blintson

I think that's as close to "fuck off Arrington" as pg's gonna get.

While we're talking about currency, why hasn't anybody in the US(to my knowledge) made a payment processor that works by generating transaction numbers, and then sending those numbers instead of sending people payment authentication credentials?

Let's say George wants to give Sally $5.

1. George logs into his PayCo. account. He clicks generate transaction, amount $5. The server returns a very long randomly generated key. 2. He copy-pastes that key into Sally's pay-info server. 3. Sally sends that key to PayCo.'s server, money changes hands, and the key is no longer valid.

Yes. Yes it is. Just because they have lots of fancy candy packaging doesn't mean that Japanese kids eat tons of it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_obesity#Japan

Just look at photos of what the Jap kids eat for lunch:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lunchinabox/1378172475/

This is actually what they eat for lunch everyday. It's amazing.

This "rebranding" is obnoxious. If I was kid I'd be pissed. Kids can tell when you're bs'ing them. They're exposed to enough propaganda already.

The path to healthy food isn't in telling kids what to do, but exposing them to something better. Look at what Japanese kids eat. I _know_ kids would prefer salmon-roe onigiri and fried rice to potato chips and twinkies.

No, no it wouldn't. It would be more effective to stop subsidizing unhealthy food. The long-term effects of such legislation are almost guaranteed to be a net-negative because of edge cases. There are already way too many laws. You should always look first at what can be removed, rather than what can be added.

Towards the end of his entry he mentioned something about readability. I believe postfix notation is superior in both read & write-ability for FP.

Take: (reduce (lambda (x y) ...) (map (lambda (x) ...) data-set))

When you actually read this what do you do? You work inside-out to understand it. You figure out what 'data-set' is, then you figure out what '(lambda (x) ...) does to it, and so on.

You (or me at least) also write the code inside-out. You start with the data, and an idea of how to transform it, and you work your way towards that transformation.

Compare to:

((data-set (lambda (x)...) map) (lambda (x y) ...) reduce)

Of course, this brings up a lot of edge-cases. Ex.: Where does 'define' fit into this? You really want define and the variable name at the beginning.

Depending on where you live, the hottest hours of the day are usually between 12 - 5. Maybe it's instinctual for predators to not want to do stuff during those hours?

Growing up with cellphones was bad enough. Kids need their space. Whereoscope has made the lives of lots of kids slightly worse.

FTA:

"Let’s begin with the Perry Preschool Experiment, which consisted of 123 low income African-American children from Yspilanti, Michigan."

and three sentences later...

"The differences, even decades after the intervention, were stark: Adults assigned to the preschool program were 20 percent more likely to have graduated from high school and 19 percent less likely to have been arrested more than five times."

The above passage contains the only numbers I could find (cited paper's behind a paywall). Those numbers mean _nothing_.

123 people

20 % more likely to graduate = 67 graduated, 56 did not 67 - 56

The author suggests that 11 people graduated high school because of pre-school. He/she could have said "11 more people graduated high school than did not", but he/she didn't. Tried to obfuscate it.

"19 percent less likely to have been arrested more than five times."

They obviously tried to find something that reinforced their point instead of looking at reality. They didn't say "19 percent fewer arrests", they said "less likely... more than 5 times". Because the real difference in mean arrests is probably much smaller.

Again the study is behind a paywall so I can't read it, but I suspect they're not even wrong.

I lived in Japan for two months. I've been to China for a week. I'm fluent in Japanese and I've taken a Mandarin class.

There is no doubt in my mind that English is the superior language and we'd all be better off if the Chinese would learn English rather than the other way around.*

* We'd probably be better off still if we all learned Esperanto, oh well.

Bill Gates was well-connected from the birth. You can't learn to have a rich lawyer as a father.

Microsoft didn't build an OS for IBM. The group that actually built the OS probably turned down IBM's offer because they couldn't get away with what Microsoft did.

There's very little admirable about what Bill Gates did to get where he is, and unless you have connections like him you probably shouldn't try to succeed doing similar things.

And yes, I know "How to Win Friends and Influence People", etc. etc. There are plenty of people who are much, much smarter than Bill Gates who tried to do similar things and failed, or weren't nearly as successful because they weren't born into it.

