Hacker News Reader

jobeirneon Gun – Distributed, embedded graph engine

I found the header image a bit disconcerting, and immediately hit Back (I'm at work).

jobeirneon Facebook may lose 80% of users by 2017, say Princeton researchers

I'll place a $100 bet against this claim. Any takers?

jobeirneon Keyhotee - Take back control of your digital life

Windows only -- really? It's 2013. If you're trying to get traction with a highly technical identity platform, windows probably shouldn't be your top pick.

jobeirneon Ghash.io very close to 51% of bitcoin pool

A counterfeiter sees far less benefit from the continuation of the USD than does someone who owns 51% of the BTC mining infrastructure.

jobeirneon Ghash.io very close to 51% of bitcoin pool

Thanks for the concrete counterexample. I still find it dubious that the owner of Bank A would be willing to destroy a stream of income as considerable as a 51% stake in BTC just to preempt a competitor in another market. That seems too self-sacrificial to be practical.

Also, you're missing the point that Bank B's successful adoption of BTC would also benefit Bank A's owner, since that adoption would be a boon for BTC, which Bank A owner has a very large stake in.

jobeirneon Ghash.io very close to 51% of bitcoin pool

Folks are missing an important point here about the incentives of a pool majority (that I recall Satoshi mentions in the original whitepaper[0]): even if a particular agent has a majority in the mining network, it isn't in their interest to upset trust in a system that they have such a large investment in.

Where would the sense be in taking the risk to undermine public trust in BTC for a short-term gain like modifying a few transactions when you have such a large stake in the system?

[0]: http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

jobeirneon The Anti-Human Consequences of Static Typing

> A static type system is a mechanism whereby an algorithm determines if a program exhibits a property, P, and if the property is not found to hold, then the program is rejected.

Doesn't this definition encompass dynamically typed languages as well? e.g. P is syntactic validity?

jobeirneon Why Lisp? 3 answers

"To an unusual degree, someone who codes in lisp is on nearly equal footing with the implementer."

Working with good developers => kinda cool.

Working with average developers => oh my god why.

jobeirneon BufferBox: We're Joining Google

The "Locations" page looks broken somehow: it's telling me that the nearest Bufferbox to NYC is in Toronto. Is that actually the case?

jobeirneon The Zen of Python (by example)

IMO, #3 was more about YAGNI[1], i.e. you probably won't need the speed, integrity constraints, relations, etc. delivered by SQL, so keep your data model flexible and lightweight until a shortage of those things is actually getting in your way.

I wouldn't be surprised if many people criticizing #3 had no practical experience with NoSQL and the benefits brought by its lack of baggage.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_aint_gonna_need_it

jobeirneon The freedom to drink coffee

I'd like to also recommend Hazlitt's book: it is an extremely well-written exploration of commonly-held (even today) economic fallacies. Hazlitt's display of circumspection alone is worth the read.

jobeirneon The freedom to drink coffee

And that principle differs irreconcilably in NAP and Kantianism, so using "deontology" here is not helpful.

jobeirneon The freedom to drink coffee

> This includes things like making controversial statements ("I find it endlessly amusing that communists or socialists would call themselves anarchists") without expanding on them

The phrase you cite is "endlessly amusing" because it is a contradiction in terms; communism/socialism is predicated on the presence of a government, and anarchism is predicated on the lack of one. If you need that explained, I'm not sure why you're participating in this thread.

jobeirneon The freedom to drink coffee

Calling the ethics as described above "deontological" is risky and ill-advised because that term is commonly used to describe Kantianism and a use of the categorical imperative[1]. These two (if taken seriously) rule out a marketplace because participants treat each other solely as a means to an end. Deontology, as it is commonly referred to, and the NAP are incompatible systems of ethics.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics#Kantianism

jobeirneon The freedom to drink coffee

I didn't read nirvana's comment as conflating your views and Libertarianism. Where is this happening?

jobeirneon James Dyson reinvented the vacuum. Now he wants to remake the economy

> But Mr. Dyson describes it as only one symptom of a larger problem: a Western world, especially the former branches of the British Empire such as Britain and Canada, that has lost its will to invent and make things.

