cchooper

On the issue of a central leader figure, I have seen projects fail precisely because someone was staking a career on it. In that scenario, the customers you truly serve are your boss and your boss's boss. Users? Damn them and their expensive 'requirements'. Support? Someone else's problem. Maintainability? How is that going to get me promoted? All of those things cost time and money, and therefore are risks to be avoided. Better to spend your time burying bad news and selling your failure as 'success' to those who really matter.

All of the self-managing teams I've ever worked on have been much more user-focused and success-oriented (in the true sense) than any project where someone was afraid of losing their head. Self-managing teams just seem to be immune to certain kinds of office politics.

Although the lambda papers talk about Scheme, that's not what they're really about. They're really about... lambda. The takeaway is that many common features of languages can be thought of as disguised uses of the lambda operator. So lambda is actually the unifying abstraction behind many languages, even if they don't know it.

The original 'Lambda the Ultimate X' papers are very short, so no reason not to give them a try.

Well if that's not an invitation to finally start my blog, I don't know what is.

Having just quit my job for a contractor role in London, I am so glad to see this here.

The Economist and Financial Times are both modern success stories for selling on-line subscriptions, so your theory holds out in practice.

I could make tomorrow evening, or most other dates after work.

Zero-click info for error messages would be a great resource. There are already some sites that do this for specific kinds of error (e.g. ora-code.com for Oracle errors) but a general "put in this error and I´ll tell you what it means" site would be fantastic.

If I were to add up all the searches I do in a day, then searches for programming advice (e.g. how do I fix X, what's the syntax for Y) would outnumber all my other searches put together, so I definitely think there's a bit opportunity here.

That's only the start of it. How many people who use the web know what http means, or why it appears in their address bar? And how many people at all know what :// is for?

Several Lisp applications have config files that are just Lisp files run at start-up. Emacs is an example. You can (and people do) put absolutely any code in there. There's no need to restrict it to just setting variables.

So what's the difference between a config file and code? Config files aren't compiled (so no need to rebuild when you change them) and they are intended to be modified by the user, while other code isn't.

There is a world of difference between the ad hominem fallacy and an insult. The ad hominem fallacy is bad reasoning. But insults are the spice of life and cathartic for the soul.

Lady Nancy Astor: If I were your wife I would put poison in your coffee!

Winston Churchill: And if I were your husband I would drink it!

There is not a single great movie in your 2005 list. In fact Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is one of the worst movies I've ever seen.

As for the 1980s, this was indeed a much better decade than the current one. The 70s were even better, much better than the 40s.

> is it really surprising that there were a handful of good movies among them?

Not good movies, great movies.

If object-orientation means X then why don't people just call it X?

If object-orientation is polymorphism then how come many polymorphic languages aren't object-oriented?

At the very most, object-orientation is a particular mechanism for achieving a particular kind of polymorphism (namely ad-hoc object-based polymorphism). At most. Given the vagueness of the term, it could not even be that.

These days, the commonly accepted wisdom is that movies were always as bad as they are now, and anyone who says otherwise is just idealizing the past. I offer the following evidence that the quality of movies is not constant over time:

1939: Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, Gone With The Wind, The Wizard Of Oz, Stagecoach, Ninotchka, Wuthering Heights

1940: Rebecca, Fantasia, His Girl Friday, The Grapes of Wrath, The Philadelphia Story, The Great Dictator

1941: Citizen Kane, The Maltese Falcon, The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels

Rather than relying on personal taste, I took these from various 'top 100' lists. I haven't seen all of them myself, but the ones I have seen are a mile apart from anything released this year, or any recent year.

I upvoted this because it's a wonderful example of mathematical crankiness. I've always wondered why cranks are attracted to the same things: Cantor's diagonalization proof, squaring the circle, 1=0.999.. Perhaps it's because the problems are easy to understand, but the proofs aren't.

