I stumbled across an amusing sequence of streets in Brooklyn, Indiana. When you leave Home Avenue, you can go one block west to Church Street, or one block east to Hooker Street.
While we're on the topic of reinterpreting The Lord of the Rings, someone speculated (based only on the texts of Tolkien, themselves) that Tom Bombadil was a sinister character.
That's what someone gets for reading just a little.
It is clearly indicated that Bombadil is friends with farmer Maggot (Tolkien states that Bombadil is a Hobbit name). Merry says that Maggot used to go into the Old Forest. If he did so, then meeting Bombadil would be very likely.
Gildor's friends apparently sensed the great urgency, so they would have taken a very direct path which would have led them straight through the Old Forest (after all, Elves have little fear of such things).
The statement that Elrond "has never heard of Tom Bombadil" is clearly wrong given Elrond's comments about Bombadil at the council.
> In those lands I journeyed once, and many things wild and strange I knew. But I had forgotten Bombadil, if indeed this is still the same that walked the woods and hills long ago, and even then was older than the old. That was not then his name. Iarwain Ben-adar we called him, oldest and fatherless. But many another name he has since been given by other folk: Forn by the Dwarves, Orald by Northern Men, and other names beside. He is a strange creature, but maybe I should have summoned him to our Council.’ -- Elrond
Likewise they are wrong about the danger. The Old Forest is not particularly dangerous (as the Hobbits showed by burning part of it down) and while the Barrow Wights (sent by the Nazgul witch king) are dangerous, they seem to hardly compare in danger to caves of dead spirits, haunted pools, orcs, trolls, etc. A war of Gondor against all the evils of Bombadil's domain would be over almost as soon as it started.
I know of no statements that the Withywindle is cursed. Goldberry met Tom there though, so it is likely he sticks around because she cannot leave her river. There is even less evidence that willow trees can appear human (plus the truly bad tree is an "Old Man").
If (like many conjecture) Tom (and perhaps Goldberry) is the physical manifestation of the spirit of Middle Earth itself, then it makes sense for him to withdraw to that area. Arthedain remains relatively undisturbed throughout the third age. The Old Forest and Barrow downs are unoccupied (save for a few Wights) and the Hobbits are a people who prefer the Earth. In fact, almost the entire area of Eriador is unaffected by the War of the Ring save for the Scourging of the Shire (though a big event for Hobbits, it hardly compares to everything else that happened).
Silicon Valley objectively, measurably does not care about engineers being cheap. If it did, tech companies would open engineering offices in the Midwest where 1/3rd the salaries would let employees live 3x better.
You don't have to care to pick up free money off the ground. Wage-fixing didn't involve any downside or tradeoff until they got caught.
If they cared about cheap, they'd be willing to take on tradeoffs like communication overhead with satellite offices in low COL areas, potentially increased risk of a bad hire by making the interview pass rates higher, etc.
Even if you want a particular engineer very badly and money is no object, you're going to offer just enough to beat his next best offer. You're not going to 10x it. That would be waste.
I don't know what you think SV salaries are. 1/3 of typical engineering salaries here would be about $40k year. In the midwest that is going to buy a very modest lower-middle class lifestyle if one doesn't have debts.
Also, cheap is relative. $120k/year sounds like a lot, and it is a lot. But relative to the value provided it's pretty small. Also, these companies work together to suppress wages. It helps that so many willingly play the "work for free" game by contributing to these companies' open source code with no compensation. Workers in SV are cheaper than their salaries make it appear.
I'm always confused why the shareholders in these tech companies don't throw a fit over the very expensive locations that the big SV firms occupy. A huge chunk of their engineering talent comes from the Midwest and overseas, so why not relocate to Nebraska?
I suspect the upper management really doesn't want to move because they already have nice spots in SV.
Actually, the real estate was reasonable in the Santa Clara Valley/South Bay before they came along and made it $$$$$$. The same would happen in the Midwest. Look at Denver.
So, yeah, they do care about cheap.
