Hacker News Reader

ibsulonon WhiteHouse.gov Releases Open Source Code

Well, that's how Expect became public domain...

ibsulonon Starbucks: Numbers do lie. Sometimes pathologically so…

I don't know about that. For a while, at least, people raved about DD's coffee.

ibsulonon Women in tech - Stop talking, start coding

It's human 1.0, really.

ibsulonon The world's most popular goals

That's a saturated market too. :)

ibsulonon Why Top Colleges Squeeze You Dry

"Publish or perish."

The dirty secret of universities: the job of most faculty isn't to teach, it's to research and bring prestige to the university. In the sciences, research is a byproduct of bringing in money, so research grants are the most important part.

Thus, on top of those three classes (two at the university I live near) they're expected to put in full time work on their research.

From what I see, it's about a 60 hour average week in the social sciences. That dips to 35-40 in the summers.

ibsulonon We are like prisoners... We do not have a life, only work.

Factory workers here would revolt if you limited them to 45 hours. Many regularly work 60.

ibsulonon We are like prisoners... We do not have a life, only work.

These workers are taking it to the extreme: 12 months on, their kids have a shot at going to college rather than working in a factory.

ibsulonon An Android Side Project

I'm curious... how would you have developed a schema for S-Expressions without it ending up just as verbose? What do you lose? End tags?

http://www.agentsheets.com/lisp/XMLisp/ as an example of what XML in lisp would look like, and I can't say it's much of an improvement. Further, end tags make human debugging much easier.

ibsulonon The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect [1994]

Gur ceboyrz vfa'g cnenqvfr, gur ceboyrz vf gur ybff bs pbageby. Jura jr ybfr gur cbjre gb pubbfr bhe bja yvirf, naq rira jura gb raq gurz, vf vg ab ybatre cnenqvfr? Znal unir fhttrfgrq gur fnzr ceboyrz jvgu gur gurbergvpny urnira: ng jung cbvag qbrf rirelbar whfg trg oberq?

ibsulonon What if the greatest athlete alive decided to actually get serious?

How many times was Marion Jones tested? He had BALCO-type money that could help evade the current state of the art in testing.

ibsulonon What if the greatest athlete alive decided to actually get serious?

No, just Lance Armstrong. (Many allegations have followed him.) To be fair, he's accused of blood doping, not steroids.

Cycling seems to be governed by the phrase, "If you ain't cheating, you ain't trying."

ibsulonon Dan Grigsby (Mobile Orchard) abandoning iPhone development

Do you believe that Electronic Arts would use LUA if it produced an inferior result? Do you think it would harm their efficiency and portability if they weren't mystically "excepted" from the policy?

ibsulonon Dan Grigsby (Mobile Orchard) abandoning iPhone development

This assumes that a non-apple compiler will yield an inferior result. Unity3D is one example to the contrary. ActionScript may or may not be another, but efficiency is our secret sauce as developers. It is our inherent value.

ibsulonon Dan Grigsby (Mobile Orchard) abandoning iPhone development

If you need Lisp, Python, or Ruby to increase your productivity to cut corners on web development times, perhaps that means you're not charging enough for your services.

Java or bust! Level the playing field.

ibsulonon Node.js, YUI 3 & Dom Manipulation… Oh My

It makes more sense than it sounds.

Client-side: Punch tape goes in, results come out. The idea of a server doesn't make sense because there isn't enough power for time sharing.

Server-side: We have powerful enough computers to timeshare, but computers are too expensive to have less powerful ones for everyone.

Client-side: a computer for each person doing more elaborate things is cheaper than a mainframe. Bandwidth is expensive, so it doesn't make sense to deliver all but the most basic GUIs remotely. (How many people were using remote X applications across the world in 1989?)

Server-side. Maintaining application executables (upgrades on all machines, security rights, telecommuting and mobile computing) is more expensive than putting it all on a web server. However, interpreted languages are just a bit too slow to run on their own. (Java was a viable option, but applets never caught on for many reasons, one of which was that Sun didn't put the work in to make the GUIs pleasant to use.)

