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Well, once you're off, the benefits start to pile up quickly. Food tastes better, you don't cough up strangely colored things early in the morning, your lungs don't burn, etc. It's still an incredibly difficult addiction to quit, much moreso than I expected before I started smoking. When not smoking, I do tend to miss all of the benefits, especially the extra time to think, but I've in the past replaced it with taking brief walks to get some coffee or tea.

When I am reading HN, it's almost always during time outside the office in the smoking area, or in front of my house, smoking a cigarette, like now.

I would certainly agree that nicotine is profoundly addictive, and the cigarette as a delivery system equally so. It reduces anxiety (especially useful to smooth the effects of caffeine), acts as an apetite suppressant (long nights hacking can be interrupted by a five-minute smoke break rather than a thirty-minute food break), and is a mild stimulant. One issue here, though, is that as you become addicted, most of the anxiety you calm with cigarettes is caused by withdrawal symptoms or even fear of withdrawal symptoms, like headaches, hand tremors, dizziness, blurred vision, all very unpleasant. The pavlovian response is pretty strong: inhaling cigarette smoke gets you the effects within seconds. In the case of withdrawal symptoms, you have this discomfort, and it is relieved almost instantly after you inhale. People with anxiety disorders or depression have a strong tendency to self-medicate with nicotine.

Psychologically, it's nice to have something to do with your hands while standing around outside waiting. Like time in the shower, sometimes I have my best ideas outside smoking, thinking about nothing in particular. And an excuse to get up from the computer and go out for a little while is great, too. There are social benefits as well, if you live in a neighborhood or work at a company where there are people coming and going, happy to converse outside.

So the addiction goes fairly deep, and is often not understood by non-smokers. The fact that you see, in almost any major metropolitan environment, homeless people smoking is a pretty good indicator. Personally, there are times when I have opted to smoke rather than eat or sleep, and it is confounding but there's a deep urge anyway, as if my body were telling me that I "needed" to smoke, in the same way that it tells me I need to eat or sleep.

I've made a number of attempts to quit, and have found the nicotine patches to be the most useful method. (I have a couple of boxes of them at home, waiting for Monday to roll around.)

Then you go back and read the source so you can try to run through the calculation backwards in your head to estimate, relative to the surrounding comments' timestamps, what the score might be based on its position?

It is always odd to me that Mac users tend to always call non-Mac computers "PCs", as if all PCs were basically the same, and as if Macs weren't personal computers.

It looks that way, which is pretty sad. I'm typing this on my beloved N900, which I found far more usable and open than Android (which I kicked when it wouldn't stop screaming "CLOUD! CLOUD!" at me, and Eric Schmidt kept coming into my house at night to smell my hair).

Seriously, though, there are only two real competitors, Apple and Google, in the smartphone market, which is unfortunate for everyone. Windows phones have been floundering, WebOS seems to have lost traction, and Blackberries are...Blackberry who? I hope we're not entering the Dark Ages of Mobile Phones.

I've been doing Ruby for a long time, and back when the mailing list's signal to noise ratio was better, I used to read it daily, so I've been reading Zed's flames for a while. ("The Chainsaw Logger Infanticide Maneuver" was a pretty great one; I still show it and the resulting thread to people.)

I can say with a fair amount of confidence that Zed's fully aware of this effect, and is doing what he does intentionally. He has informative content, but also knows how to push precisely the right buttons. It's often entertaining, but the abasive style is also a brilliant and effective form of self-promotion. (Think Donald Trump or Rush Limbaugh.) He knows precisely what buttons to push to get a reaction, and (as far as I can tell) enjoys himself immensely. It's great to watch if you like to see flames written to people that take themselves too seriously.

So I don't think you're telling him anything new here. If you sit down at a table and don't know who the sucker is...

There certainly are a few (at least) pain points with Facebook, even for "normal" users. Spam, for one. Something that makes it a little more accessible could take off, but a competing browser may not solve the pain points.

Plain-text formats have always been slower for things that are not plain text. But even 30 years ago, when computers were even slower, Unix designers decided plain text was still the way to go, because it was easier to debug and easier for humans to work with. No specialized tools required, no poring over hex dumps. HTML won over other document formats. JSON and XML won over other binary formats. Any coder can look at JSON and see what is being transferred, without the aid of anything but a text editor. Plain-text marshalling formats for binary data (e.g., base64) are still useful for pasting data into an email or adding ssh keys to authorized_keys with "cat >>".

This is perhaps a long way of saying that I don't expect that having tool support makes SPDY any nicer.

