HN user
Other languages also have this exact same quirk, like Spanish[1] or Portuguese[2].
[1] https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nombre_colectivo [2] https://pt.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantivo_coletivo
I know this comment will sound a bit unrelated to the main topic but reading this made this thought pop up in my mind and I thought it would make sense to share it. This comment is, however, related to the sub topic of the quoted sentence:
It literally can’t exist without broad support from many countries.
This is the same constraint for the, let's call it, "peace on Earth" problem, or just "peace".
If only more of us could realize this is what it takes to solve that problem... which itself is part of the puzzle, i.e. how to increase awareness about the need to solve this.
While there are a number of people and organizations trying to do this, I see that there seems to be more possible fronts that could be used to tackle this and accelerating the reach for stability and sustainability of the state of peace.
One example of a possible front (and I honestly don't know if those already exist) is: through marketing it would be possible to influence people enough to be interested in the outcome of "peace on Earth" and pay some money for that, in a way that it doesn't feel like a donation, and more like an investment or maybe acquiring a service that would be hopefully realized in the coming years (hence the importance of the marketing capacity of that entity, as this mindset needs to be set in the consumers in order to make them buy the good).
Of course, the reporting to the consumers on the use of the invested money toward that effort has to be as transparent and honest as possible, as those approaches are arguably required for a sustainable state of peace. And hopefully it would make enough sense for an entity to operate in the way of the outcome it is seeking. Even though we are moving from a state of no-peace, which is hopefully unsustainable. In other words the effort could be be defined as "safely and confidently accelerating the maximum point of unsustainability of the no-peace state such that it inevitably transitions to a sustainable state of peace".
That's then possibly a private endeavor (not that it could not be a public one as well, but you need to raise enough money to pay for the possibly expensive marketing and then pay all of its employees), because there is now an identifiable market willing to pay some amount in exchange for obtaining the "product" of peace, which in other words just mean the modulation of humanity and its mindset in order for it to operate in such a way that it is always aligned to its own common good, or maximum known state of well-being, sustainably.
We already know that groups and individuals are not great at doing that, on average. So if an individual is not always able to operate towards its own good, or maybe some are but don't have access to the resources that would allow them to do so, how could then a group of individuals be able to do so? Unlikely.
And yes, exploring the universe and finding more about its mysteries and teaching humanity about them is a valid and great approach and a subset of all the possible approaches.
It is a subset because in order for an individual to be interested in knowing more about the mysteries of the universe, or consciousness and other topics, they have to have this mindset, well, set in the mind.
Therefore there are many more fronts that could be, and to many extents currently are, covered. So all I'm arguing here is we are not doing enough to reach the tipping point before possible big catastrophes happen, therefore we should do a lot more than what we're currently doing. There are many entity/company/organization models to explore that could benefit us in a spectrum of possibilities ranging from private to public.
Agreed. I wouldn't buy anything larger. My Kindle fits perfectly in my coats' inner pockets and also in my backpack's otherwise unused CD pocket.
Google Closure Library does this in goog.structs.Set with an interesting generic solution.
A string key for the underlying map is generated based on the data type of the element being added in the set. If you're adding an object into the set, the object is mutated so that it stores a unique ID. The object's unique ID is used to form the string key that will identify this object in the set.
Note how goog.structs.Set.getKey_ is used in the add() method: https://github.com/google/closure-library/blob/v20160125/clo...
This is how the library obtains the unique ID of an object: https://github.com/google/closure-library/blob/v20160125/clo...
"... but instead are able to write code that modifies code and generates code as easily as if you were writing the original code in the first place: the comparison to Ruby is therefore fundamentally flawed."
This. The ability to easily reason about the code and manipulate it because its syntax is simple and predictable is the big deal to me.
I think this is analog to switching from Roman to Arabic numerals. The syntax is regular. No matter how big the number is the rules are the same. There are no exceptions. Hence doing calculations with the former is a lot clumsier than with the latter.
That's the ideal scenario at least. I do realize that math might not be as simple as it could be, but I'm not really qualified to argue about that. But what if we were still using Roman numerals today? Would we be at the level of understanding we are at right now? It seems to me that it's more or less the same thing when you start understanding Lisp and why it is the way it is.
This is just too big of a tradeoff to be ignored. In my experience choosing the simple and regular solutions paves the way to progress, in which useful things that look trivial now would be rightly discarded or would be viewed as too complex if our mental model were grounded on the previous clumsy framework.
Now, I'm not saying "just drop all your clumsy languages right now, because today we have a better idea, and start using Lisp". I certainly don't do that. I don't even work with Lisp. But my point is that not realizing that Lisp has some properties that make it special is perhaps hindering yourself of being able to see that some things can be a lot simpler than you thought they could be.
> Simple test: if there were more comments like this, would HN be a better place? If yes, upvote. If no, downvote. If indifferent/not sure, move on to next comment.
