busy_beaver

Ah, and I see my original post has been modded down to zero, in the classic Digg-style mob rule fashion.

I'm outta here.

The gratuitous U.S. bashing in this thread looks exactly like something you'd see on Reddit (more likely, Digg). Not only is it ugly, it's utterly irrelevant to the nominal topic of discussion. Even if the U.S. were Nazi Germany, the Stalinist U.S.S.R., and the Pol Pot regime rolled into one, it would have zero relevance to the ethical position of Google with the Chinese government.

I suppose I could have said that Paul B.'s position (and that of several others) is a classic example of the tu quoque variety of ad hominem fallacy, but that would basically just be using Latin to say the same thing.

And yet here you are.

I'm curious: what made you decide to move to a country with no freedom, bad education and no culture?

"Exactly who is in Guantanamo or the secret CIA prisons, and why?"

Well, not you, and not anyone you know.

The mere fact that you're comfortable posting this stuff on a public site, under your own name, demonstrates that you have ZERO fear that someone will break down your door tonight and take you off to a "secret prison".

To be quite blunt: you don't even believe your own bullshit.

Wow, for $1,000 per year you could just about buy a MacBook and a copy of Parallels, which would let you create a full library of VMs with all the different browsers and operating systems, then load any one you wanted.

Plus -- you'd have a sweet machine to use for other purposes when you weren't testing. This sounds way overpriced.

You could do the same thing with VMWare Fusion (though it's still in beta, and I haven't tried it).

Err... what does doing math have to do with it? If I have a good (human) assistant, I can ask him or her to find me all the Y Combinator articles and it just works. I don't need to write some formal mathematical description of the task.

It's true that it's all math/physics/chemistry underneath, due to how the brain works, but in practice we never worry about that, just as an engineer doesn't generally consider quantum and relativistic effects when he's designing a bridge, or an outfielder doesn't scribble down a bunch of differential equations before catching a fly ball.

Sure, any standard computer is equivalent to a bounded Turing machine, but Turing machines are a real pain in the ass to program.

Mathematical purity is one thing. Getting your work done is quite another.

Over-mathematization is what killed AI (IMO).

As a second source (it's sometimes helpful to hear material from more than one perspective), UC Berkeley has some podcasts from a Scheme course which uses SICP:

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details.php?seriesid=1906978270

I listened to a few of them a while back, just to check them out. Not bad, if you can ignore the lecturer's occasional side-trip into politics (well, it IS Berkeley).

Tcl/Tk? For the 21st century?

Ummm.. okay.

Chicken Scheme compiles to C. It's also directly supported by SWIG, so it's (reasonably) easy to call functions in C DLLs and the like.

Someone mentioned below that it's working on Reddit. I just looked at their feed, and it looks like they are indeed putting the comments link inside "description" rather than "comments".

Feedvalidator finds a couple of problems, but I'm not sure that they're related.

http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2Frss

Maybe try generating an Atom feed? Atom seems to be much better defined than any of the myriad competing RSS implementations.

Or maybe toss a hyperlink into the description tag rather than the comments tag ... from what I see in the RSS 2.0 spec, comments is a more of a "should" rather than a "must". The spec itself refers to it as an optional element, and Winer (I think) says in a note that implementers "should" support it. Clearly some of them don't. :-)

"I bet most people who use/used PHP got there because it was popular"

This is fairly accurate, but not quite the whole story.

Ascribing PHP's success to "popularity" makes it sound like a simple fashion statement. The reality is that, due to its popularity, PHP has a ton of libraries and an enormous base of existing code (ranging from little hacks to parse a certain data format all the way up to full-blown applications like MediaWiki). It's not just the language, it's the ecosystem.

That's a real advantage that's often overlooked by those who advocate other languages. Also, don't forget that PHP hosting is cheap and ubiquitous. Rails, not so much.

That said, Ruby is catching up pretty fast, and I've been using Ruby (and sometimes Rails) for any new project that isn't tightly coupled with existing code. For me, writing Ruby is vastly more pleasant and efficient than writing PHP, even though I've been using PHP for five years and Ruby for only one.

I still write a lot of Java, too, but JRuby is starting to eat into that pretty fast. It's an end run around the library/existing code problem.

Thanks, but I'm looking for instructions for going the other way. The Wikipedia article (at least the one I found) has good information for sending email to cell phones, but that information is all over the place.

What I need is a comprehensive, cross-carrier list for sending email from cell phones. I've found this information for a few carriers, but it's not complete by any means. For instance, it looks like Cingular (U.S.) and Rogers (Canada) use the same method as T-Mobile (U.S.), just using a different number (500 for T-Mobile, 121 for Cingular, and 0000000000 for Rogers).

I may have to devote a few days to digging out this information by hand from the carrier web sites. If I do, I'll add it to the Wikipedia article.

MacBook (non-pro). I'm poor/cheap, plus I actually prefer a smaller form-factor for notebooks; I have full-sized external monitors at both home and work, so the smaller display is a non-issue where I spend most of my time, and a postive advantage when I'm mobile.

Does anyone know of a reference list for sending from SMS to email on various carriers/platforms? There are all kinds of resources for sending email to SMS (generally involving sending it to (phone number)@(carrier address.com)), but I haven't been able to find a cross-carrier reference for going the other way.

On my T-Mobile service, for instance, I have to send an SMS to "phone number" 500, with the email address, subject, and body of the message separated by appropriate delimiters. How does it work on other carriers?