Bill Gates dad is the co-founder of one of the largest law firms in Seattle, and his mom knew IBM's CEO. Being well connected is not a skill*. If somebody with fewer connections tried to pull off what he did it'd probably bite'm in the ass.

Edit: Skill you can learn, my bad.

This is awesome!! I'm gonna try running a dinner party in my area. Proposed menu:

Hickory-smoked pork ribs

Yam Champloo (yams w/nuts&fruit&otherstuff)

Coconut-Squash Soup

Stir-fry & brown rice

Fried spicy banana peppers

If conveying that information in your voice is useful, it's also very useful to be able to fake it. I lifted weights in high school, went wakeboarding with people and (briefly) went to an MMA gym. I've met skinny people with deep voices and ripped people with high voices and vice versa. I wasn't able to find a link to the original study, but I think they're completely wrong, and the correlation is nonexistent or negligible.

Single quoting lets you pass a list without evaluating it.

(car (eval '(a b c))) vs. (car (a b c))

Do the same thing.

Have you read SICP? Somewhere in the 1st-3rd chapter there's an explanation of first-order evaluation that scheme uses. Once you know how scheme evals sexps, it makes sense that quote skips some of the steps of evaluation. I strongly recommend the SICP/Little Schemer/Seasoned Schemer if you haven't heard of them.

FTA:

“With the Internet it has exploded, but a lot of chief and command officers didn’t understand and chose to put their resources in things like burglary or homicides.”

This is probably the most egregious example of justifying something "for the children". I'd much rather the police department put resources into catching murders. Murder is worse.

I'm not a troll.

I don't think the law should have anything to do with this. He didn't do anything hard. He was only able to get away with what he did because Harvard was to lazy to verify his documents. Harvard charges $33k/semester, at that price they can afford to take the time to verify _every_ applicant's information.

I always thought that a pair of video-glasses would be great for coding -- Any HNers here who've used a Heads-Up-Display? Do you think they're good enough for coding yet?

I don't think grades/school should be used for employment at all.* Grades may coincide with good skills but they are _COMPLETELY_ orthogonal.

1. Most programmers in the US go through 16 years of school. The final 8 have an effect on where you end up. Of the first four(high school) only about 1/3 of your time is spent on math/science* * . Of the final 4(at the two colleges I attended) only about 2.5 years are spent on math science. Of that 2.5 years only about 1.5 are computer-science specific.

This means you're determining somebody's programming competence based on information (What college and grades) that is less than half(48%) based on math/science proficiency and less than quarter(19%) based on computer science.

2. They're subjective. Especially liberal arts(i.e. MOST of school).* * *

3.It's incredibly expensive. Computer science and math cost next to nothing, but for some reason I'm supposed to give some school 60k over 4 years to spend about a quarter of my time studying what I'm interested in.

4.If you test out of a class it doesn't count for grades. If I work very hard and do 16 weeks of calculus in 3 and take a test, I get credit. If do nothing and just ace the class I get an A to pad my transcript. This creates a DIRECT incentive to do less.* * * *

* I am absolutely all for hearing about research/coding/contests I don't think schools opinions should matter at all.

* * I mention high school grades because high school grades determine which school you go to.

* * * Yes, math and science in high school/college can be and frequently are subjective as well. Teachers give credit for effort/showing work on problems/homework/etc. etc.. My high school algebra grade was a C despite getting 90+% right on exams because I didn't do the homework and the teacher wasn't satisfied with my explanations.

This could easily be worse than ACTA. This is basically the first step to making anonymous communication illegal.

I'd like to know PG's development setup was when he was building Viaweb. I heard it mentioned somewhere that PG used vim, I'd like to see his .vimrc, etc. etc. from the time.

Most of my school's funding is and was not dependent on their student's skills, schools get funding for attendance. When I went to school they checked attendance 6 times every day (once for every class), and gave you 3 bathroom breaks/year/class. Taking attendance took about 5 mins/ class, every time you went to the bathroom a teacher had to sign a form verifying you had permission. This comes out to about* 340,000 HOURS of wasted time in ONE YEAR FOR ONE HIGHSCHOOL. This isn't even considering many, many fundamentally wrong things with how grades and classes are structured and credit is awarded. For every competent teacher teaching a useful subject there are 3-4 incompetents wasting people's time with sophistry and selectively blind adherence to stated rules.