I'll second Hacker and recommend his Wittgenstein's Place in 20th Century Analytic Philsophy as a reasonably accessible starting point.

This thought struck me when I observed the reverse process in some poor countries during the oil boom. Where people are poor and energy is expensive, there's an incentive to 'deindustrialize' by replacing expensive machines with cheap labour. Industries weren't just standing still or going bust, but innovating by eliminating mechanization and taking on workers. Presumably an industrial revolution is the same process in reverse.

But why do you need to offer them something when you could just take it? The answer is that they will shove a gun in your face if you do. Property rights are just as much based on force as any other law.

The FT called it the Great Unwinding, on the basis that the unsustainable debt/trade/current account imbalances would start to reverse their direction.

It seems the only thing anyone can agree on is that we're experiencing something really 'Great'.

It sounds to me like an expert system. What I can't see is how it's different to any other kind of expert system. Just more data?

You're both (a little) wrong! :)

You can't call something an illusion just because its true nature is misunderstood. An illusion is something that looks deceptively like something else. A hologram of a table is an illusion, but just misunderstanding the nature of a table (e.g. misunderstanding the fundamental particles from which it's constructed) does not make it an illusion.

Saying that time is an illusion is like saying that we appear to be living in a universe with time, but actually we don't. We are in fact experiencing something that looks like time, but isn't really time.

But obviously we do live in a universe with time, and the fact that time may turn out to be something strange or unexpected does not make it an illusion. It just means we misunderstood its true nature.

I don't know about TV, but for a very low budget film the major costs are:

1. Talent (although assuming you write and direct yourself, and use unknown actors, this can be brought down to under a few thousand).

2. Film stock and processing (over 50k with celluloid, but obviously digital is much cheaper).

3. Equipment (camera, dollies, lights etc.): 40k

4. Crew: 70k for a 2 week shoot with a cheap crew, including catering

5. Post production: 40-60k

This sort of money will get you a surprisingly professional looking 90 minute film. However, production costs on film are always eclipsed by marketing costs. It can cost thousands of dollars just to market a film to the distributors, no matter to consumers.

Obviously, you can make a film for much less than this, but only if you want to make a film like Clerks or In The Company Of Men (i.e. one location, shot in a weekend).

Interestingly, almost everyone posting to the Reddit thread got that it was a joke (http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/81s36/i_hate_li...) but most people posting to HN took it seriously.

Creole and pidgin languages are special cases though. They are simple because they are relatively new constructions, rather than because they are unwritten.

I understand why. Thanks for replying.

Other than news.arc, is there any particular aspect of the language you're focusing on?

I suspect it's more because these books have a fanatical following, the kind of people who want to deliberately manipulate 'Best Of...' lists to give their beliefs more publicity.

It makes no sense to say that the dictionary has it wrong. If you discovered that human beings were actually created by aliens for some sinister purpose then we would be their technology, but unless that's what you're proposing then the word just doesn't apply.

Technology doesn't mean 'impressive, complicated thing'. You can't say 'people are really special and a product of evolution' and infer that people are technology. It's like saying that red is a really beautiful colour and therefore is actually a shade of blue.

But even if you could say that it would be irrelevent, because it would be misconstruing what the unabomber meant.

It's quite clear that the unabomber did not consider human beings, or nature generally, to be a form of technology. His manifesto is all about the opposition of technology and nature. He says that technology destroys nature, and therefore we must destroy technological society.

And are human beings technology? I can't find any dictionary support for that use of the word. Technology implies either something created by the application of science, or the complete set of material implements manufactured by a society. Human beings clearly don't count.

There's a good article in the FT today on a similar theme: how this recession is/isn't like past recessions, particularly the Japanese "lost decade".

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/774c0920-fd1d-11dd-a103-000077b076...

It's a symmetric relationship. If a note looks like a chord then a chord looks like a note. Both a mix of frequencies and a single frequency can produce the same colour, so they both look like each other.