Cheap is relative. In the U.S. $90-120k is a common salary for mid to senior level engineers working with trendy technologies all over the country (i.e. a salary within the top 10% of income earners in the U.S.). If you're rocking 25 years of experience in the industry and demanding a salary that's pushing into the $130k-200k range for a non-executive position, you're very likely going to get passed over in favor of a cheaper engineer that can produce similar results but is demanding a significantly smaller, but still excellent salary. The bottom line is, 20 years more experience doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be "20 years" more valuable to the company, especially if the trending tech stacks are all less than a decade old.
Whatever you call it, $120,000 puts one within the top 8% of income earners in the U.S., if you can't make that salary work then you only have yourself to blame.
Barely middle class? That's an insane exaggeration. After taxes you are left with nearly double the median household income. Even if your rent is bonkers expensive, you still have way more money leftover than many people even start with. Barely middle class.
In a minor metro, middle class generally means comfortably paying the mortgage on a middling single family house in a good school district with a sub-25-minute car commute.
In some major metros, $120k is struggling to pay the rent on an okayish family-sized apartment in a below-average school district with an hour-plus public transit commute, with homeownership maybe creeping into the realm of possibility by making extreme sacrifices to save for 15-20 years for a down payment.
I don't understand this mentality. If you're paying $3600+ in rent and are struggling, then you need to find a cheaper place to live or find a roommate, because you simply cannot afford it.
Oh, I have plenty of discretionary income for my situation. Maybe a teensy bit more than I would in a place with low housing costs but also low salaries.
But even a sacrifice of 100% of my discretionary income wouldn't put homeownership or childrearing (extra bedroom + good school district or private tuition) within reach. Certainly not both. Maybe I'll get to pick one on this salary if I ever see liquidity on my equity, but really I'm holding out for making a much higher salary in 10-20 years.
It's a fun thing to do with my early 20s. But I understand the presumption that a middle-aged man would not take this salary, as it'd be pretty damn difficult to rent more than a studio. Even the studio is extravagant: several of my peers of similar age have roommates. A family is certainly below middle class if it has to share an apartment with other families.
> I have plenty of discretionary income for my situation.
Then it sounds like your salary is great.
> But even a sacrifice of 100% of my discretionary income wouldn't put homeownership or childrearing (extra bedroom + good school district or private tuition) within reach.
Middle class doesn't mean you get all that without effort. You have to budget, you have to shop around for the right neighborhood, you may not have the option of spending money on a whim, your partner may need to find a job, but $120,000 is more than enough to buy a great home in a good neighborhood, it just won't be one in the heart of the city.
> Even the studio is extravagant: several of my peers of similar age have roommates
Right ... you're living in an expensive studio apartment in the city, you have to move when you want to start a family unless you're making much more money than a typical senior level engineer.
>$120,000 is more than enough to buy a great home in a good neighborhood
What? Let's suppose I could save $1,000/mo over 10 years, giving me a $120k down payment. (After retirement savings and $3k rent, this would leave me about $1000/mo in discretionary spending, including groceries).
The figure that maxes out a debt-to-income of .36 is $3526/mo, corresponding to a home value of around $640k.
For two bedrooms, that's a fixer-upper far from transit in a bad part of any East Bay BART stop town. And that's today: run the last 10 years of increases out another 10 years.
A $640k house is an amazing home almost everywhere in the country. The problem you're describing here is that the region you're living in has insanely high real-estate prices compared to the rest of the country and you cannot afford to live there.
Jobs that would pay someone like me $120k don't exist "almost everywhere in the country." They exist here, and in drastically smaller numbers in a few real estate markets with similar characteristics: New York, Seattle, maybe LA or Boston. Some of these have cheaper prices today, but also steep growth curves. I think they'll all be pretty similar in 10 years.
You're making my argument for me: $120k is "you can't afford to live there" territory, i.e. barely if even middle class, for the vast majority of software engineering jobs that would pay it to junior engineers.
Therefore it's reasonable to think middle-aged engineers would not take it, and that it would be a waste of time to interview them if that's your salary ceiling.
Of course $120k is great money and $640k is a great house in some places. These are not the same places where junior engineer salary ~ senior engineer salary ~ anywhere near $120k. They would pay more like $60k to the junior and $80k to the senior.
You're living in a bubble where you've somehow been lead to believe that the only places where software engineering jobs exist is in the most expensive cities in the world.