I agree with you here. The problem is that this is not directly obvious by only observing the upvote arrow. It might communicate more things than this, like "I agree with this comment." So, unless you tell them (and keep reinforcing this meaning), different people will read it differently.
I would even argue that it would be a good idea replacing the upvote arrow with a link named "I want to see more comments like this". That would stimulate more well thought, relevant comments, while agreeable/funny comments would still be there, but at the bottom of the page. These might be harmless, but they don't deserve lots of upvotes.
"He should be called by his tribal name ..."
And what is his tribal name? Remember that he is the last survivor of an uncontacted tribe. We would need to contact him in order to know that, right?
In Brazil, the word we commonly use to refer to the native inhabitants is "índio". When we refer to someone who is born in India, the word is "indiano".
Both words translate to "Indian" in English. Maybe that is why the article calls him an Indian. What word would you use instead, "native", maybe?
"Would you rather spend 6 months hacking together a product just so you don't offend 10 people?"
Probably not, if by "offend" you mean "market research", but that is not what I'm talking about. I'm specifically talking about the method you proposed, which I don't find to be fair.
In your question, you seem to imply that "market research" as a whole is offensive, which is not what it seems to me. Look at the Dry Test (the method Tim Ferris wrote about) mentioned up in this thread. It seems fair enough to me, and you still get the email of the people who are interested in your product.
"if you always play by the rules you'll never make it."
I simply don't buy that. Do you really mean never?
I find this would not be a fair approach, even if you do not really collect any data from the form.
Would you tell them "This product is no longer available for sale" when it never was? In fact it doesn't even exist.
Would it be fair to make people spend their time filling a form that won't result in anything?
Who can guarantee you did not collect the data submitted by the form?
"... but anyone ever leave the software world to do something unrelated?"
Yes, however I don't know how large the number of people who leave programming related jobs is. It would be interesting to know some numbers about this topic.
Anyway, I don't think these numbers really matter for your decision. What matters is how you feel about that. I think the best thing you can do is talking to people who were in a similar situation before deciding what you're going to do next.
Some time ago I posted a quite interesting story here on HN of a game programmer at Electronic Arts who left his job to be a coffee farmer:
http://www.konaearth.com/Life/2006/060430/
Worth taking a look.
"... but it's not a Lisp ..."
It is.
"... pure Lisp ..."
There is no such a thing as "pure Lisp". Lisp is not a programming language, it's a family of programming languages that share some common properties.
To put it more clearly, we could represent Lisp and its members hierarchically:
Lisp
Common Lisp
CLISP
SBCL
...
Scheme
Racket
Gambit
Chicken
...
Clojure
..."If every college let everyone in, it would be worthless."
I think that HN, while not a college, might be a counterexample for this idea.
Here everyone can join and communicate, and yet we can maintain a high level of communication. The ones who don't fit are quickly flagged or simply won't come back again.
I think selectivity is good, however it doesn't need to be enforced in the admission step, it will happen in the middle of the process. People who would not be able to follow the course requirements would quickly drop out.
I'm not arguing that this idea would work (I don't really know), but based on the HN experience I think it should be considered.
I don't know, but apart from that there are other benefits which are still valid. And I wonder if the yellow light would be necessary at all.
I think the main problem is that the title is misleading, even if another name were used.
What does "Zed's Dead, Baby. Zed's Dead" inform that is related to ZFS? Does it somehow attract people who are interested in ZFS for Mac OS X or it hit the front page for some other reason?
Or maybe the word "Zed" is just related to ZFS (or ZFS for Mac OS X) in a way that I'm unaware.
This is a great reading.
I didn't read it all so far (but I will), but I think if people were taught mathematics in a more explanatory way there would be a lot more of them interested in it, and therefore interested in areas related to it, or at least we wouldn't have a society so afraid of it.
It's amazing how many people don't know the very basics of it like, for instance, how multiplication is just a compact way of expressing a repetitive sum. And things like that happen because they were trying to remember numbers and formulas instead of understanding the concept.
It's just hard to forget about a concept, which gives the basis to understanding more complex things. I think maths teaching would be more productive if we spent more time elaborating on why things are done in some way (or how to come up with a concept just by reasoning about it, without doing calculations and writing symbols on paper) than trying to teach more complex concepts for someone who doesn't understand the basics, and therefore won't grasp the complex ones.
There's clearly something wrong about teaching maths, and very likely other subjects too, or maybe something wrong about teaching (anything).
Or perhaps it means it is getting closer to reality in peoples' minds if it is an April Fools Joke
I think that's true, but I don't see it as a shame to be a joke in any way. I mean, in Google case, the joke is more in the application form and other subtle things, like the last FAQ question (http://www.google.com/virgle/faq.html#11) and the error page (http://www.google.com/virgle/error.html), which says, amongst other things:
"... Virgle isn't real.
