to Glassdoor reviews. Apple and facebook is here but they dont advertise the location or hire locals.

Don't even get me started about Telus lol

When a Starbucks barista in Seattle makes more than a junior, intermediate software engineer, your city is fucked.

yay

We do have that elusive quantumn computing company, yet to deliver any GDP boosting product.

and thousands of me too startups with shit pay and long hours. this was actually a selling point by the BC government: "Our workers are cheapest in North America"

<comment><USER3> Are junior software engineers really making less than $28k USD? The impression I got from an acquaintance originally from Vancouver BC who was looking to transfer back there (while staying with Amazon) was they pay similarly, but the projects available to work on are much fewer at Amazon's Vancouver BC office.

Telus, Robbers & Bhell can be pretty brutal from what I've heard, and the IISPs are pretty limited in what they can offer due to the CRTC's tariffs.

Seattle Barista Salary: [https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/seattle-barista- salary-SR...](https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/seattle-barista-salary- SRCH_IL.0,7_IM781_KO8,15.htm)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Open Source and Engineering Culture - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.harrys.com/2013/10/08/open-source-and-engineering-culture.html

<comment><USER2> Pretty useful ruby gem if you're using Pixlee.

My lack of notable open source contributions kind of makes me self conscious; hopefully I can get over that one day!</comment>


Google Font Effects - <AUTHOR> https://developers.google.com/fonts/docs/getting_started#Effects <comment><USER2> Great, now someone needs to write a "disable animated fonts" extension.

Extensions required to make the web usable:

AdBlock: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/adblock- edge/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/adblock-edge/)

NoScript: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/noscript/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/noscript/)

Toggle Animated GIFs: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/toggle- animat...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/toggle-animated- gifs/)

<comment><USER3> > Extensions required to make the web usable:

> NoScript: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- > US/firefox/addon/noscript/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- > US/firefox/addon/noscript/)

Can you elaborate, how does noscript makes web more usable?

<comment><USER2> Sure. Lots of websites have really questionable javascript behavior, like replicating mobile behavior where dragging the mouse around makes you "swipe" between articles, or in-line image resizing (wikipedia), or auto-rotating image galleries, or shitty page-loading effects like fading text in, or breaking your scrollbar.

NoScript eliminates that kind of garbage.

In addition to this, there's the privacy benefits, lowering your page load time and CPU usage, and avoiding running arbitrary programs on your computer loaded off the internet, which is how GitHub was DDOSed last month.

For an average, non-technical user, I wouldn't recommend NoScript. But if you're willing to put up with a little annoyance of allowing two or three domains now and then, it really makes a lot of webpages behave better.

<comment><USER4> except the fact that many sites use js to render anything so it makes most of the web unusable unless you turn it off.

<comment><USER5> NoScript also has surrogate scripts that replace what was blocked with a minimal script to un-break sites. It's usually used to fool a site with first- party scripts enabled into thinking that the third-party scripts loaded, too, but there are also scripts that allow a site to work without any of its scripts being enabled. The changelog currently show that they recently added a surrogate to allow some troublesome wordpress themes to work without scripting, and to allow the Microsoft support site to show article content without scripting.

<comment><USER4> yeah but it is an unfortunate game of wackamole. I really wish I could turn off JS but when I did, I would always just end up with no other option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm missing a spinning skull GIF, a permanent under construction sign and blinking pink text that scrolls incessantly.

GooGleoCities, perhaps?

<comment><USER7> Lol, i also thought of Geocities and old Frontpage pages :p Missing fireworks anyone?

<comment><USER8> I taught myself coding HTML by hand using Hippie. I regressed and switched to Frontpage because it was so "easy". I then went over to the Dreamweaver and stayed there until I learned server-side programming, which put me back in the text editor, where I've happily been since.

Even with my stupid page of links nobody other than me cared about, it was still exciting learning HTML and being able to publish whatever dumb things I came up with online on Geocities.

Image counters, web rings, and that analytics company that gave you free analytics but you had to put there little square logo on the bottom of the page and anybody could click on it to see your stats. Those are some fun memories of my fledgling web years, circa the mid-90's.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a really clever move by Google. Put these out there, then lower the PageRank score of anyone foolish enough to use them!

</comment><comment><USER10> "When making headers or display texts on your website, you'll often want to stylize your text in a decorative way."

Oh dear.

"..with minimal effort to produce beautiful display text"

The original fonts are tweaked painstakingly by a designer. The "effects" are like putting lipstick on Mona Lisa.

Web site design is now a branch of publishing and design and Google is one of the larger corps operating in the area. This is like... I don't know, offering a high end DSLR with a physical button to add instagram filters and lens flare to the original image. Well, for free, but the decision process to add these features gives the appearance of amateurism and lack of respect for good design.

Schoolkids will love these exciting tweaks, no doubt.

<comment><USER11> But hey, at least it's just text instead of an image. This is good for accessibility.

<comment><USER12> Ironically, more accessible for the blind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Suddenly I feel I'm back in 1995. Bring on the dial-up sound... [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0)

</comment><comment><USER14> Oh great now all we need is geocities and (the old) MySpace to come back. I sincerely hope this is a joke.

<comment><USER15> Personally, I think in those days the web had more "character".

<comment><USER16> As always we're oscillating. I too am thinking the older wilder web had something that has been lost nowadays. Everything is very similar even if cuter and more interactive. There were a lot of curious 'design' and aesthetics before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Web people, please don't start to use effects that are only supported by one single rendering engine (okay, Blink+Webkit).

<comment><USER18> Many of these work in most browsers. Google's fonts API only serves CSS and font files specific to the browser. Open the following links in different browsers and watch it change: [http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Rancho&effect=shadow-...](http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Rancho&effect=shadow- multiple|3d-float)

<comment><USER19> Only 5 of them work in Firefox.

