chancho

I think ruang was referring to Kleinberger, who applied the idea directly to web pages, as opposed to scientific journals or economies. He did it only short while before Page and Brin, and they even cited him. As to why he didn't make a search engine, I'm guessing it's because CMU is in Pittsburgh.

Someone else (in some other similar thread that I've forgotten) pointed out the similarity to "the olden days" when everybody knew everybody else's business.

To which the reply was: Yeah, but you knew exactly _who_ knew your business. This new brand of everybody-knows-everybody's-business is entirely different because it's asymmetrical: everybody knows everything about me but I don't know shit about "them", who they are, where they are, how many of them there are, etc...

Aggressive Hindley-Milner inference is old but getting it to mesh well with the OO concepts that developed independently of it (subtyping/inheritance, run-time polymorphism, virtual functions, etc.) is seriously tricky and is an area of cutting-edge research. I'm not a type theory expert but my impression of the current state of things is that you can have aggressive HM inference (infers the type of everything and does so correctly) or OO language features but not both.* If you want both you have to settle for "best effort" inference where the compiler infers things when it can but sometimes needs the programmer's help. This flavor of inference is just now (within the last decade) making it into mainstream languages, cf. C#'s var, C++0x's auto/decltype, Scala, etc. And ooc's inference appears to work this way too (or at least it's going to.) So how is this not modern? What are the "modern" features that ooc language is missing?

* My limited understanding of Ocaml is that it supports both, but nobody uses the OO features of the language so I assume there's a reason for that.

That is almost exactly the Dust theme which is now default in ubuntu, with green icons instead of orange.

The gratuitous eye-candy of the XP/Vista look-and-feel was already cliché when it first debuted. Hopefully Ubuntu will leapfrog it. Note that the black "Dust" ubuntu theme seen here was created by a user, not by a designer at Canonical. Compiz is extremely customizable/themeable (unlike Windows or OS X) so it's likely another talented user will go further with the UI design.

So? A $2500 computer will be obsolete in a few years. A $1400 desk will (hopefully) last at least a decade.

How can you not capitalize a name like JERKER?

That's exactly what I was thinking of. Thanks.

(Of course, at >$3000 I'm not actually going to buy one. Just geek out over it.)

Wanted: midi keyboard controller with a 1-axis touch control surface on every key. I will be your first pre-order.

Curse the vending machine lobby. I want a perfectly square $50.

Starving startups of cash makes them easier to buy.

Yeah of course, but languages which compile to C also have (huge, IMO) drawbacks, especially with regards to debugging and profiling, things that have a profound effect on the end user experience.

I'm not trying to defend the restriction or anything. It's Jobs' right to pull this shit and its everyone else's right to move to Android. I just think it's less about innovation in tools and frameworks and more about keeping the platform isolated for business reasons. This is just an extension of the "no interpreters" rule, which more severely (IMO) hampers language and tool innovation.

So it's impossible to write an innovative tool or framework in C, Objective-C, C++ or Javascript?

Without some kind of encryption on the file being shared, what we be the basis for the assurance that the file is securely erased? A promise?

You are not subsidizing their ability to receive mail from you. You are paying for your ability to send mail to them. It's the same rationale as the universal service fund for phones. A network like the phone or mail network reaches it's full potential only when it connects everybody.

> Anybody who says they are good at C++ is either delusional or has spent years writing, linking, debugging it.

This strikes me as a completely reasonable and not deprecating thing to say about any powerful language (such as C) or any advanced tool in any profession for that matter.

It does compete with Java, as both are garbage collected. C, C++ and Fortran are in their own category because they don't have to deal with the indirection of boxed heap objects.