Now, we have client side computers and javascript interpreters powerful enough to develop client side utilities that can be dynamically loaded, giving developers the best of both worlds. The balance switched again in favor of client-side applications. I expect this to hold for a while, until bandwidth and centralized processing power overtakes individual client machines to make server-side applications more valuable again.

ibsulonon New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others

...until Apple changes its mind.

ibsulonon “There is no longer enough mail to sustain six days of delivery.”

It would be more expensive, not less. The post office currently operates as efficiently as it does because of the economies of scale, and as such is close to break even.

It's not like the free market doesn't compete. UPS and FedEx are still around, for example, just not on bulk mail and first class. It also connects with other postal services in other countries, and reciprocity agreements are governed by treaties, making a true free market solution incongruous with the rest of the world.

PS -- the post office is the second oldest institution in the US, and government-controlled postal services go back to (at least) Darius I in Persia. There's more precedent for a privatized military.

ibsulonon “There is no longer enough mail to sustain six days of delivery.”

The problem is that bulk mail subsidizes the rest of the system. Now, you might say, then the system is flawed and perhaps a private solution would be better!

The problem is that the post office exists mostly because most rural mail costs more to deliver than the price. It is in the government's interest to make sure that it can send and receive mail to and from all pieces of the country (for taxes, the census, and for general commerce for rural areas. )

As such, bulk mail is a subsidy.

ibsulonon Ask HN: Bootstrapping a Startup Alone

This is the kind of time where you build something larger than the minimal viable product. Something you may want to consider is building an open source project, then charging commercial support once you get a green card.

ibsulonon Resetting PHP6 (or: Unicode claims another victim)

For PHP at least, there is a license match issue.

ibsulonon Flip the stick

Obviously, some problems are harder than others. However, many of us come from backgrounds of some privilege. You have a computer and likely have the capacity to program. You speak English, the current language of commerce, and you likely live in a country where capital is available. You were born on at least first base.

That means you're in a position to gather the resources to make a difference in these problems, even if you can't start today.

ibsulonon Resetting PHP6 (or: Unicode claims another victim)

I just don't understand this.

A file is very very very simple to convert once. Tell your developers, "If you don't encode in UTF-16, you will have a performance penalty. Set your file encodings as UTF-16 too. You weren't doing complex internationalization work before, it's really not that big a deal."

I worked with someone who had been on the ICU project, and he argued that UTF-16 is the best compromise for most cases. If you're working primarily in the western character set, UTF-8 is attractive, but that comes at the expense of others.

And frankly, if you don't roll it yourself, what are you going to use other than ICU?

ibsulonon Where Tcl and Tk Went Wrong

What do the overlords say?

I learned Just Enough TCL for some Expect scripts, and anyone who is working on problems that need the features Redis has aren't going to sweat a little TCL, IMHO.

ibsulonon Startups Get Hit By Shrapnel In The Banking Bill

raises hand

Single people and Dual Income No Kids.

ibsulonon Pandora By The Numbers - hypebot

"During Pandora’s first year, the 90210 zip code was the area listening to Pandora the most"

This was because, to make sure that listeners were in the US, they required a zip code rather than geocoding IP.

(I was at his get together in Tucson - AMA, I guess. :)

ibsulonon Pandora By The Numbers - hypebot

Yes.

ibsulonon Unemployed, a grad student rethinks the world of work

It's much harder in the non-tech world, especially competing against people with specific skillsets. If you spent your time as an editor, nobody is going to look at you for a secretary when there are 50 resumes for secretaries staring you in the face.

Editor jobs dried up.

ibsulonon A Rosetta Stone for jQuery & YUI3

I was wondering what the business case was for the switch. I'm evaluating both for a project of mine right now. (I use GXT for another project, but that won't fly for this one.)

ibsulonon The hidden dangers of working in IT

You don't have to do continuing education work at that time?

ibsulonon Why I prefer French health care

http://progressive.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/article.php?article_... speaks of the place of privilege in Objectivism. If every child was guaranteed equal access to health care, food, shelter, good education, and health care, I would have less of an issue. However, as Objectivism stands, what we really see is a de-facto neo-feudalism.