Look at the list: "Support: Chrome, Safari".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I like to contrast this with a few links which were posted here a few days ago, regarding how Google is now a design-driven company.

<comment><USER21> To be fair, they don't use this on their properties. Apple ships Papyrus too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> These have been around (and in beta apparently) for a few years.

You may be fooled by the shiny new wrapper around the docs into thinking this is a new thing.

<comment><USER23> They can't possibly have been around that long - according to all the other very original comments here, the web would have imploded and turned into 1995 geocities or some such.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Damn! Blink effect is missing. Will have to wait for the next version/update. :D

</comment><comment><USER25> Pairs nicely with [http://code.divshot.com/geo- bootstrap/](http://code.divshot.com/geo-bootstrap/)

<comment><USER26> .. and spin those logos like a pro with swift3D! [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_3D](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_3D)

I just learned they went out of business in 2009 :-(

They will forever be spinning in my heart.

<comment><USER27> Oh man, the memories are coming back... The real pros hand-traced their 3D logo animations! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> WordArt is back!

<comment><USER16> Just in time for the return of XFiles.

ps: gradient overlay is seriously lacking. [https://www.google.com/search?q=font+gradient+metal&tbm=isch](https://www.google.com/search?q=font+gradient+metal&tbm=isch)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> nostalgia ... It amazes me to think that back then how we all collectively agreed that those spinning, scrolling, blinking geocities type designs were cool - and tried to imitate them. Now a decade later, collectively laugh at them. This seems common in fashion - but is it true for other art forms as well? How then some art survive the through time and are viewed as beautiful by number of generations that follow? I mean, could we point to some web designs done years back that would still appear tasteful and clever today?

<comment><USER30> The reason the early public WWW is so ridiculous is that it was an entirely new technology and thus we embraced its difference. The closest equivalent to a webpage was a physical printed page and the most obvious thing a webpage can do that printed pages can't is having animations.

It's also easy to forget that while some works of art have endured over thousands or tens of thousands of years, most art likely hasn't. The ancient art we have today is like a Best Of album -- it leaves out all the works that were instantly forgotten or just not good enough and creates the impression that _everything_ was better back then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Nothing good can come of this

<comment><USER13> Designers born from 1990's onwards must be warned... This is a dangerous game...

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> April fools...?

<comment><USER33> first thing I did was google if this had been an April fools!

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> One bad thing about using computer in China is, anything Google-related either is painfully slow or deliberately blocked (by GFW). On some website, google- analytics.com become a major speed reducer (browser says something like "sending data to google-analytics.com"). Using fonts.googleapis.com have a similar effect.

Chinese people would have to wait until some Chinese company make similar things available.

<comment><USER35> Or you just get screwed if you are in China using the western web without a VPN. I find that about 20-30% of the sites actually work, not because they are explicitly blocked by the GFW, because they are using some Google API/font/analytics.

Thankfully, reddit and hackernews are good, and they have pretty much become the web for me while I'm at home (we have a direct connection at work).

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Finally, the missing block to building geocities v2!

<comment><USER37> We need a new an HTML5 what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor (a new Frontpage/Dreamweaver). Sadly, the HTML "contentEditable" API is in a very broken state.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Hmm, not all font effects listed there can be seen in Firefox (39 beta) and IE (11).

<comment><USER39> Same here - I thought some of the effects were just very subtle, until I opened the link in Chrome! Oh well, most of our client traffic is not Firefox so this isn't such a huge issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Thankfully, a lot of these don't work in Firefox.

<comment><USER41> Same here (FF on Linux Mint)

Working: anaglyph, emboss, fire, fire-animation, neon, outline, 3d and 3d-float.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Well, I thought the 3d font effect _could_ have some genuine use, now, in 2015. Am I a bad person?

</comment><comment><USER43> Fire animation is the new blink.

</comment><comment><USER44> So I post this on designer news and it ends up on hackernews? What. Upside down.

<comment><USER39> I would say that this is almost more of a "developer design link" than a "designer design link". As in an engineer/dev can implement these "effects", in code without touching graphic editing software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Looks like Google discovered that they can keep tracking this way users on remaining websites that don't use google analytics. And this time if you start blocking these requests the web page will look bad.

</comment><comment><USER46> Google Font Effects in use: [http://codepen.io/mindconcepts/pen/EjWORQ](http://codepen.io/mindconcepts/pen/EjWORQ)

</comment><comment><USER47> So many of these are not supported on Firefox, very disappointing.

<comment><USER48> As a Firefox user I'm glad this is missing in Firefox.

Maybe it's my age, but I'm getting more and more tired of unreadable pages that take ages and a lot of resources to load.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> None of them seems to be supported by Internet Explorer ?

<comment><USER50> Google is playing angry teenager again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I'm on Safari Webkit Nightly and a bunch of these that claim to be supported by Safari and Chrome only seem to work in Chrome for me.

</comment><comment><USER52> Awesome. My sites will be all fire from now on.

</comment><comment><USER53> No. Please no.

</comment><comment><USER54> There's a typo. Last line should say "Last updated April 1, 2015."

</comment><comment><USER55> Thankfully, using FF, I miss out on most of the "fun".

</comment><comment><USER56> Outline could be legitimately useful, such as for subtitles.

</comment><comment><USER57> where's BLINK? i want blinking text!!!

</comment><comment><USER58> Hey Google, April Fools was on April 1st.

</comment><comment><USER59> Why does this exist?

</comment><comment><USER57> i want blinking ... blinking !!!!

</comment><comment><USER60> Why???

</comment><comment><USER61> Geocities is the new black?

</comment><comment><USER62> What? No `blink`? Useless.

</comment><comment><USER63> Cool.</comment>