These jobs are all over the country, that's just a fact, even excluding remote positions.
> The context of this thread is paying senior engineers the same as juniors, around $120k, which implies an expensive coastal city.
I never said anything about juniors, I said that seniors often make around $120k already and at some point there are diminishing returns on the business value of seniority for engineers. If my company is paying the senior engineering staff around $120k/ea why would we then pay a new-hire $180k because they have 25 years of experience when they likely produce work of a similar quality to our engineers with 15 years. I'd be much better off hiring a new engineer at $120k and using the difference to provide raises to my core engineering team that hold onto critical business process experience. Of course, exceptional candidates can command an exceptional salary, but they're the exception by definition.
Looking on Glassdoor for places where $640k is a great house - Omaha, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Akron, Des Moines, etc. - the median software engineer there is making $70-80k. Great money, upper middle class in context, but not $120k.
$120k seems unrealistically above market, even for a seasoned old pro, in such places. Am I off base?
Of course if you're paying it there, then it's an extremely lucrative gig. But as far as I can tell, there are maybe a few hundred such positions in the country.
Are you familiar with the "Old economy Steve"-memes? Not all places have those magical cheap homes readily available. The US (and Canada/EU) in 2017 are made of two kinds of places: 1) Incredibly expensive housing 2) No jobs.
You don't start with a salary and then choose a city. The city determines the salary. If you can find a salary at all, it's likely to be in a high COL city.
Of course I'd love to make $120k from somewhere that buys a nice house. That is, far as I can tell, not an option. I can save while living in a high COL city and then buy a house for cash in a low COL city, but I'd still need a job to pay property taxes/groceries/transportation. In cheap areas, the pickings are slim.
How either of us defines major metro areas doesn't matter anyway, because the median household income in NYC is in line with the rest of the country, in the low 50s[1]. San Francisco's is around 65k[2]. If you're earning $120k, you're not "barely middle class", you're "doing well".
All of this goes to show that the Unix-haters were right.
The Tenex line of operating systems from DEC had built-in session management in the 1970s. Unix still doesn't have it. All non-trivial terminal handling was kept in user-space. Therefore, programs had to make assumptions that are now hard-coded in their very design.
To this day, the Linux and BSD kernels assume that they're talking to a VT100 with a few frills. The commercial Unix kernels were worse; I used a SunOS tutorial in the mid-90s that started me off on ed (yes, the standard editor; the man page even called it that without qualification) because Sun started out with an older version of BSD that assumed teletypes.
This has had consequences. The major reason why microcomputers took off was because an Apple ][ running VisiCalc could do things that a terminal connected to a mini/mainframe computer could not do.
Here we are, living in the future, where wristwatches have true color displays, and household appliances run webservers, but the correct, macho, hipster-approved user interface would be shamed by an Amiga 1000.
Sad to see this downvoted, you make valid points about the importance of bitmapped display being a boon to microcomputers vs character or block oriented systems like minis and mainframes.
The reality of modern times is more nuanced and I don't fully agree with you (for instance there has been movement in i.e. SCO UNIX in the late '80s, now fb/drm based terminals for linux/bsd but it is pretty slow going because most people embrace two distinct modalities with the terminal being a lowest common denominator and everything else being graphics (or even WWW). So in effect, most people use *nix as a personal minicomputer or distributed minicomputers, and the text interface is a lower level thing while they pump out X11 or Wayland or WWW for "modern" experience. In this role, tmux is about the ideal session manager I can imagine.. but that may be more of an "unknown unknown" than me knowing it is ideal.
I am the author of this essay and this is the umpteenth time that it has appeared in Hacker News. If you look it up using the Hacker News search function, it even invites readers to beat the dead horse one more time.
I'm surprised that it still gets so much attention. Every few months, someone volunteers to translate it into another language (see the bottom of the page).
I wrote that essay five years ago. Nowadays, just use Clojure or Racket and ignore what I've written.
And yes, I know, I really need to update the design of the site. I wrote it when I was still a rookie web developer. I'm starting a new job so I'll redesign my site in my copious free time.
