wynand

Still holding out strong I see :).

Permit me to explain how I see this. You may disagree strongly with me but I hope to convey why your comment aroused so much passion.

I don't see Amit as considering himself to be more important than anyone else. I see a man who is trying to save his own life (with very little time to spare) and I have sympathy with his cause. I don't expect him to take this cause further when he is well, even though I know that many people in the world are suffering.

My position is very different from yours. I find it difficult to agree with the sentiment of your comment because I don't expect Amit to be looking out for anyone else but himself at this moment. In this case, I suspect that many others here have similar views.

Andrew, your comment is correct when literally interpreting dictionary definitions but misses the spirit of the situation.

If we take the current criticisms (of your comment) as being morally representative of the general population (probably a decent approximation) then most people would consider the dictionary definitions of ``shameless'' and ``modest'' to be incomplete and not applicable (at least not to someone that is possibly dying). That is one reason why you see so many upset comments here.

In the end, saving Amit's life is better than not saving it, all else being equal. Especially when the goal is so clearly defined and within reach.

Please avoid personal remarks.

It's alright to disagree strongly with someone else but mutual respect is one of the attributes that keeps HN an open and interesting discussion forum.

I found it neither confusing nor hypocritical. My take-away is that with an educated work-force and working market, a city can improve its productivity by allowing density to increase. Cities that don't do this - typically cities with well-heeled citizens who don't want their backyards ruined - will see their competitive advantages eroded.

I have respect for people that can deliver, regardless of what they use. The allure of cool tech is strong but tech doesn't make products: people do.

I cannot see what is wrong with your using plain PHP if you can get the job done faster (as long as you avoid things that make exploits easy, such as raw mysql db functions). When the time for a framework comes, you'll know.

Stop worrying about what others think and good luck!

codedivine has a point and it's even admitted in this posting: "we expect the initial performance to be abysmally bad (maybe 10x slower); however, with successive improvements to the locking mechanism, to the global program transformation inserting the locks, to the garbage collector (GC), and to the Just-in-Time (JIT) compiler, we believe that it should be possible to get a roughly reasonable performance (up to maybe 2x slower)."

It will likely be difficult to beat expertly written code using explicit locks. But most people aren't experts in concurrency and will either get it wrong or have slow implementations. And if transactional memory catches on, we may even see some hardware assistance in future CPUs.

(S)TM is definitely worth exploring more and even a 2x slower implementation (as envisioned by the PyPy team) could cover most concurrency needs, which will make it a success in most people's eyes.

I'm using the Scipy superpack (http://stronginference.com/scipy-superpack/) on Lion and Matplotlib has given me no trouble so far.

As a counterpoint, I have heard complaints about the Chinese political regime from a number of Chinese students here in the Netherlands.

Yes, I have also run into those who see no problem with (or even approve of) the censorship.

But there are more than enough dissidents.

EDIT: changed "oppression" to "Chinese political regime" as it more truthfully reflects my experience with Chinese students.

I don't fully understand. Is your app written in AppleScript?

My Emacs history only goes back 5 years.

A number of days ago, I downloaded Textmate and started playing with it. In the beginning I almost wanted to just delete it and go back to Emacs. But as time went on, its simplicity became increasingly pleasant; so last night, I purchased a license.

To me, it's good to know that innovation in text editing is not over. I don't think that Textmate is the last word by any means but it is a beautiful tool and I'm curious to see how Chocolat stacks up.

The tabloid presses seem to have blunted Occam's razor. I have used AirBnB in the past and have come to realize that a lot of renters lose enthusiasm in time and simply don't respond - sometimes they respond half-apologetically after a week or two. Also, given that it's summertime, I wouldn't be surprised if a number of New Yorkers are on holiday (and perhaps ignoring their e-mails).

I am pissed with AirBnB for how they've handled the recent events but speculating like this is just kicking them when they're down.

I have some pretty strong feelings about IP (I oppose software patents and I think copyright terms are too long) but I suspect that IP will become more sophisticated and pervasive. Robin Hansson has a post about what he calls "IP+" (http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/07/ip-like-barbed-wire.ht...). I don't like the future he paints but it is better than today's setup.

A large (and growing) part of the world's population will want some kind of guarantee that they'll be compensated for their time and they'll be pushing for some kind of IP. Whether or not this will be better or worse for society, only data can tell us. But regardless of that, people want to optimize for what they think is best for themselves and their offspring and will vote on the basis of that.

You're right - DNA methylation is inherited (see epigenetics). So DNA alone does not give you enough information.

