nfnaaron

They're both rich ... no.

They're both hairy ... no.

Ah - they both choose their computer systems based on stubborn adherence to software ideology.

"You're the one insisting that all-in is always the right solution."

I never said the words "all in," and you complained above that I'm not going all in. I'm confused.

In fact I'm opposed to "it must work 100% or it's useless, and if we do it we must do it 100%." I thought that was clear, but I guess not.

Feynman.

"Nope. We'll end up with a lot of old-tech solar that isn't as good as what we'll get by waiting."

No, we'll still get the years of use from the "old tech" while new tech is being developed, partly on the back of what was learned by bothering to develop the old tech in the first place.

What if we decided not to build cars until we developed the Prius? Or computers until the iPhone? You have to go through the stages, tech doesn't happen fully realized without what went before.

So that the US citizens that live there are fully represented.

So implement storage. Build more capacity than you need for momentary power and use the excess to charge batteries or raise water columns. Build still more excess capacity, charge local storage at the solar plant or at intermediate locations, and use the rest of the excess at the point of consumption to charge storage there.

That's a lot of solar generators. So the sooner we start, the sooner we'll get there. The interesting thing is, just as better computers help us design and build still better computers, increasingly available energy will drive the cost of existing energy down, reducing the cost of energy used to build and maintain new capacity.

If we can only power the world half the day with solar, then that's a large fraction of our power that we don't have to burn oil or coal or biomass (food) for. If we can only power half the world half the day, it's still a win. If we can only make it through part of the night before lighting up an oil generator, it's still a win.

It astounds me that we're living in a blowtorch and we do essentially nothing with it, fight wars over oil, spew oil and emissions all over the world, and watch the elderly and poor die from lack of heat or cooling.

Link to a downloadable/non-404 version of Hughes' paper:

http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Paper/702256.aspx

Two pdf links below the summary paragraph.

This is well done and worth checking out. The only thing I didn't like is the strictly linear route to all articles, whether you're interested in every article or not. But I don't think that takes away from the accomplishment.

Sounds like Microsoft condemning Communist open source.

Condolences.

"Beyond the technical and management experiences, the experience taught me how to be audacious and think outside the normal framework," Or relates. "Much of the Mosad's power derives from a capacity to do things so audaciously that the enemy can't imagine such things would be done to him."

"... and their users need to handle multiple versions in multiple locations ..."

Man, I get crotchety just by going to different King Soopers (Kroger) stores in my area and having to deal with variations in "swipe your card" terminals and protocols.

Would you buy a bank app from an app store? I think I'd rather get the app directly from my bank. On the other hand, I'm having trouble reconciling that last statement with Quicken downloading data from my bank; I didn't get Quicken from my bank.

"So who created programming languages?"

We did, but we did it on purpose. Programming languages are mere tools, subsets of human language. Human language evolved as part of human evolution, and is as intimately part of the definition and condition of "human" as a beating heart and a gleam in the eye.

Programming languages are created for limited and specific purpose, relative to human language. They take a few months to a few years to create. They're "received" by most of us, and only if we volunteer.

Human language wasn't created, it evolved, like feet and stereo vision, over hundreds of thousands of years, from grunts to sonnets. We have no choice to absorb language because language is part of the bath of human existence. It grows with us as the result of interaction between environment and genetic capacity, just as we grow arms.

To refer to computer languages as "language" is somewhat grandiose. They are very little like human language, and more like the rules and vocabulary of baseball. In other words, a computer language is merely one use of human language. You could refer to the traffic code or the penal code as language, and it makes about as much sense as referring to computer code as language. They all three are the same thing, a description of rules and vocabulary, meant to accomplish a set of goals in a constrained environment.

In contrast, human language has no purpose, not in the sense that traffic code and computer code have purpose. You can't decide to use human language or not, no more than you can decide not to use blood. Human language just is, and it's that difference in specified purpose and no purpose that tells me they are not the same thing, nor even like each other. At best, computer language is an extremely small and constrained subset of human language.

The answer to "why are objects so unintuitive" is in the question's implied requirement that a computer language be able to describe an object as fully as human language, and that we can understand such an object with all the precision and ambiguity which human language allows; that's impossible.