I think it's a nice article, no problem with it appearing for an umpteenth time again. Any article that speaks about Lisp is a good article for me!!
There are some pretty good points, however there are one or two things that i take issue to, because they can be misleading:
1. The "lone wolf Lisp hacker" is not the only kind of Lisp hacker. Lisp has been used on important codebases at space missions and there are codebases of million-lines Lisp code at work right now, for example for airline reservations.
There are some Lisp projects on GitHub being contributed to and forked. The amount is small because popularity of Lisp is small compared to the main languages GitHub users prefer (i.e. Java, JS, etc), but they do show there is collaboration between "lone wolves".
2. You write "Unless they pay thousands of dollars, Lisp hackers are still stuck with Emacs."
I have used many IDEs (Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, Eclipse, Netbeans, IntelliJ, and many Borland products) and the combination of Emacs + SLIME is pretty good, to be honest.
Since you're here, what's your take on why Clojure has become so popular lately (compared to the mindshare that Common Lisp or Scheme seem to have nowadays)? Although I've barely touched Lisp (and never touched Clojure), it seems weird to me that Clojure is so widely used compared to other Lisps. From what I can tell, the main differences are that it's on the JVM (obviously) and that it uses loops rather than recursion, but neither of these really explain to me why things like ClojureScript exist instead of "SchemeScript" or something like that. Do you think it's related to the ideas presented in the blog post, or is there something I'm missing?
My take is that Clojure's community is distinct from that of other Lisp communities.
Old school Lispers are the Jacobites of the Computer Age. Their warnings were ignored, so their nightmares came true; and the world has changed so much, as a result, that few can even imagine an alternative. They were right about nearly everything, and now they are irrelevant.
So pour out a drink for the king over the water and for Genera. Curse this present dark age of bureaucrats and Posix. And then MOVE ON. The Clojurists are the first sizable community of Lispers that has done that.
American Airlines raises the wages of its employees to the market rate. As a result, investors pull money out of the entire airline industry in anticipation of rising wages everywhere.
I remember feeling scandalized the first time that I saw a banner ad on the web. I also remember the epic flame wars on Usenet (sic transit gloria mundi) when Canter & Siegel made the first commercial spam campaign.
At times, I have wondered how much of the Internet would shut down if ads were forbidden. Sometimes, that thought sobers me. Other times, that thought gladdens me.
"I remember feeling scandalized the first time that I saw a banner ad on the web."
As a web dev circa 1995/1996, I clicked once on every single banner ad that I saw. Every one of them.
I had it in my head that banner ads were the economic model that would support the web, and I very much wanted the web to succeed, so I was trying to "pad the numbers" for both buyers and sellers of the ads.
The "Green Card Spam" basically ended USENET by violating the spirit and agreement those participating in that system more or less adhered to.
They had no respect for the norms, for basic politeness, and instead wanted nothing more than to make money, no matter how many "snowflakes" were upset.
Not unlike a certain businessman running for President...
This is such a cool hack. I love it. I want to make one, too. This guy is a true hacker.
Now it's time to nitpick. It doesn't seem that there's any way to generate key-codes.
Entering text is nice, of course, but that's not all that a keyboard does. How about cursor control (arrow keys, PageUp, etc.), function keys, or scroll lock?
One can make control-key combinations, but that limits one to what's available in ASCII. For instance, there's no way to distinguish Ctrl-j from the Return key.
That last point brings up something related. In ASCII, the Control key modifies the bit representation of the key pressed. That's why Emacs in terminal mode can't tell the difference between Ctrl-j, Ctrl-J, and Return. In modern user interfaces, the Control and Alt keys are specialized shift keys that let the OS and applications tell the difference.
Of course, one could do the same workarounds that terminal emulators perform, like using escape sequences and such. Then, while using this device, one would have to know the proper sequences for xterm, or vt420, or, or, or…
Still, nice hack.
EDIT: By the way. Some poor lost soul should be forced to use Emacs with this keyboard. Any suggestions on who should be condemned?
> Entering text is nice, of course, but that's not all that a keyboard does. How about cursor control (arrow keys, PageUp, etc.), function keys, or scroll lock?
https://www.crossing.us/intersections/lorien/elrond