Right, but we have to limit ourselves to the upper segments of the smart phone market. If we include the cheapo Androids when talking about smart phones then Apple's relative market share may very well drop in the coming years (unless they come up with a lower-end iPhone but even a low-end iPhone would probably not exactly be low-end).

But I agree that they cannot afford to lose ground to HTC, Motorola, LG and Samsung's high-end phones.

I remember I had difficulty contributing to Kickstart since I'm in the Netherlands.

Is there someone here that can set up a Paypal account for this gal? I'd happily donate a few $.

New Mac user here (I've had mine for less than 12 hours now). Caveats upfront: I'm a long-time Ubuntu user and I'm a programmer, so I'm not exactly a parental-class user.

The most confusing thing for me was to get my Mac onto our university WPA2 enterprise network. It is actually impossible to configure Mac OS 10.7 for this (at least via a GUI). After an hour, I realized I could use the .mobileconfig file for the iPad/iPhone (on our network) to set up a profile for my Mac and then things went smoothly. This was annoying to be sure and I'm not sure what benefit derives from this removed functionality (since 10.6 can do this).

But other than that, I've had a blast of a day. Everything else has been fairly discoverable and I figured out the gestures very quickly. In contrast to some of the complaints, I like the reversed scrolling and I like the way that Mission Control works.

I'm certain that if I were to give this machine to my parents, they would be fine. Perhaps I would disable Mission Control but otherwise I cannot foresee stumbling blocks.

If I had to give a name to this approach, I'd call it "adversarial debugging".

It's an excellent technique for software improvement, as it somewhat mirrors an evolutionary game. You have your prey (your software) and a predator (the chaos-like monkeys). When the predator is successful, you improve your prey until the predator is under control (with non-chaos monkeys). Then you improve your predator (chaos-like monkeys). This cycle of prey/predator improvement can be repeated as long as needed.

As saurik points out, this has the potential to lead to cascading failures. But this is true of any complex system that has multiple levels of self-repair - repair systems in biological systems can also work against the host organism.

I'd love to see commonly used software hardened in this way - Apache for example. Imagine a contest where the aim is to find creative ways to bring down sandboxed Apache servers (executed on the machine of the contest participant). You (the contestant) come up with an Apache killer and submit it to the contest website and get points based on how much damage your code can do. This gives the Apache developers an idea of where to harden Apache.

The obvious danger with such a system is that it's a treasure trove of DOS attacks against existing Apache installations. But the argument in favor is that some black-hats might already have similar code anyway and they won't be publishing their code. Also, the code is a good test harness that can be used to verify that major architectural changes (such as what would be needed to integrate Google's SPDY into Apache) don't make Apache vulnerable to previous attacks. And of course, other similar software (Nginx et al.) can also benefit from some of these test cases.

There is a relationship between exercise and weight but not nearly as big as people like to believe. You're right that diet has a much bigger impact.

I had to dig out this paper the other day because someone that I was talking to did not want to believe that weight is mainly tied to one's diet:

http://www.nature.com/?file=%2Fijo%2Fjournal%2Fv21%2Fn10%2Fa...

I'm not sure if this is behind a paywall (my uni has access to everything on Nature's site), so here is the salient bit:

RESULTS: Primarily, subjects aged 40 y have been studied (39.5±0.4 y, mean±s.e.m.) who are only moderately obese (92.7±0.9 kg, 33.2±0.5 body mass index (BMI), 33.4±0.7% body fat); for short durations (15.6±0.6 weeks). Exercise studies were of a shorter duration, used younger subjects who weighed less, had lower BMI and percentage body fat values, than diet or diet plus exercise studies. Despite these differences, weight lost through diet, exercise and diet plus exercise was 10.7±0.5, 2.9±0.4* and 11.0±0.6 kg, respectively.

I don't know enough about economics to give a qualified answer but let me try. All currencies are vulnerable to feedback loops but governments can do things like change the interest rate to encourage/discourage spending. I don't understand how this would be possible with Bitcoin.

I overlooked the Bitcoin limit - price inflation will certainly be limited through this mechanism. But I wonder if this might not cause prices to drop at a constant rate (since Bitcoins are so divisible) - this would include labor costs (although how wage stickiness would hold up to this remains to be seen).

I read some criticisms of Bitcoin (including those from a previous HN post about Bitcoin) and one of the biggest criticisms from an economics perspective (if I understand correctly) is that the Bitcoin network is at the mercy of positive or negative feedback loops (hyper inflation or deflation).

All current currencies are controlled by central bodies that can dampen the effects of these feedback loops.

