msg

Tell HN: Please Stop Writing X

It's glassware.

Or, if you don't feel like internalizing a bunch of "responsibility" and watering yourself down, get ready to be misunderstood and torn to pieces. And get ready not to care about people who don't care to understand you.

I understand that having integrity (a public face no different than your private face) is better than being a hypocrite. But it's better to have real, strong opinions than to have milquetoast integrity.

The notation (C(x): x is a context) actually means "C(x) is shorthand for the following sentence: 'x is a context'". C is not undefined, it is the template "___ is a context".

I guess the way the brackets are used may not be standard and could be confusing.

It looks straight out of my college course on logic. The backwards E is the existential operator. C is a verb. The sentence means "a context exists".

Mine is today! I guess I am your fence post.

Why can't they just wait for the market to move forward? My G1 is almost 2 years old, meaning time for a subsidized upgrade. In a few months I'm going to have Flash on my phone for the same price I paid (about $200) for 1.6.

Google has said before that it is going to break out the user interface portions of the OS so they can be updated without a (carrier in the loop) OS upgrade. To me that says that OS level innovation is going to slow, and so will fragmentation. At that point the only thing stopping you from taking advantage of an Android feature will be horsepower.

You can also press the Delete key to cut short a search. I would prefer to hit space multiple times and get the same behavior.

I tried searching for wtf. It lengthens the term to wtfismygearscore, which appears to be some WoW tool. What I don't like about the tool is that it makes my searches too specific! It doesn't know when to quit and the completion is often longer than I want it to be.

Strange.

We are starting to call that thing a "screen" in my home, because we might hook it up to Nintendo, DVD, computer, cable, what have you.

I agree "box" may be a little overloaded but the context will usually make things clear. There is only one thing you can do with broadcast television: watch.

We also have "the tube" for broadcast television (a little dated because the tubes are disappearing), or "cable".

Maybe this is a regional thing though.

Whenever someone wonders in conversation who won the Battle of Trafalgar or how to get to Safeco Field by bus, I always say the same thing:

"That's the kind of question I ask the magic box."

For me this thing means knowledge. It's the oracle, the multitool, the utility belt, the mystic key.

I suggest we all call it "the box".

I have my own preferred color scheme, won't bore you. At bottom, it's GhostWhite on black.

I don't like tabs!

  ;; destroy all tabs
  (setq-default indent-tabs-mode nil)
  (defun untab-writable-non-makefiles-and-csv ()
   (if (and
        (not buffer-read-only)
        (not (loop for re in '("[Mm]akefile" "\\.mk" "\\.csv" "\\.txt")
                   if (string-match re buffer-file-name)
                   do (return t)
                   finally (return nil))))
       (untabify (point-min) (point-max))))
  (add-hook 'find-file-hook 'untab-writable-non-makefiles-and-csv)

Emacsclient is a real must.

  ;; use this to start server for emacsclient
  (if (not (boundp 'server-process))
     (server-start))

All my shells run inside of Emacs. So they're named, I get completions, and so on. That includes remote shells, using tramp and ssh-mode.

  ;; tramp mode...
  (setq load-path (cons "~/emacs/tramp" load-path))
  (require 'tramp)
  (setq tramp-default-method "ssh")

  ;; remote shell! Hooray!
  (require 'ssh)
  (add-hook 'ssh-mode-hook 'ssh-directory-tracking-mode)

Here's what I use for session.

  ;; back to emacswiki.org/emacs/DeskTop
  (setq *foo-desktop-dir* (expand-file-name "~/emacs/desktop"))
  (setq desktop-dir *foo-desktop-dir*)
  (setq desktop-path (list *foo-desktop-dir*))
  (desktop-save-mode 1) ;; Switch on desktop.el
  (setq *foo-desktop-file* (concatenate 'string desktop-dir
                                       "/" desktop-base-file-name))
  (setq *foo-desktop-lock* (concatenate 'string desktop-dir
                                       "/" desktop-base-lock-name))
  (defun desktop-in-use-p ()
   (and (file-exists-p *foo-desktop-file*) (file-exists-p *foo-desktop-lock*)))
  (defun autosave-desktop ()
   (if (desktop-in-use-p) (desktop-save-in-desktop-dir)))
  (add-hook 'auto-save-hook 'autosave-desktop)

It is the same paradox that comes with the power of special interests. Special interests are small. They have shared objectives. They pool their resources. They are following Napoleon's dictum:

"In a battle, as in a siege, the art consists in concentrating very heavy fire on a particular point. The line of battle once established, the one who has the ability to concentrate an unlooked-for mass of artillery suddenly and unexpectedly on one of these points is sure to carry the day."

In contrast, the people, on average, want nothing. They believe that their efforts will be undone by those opposed, or not alter the ponderous inertia of the status quo, or that factions or (no surprise) special interests will be able to absorb the vast majority of legislative attention and resources. So the average is apathy.

It's not thought all the way through, though. If a special interest can do it... so can you.

There is such a thing as getting more than you bargained for.

He should take this a step further and talk about BATNA. It explains a lot of other reasons why you might stay in a crappy job, such as that the job market is lousy right now. You can also say the job market is not "liquid" right now.

Many people are sitting in local maxima rather than risking their milk money trying to climb the ladder. The sculptor works at a bank and the banker works at an antique store because it's not time to follow your dreams just yet...

In IT, the best explanation is here:

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Up-or-Out-Solving-the-IT-Tur...

Eerie success is impressive. Routine failure is not anti-impressive.

People treat Google the same way every time some Labs experiment like Wave fails. They think it means Google's lost their Edge and spinning their wheels. It's equal-and-opposite pessimism to go with the optimism.