Right:

1) Create unfortunate speed hack so browser written by you is faster with servers written by you.

2) Declare it a spec without other existing implementations.

3) ????

4) PROFIT

There's also AbsoLUAtion for Lighttpd. Lua's a very nice, convenient language for embedding dynamic/user-configurable bits in otherwise static applications. PowerDNS and nmap use it, too. It seems to have displaced Tcl as the de facto language for embedding.

I really like this language. The core libraries have sensibly named functions, getting it to generate or talk to C is trivial, and it's simple to get a GUI or a small script or something going. It has good bindings to SDL, which makes it easy to do some game programming. The REPL has a great online help facility, and interactive reflection is simple, so there's little head-scratching. I used it years back, when my main exposure to Lisp had been CL, and it was refreshingly convenient.

The only problems I have with it are the minor one of the OO syntax (minor as I never made much use of the OO features) and the somewhat more major issue of the dynamic scoping (no closures). It was a deal-breaker for me but was pretty educational, as I had not quite understood dynamic versus lexical scoping at the time.

Except those issues, it's a great Lisp, especially if you need one that plays nicely with the OS and is easy to learn. (And it is pretty speedy to boot, even respectably speedy interpreted.)

(Edited, removed a bit where I repeated myself.)

LUSH is still fairly active. It moves a little slowly, but this is good since it's stable and a lot more mature than Clojure. The authors are still using it for real projects, so it's likely to stay around.

You may have it backwards: Chuck Moore doesn't compute. He tells electrons where to go, and they take orders. Inside every computer built by Chuck Moore, there is only another computer built by Chuck Moore. Chuck Moore once built a zero-instruction chip that always produced the correct answer. According to a doctor that wished to remain anonymous, Chuck Moore has only two internal organs: a whiskey processing unit, and a NAND gate. Chuck Moore once traveled back in time just to convince Alan Turing that his computer didn't need any I/O devices besides a tape reader.

SCNR

Speaking as just one guy, "log in with $service" is a bigger pain than "Sign up and log in". Sometimes I don't have $service, or I have it but don't like using it, or I have it but I don't want whatever new random thing I'm trying out to have hooks into it. (Anyone else seen in their Twitter feed a bunch of app noise followed by an apology?)

I dropped GMail about a year and a half ago. If any services I was using required it to log in, I would have had to drop them, too. I think it's mostly because I know a lot of programmers, but I do know a large number of Facebook "conscientious objectors" (myself included) who can't log in to things that require Facebook.

It's really nice to have services like this self-contained (as long as it makes sense; Twitpic, for example, would be less useful if it had no hooks into Twitter). I can pick the service up and if I don't like it, put it back down. And if I drop some account elsewhere or just change accounts, nothing depends on me having it to log in.

I agree, for reasons that have made me sad since the late 90s, when cookie-cutter FPSs arrived on the scene, clinging to the coattails of iD et al, soon to be followed by cookie-cutter MMOs, and finally, the miniature Dark Ages of the industry: sequels, sequels, sequels, and in-game advertising. Quirky, unique games and games that are very difficult just don't sell as well. I think it was in GameFan (RIP) that I read the quote that summed it up: "The hard-core are never catered to."

Game companies started to broaden their reach, to expand their demographic. The same is happening with Facebook. I watched my mother play game after game of Bejeweled. Facebook's reach is huge, well beyond the demographic usually thought of as gamers, that 18-35 male collective cash cow. I'm not on Facebook, but my mother is, my aunt is, the sort of person that kinda likes clicking cows. Zynga's games are close to their tolerance: easy, always there, not too deep. The gaming equivalent of a Will Smith summer blockbuster, the type that upsets the people that really love movies. A McDonald's burger, a Mariah Carey song, Marlboro Lights, Windows XP, Zynga: the suburbs of their industry. It may not be loved by critics, but damned if you can't make more money selling to a broader demographic than to a smaller group of devoted genre fans.

So, on a much larger scale, we're seeing the games market broaden and develop, the same way that we saw it happen 10 or 15 years ago. There's hope for the future: you can still get rich making an iPhone/Android $2 game or a Minecraft, so we still have some sort of vibrance, sparks flying from the souls of the passionate and creative. But the way things are, there's more money in Farmville. I've stopped being angsty and dropped my elitism: you can't fight basic laws of commerce or Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everything is crap").

I value my time, so I don't play social games (unless you count GitHub), but the customers have indeed decided what they want, or at least what they'll pay for.