Yet."This reminds me of Google on April Fools' Day, creating a project willing to do exactly that.
For introduction to HTML, CSS, JavaScript, HTML DOM, I recommend you visiting the site http://www.w3schools.com/ .
Respectively, you might want to read: Learn HTML, Learn CSS, Learn JavaScript and Learn HTML DOM.
For reference, when I want to remember or search for some specific tag, I'm used to go to http://htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/ .
And I highly recommend you, when you're a little advanced in your learning, to periodically access Web Devout: http://www.webdevout.net/ . There you can find tables containing browser compatibility elements for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, DOM, articles, really interesting stuff.
Another awesome website I'm used to access, mostly for JavaScript clarifications and techniques: http://www.quirksmode.org/
I think these resources are 95% what I use when I need to figure out something regarding HTML/CSS/JavaScript/DOM and browsers compatibility.
What about generating more 2 front pages versions:
- One page listing the top posts, but only counting votes from the leaders, say, 10% of all users. So if Hacker News has 100,000 users, only the votes from the first 10,000 users would be counted.
- Another page listing the top posts counting only votes from the oldest users. So from 100,000 users, only the votes from the 10,000 oldest users would be counted.
I'd like to see pages like that, and notice the differences between the actual front page and those counting only the fist 10% users slice by these criteria. And also, because of their antiquity or karma, the 10% slice would receive a sort of reward.
Before reading "O(1)" I thought it would be written "Priceless".
However I think that's the idea, but using programmers currency.
"Einstein and Donald Trump supposedly needed very little sleep which is why they could work so hard."
Interestingly, I read in a magazine from my country that Einstein slept at least 10 hours each day (and more if needed).
So, reading your statement, I decided to search more about this typing "einstein hours of sleep" using Google.
I found some links like:
"... while others have been known to require 8 to 10 hours (such as Albert Einstein)." - in http://webhome.idirect.com/~readon/sleep.html
"She points out that Albert Einstein sleep nine hours a night and was still able to get plenty done." - in http://evenstaronline.com/resources.html
"Einstein, on the other hand, demanded 10 hours of sleep every night for himself." - in http://www.quickiesheets.com/
I'm not sure if this is really true, but I do believe that a lot of hard work people can easily sleep during 10 hours.
9 hours. But I can easily sleep up to 10 hours!
Anyway, I don't care about my time of sleep if I can be very focused in my work for several hours. And this does happen often (when I'm not reading News.YC, heh).
I believe there are enough hours to work each day if you are really focused in what you do and if you're really feeling rested with your sleep time.
"I for one didn't see the article a year ago."
Neither did I.
That's the way information are spread. Duplicating them is a side effect and there's nothing wrong with that. If they are still interesting, people will upvote them again, and again...
"Also, I don't see a problem with the practice of putting sensitive data in GET variables if the website is protected by SSL - Am I missing something?"
GET requests are logged by the web server and in the browser history in plain text, even for SSL requests.
Therefore any server administrator or computer user can have access to those information just reading the server log or the browser history.
I don't use Google Toolbar, but I found a link explaining that you can disable this feature:
http://www.google.com/support/toolbar/bin/answer.py?hl=en...
Anyway, if you're having this issue, you probably agreed on this behavior when you accepted their license :-).
This may sound simplistic, but I think this happens due to the intent of the user when using some service.
Simply people with commercial intents, willing to spend money on something, are more likely to use a search engine than a social network.
Vim. Both for Windows and Linux I use it, it's a good and very powerful editor. However it's not the type of editor that you'll get how to use it in 5 minutes (well, this is true for the very very basic use, just press "i" to insert text).
Download the self-installing executable here:
I'm not a lisp programmer neither I know the peculiarities of each lisp implementation, but I think I understand it a little bit.
My question is, what hinders Arc (or other Lisp if it has the same problem) to create an operator that finds any global symbol from the top, like when an absolute path starts with "/" to find a file?
For instance, let's stay that there is an "unshadowable" operator called "." and let's take your example:
(let foo snoz (jims-macro frotz))
However, if Ann's macro were written carefully (and all macro writes should know that macros can be used in any context, any scope), Ann would care to call "foo" from the top using the "." operator, like:
...
(. foo args) ; excerpt of Ann's macro.
...
Of course, I'm just a Lisp newbie, maybe I'm just creating a huge mess with the concepts :-).
Is there any Lisp using that approach?
Heh, actually it already reached that point, more than 10 years old I think.
From http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2007/04/19/interview-with-lutz-...
"Lutz: newLISP started on SunBSD in the early 90's, then moved to Windows 3.0/1 as a 16-bit application, then to Windows 95/98 as a 32-bit program. During all that time newLISP was more like a hobby for me. Around 1999/2000 I made it Open-Source under the GPL license on Linux."