"This is a BUG, not a feature."

That's the way BitTorrent is supposed to work, by definition. If it didn't, the client would soon be banned for leeching.

If you don't want this to happen, don't run BitTorrent.

Calling this a "bug" is like complaining that your email program sends mail, or that your web browser downloads web pages.

"I had no idea that firefox extensions could spawn processes."

A Firefox extension can do just about anything that any other program can do. It can contain arbitrary C++ XPCOM components. Be careful out there.

MacOS is a nice Unix in its own right, and if you really need to have Linux, it runs fine under Parallels. I've got Windows XP, Ubuntu, and the One Laptop Per Child project images on my MacBook, and can boot any of them depending on what I want to check out.

I've often wondered how much of the explosion in web creativity can be attributed to the transparency of HTML -- you can "view source" any page and find out exactly how the designer created that cool effect. By comparison, Flash is opaque. Yes, there are tools that let you dig in to the ActionScript and whatnot, but you don't have the immediacy of seeing it right there in your browser.

While Textmate is indeed the shizzle, this app isn't really playing in the same space.

Textmate is a code editor (and a very nice one). Coda is a web design tool, like Dreamweaver (integrated preview pane, built-in GUI support for CSS mangling, etc.). Coda looks to be a lot cleaner than Dreamweaver. I like it -- but I'm not sure I do enough web design to justify switching. It has more to do with the time to learn a new app rather than the cost; while Dreamweaver may be nasty, I've been using it for a long time. If I found myself needing to do a lot of web design, I'd definitely consider a switch. Coda seems elegant and intuitive.

Netscape, YouTube and PayPal (among others) came out of UIUC.

This guy wrote a basic continuation-based web server in Chicken Scheme (which compiles to C). Might be worth a look...

http://www.double.co.nz/scheme/modal-web-server.html

"IT's rise to prominence as a core competence that delivers competitive advantage"

Stopped reading here. Sorry. :-)

Hmm... if A players hire A players, B players hire C players, and C players hire losers, how could B players ever get hired?

Do the people who think up these simplistic axioms ever bother to think them through?

Far33d's comment about the "echo chamber" effect is well-stated. Look into why IBM missed the minicomputer boom, and why DEC missed the microcomputer boom.

Sam_Odio also has a valid point. Selecting the choice that offends the fewest people is what gives us so many buildings with walls and carpet that are a bland beige/white/gray color.

The real issue here is distinguishing between Joe 1, who's controversial because he's a bloody genius, and Joe 2, who's controversial because he's an asshole. This is further complicated by the fact that legitimate geniuses aren't always the easiest people with whom to get along. If you take this guy's advice, you'll wind up with Joe 3, who may be a good worker bee, but probably isn't ever going to do anything great.

"Compare that to Ruby, where you can't even get a specification of the current state of the language for free."

Err.... http://www.ruby-doc.org/

"What do you use for Ruby on Rails?"

Textmate. :-)

http://macromates.com/

BTW, you might want to have a look at JRuby. While it's still pre-1.0, it's moving along nicely. It will allow you to leverage all your knowledge of the Java class libraries.

If Scheme will do, Chicken, Bigloo, and Gambit all compile to C code as an intermediate step (which you then run through gcc or whatever to generate the binary). Bigloo will also generate JVM and .NET output (.NET is still experimental).

I haven't worked much with Gambit, but have fooled around with both Chicken and Bigloo. Of the two, I found Chicken to be the friendliest (it also seems to have a somewhat more active community). Another possible advantage of Chicken is that it's directly supported by SWIG. There was some activity on the Chicken mailing list a few months back about porting some game libraries. I don't know what the current status of that might be.

Bloglines shows the comments links fine, so not all feed readers ignore them.

What I'd like to see in the feed is some indication that the link points to an external site. We get that locally, but not in the feed.

Edit -- that looks unclear upon rereading. When we see an article in the list on news.ycombinator.com, it looks like this:

Y Combinator a new twist on finding hot companies (mercurynews.com)

The same article in the RSS feed doesn't show the (mercurynews.com) part. It would be convenient to have that in the feed as well, so we know that we need to pop two new tabs for that article, rather than just one.

In the comment section, Shefaly makes a good point about trying to observe the guy in social situations (i.e., not a formal interview or business meeting).

I recommend visiting a restaurant and observing how he treats the waitstaff. If he's rude or abusive to the waiter, how do you think he's going to treat you when you're his employee or partner?

"I work at a newspaper"

Which is another dying industry, in case you hadn't noticed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/26/business/media/26paper.html?ex=1176091200&en=870eff3de332e892&ei=5070

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8HFM6GOB&show_article=1

http://www.journalism.org/node/797

I work at an R1 research institution. When I attend talks in EE and CS (i.e., the ones attended by the guys doing research for tomorrow's technology), I see essentially nothing but Linux and Mac notebooks. 3-4 years ago it was about 50-50 Linux and Windows, rarely a Mac.

I don't think Graham is disputing that there are a lot of Windows machines out there (in fact, I seem to remember the article explicitly acknowledging this). He's talking about tomorrow, not today.

I'll bet if someone had visited your newspaper 25 years ago they'd have seen CP/M or Wang systems.

In 1925, the British Empire controlled 25% of the earth's surface, but it was dead nonetheless.

That's a great looking font --- elegant, but still LEGIBLE.

I found the download page here:

http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html