Hacker News Reader

chbartson Woman Gives Her Autistic 9-Year-Old Marijuana

> For comparison cocaine is a schedule II drug because dentists use it.

That would explain all the kleenexes.

chbartson Woman Gives Her Autistic 9-Year-Old Marijuana

> will adopt medical marijuana

Or, you know, stuff like Marinol, which is apparently as effective without the harmful effects of smoking. Hell, even the DEA likes Marinol: http://www.justice.gov/dea/ongoing/marinol.html

I'm fully in favor of legalization. I don't think it should be predicated on bogus reasons.

chbartson When to use Excel, when to use R?

> Think of it as a DSL

I can't let this stand as a blanket defense of crappy languages. We have Lua. We have Python. We have Scheme. We have multiple other languages that can be used as a good way to access the goodies provided by your wonderful hand-crafted libraries regardless of what they do. There is no reason for you to invent your own language just so people will be able to use your library code from a REPL.

Sadly, back in the dark ages, this was not true. However, in the future, anyone who tries to defend the horrible design of a new language with "Think of it as a DSL" gets to debug a 1000 KLOC application written in ANS COBOL 1968, which is a DSL for fixed-field database munging.

chbartson When to use Excel, when to use R?

CS people might be put off by the fact R is really a pretty lousy language if you've seen any other language (like, for example, Python). It's obvious that it wasn't a programmer who designed the language R uses.

This blog posts points out a list of specific gripes about the language: http://tjic.com/?p=10739 There is some real weirdness to this language.

The R Programming Language for Programmers: http://www.johndcook.com/R_language_for_programmers.html does a lot to ameliorate this, but the fact the weirdness is there at all makes a programmer a little uneasy.

chbartson Video Games Can Never Be Art

Is architecture art? Look at it this way: It is fundamentally constrained by not only the laws of physics, but building codes and the prosaic demands of those who have to live there. (Well, Frank Lloyd Wright could probably claim to have shaken off those constraints, but he's off to one side.)

It is different from sculpture in that the artist does not have a free hand, much like the video game creators don't have a free hand compared to novelists or even cinematographers (who are limited compare to novelists and painters but not as much). Limitations are the bane of choice, and choice is the fundamental aspect of art.

chbartson App Store Bans Pulitzer-Winning Satirist. For Satire

> I was not a pornographer

How certain are you of this? Would you be able to successfully defend every photograph or email you have ever produced against obscenity charges? I think, if it came down to it, the courts could find a hell of a lot of inadvertent pornographers out there.

Note I said 'could': Selective enforcement of over-broad laws is a boon and a horrible threat, because it implies everyone is guilty of something, so the government could pound anyone who bothers them if it chose to.

chbartson App Store Bans Pulitzer-Winning Satirist. For Satire

> There'd be no way to keep pornographic or sexual content constrained to a .xxx domain even if regulations were implemented to try to make it so.

But how much harm could they do in trying? That is the question you should ask. Look up Anthony Comstock if you want an example.

chbartson Htop - better top

tcgrep is good, too.

chbartson Bill Gates Bans iTunes From Windows

Hm. I thought a thought experiment required some thought on the part of the person proposing it.

chbartson Vimium - the hacker's browser

> What about Conkeror?

Never heard of it.

chbartson Bill Gates Bans iTunes From Windows

Also, Windows doesn't have an App Store. How would Gates ban anything from the Windows platform?

chbartson DiBona: Google will hire two Android coders to work with kernel.org

But isn't Linux already on mobile and embedded platforms? What makes the Android so special in this regard?

chbartson Vimium - the hacker's browser

Emacs users already have emacs-w3m, but it would be nice to have something better.

http://emacs-w3m.namazu.org/

chbartson The story BCG offered me $16,000 not to tell

> The reason for mentioning the $16k in the title isn't to say "look how much money I turned down" but to say "look how much money they offered me for this".

Right. It's to emphasize the fact that not only were they morally corrupt and doing horrible things, they were incompetent to the extent they though they could shut him up with a measly 16 grand.