Excuse me? Apple's pushing the limit of display technology by using layered pixels. Google has invented and is maintaining an index on the sum of the world's knowledge. Facebook and Twitter have invented contraptions that make information dispersal nearly frictionless. And this guy says the Western world has lost its will to invent and make things?

jobeirneon How Microsoft Pays Big Money To Smear Google In European Parliament

This guy doesn't know the definition of 'monopoly.' Neither MS nor Google qualifies: http://alpha.fdu.edu/~koppl/note19.htm

jobeirneon I have a bad feeling about this

Bingo; IBM and Microsoft aren't the ones holding the gun.

jobeirneon How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work

As goods are produced more efficiently, they become less expensive to purchase for the consumer. As efficiency increases, then, workers have to work less.

The amount that Americans have worked per week has dropped almost monotonically (http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/whaples.work.hours.us) since the mid eighteen-hundreds. The end goal is that we all don't have to work so much; maybe some of us not at all.

In short, an economy should pursue the most efficient strategy for manufacturing and delivering goods, and that happens (mostly) through the price system.

jobeirneon How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work

I agree with your sentiment, but job creation isn't the end goal. Prosperity is. Prosperity comes through automation, which is the exact opposite of job creation.

jobeirneon How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work

The untrained eye sees jobs being taken away from Americans. The economist sees value being passed on to American citizens in the form of a price reduction of Apple products, and healthy acknowledgement of the reality that the American workforce is no longer suited to produce computer hardware efficiently.

Jobs are not a sign of prosperity; we don't go to work just to go to work. If that were the case, we'd mandate that people must farm with spoons.

jobeirneon How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work

FTA: "However, what has vexed Mr. Obama as well as economists and policy makers is that Apple — and many of its high-technology peers — are not nearly as avid in creating American jobs as other famous companies were in their heydays."

Economists? Only economists who either don't understand basic principles like division of labor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_labour) and comparative advantage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage), or are willing to neglect them in return for being on some protectionist politician's payroll.

jobeirneon The next SOPA

There will always exist groups of people who want to abrogate the rights of the average person for the benefit of a select class. What makes people think this struggle is unique to the MPAA or the RIAA or even media on the internet?

It's time to think about how we can restructure our government to avoid this class of problems, not just the next SOPA. In the words of Eric S. Raymond,

"For freedom to flourish, the Internet must be kept free of government control. The Internet needs to be kept free of corporate control, too. But, as we have seen with the DMCA, corporations that want to control the net have to do so by buying bad laws from the government — they can't jail or kill you themselves. Thus, the most important front in the battle is still heading off bad laws and regulations."

jobeirneon Raspberry Pi: We’ve started manufacture

Why is attempting to limit international commerce "really, genuinely good"? Are you aware of comparative advantage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage)?

jobeirneon True Scala complexity

> however you lose strong typing

You lose static typing; strong typing is different: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_typing

jobeirneon JS 2 CoffeeScript Compiler

Does anyone else find CoffeeScript insufferably unreadable? Why take a basically nice-looking language like JavaScript and bathe it in special forms?

jobeirneon Coding backwards

Awesome! While I'm a little bummed that I no longer have a good excuse to implement this and brush up on my Django/JavaScript, this is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks.

jobeirneon Coding backwards

I acknowledge that what I'm doing is "about as top-down as you can get" in the article.

jobeirneon Why you should quit your technology job and get a Ph.D. in the humanities

To a young undergraduate, frustrated with the lack of rapid progress on tough philosophical questions, AI seemed like the great hope, the panacea—the escape from the frustrations of thinking.

Yeah, that'll go away in short order after taking a few AI classes.