alexandros

The project you mentioned in this thread sounds interesting. Maybe we can take this offline? You can email me at a dot marinos at surrey dot ac dot uk.

Just bits and pieces as parts of a current EU project, nothing coherent. We are still working out the pieces in theory, particularly 'community currency' and the programming paradigm. While it is our desire to focus our energy on finding out how much 'cloud computing' can be had without compromising local autonomy, the speed depends on how much support we can get, as we can only do so much in our free time.

There have been proposed alternatives, at least on the whiteboard level..

http://arxiv.org/abs/arxiv:0903.0694

Disclaimer: I am an author

Well, at least now they can pay the fine

At least it got recognised... Opera is just "that browser". I don't know if that's more insulting or not.

that's the one

I wonder if the person who accidentally lands on this page will dismiss the notification as just another 'you are the millionth user' scam... Wasn't there an XKCD comic about that?

I am not sure what you are disagreeing with here. If the result is people's machines not booting, surely something must have gone wrong, and it can't be a bloggers mistake. Unless you think that the thousands of smart geeks are intentionally crippling the machines (it's not a bug, it's a feature!)

Remember however,that the worst architectural decisions (coupling windows + IE?) have been taken for business purposes. Legacy and bad management can and does wipe out the benefits of legions of smart programmers.

Sometimes stuff gets buried.. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=402205

Language, like restrooms, embeds a number of assumptions about the culture that uses it, for the sake of efficiency. These assumptions are usually right. A while after they stop being right, they get phased out. Optimising for all use cases is not optimising at all.

Wave requires that the services integrate Wave to begin with. This is a very high barrier. Building a notification service that binds to the various APIS is much more feasible in the near-term, regardless of the fact that the human effort needed makes it problematic to scale to a very large number of services.

maybe the other 80% of the effort is experiments and learning so that it can deliver the 80% of the effect with 20% of the effort in your next project? Somehow it seems that if you always do the east 20%, you lose something.

Well in that sense, try to figure out what percentage of HN gets invalidated by the following 'news items':

"PG Still writes articles, nothing's changed"

"Big Companies still acquire Startups, nothings changed"

"VCs still fund startups, nothings changed

"Startups still want feedback for their apps, nothings changed"

Sometimes details matter.

Just a guess here, but maybe the author thinks that Kurt Gödel actually "...is widely regarded as the most important innovator in scientific and technical computing today."?

Then again, I don't even understand what the term 'technical computing' means.

This is so very true. I often hear developer friends rejecting every proposition that goes against their current plan with excuses such as 'I don't know how to do that', 'I don't think that's possible', etc. etc. While I appreciate the clarity of mind that this can provide and the fact that it can deliver from 'analysis paralysis' and seemingly infinite development routes, there has got to be an alternative...

Another reading of the same results: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1456

For one thing, who said liberty equals happiness? It may be that the animal born in captivity is happiest, knowing nothing of the world beyond its cage. That does not of course cause liberty to be pointless. Liberty may enable you to better provide for yourself and others around you, but it also stresses you by exposing you to the elements. The problem is with the persistent popular narrative that equalises the two, its falsity rendering observations paradoxical.

Wouldn't such a move require informing the parent? Besides, the article describes how the doctor went out of their way to praise the virtues of the medicine provided. If helping with a condition has the side-effect of spreading dangerous memes (yes, homeopathy can be dangerous if appropriate treatment is foregone in its favour) from the mouth of a respected expert, then that is one hell of a side-effect that the parent should be at least made aware of.

The way I read it, it has to do with whether you allow a demonstrated flaw in reasoning in one's area of expertise compromise your respect for that expert. A very interesting topic, to me at least.

Cross-tabulation is not about denormalization. If anything, it is about producing the reports you want while keeping your data normalized.

I sympathise with all the human emotion in the article but can't help being disappointed by the superficiality. Throughout the article I kept expecting a good analysis of the situation, of the systemic biases that led to this, and all I got was that it was the 'propaganda smokescreen of The Market' to blame. What does that even mean? I can see why everyone finds venting at the faceless Market as personified by the inhuman Bankers and Traders but nobody looks deeper to give any serious responses other than 'more regulation'. So, once we have established that people in position of power become inhuman guardians of their priviledge, our solution is to defer to other people in positions of power? Seriously? I think we can't afford to be this uncreative.

"This is not even about women, as I have seen both males and females on either side of the fence. This is about mutual respect - I don’t agree with you, but respect your feelings."

It's too bad the author doesn't take the women's rights approach, as that may be more easy to argue. The 'you offend me' or 'you hurt my feelings' card is extremely weak, especially in an opinionated, anti-conventional (or so it sees itself) community such as the ruby/rails crowd. In all honesty, if you refrain from this because 'someone may get offended', then where do you stop? Do you edit out all the cursing? there's lots of that in the Rails community. Do you speak only strictly in formal language? Present only in suits? I'm sure I can find people who think absence of any of these is problematic. But so what? There will always be someone who is offended.

And then comes the Buddhism analogy. Yes, I will take my shoes off when I enter the temple, because I am an outsider. But maybe a buddhist insider has the expreience, influence and respect to innovate in terms of Buddhist tradition, where I would be considered sacrilegious. To make things more difficult, 'proffesionalism' is derrived from 'professional'. It's simply a function of what most professionals do. That's why you don't call them 'professionalists', followers of 'professionalism'. I doubt the author can find a definition of professional that has anything to do with presentation style. Apparently, these ruby/rails/couchdb professionals make presentations like this. If that were unacceptable, then how would the professional presentation of someone from the Adult industry look like? Blured-out product images?

I'm not necessarily taking a stand on the topic itself, as I said, there may be better ways to argue. I am just noting an extremely weak argument on the part of the author.

Your position is dangerously close to solipsism. You allude to Occam's razor but it also answers your question. If the simplest algorithm does not imply limiting the amount of 'stuff' (universes), why would it limit the amount of observers?

This is not about ID vs. evolution. It is about whether the brain can be reduced to a purely physical system or if there is something nun-physical about it, i.e. a 'soul'. Clearly, building a functioning artificial brain by copying the physical characteristics of a human brain should settle this one. I'm not saying we are there now, but there is certainly progress.

The understatement of the applications by the scientists makes me suspect that (a) they are being politically wise keeping it on the down low or (b) that the article's claims are exaggerated. If (a) is the case though, the potential consequences just blow my mind.. I mean, Robin Hanson has been talking about emulated minds on chips for a while, but I didn't think we were so close to real results. What this would do to arguments about religion, bioethics, irreducibles will make for very interesting discussion.

What exactly is a distributed keystore? Google's 1st result on this is the linked article.

The question is a very good one. However the answer is unconvincing to me. By this reasoning, should someone make a jquery compiler that blocks the access to the original javascript language, and perhaps fills in any resulting holes in fuctionality, then jQuery would be a language. But how much would have really changed? And also, should then someone implement this new JQuery within a javascript environment, we would be talking about an embedded language within another language. but isn't that what we have now? I think to the extent that a library brings in new syntactic styles, it becomes more and more similar to a language.

As an aside, this got me thinking about compilers that can compile multiple languages in the same source file.. a kind of linguistic pick-n-choose... has anything been done along those lines?

...like all your friends do.

Maybe this is a way to provide more degrees of freedom to some of the more promissing 20% projects that don't make sense internally?

when they are sliced for specific dimensions, then, yes, the semantics should be a default property of the result. When sliced and diced for obfuscation, not so much. If they were indeed obfuscating purpusefully, then there is a fraud case in here. This however does not make the technique guilty by association.