The relationship between real world objects is both: physical and independent of human thought; and subjective, contextual and dependent on human thought.

A real world object, like a car or a row in a database table, obeys physical or mathematical laws independent of human thought.

Objects also have relationships that don't exist without humans. The car and row mean different things depending on how we decide to perceive them. The row, in the limited context of SQL, is a collection of data that must adhere to constraints, and that's expected to be produced and consumed in limited ways. The car, in the limited context of the traffic code, is an object that moves through the traffic system according to (or not) designed and learned rules of motion and safety.

The row, in the limited context of love and ambition, is potentially my partner for the rest of my life, or this afternoon's rejection. The car in the same language is a symbol of desperate love, as so memorably programmed by Bruce Springsteen in Born To Run.

To expect a computer language to completely, intuitively and consistently describe an object makes no more sense than to expect a love song to determine the rules of traffic.

Or something.

Cooler Twitter. Enterprise Twitter. Better Personal Twitter management.

"What possibly" and "conceivably" assumes that the current form of Twitter is all it could ever be.

If they're smart enough to do Twitter, they're smart enough to enhance Twitter in a way that people will pay for it.

Keep in mind, this is all based on the linked article's characterization of Twitter as an ad company, and what they might do instead.

Open Twitter, allow anyone to be a Twitter server, and sell their services to Twitter providers who don't want to deal with Twitter nuts and bolts, as Disqus does for comments and Google does for gapps.

Be an expert in Twitter and sell training to implementers and users, as GitHub does for git.

Have free and paid levels, as GitHub, Disqus, Dropbox and countless others do.

Have all paid services, as old school businesses do.

There's probably more else that I haven't covered.

It's on my DL. You're all (all 6B of you) welcome to all my parts, once I'm done with them.

"don't mean to be a (french) grammar nazi"

Would that be a grammar Vichy?

"it's spelled "voilà"

Right. The dash was in there to emphasize mispronunciation of a mis-spelled word, to indicate mock astonishment in context.

Thanks. :)

My point exactly.

This problem was very easy to fix: move his account to another server. It took an amount of one blog post to trigger the solution. He got special attention.

Remember that facebook non-deleted picture discussed yesterday?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1400128

It's 404 now. I suspect (purely guessing) they specifically took that one picture down, but did not also "solve" the problem that left it there in the first place.

I quit a social network a few years ago, but they would not delete my account. So I logged in and changed my name to something like NameOfSocialNetworkRefusesToDeleteMyAccount. And vi-ola, the account disappeared in a day or so.

The embarrassing wheel gets the grease.

So you can't delete delete a picture if other people, who don't own it, like to look at it?

(My comment is backed by fundamental ignorance.)

Have you tried university/research hospitals? I wonder if it would be worth researching/shopping for such a hospital and get them interested in and committed to finding out what ails you.

Or, they're trying to encourage you to be logged in when you search. IIUC, you won't see "your" personalized picture unless you're logged in and cookied.

It doesn't actually do the exact same thing:

http://c-faq.com/aryptr/aryptr2.html

Totally subjective, but with slicehost I recall that their Dallas center had problems noticeably more often.

Is there something about Dallas, for Linode or Slicehost or both?

Agreed 100%.

"Their browser is too tied to the OS."

During the debates surrounding the anti-trust trial MS argued that that, browser tied to the OS, is a feature. They were close to saying that the browser is the OS.

"Perfect email regex finally found"

Based on the HN title I thought it was going to be an article describing a post-it found on Fermat's dressing table mirror.

Instead it's a list of mostly correct regexes. As Miracle Max might have observed, mostly correct is partly imperfect, and partly imperfect is Not Perfect.

For fuck's sake, take the bag!

There's no way at all that you can imagine what you might do with your life, what you might experience, what you might give other people.

I'm not religious at all, but if there's anything in the universe that qualifies as a miraculous gift, it's your (you, I'm talking to you, dmc) life.

The universe would be a lesser place without you.

See what happens.

Abso-fucking-lutely.

Let woman-kind make that decision, no reason you should pre-empt them.