The mythical "sufficiently smart complier" can remove these indirections, but no current compiler can do it perfectly, as doing so requires generative the copious amounts of object code that C++ is so roundly criticized for (templates). GHC is pretty good at removing these indirections. I understand C# compilers are as well. I've not used Java much but isn't there some issue where you can't store primitive integers in a collection because they don't inherit from the base Object type and/or the JVM doesn't support unboxed objects?* This is the same kind of annoyance you have to deal with in Haskell to get fast-as-possible performance (i.e. using types which are not polymorphism-friendly thus decreasing code reuse and increasing verbosity) so in that way I think they are equal with regards to the performance/brevity trade-off.

* I'm sure this has probably been fixed in some recent version of Java but it's still illustrative of why garbage collection imposes a real performance impact that C and C++ just don't have to deal with.

Ah, I wasn't aware. (Shows what I know about this bill.)

While catastrophic insurance is a good deal for young unmarried people, part of me thinks it's not how health insurance is supposed to work. If you're not spreading the cost of caring for old/sick people among young/healthy people then what's the point?

The other part of me thinks it's just a handout to the insurance industry and people such as yourself shouldn't have to pay a dime for someone else's overpriced cholesterol drugs or 3D ultrasound.

$750/year is about the cost of so-called "catastrophic" insurance: high deductible, low monthly. Worthless for the kind of chronic ailments that old people suffer, invaluable for things like car accidents or leukemia. Only an idiot would rather pay the fine than buy this kind of insurance.

FWIW, he only gave 27 names, so it's safe to assume that the other 13 were names like Brooks, Sage and DeBenedictis (the overall winner.) Here is the list of finalists: http://apps.societyforscience.org/sts/69sts/finalists.asp

So not all gloom and doom for white America. Yeah the children of immigrants were over-represented with respect to their numbers here in the US, but if you step back and look at the global picture, then they are just about proportional. And I think its a good sign that the US is still an attractive place for the worlds intellectual elite to come and raise children.

Don't you mean Africa?

Except that sputnik was a proxy for a nuclear weapon. "Look what we can put up above your heads, and there's not a thing you can do about it." High-speed rail doesn't have the same overtones.

Also, connecting 1.5 billion to 700 million is a lot more lucrative than connecting, what, 150 million to 50 million? Nevermind the fact that there are existing high-speed networks to connect with in Europe and China. What a fucking bummer it would be to take a 6 hour train trip from NY to LA then a 6 hour bus from LA to SF.

Performance. Until someone rewrites the entire Haskell standard library to use unboxed primitives and that stream fusion voodoo then C++ sits alone at the intersection of performance, abstraction and usability.

Carrey's site broke my monitor (I was compelled to punch it.)

Yes exactly, he will be drafted into the Russian army because he will still be a Russian citizen. (Not sure what you're WTFing. Did you think he meant drafted into the US army?)

In the meantime before clang fully supports C++ I would appreciate a flag for GCC that just gives me abbreviated error info:

    file.cpp:65: error: please have a look at this line and see if anything jumps out at you.

as that is basically all GCC C++ errors are good for.

Not to pile on, but I think you really are missing the point. The point of the current deficit spending (taking out loans) is not to invest in something that will create wealth later, it's to prevent the destruction of wealth now. That's what he means when he says it's "counter-cyclical" spending. We're smoothing out this negative GDP bump now by borrowing from a future positive GDP bump. You spend now to prevent a depression. When you pay the loan back you break even at best, probably lose a little, but it's better than not doing anything at all.

If you don't agree with this kind of macroeconomic reaction then that's the argument you should be making. To disagree with these loans because they can't possibly turn a profit just misses the point.

'Probabilistic' doesn't have to mean 'nondeterministic'. Hash tables are deterministic and probabilistic. You could probably do the same with a skip list: hash the key to see what level of the skip list it gets promoted to.

It doesn't have to be a linked list though. There are other purely functional sequence data structures which support O(log n) insertion and deletion, e.g. Haskell's Data.Sequence, which is a finger tree of some sort. If you could find a way to do binary search on one of these in better than O(log^2 n) time you'd pretty much have your purely functional skip list.

local state, you will not like what concurrent threads do to it... For every nice argument there is a counter.