Need to Know (NTK) was a UK weekly tech email newsletter that ran from 1997 to 2007, covering the industry with a satirical tone.
HN commenters recall it fondly and wish for a modern equivalent; it also comes up for its 2001 'time_t 1E9' joke.
I was directly responding to a question from somebody who didn't know about ESR. Were you previously aware of the fact that Eric Raymond is a batshit crazy racist, or did you just learn something new from me that you didn't previously know? If so, then mission accomplished! I'm glad to have opened your eyes even a little bit.
Do my political beliefs about racism being bad and obligatory to call out contradict your own beliefs, and annoy you so much that you're compelled to argue and continue to drag this out? Or do you know some actual facts you can prove about ESR that contradict the proof I posted with links and quotes? Then by all means share your proof I'm wrong, instead of stifling the discussion! Why are you so irritated and motivated to suppress those widely known facts from being mentioned on Hacker News?
If simply stating the facts and quoting ESR's own words sounds to you like an ad hominem attack, then that's ESR's problem, and maybe he should have kept his mouth shut instead of publicly saying things like "The average IQ of the Haitian population is 67... Haiti is, quite literally, a country full of violent idiots", and he exercises enough personal responsibility that he doesn't need you to bravely step up and defend his racism.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7011
Or is your real issue with the valid criticism I raised about the book (and that you awkwardly ignored and haven't countered) about "In Unix Everything Is A File" being wrong, which is LITERALLY the…
Anecdotally, I think you got the wrong end of the stick regarding type safety.
I used to work for a defence contractor who avidly programmed everything in ADA with verified compilers and mathematically proved algorithms.
Stuff still broke because the algorithms and designs were wrong. That particular problem is far more problematic than type constraints.
Regarding BBC BASIC, it is strongly typed but all casts and conversions are implicit so you need to know what it's going to do:
REM win
p%=4;q%=4;r%=p%/q%;PRINTr%
REM fail
p%=4;q=4.0;r%=p%/q;PRINTr%
The earlier has no cast, the latter does.
When it goes wrong, it's not usually the code that's gone phut:
http://www.ntk.net/2000/07/14/dohtrain.jpg
> “Developers, developers, developers!” was a cry from Steve Ballmer and one of the speeches that defined him as CEO of Microsoft. These infamous words were uttered back in 2006.
The famous YouTube video of it was uploaded in 2006, but my sources say the event in question was from Microsoft's 25th Anniversary Event in September 2000.
I could use a more authoritative source than knowyourmeme, though, so someone else is free to chime in there. There's a newsletter referencing it as early as 2001[0], so that seems to suggest well ahead of 2006.
[0]http://www.ntk.net/2001/08/03/
Carmack is definitely someone who was determined -- and quick.
When Carmack was working (I think on Quake), you could follow his todo list, which he kept stored in a .plan file on his server. If you used the Unix shell command "finger johnc@idsoftware.com" command, it would send the text of that file. It was pretty amazing to watch him crank through his tasks in near real time.
The texts are archived here: https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive
He is also pretty good at poker, apparently: http://www.ntk.net/1998/02/13/?l=114#l
> starring Salma Hayek as Joan
Charlie Brooker has come a long way since tvgohome[1]!
> Hayek said that it gave her opportunity to [...] have "permission" to do "the most disgusting, grotesque things", though one such thing in the script made her question, "Do I really want to do this?"
Maybe not that far, in some respects, then.
1: http://www.ntk.net/tvgohome/
It was on the NTK email list (UK-based tech newsletter) in the late 90s / early 2000s - http://www.ntk.net/ - when people had limited bandwidth on their dial-up connections. Possibly more of a principle along the lines of "save the pennies and the pounds look after themselves" but I remember it clearly.