Does anyone with an economics background have an idea of how the Bitcoin network could be adapted to counteract these feedback loops? For example, perhaps the network should make the transfer of small amounts very liquid whilst the transfer of larger amounts becomes progressively more "viscous".

I hope an American lawyer can answer this (or at least someone with a good knowledge of the US legal system).

What can an individual (even one outside of the US) do to effect change in the software patent landscape? Who needs to made aware of the problems in the patent system? How can these people be reached? What will it take to get them to introduce changes that reduce the number of these lawsuits?

Is there anyone running a website dedicated to 1) cataloguing obvious ideas to act as prior art, 2) collecting cases for use in lawsuits involving software patents, 3) systematizing steps for how individuals can make a change?

I'll hazard a possibly bad answer.

MVC is not inherently OO - it's more about sending messages which, although a feature of modern OO (Alan Kay even said that he should have called OO Message-Oriented programming), is not its defining feature (as we see it used today).

Since the Model, the View and the Controller are just continually processing and sending messages, you could easily implement them as processes (say as in Erlang). A processes's state is then retained in immutable structures passed to recursive invocations of its main message loop (sorry if this sounds opaque - I'd recommend seeing how it's done in Erlang).

Another GUI approach to FP that is being researched is functional reactive programming. There is a neat Javascript implementation called FlapJax. You could probably argue that FRP is a generalization of MVC (though I'll hedge my statement since I'm not 100% sure of this).

http://www.webupd8.org/2010/11/alternative-to-200-lines-kern... is also about this story and how to set up this scheme in Ubuntu and one commenter mentioned that he used a similar approach in Suse.

Perhaps but I think it depends on who's writing it.

I love Python and haven't touched Java in years but my colleagues who use Java seem to write programs that are maybe around 3 times longer (this is a ballpark figure).

I get the feeling that programmers that produce gobs of Java code are probably going to do the same thing in Python. A good Fortran programmer can write Fortran in any language :).

I remember some months (maybe more than a year ago) when there was a story about a Doom-style engine in Javascript and someone commented how sad it was that with all this powerful technology, we're getting excited about 1990s style graphics in web browsers.

I had sympathy for that but it now seems to me like web technologies are improving at such a rate that we'll hit near-native performance in a few years (of course, technologies like Google's NaCl can do that now but it would be quite something to see technologies like WebGL and Javascript close the performance gap).

Not in my case. My HTC Desire was untouched by Vodafone in the Netherlands but still required rooting with unrevoked.

It also doesn't help that until recently, the Dutch freight trains weren't well coordinated with the commuter trains, sometimes leading to unnecessary delays.

Standardization seems like the easiest first step to pull off. For a given route, a train should always stop at the same platforms, be the same length at a given point in the day (that is, morning trains might be longer to deal with more traffic, but then they should always be equally long) and should stop so as to align its doors with painted cues on the platform.

I cannot understand why Microsoft keeps on trying to play catch-up with Google and Apple. They have a tough fight ahead if that is to remain their approach (even with all of their resources).

There are a few brights spots for them - Kinect looks amazing - but their obsession with doing everything that Apple and Google are doing may hurt them in the long run.

(I am not concerned whether MS succeeds or not - I haven't used an MS product in years - but I am astounded that a company filled with so many clever and creative folk is loath to innovate on its own terms.)

Why do you think it's more likely that employees are in the wrong?

The asymmetry of the relationship makes it more likely for the employee to be get the short end of the stick. It's not inspiration and respect that get passed down the corporate ladder (in most companies). Many employees don't speak up for fear of repercussions (they are at the mercy of their managers, after all).

I'm a long time Python programmer and I am currently using it for scientific programming (for my PhD).

I've shopped around a lot for alternatives to Python and looked at Ocaml, F#, Boo, Clojure, Common Lisp, Haskell and Scala.

There are a couple of things still keeping me with Python:

* The REPL, especially IPython,

* Numpy & Scipy,

* Networkx & igraph,

* jpype for fairly seamless JVM integration (this way, I can interact with Cytoscape), rpy for fairly seamless R integration,

* ZODB,

* IPython's parallel processing framework.

The .net environment probably comes the closest to providing everything here, but the REPLs need a lot of work and the graph libraries have more complicated interfaces which make them a pain to use on the command line.

Python is not without its warts but when I recently had to spend time with Matlab again after a few years, I was reminded of just how nice the Python ecosystem is in comparison.

Update: I should add that if you rely on one of Matlab's toolboxes, you might not find any decent alternatives outside of Matlab. You can always use a bridge like MLabWrap to access Matlab from Python.