Public high school education in this country is a net negative. High school "education" has nothing to do with teaching students skills, its there first to benefit the people running the school, and second to make people obedient for factory jobs.

Math & science people tend to be humble & introverted because they're usually wrong about the solution to whatever problem they're trying to solve, and they spend all their time doing math/science and not talking to people. This is a bad thing. Every hour spent on spiffy presentations is an hour not spent on telling people public school's are doing it wrong. The author wasted his/her time on this* * , it's not going to change anything. Math/Science people who want to improve the state of math/science education should spend their time politicking, not science'ing.

* (5mins/attendance * 6 classes * 10 mins bathroom break form filling/a day * 2000 students * 34 weeks/year / 60mins/hour = 340K)

* * It is pretty cool, though.

That's a good thing. If you can say the same thing using simpler, or fewer terms you should. It's not hard to make something simple seem complicated, it's hard to make something complex seem simple. Look at lisp.

I wrote that wrong, my bad. I was copying from a call-by-value example from memory. Changed the following:

  *(int *foo)pointer_param /*changed to*/  *(int*)pointer_param = bar

Absolutely not. Highschool was by far the least productive time of my life. I'd have shot a few teachers if I had to put up with them six days a week.

1.Did the large number of homophones emerge through use of the written language?

No. Modern Japanese is the standardization of a 3 different scripts. Kanji, which are Chinese characters, katakana, which is a phonetic script made by simplifying Chinese, and hiragana. Katakana and kanji were used for official writing, and hiragana was used for informal writing. The Japanese government standardized the three scripts in 1915-ish and now they're all used together for different things.^

2. How do they manage to talk to each other, then?

Context, context, context. You can tell which homophone means what depending on the context and part of a sentence a word falls in. Sentences frequently consist of just the verb. Where we might say "turn it on" a Jap would say "on". Also Japanese people rarely interact with people outside their circle of friends/business acquaintances, and when they do it's in extremely formal circumstances where everybody knows what to say.

^Generally, katakana = foreign words, kanji = nouns/verbs, hiragana = grammatical markers(particles & verb conjugations)

No. Japanese has a LOT of homonyms. Kanji are necessary to tell the difference between all the possible meanings of a given set of sounds^. IANAL^^ but from my experience it seems Japanese is much better for speaking and reading than it is for writing. In speech the homonyms are more useful because it's easier to tell what something means from context. I find that I'm often much terser in Japanese than in English in speaking and vice-versa in writing.

^The number of kanji in use is actually INCREASING because of auto-completion software.

^^(I Am Not A Linguist), actually readability of Japanese could go either way, I'm not sure. On the one hand, the characters are more complex, requiring more space and processing; on the other, they stand for larger chunks of meaning. Has anybody here seen any studies on the reading-comprehension speed of Japanese vs. English?

^^^Also, on readability: Kanji help show the grammatical structure of a sentence somewhat. The same way you read English words by recognizing their shape, you can recognize the structure of a Japanese sentence by it's shape.

I am a meat-eater who's made an intelligent, intentional decision to eat meat. I sometimes hunt deer and turkey, and I've caught and gutted fish. I've seen slaughterhouses where cows and chickens are killed, and animal cruelty doesn't bother me at all.

Not that I'm not worried about antibiotic abuse and such breeding disease, I mean that I don't care at all about the animals' welfare.

It should absolutely not be open-sourced. I know a few people in the car industry, and there is no doubt in my mind that in the long-term open-sourcing car software will make car-reliability worse.

1.Writing software for a car extensive domain knowledge about how a car works. Acquiring that knowledge is a lot more expensive than learning about computers.

2. It means writing better software helps your competitors. Cars are a red market, to get any market share you take it from someone else. Toyota is currently the market leader because they spend way more on engineering, and they work harder than the big three. I've talked to mech. engineers at Ford and Toyota, and there is no doubt in my mind that I'm safer in a defective Prius than I am in a defect-free Ford Taurus. Toyota does a better job than the big three at every step in the design and manufacture of a car.

I think doping is awesome, and it should be legal. Treatments that are proven safe for athletes could then be used by everybody else. I would love to never need to exercise, or sleep again.