Hacker News Reader

bfrson Dell Announces A Linux Laptop Designed For Developers

Don't you get too much strain on your left pinky if you remap CapsLock to Ctrl?

I shifted to:

CapsLock -> Enter

Keys next to spacebar -> Ctrl

This feels a whole lot better. As Xah Lee [1] points out, the original symbolics keyboard that Stallman developed emacs on, had Ctrl keys next to the space bar.

[1] http://xahlee.org/emacs/emacs_kb_shortcuts_pain.html

bfrson What motivates people to work on opensource development?

Some background on this post.

It is a discussion on the AGI (artificial general intelligence) or OpenCog mail list regarding the use of virtual credits. One of the late comers to the project (Yan King Yin) feels that given the effort that needs to be put in for AGI development, some sort of compensation beyond bragging rights, would motivate him better. He proposes the adoption of virtual credits, and the OpenCog project leader, Ben Goertzel gives his reasons why it might be a bad idea.

For anyone who has wondered what motivates people working on opensource software development, this discussion provides some interesting insights.

bfrson Artificial Intelligence Could Be on Brink of Passing Turing Test

I read it. Thanks for taking the time to reply.

bfrson Artificial Intelligence Could Be on Brink of Passing Turing Test

If siri 5.0 or Cyc 1000000.0 passes the Turing test, it will be the same story all over again...the goal posts will be moved one more time. People will say that passing the Turing test is not really a mark of true intelligence, its just an imitation!

bfrson Artificial Intelligence Could Be on Brink of Passing Turing Test

I'm somewhat skeptical if AI can be built by extrapolating the Cyc project. At best we'll get a sophisticated QA bot. I feel that vision is central to human cognition, and the Cyc project seems to be all about relationships of words to words, without any relations to vision stuff, images and video.

bfrson Where is the casual programming?

matlab has a lot of these features, and so did genera for lisp machines. Proprietary development stacks win when it comes to solid documentation.

bfrson Richard Stallman: How I do my Computing

I guess it has more to it than time management. For time management, I think its way easier to use emacs org-mode to make a queue of websites to browse and get to them later.

bfrson Richard Stallman: How I do my Computing

I guess understanding the full implications of this is what Lisp Enlightenment is. http://xkcd.com/224/

bfrson Richard Stallman: How I do my Computing

A more convenient approach might be to remote desktop at random to a pool of machines that aren't his and that other people also use, the way he uses Google search.

By the way, isn't this what TOR is for?

bfrson Richard Stallman: How I do my Computing

I skimmed documentation of Python after people told me it was fundametally similar to Lisp. My conclusion is that that is not so. When you start Lisp, it does `read', `eval', and `print', all of which are missing in Python.

Lisp experts, what does this mean? As far as I can tell, Python has pretty good REPL facilities.

bfrson Richard Stallman: How I do my Computing

Can someone help me understand what the purpose of this is:

I have several free web browsers on my laptop, but I generally do not look at web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites operated for or by the GNU Project, FSF or me. I fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me.

bfrson Stallman: "Facebook is an international parasitism project."

I don't mind going to Mark's camp, but its huge size sometimes frightens me. What if a black swan event happens to it? Say a stupid virus penetrates and wipes it out? A more distributed social network, like the failed Diaspora project, might be less vulnerable to such an attack.

stupid in this sense: http://www.searchlores.org/realicra/basiclawsofhumanstupidit...

bfrson Learn to read a binary font by reading a story

dime going as "TKAOEUPL" reminds me of this: http://i.imgur.com/EFzu9.png

bfrson Learn to read a binary font by reading a story

50 years or so? Kurzweil would have another heart attack if he read this ;)

bfrson The problem with having great ideas

another tl; dr:

Edison: Innovation is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

bfrson The myth of the lone genius

I couldn't get past the backwards bending royal ass kissing.

bfrson Skills Kids Should Learn

So, your advice to kids is:

1. Sit down and shut up!

2. Be a conformist.

3. Keep your head down.

4. Listen to strangers, not parents.

5. Every one is out to get you.

Wow, how original!!!

bfrson Wikipedia on Twinkie: PR win

I remember reading a couple of years back on wikipedia that it would be hard to find a snack more dangerous than a twinkie. But today its almost completely in favor, with the "Health Aspects" section reduced to a single line. Nice work by the Hostess Brand PR guys. Wikipedia seems less and less trustworthy.

bfrson Ask HN: Why did you start programming?

How far has that project come?

bfrson The programming assembly-line

"...How many times can you build a cookie-cutter CRUD app with a web frontend that fetches and displays data from a SQL backend before you feel like all you are doing is cranking a lever?...

...Think of those who have implemented language compilers and runtimes, database engines, search engines, operating system kernels and the like. Unfortunately, such projects come along rarely, and the bar for contribution is extremely high..."

That in a nutshell expresses the dilemma of most software developers.

bfrson Wat

Your comment made me laugh a lot! Thanks.

bfrson A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages

I don't know why, but this had me laughing uncontrollably:

1983 - Bjarne Stroustrup bolts everything he's ever heard of onto C to create C++.

bfrson Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator

Ability to fold comment threads.

bfrson I want to fix programming

Relevant stuff from SICP [1]:

"The contrast between [a mathematical] function and [a computing] procedure is a reﬂection of the general distinction between describing properties of things and describing how to do things, or, as it is sometimes referred to, the distinction between declarative knowledge and imperative knowledge. In mathematics we are usually concerned with declarative (what is) descriptions, whereas in computer science we are usually concerned with imperative (how to) descriptions.

...an important current area in programming-language design is the exploration of so-called very high-level languages, in which one actually programs in terms of declarative statements. The idea is to make interpreters sophisticated enough so that, given “what is” knowledge speciﬁed by the programmer, they can generate “how to” knowledge automatically. This cannot be done in general, but there are important areas where progress has been made."

[1] http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-10.html...

bfrson We are sorry to inform you

http://www.freetochoose.tv/

bfrson This photograph is free

That is some refreshingly clear thinking.

If I remember right, Jaron Lanier's "You are not a Gadget" [1] makes similar points.

[1] http://www.jaronlanier.com/gadgetwebresources.html

bfrson This Photograph Is Not Free

This rant is very similar to Harlan Ellison's "Pay the Writer" rant (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj5IV23g-fE).

bfrson Affordable Housing: Chinese Version

Ok I misspoke, it should be "libertarian (barely) acceptable way".

bfrson Affordable Housing: Chinese Version

I wonder if the Chinese approach to affordable housing, government building huge apartment complexes, will fare any better than the U.S. approach of underwriting housing loans, instead of building houses directly, i.e., a kind of housing voucher system. Vouchers are supposed to be the most hands off, libertarian way for government to get involved with anything, and even that blew up big time.

All I'm sure of is that whenever big government steps in, SNAFU and FUBAR are not far away.

bfrson K-Means Clustering and Art

Does anyone know how k-means ranks as an image segmentation technique? How does it compare to say watershed, meanshift, globalPb, etc.?