...Where's my copy of Ninja Gaiden? I still haven't beaten it in two decades.

Most of them do tend to be cleaner.

But anyone remember the report a couple of decades back about water usage after the US Navy started letting women on ships? Having ladies around made the guys shower more often. Empirically, I can verify that, since getting married, I do tend to shave more often.

The site specifies their plan for this. Did you read it before commenting that they don't have a plan?

The site outlined what has been wrong with their recent development practices and says what they intend to do to fix it.

Astonishingly few people commenting seemed to have read the whole thing. The reason it will (supposedly/hopefully) be different next time is that management overhead, bureaucracy, and outsourcing are killing their software development. If they actually can cut through the red tape, then I don't see it as very far-fetched to say that they can come back as a mobile software shop. I've got a Maemo device (using it now; very capable, except the keyboard's a little cramped), and prefer it by a wide margin to my employer-issued iPhone or the Android device that I returned after getting this phone.

If I were a Nokia shareholder, I'd be voting for these guys for certain. Windows has consistently been unimpressive, and MeeGo feels a lot like a platform that has a lot of cool potential but is unpolished and has gotten too little love from its progenitor.

I didn't say that; I said that it's hard to attach attributes to them since they're not a coherent organization, but a number of people claiming the same name.

Some of them are. The Guy Fawkes masks are sort of a good way of describing them: a bunch of completely unrelated people assuming the same identity for a time. Likewise, the "Anonymous" you hear of is usually the "Anonymous" that pulls this sort of stunt and then publicizes it. There are a number of people hanging out on /b/ doing nothing but humorous (depending on your sense of humor) image manipulation, also calling themselves Anonymous, and people trolling LiveJournal doing the same. They've all got a different character, but if they all use the same name, it makes them difficult to attach attributes to.

They get to be anonymous by all assuming the same name, "Anonymous"; it's tricky to talk about them as a unified group because it's a group of groups, all with the same name. "This Anonymous" versus "that Anonymous" is hard to talk about. (It's a disclosed exploit in language.)

I think you've just described at least two startups I've worked for.

I agree, although most CL and Scheme implementations seem to be stuck in the Lisp box, from which escape is painful. Racket (PLT Scheme), Chicken Scheme, and Lush do a pretty good job of providing good access to the OS, but SBCL and CLisp (neither of which I've poked at in years, so there may be some magic library by now) always felt like they wished they were the OS and pretended there was no Unix, owing to the time when CL was standardized and this was sort of still true.

Smalltalk implementations are pretty similar in this respect, although both language families are still pretty fun. Erlang and Inferno/Limbo are both sort of guilty of this, but for slightly different reasons. But it's pretty inconvenient around the borders, getting into and ot of the "real" OS. It's sort of a mixed blessing that nowadays, most developer OSs are (on some level) Unix: there's a baseline, a set of facilities that can be expected to be present and to behave a certain way, so most modern Lisp-like languages are pretty friendly to the OS (or at least provide an FFI to C). The downside is that the baseline is POSIX, a little stiff sometimes and often quirky for historical reasons. (Still waiting for Plan 9 to catch on...Maybe I should stop holding my breath.)

Surprised no one has mentioned MonaOS. It's a small, Scheme-based, x86 OS. It's got a lot of parts written in C and assembly and is occasionally buggy, but is fun. It is largely a one-man show, but it's already fairly functional. There are images at http://monaos.org/ and the github repo is at https://github.com/higepon/mona .

It's not a scientific metric; I did preface this by saying that "bloat" is a subjective term. But LOC of the codebase is a pretty good rule-of-thumb metric; I'm not pretending any more credibility than that. It's not hard evidence, but it is an indicator (and I chose the word carefully) that the codebase may be trying to do more than it ought to. It is an indicator in the same way that fatigue and a rash around your joints are indicators that you have strep throat, but the evidence would be the presence of some strain of streptococcus in your blood. There's no line of code that one can point to and say "Hey, that conclusively proves bloat."

There ought to be asterisks before the dots in those two find commands, which have instead turned into italics. My apologies.