If he gets a book deal out of this he'll be laughing pretty damn hard at a bribe attempt that, really, isn't even a house payment.

chbartson GCC 4.5.0 is out

If I knew where to buy an alot, I'd give them one.

chbartson GCC 4.5.0 is out

It should have been that way from the beginning. This 'cascade of error messages' style is pretty damn bad.

Also, the compiler must quit on the first error: Continuing with the known-bad state is not only asking for trouble, it's inviting it in and setting up the guest room for it to stay a month.

We aren't on mainframes anymore. Getting an error message means you go back to the editor immediately, not in a week when your next time slot comes around.

chbartson Is Lisp just too hard?

Interesting that those things are missing from C as well, but nobody seems to mention that...

(Common Lisp has mature FFI and wrappers around things like DBI and graphics libraries. Clojure gives you the JVM libraries for your sins, and I dare you to seriously argue that the JVM has no libraries to its name.)

chbartson Cuil responds to critisism of Cpedia

> Blas, for those of you not from the West of Ireland, is the polish a hurley gets from the sliothar when used by a player of unusual skill, a patina on the surface of the wood testifying to the depth of talent of the player that had used the stick.

Now, how about explaining this for those poor benighted souls who speak English?

chbartson Cuil responds to critisism of Cpedia

> It may be somewhat funny now, but someday we'll say this was ahead of its time.

Things are usually only 'ahead of their time' if you ignore a lot of the implementation and operational details. For example, Vannevar Bush's famous Memex, always cited as the important precursor to hypertext, was flatly unworkable: A desk-sized machine built around microfilm? It makes as much sense to talk about Jules Verne as the father of manned spaceflight because he thought of firing men from cannons.

My point is that being the first to an idea is rarely the important thing. Being first to a good, solid implementation is what counts.

chbartson [dead]

Read this message board thread. It lays it all out:

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=...

This post is the standout:

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=1147211&#...

chbartson Apple: .net apps are kicked off iPhone OS 4 too.

> However, I also think Apple is doing the right thing by banning "meta-platforms" from the App store.

But didn't Apple also ban writing apps in, say, Haskell and all other non-C-family languages that compile to machine code? Writing in a language like that is no more a "meta-platform" than Objective-C itself is.

chbartson The Counter-Plagiarism Handbook

This article seems to make the claim that rewriting the work of others is somehow not plagiarism. Interesting.

chbartson Betraying Salinger

> Yes, but a self-obsessed jerk who created truly great work.

That is certainly a popular notion. Funny how other good authors are also prolific authors.

chbartson Minister thinks IP address is an "Intellectual Property address"

Fifteen years does not guarantee competence, just like being CEO or CTO does not. Besides, if he were successful in business, why would he be in government? Warren Buffet has never held a cabinet position, to my knowledge.

chbartson Minister thinks IP address is an "Intellectual Property address"

Do you think policy-makers should have knowledge about the things they make policy regarding?

chbartson Steve Jobs’ response on Section 3.3.1

> So apparently native look 'n feel isn't all that for some people in their choice of applications.

Heresy in Mac-land. This is contrary to just about everything the Mac GUI has historically tried to support/enforce.

chbartson Cuil relaunches as 'cpedia.' The results are not pretty.

> Their robots.txt is password protected now. (?)

It lets you in regardless of the username/password combination. I just logged in with this:

username: you morons

password: this defeats the whole damn purpose

I wonder if any of this gets logged at their end.

chbartson Cuil relaunches as 'cpedia.' The results are not pretty.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-up_technique

http://cpedia.com/search?q=william+s+burroughs

Had they positioned this as an art project applying the cut-up technique to the Web as a whole, it would be seen as a real success.

cpedia itself speaks:

"Along with JG Ballard, Angela Carter and Anna Kavan, William S. Burroughs has probably done more to influence my writing, my reading, and my appreciation of literature than any other writer."

(No attribution in article. I like to think of this as the software's own appreciation showing through.)

chbartson How 5 Guys Burgers and Fries Got Started and Their Practices

Don't forget the free peanuts. They're different enough to serve as a hook to make sure people remember the business.

chbartson US Exports: "The Cloud"?

My point is that people might be subject to a rude shock when they realize their data produced by and for their business processes is subject to the laws of a foreign country.