This is why I do not treat your counterexamples to Silver's accuracy as a convincing slate of proofs. I don't have enough context to judge those failures against the background of his success or vice versa.

I do find Nate Silver interesting not just for his psychic abilities. He also brings a certain love of statistics and visualization that deserves the level of coverage he gets. Is he doing any better predicting than some quant or world-class stat guy? No, and you can probably find someone who has a better combination of predictions and historical accidents. But he's also bringing the science to the populace, and that is worth praising and talking about.

I do find this 2005 (!) opinion piece by Krugman calling the housing bubble to be an interesting datapoint.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/08/opinion/08krugman.html

But between the Silver stuff and the Krugman stuff I do feel like I have enough context to judge that you have your own axe to grind.

For what it's worth, my assessment went down this year (suburban Western Washington state).

"honor among thieves"

also, "fair division": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_division

If you're used to web stuff, you can go pretty far by really learning HTML/CSS/Javascript in a deep way, then adding in an extension library like jQuery.

You can program cool, fun programs in the browser with Processing.js, a simple, cool graphics drawing language. Check out the exhibitions and learning stuff.

http://processingjs.org/

I think of those as more like programming styles. You can program C in a functional style (although the language is not your friend). You can write FORTRAN in any language.

I found personally that event-driven programming (signals, triggers, listeners) is different enough to be considered another style. Synchronization, causal sequences of events, and a clock, used for GUIs or workflows, requires a different sort of thinking than functional, procedural, or OO.

Howlers:

"Java and Android are both generally governed by a license called “GNU” which means, more or less, that you can use the tools freely to make software but that the things you develop with them are not necessarily themselves free. It’s the latter that concerns this case."

"Android’s Java is, despite being derived from the same language predecessor as Objective-C, easier to use."

They're called walled gardens. The real internet considers them damage and routes around them. Don't be concerned.

You probably can't get into the more important and interesting classes without taking or testing out of data structures and algorithms. I refer to, e.g., Programming Languages, Artificial Intelligence, Distributed Systems, Robotics, etc. Looking back, I would put Compilers in there too.

Make sure you know enough to get into the cool CS stuff. Don't assume that SW development gives you a CS background. One informs the other.

My impression was that the distinction between wireless and wired had less to do with cost and more to do with interference.

You obviously don't watch Oprah.

My wife does. Oprah's been skyping in and out of viewer homes for months.

:-)

I'm not sure if we're talking about the same terminal.

M-x term is a terminal emulator that acts like xterm and obscures all the great emacs stuff. I think that thing blows.

M-x shell is a fully-featured shell that also happens to be a normal buffer. When you cat binary data to it, it just displays binary data (as control characters, most often). I usually have to use quote (C-q) to, for instance, send a KILL to the running process (C-q C-c RET). On the bright side, if I change my mind, I just delete the C-c before I hit RET and type something else.

I'm not just talking about re-replace in history (although yes it has that, along with M-/ (for me, hippie-expand) to complete with arbitrary text from any open buffer in Emacs).

I am talking about manipulating the input/output by just editing junk in the buffer. For instance, I get 10000 lines of output and just clean it up or select a region, then run a ten-line function I wrote in elisp to do some calculation on the data, in the shell buffer, without copying it anywhere else or otherwise disrupting my flow. And I never have to touch my mouse to do it.

This is the real promise, that any useful integration you do for one part of Emacs applies to every part of it, without having to learn a new set of bindings or the weird indirections you get out of combining screen plus the terminal plus the command line sql interface plus... And there are many many useful libraries that have come out over the years.

Oh no you di'int.

Some of us just like to have infinite scrollback buffer, rectangle select, bookmarks, regular expression replace, in our remote shells. And all our other customizations.

Emacs isn't the be-all end-all tool (it doesn't run on the JVM for starters). But it is one interface to rule them all, and the interface is extensible at runtime. You can install a few packages and have a Java IDE running inside the interface. Or a version control system.

It's not that you have to... but you invested enough effort in making your interface powerful. You want to do more inside of it.

Very similar discussion a little while back:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1563021

That is right. Norvig doesn't see what Facebook is good at and ask how it will make money. He turns the question on its head, looks to a successful business model and asks how Facebook could be used for it. And it is an uphill battle for Facebook to monetize in this fashion.

I think what we've seen so far is that Facebook is about creating social spaces, not solving problems, so it really can't be used that effectively as a recommendation engine. Facebook doesn't have a great way to seek rent on these social spaces because they've built their user base on free service. So where is the money going to come from? Probably selling user data to corporations.

I agree. Until you can reliably sue a doctor in Sudan or Hong Kong for messing up your liposuction, it won't take off. Also (US), your insurance company will have to buy off on procedures from doctors they can't appropriately vet, which will probably put a premium on developed countries with higher licensing standards. And so on.

He talks about this specifically.

"JRuby also appears in Scripting Layer for Android (SL4A), formerly the Android Scripting Environment, of which more later."

"But maybe we’re barking up the wrong tree; both Python and Ruby are written in C and run well on Linux boxes, which is what Android devices are. In fact CPython has already been ported to Android as part of SL4A; I can’t imagine that Ruby would be that much harder. Also, I’m confident that they’d start up quickly and run acceptably fast."

"SL4A · Whatever the right answer is, some of the work done in what we used to call the Android Scripting Environment will surely go into it. They’re not trying to solve the same problem I am; they want to empower people to knock off little scripts right there on the phone; which is interesting, but I want to write big substantial Android apps using the nice tools on my computer with effortless built-in access to all those nice Android APIs. ¶

But they’ve cracked some very nontrivial porting nuts and figured out one instructive way to expose Android’s APIs to whatever programming language comes along."