Well, bloat is somewhat subjective, so "evidence" is hard to come by. I don't know about the other poster's reasons, but I agree, so here are mine. That xulrunner/FF/thunderbird/etc. are built from the same tree is the first indicator. Then there are the multitude of build options, a few pages' worth. The output of these two commands is somewhat telling:

~/src/mozilla-1.9.2$ find -name \.c -o -name \.cpp -o -name \.h -o -name \.idl -o -name \.js -o -name \.xml | grep -v /tests/ | wc -l 11740 ~/src/mozilla-1.9.2$ find -name \.c -o -name \.cpp -o -name \.h -o -name \.idl -o -name \.js -o -name \.xml | grep -v /tests/ | xargs cat | wc -l 4386362

(Painful to construct command lines like that on a phone, and that is a somewhat old version of the tree, but unless FF4 is significantly smaller than 4m lines and doesn't require building xulrunner and FF, the point stands.) The large number of dependencies is another indicator.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that FF is still my "workhorse" browser, and I like it a lot, despite the flaws and the bloat. (I've been using Arora for a long time, but it has some stability issues still. I like Luakit, which is small and hackable, but it's kind of a niche browser. I'm not at all a fan of Chrome.)

I installed this stuff recently, after playing with Inferno for a while. I couldn't get Plan 9 to boot on real hardware or in qemu until a couple of years ago, but once I got up and running, the documentation was a little less than satisfactory (there are man pages and research papers, but not many "getting started with X" or "how to do Y"; maybe I've been spoiled by Linux, where howto's have been prolific for 15 years).

acme is really cool, even moreso now that there is Linux kernel support for 9P2000, so you can mount acme's filesystem and write programs in any language that does I/O to do arbitrary things to windows and text. rc is also the nicest shell I've ever used.

Plan 9 has always been a research OS (although I wonder if, had it been opened up at the right time instead of staying at Bell Labs, we might all be using it now). But the ideas in it are gradually making their way to the rest of us, which is what I'm really excited about. Things like the aforementioned 9P2000 support in Linux, libixp, wmii's use of 9P for scripting, and even Inferno are pretty nice. (Can you imagine if all of those horrid, monolithic GTK/Qt /Cocoa apps were as scriptable as acme is? Even the ones that give you a scriping language pale in comparison.)

Although I don't really use Plan 9, having the ports around has been great for showing to people what I get so excited about (although that's just a fraction), and the 9fans mailing list is possibly the best one I'm subscribed to. You hear more on that list about interesting software architecture and UI design than I thought possible. It's a great place to lurk.

Depends on what "cut" means. It's been lower than projected, but still is higher than the previous year. The education budget, for example, is constitutionally prohibited from cuts; in fact, it's required to grow. The most recently decried "cut" that the teachers' union staged a strike over was really just their budget's growth being slower lower than they hoped.

If you have numbers on actual spending, year over year, then I'd love to be proven wrong on this, but I've not seen cuts anywhere in the sense of spending decreasing every year for four years.

No, it's a great plan. What California really needs is more taxes. (Please forget that Gov. Davis was recalled just a few years ago for raising vehicle registration taxes.) Not just that, but web retailers have it easy, and encoding ever-shifting tax laws for various localities from which orders might be placed is not onerous at all. (Remember, kids, some states apply sales tax to juice, and some only apply it if sugar is added!)

This totally won't harm business, and is easy to implement.

[To non-residents of our state: California's legislature is pretty disfuntional, and frequently gridlocked over even simple issues. For example, our budget is often months late, tax returns came back as IOUs one year, and the huge chunk of funding appropriated to build prisons due to severe overcrowding that has had us in trouble with the federal government for years hasn't resulted in one new prison.

So don't worry too much over every idea that floats through our Assembly. We're a somewhat pathological case.]

It's funny you should mention being married, because that's why I don't have a Facebook account.

I signed up for MySpace because a girl elected to give me her MySpace username instead of her phone number. I haven't logged in since before meeting my wife, and never got a Facebook account because I haven't yet needed one.

It seems to me to be the difference between spending time and wasting it. All I've heard about the site is photo sharing, discussing parties, people being shocked at the drop-down other people clicked for their relationship status, and games that used to be pointless (like that silly game about buying your friends or the vampire game) but have recently become manipulative and borderline malicious (Zynga). It consumes time without providing value. I have enough useless stuff competing for my time against valuable stuff.

So far, the only actually useful social site I've used is GitHub, which is more about adding a social component to doing things. I do enjoy Twitter (which is pretty tolerable and not too demanding if you keep your "following" count low enough), where I read jokes my friends make and occasionally find an interesting link or two. I had high hopes for LinkedIn, but it mostly gets me recruiter spam. ("Do you want to add me as a connection so we can network?", "Do you want to do VB.NET?", "Do you want to move to San Francisco?", "Do you want to take a pay cut and work overtime because our atmosphere is so darned quirky and fun?", and my favorite so far, "Do you want to work for Zynga?"...Nope, none of those.)