HN user
Well, I was thinking more about the contrast between the supposed permanence of tattoo and a programming language construct. Now that you have pointed it, however, it might give a certain feeling of "old school" ("self modifying code in COBOL!?") -- and I expect closures to be still "reverenced" in 2060.
And of course a Lisp tattoo would be better! ;)
And in 2060 developers will probably think something like what would think today, if shown a tattoo of "ALTER X TO PROCEED TO Y" in the flaccid forearm of a 70-year-old.
Still, much, much better than those at Hanzi Smatter [ http://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/ ].
I think we should also discuss two widely recognized fears which, in my experience, are frequently related to procrastination: fear of failure and fear of success.
Both usually go, somewhat amusingly, hand in hand, but I think they should be linked to the "mastery" discussed in the topic. Fear of both failure and success are, in short, fear of change, fear of losing control, fear of not being a master anymore.
It is indeed quite common to trade a, sometimes illusory, feeling of easiness with the known current situation for the potential uneasiness of an unknown situation given as one the possible outcomes of the failure/success. Particularly in the last case, I have seen that it is not unusual to rationalize that we have already gained achieved should not be "gambled" against the changes that would result from the success of the activity we are procrastinating.
In short, the "I'll do it tomorrow" is usually a "I'll do it when I will feel confortable with outcomes I now consider most likely". I personally have discovered that focusing in the positive aspect of the outcomes I consider most likely, even in case of failure, is usually my best weapon against procrastination.
Good, if you are interested be sure to check Silva Rhetoricae [http://rhetoric.byu.edu] too.
Without wanting to sound harsh, but we knew it existed and that one could not live without it.
Reading what I wrote, I now understand that it both sounded too harsh and completely lost the sarcasm in "snob western" (I should have added a [;)]). Believe me, as an Italian living in Brazil I have too often been accused of "western imperialism" to know what it feels like, and I hate it. I am really sorry, please excuse me.
And as I intended to say, I was agreeing with you: I would not trust my entire business to a .LY domaim, and do believe that .DE is more stable than, say, .SO. I was saying that the lack os research combined with the Germany/Colombia example was not the best way to defend your position, particularly in face of those who would probably consider it a cultural-imperialist one.
Hugo Chavez rules Venezuela, not Colombia. In fact, under his leadership Venezuela has been at times close to going at war with Colombia.
I think you have a point, but using such an example makes you sound a snob western who divides the world in "countries I am fond of" and "countries I am not fond of".
Ditto for Brazil... In my case, most apps are not for sale in AppStore, for example (not even Angry Birds).
The Gambit Scheme wiki probably has most of what Hacker News readers want: http://dynamo.iro.umontreal.ca/~gambit/wiki/index.php/Main_P...
I use LaTeX for something people usually never think about: critical editions of ancient and medieval texts. A good critical edition has many typographic details (say: parallel and aligned text, apparatus, typefaces & styles, footnotes, endnotes, margin notes, eventually hundrends of bibliographic references) difficult, error-prone or even _literally_ impossible in word processors.
Of course learning to typeset this kind of work in (La)TeX is not a walk in the park, but as a professor once told me it was easier (for a skilled operator, of course) to typeset a good, not to mention beautiful, critical edition with a Lnotype machine than with Word and similar software.
I do agree that TeX could be more "programmable", in the sense at least of integration with scripting languages; however, there still isn't a better tool and LaTeX 3/LuaTeX might indeed become a solution in the foreseeable future.
I am an Italian, living in Brazil, my girlfriend is Brazilian. The only minor hassle she had was once in Portugal, when the officer asked her three times in a row what she was planning to do in Europe (probably because, from his point of view, she was a single woman from Brazil in her early twenties). It was an exception, as in my experience Portuguese officers are in general extremely friendly and professional.
She has also crossed borders in Italy and France, and was treated very well each single time; I am sure that the fact that she speaks Italian fluently and has an advanced level of French was a positive factor, but nonetheless she was treated just like any EU-citizen there.
Short answer, it depends.
Long answer, it can run some parts of it if you join them (e.g., separating tokens, counting probabilities, some tagging and even some more advanced stuff). You cannot however, run everything (for exemple, modules and functions depending on NumPy) and must deal with how to import/export data.