rickmode

Indeed. The site seems geared to linking existing cofounders rather than matching new ones.

It won't make sense until you make a concerted effort to learn lisp. Dig into "The Little Schemer". It's enlightening. And fun.

I take the comment "don't expect your partner to be an expert in your career; rather, expect support".

The comment's wording sounds a bit like "put women in their place", but I suspect that isn't the intent.

As hyperlink: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1627390

Lying is endemic in corporate culture; success in corporations is not the same as being good at your job. Watch out for Snakes in suits.

I suggest creating or finding a work situation where the group isn't big enough for bosses, and thus corporate culture.

grogsearch.com is also available.

I'm with the other dissenters here. Groggle is an obvious play on Google. Get over it.

My head just exploded.

Perhaps Sun didn't respond to the vulnerability because Sun doesn't exist anymore.

Further, Apple specifically constrains multitasking to keep the user experience smooth and fun. Allowing free multitasking is a path to madness. Only a power-user would care or want it. And even though eventually a power-user would need to rebuild from scratch to remove bad apps. (Which of my 2000 apps is sucking CPU cycles now? Can't tell.. better reinstall from scratch.)

Patents and copyrights are artificial government grants making the intangible tangible. It's the artificialness that bothers me.

Our culture has come to think ideas are real like real estate. But they are not. They are intangible, and so is information. This feels an awful lot like the meme "ideas are cheap; execution is everything".

As all media become more like raw information--as the cost of transmission and storage of media falls--it will act more like ideas. All that will be left is the government grant to exclusive rights. Thus IP holders lobby governments for larger and larger hammers to beat down infringement.

And anyway, the point of limited IP terms is to allow derivative works for the greater good. I don't hear this greater good argument often enough.

The system is flawed. Perhaps short copyright terms as the article suggests are more workable as the information will be fresh. It may also be the only realistic solution when the time comes that infringement is effectively free (as in beer).

I have an excuse to stay up all night playing video games, watching TV and reading!

Heh... Pun not intended; just typing too fast.

What happened is the we finally hit "the dream" of building software out of large building blocks instead of having to reinvent screws and bolts for every project.

The lack of fun is, in my opinion, a side effect of using weak languages that force us to write boilerplate and ceremony along with using half-baked non-Turning complete XML languages (don't forget the "L" in "XML" stands for "language").

His example (around minute 12) doesn't sell static over dynamic typing for me. He asserts that using static types makes a program more provably correct but then he doesn't really back this up. In my experience a type system helps avoid mistakes in API calls and (more recently) with refactoring in IDEs. I've never seen an example where a type system makes a program more correct. I suspect we need just as much unit testing in a statically typed language as with a dynamically typed one.

Scala's type system tries to improve on Java's Generics, but in my opinion it makes things worse.

With Scala we end up with a part of the language where library writers use advanced things like covariance and contravariance, and a smaller part of the language for us mere mortals (a similar situation to C++ and Ruby). I'm preferring the Lisp style where the normal developer uses the same tools as a library writer (e.g., first class functions, closures and macros). And as far as implicit conversion, I agree with Dean's assessment that it can easily be too magical. It's necessary because everything is an object along with the static typing.

On the evolving Java front, I'd like to see JVM based languages move farther away from their Java underpinnings. Having interoperation is fine, but I'd like to only use it for third party libraries.

Finally, sounds like Dean is moving away from the everything is an object thinking similar to Rich Hickey. I find this sort of alternate very interesting as I explore functional programming after doing OO most of my career.

This sounds a heck of a lot like the drive by wire issues Toyota is having.

As technologist we should have a healthy distrust of any software. It's simply too complex to predict.

Is it corporation group-think that causes them to ignore this? Or hubris? I can't imagine they are that stupid.

Is this your bot? If so a second link to the Hacker News discuss page would be nice.

Thanks for the tips. I haven't checked out Postmodern. I'll check that out and try building up something with that stack.

Gold and silver used to have value because our currencies were based on it. This prevented governments from printing money to inflate themselves out of debt. That is, a government with a fiat currency can devalue their own currency to also devalue the real value of their debt -- debt which is conveniently denominated in their own currency.

Commodity based currencies prevented this sort of shenanigans because of the non-zero cost of adding to the money supply (the cost of mining gold and silver is much much greater than the cost of adding a few billion dollars to a government accounting ledger).

So it seems to me the value of gold is at least in part tied to the sense that governments will need some part of their money supply to be commodity based, and at least in part to the sense that fiat currencies will eventually fail.

Can someone clearly explain the positive argument for going off the gold standard?

Right on. And I can write a word processor in one mouse click. (OK maybe a double-click.)

"...that's not a bad salary."

That's entitlement thinking and it ignores economics. Salaries in software (and in most white collar jobs) are a negotiation. If all goes well the employer feels they are slightly overpaying and the employee feels slightly undervalued. If either side is happy then there's an inequity.

One is not entitled to specific salary, nor is one limited by a specific cap on salary.

The second point that there are non-monetary values to a job is well said though.

word! learning to program is far easier than learning to be smooth with the ladies...

Are they still running your code? I'd curious to know more of the history of Viaweb between 1999 and now. Is the architecture still the same (CLisp backed by files)?

I'm curious from a "how good is Lisp long term" angle.

The article is way too long.

For anyone that bothered to read the whole thing, did he make another point besides "let there be an easy mode and get over it"?

That bring up an excellent point: is there a strong correlation between high-PDI countries and cheap outsourcing? Even more un-PC: is there a correlation with low-PDI and high-GDP?

Exactly. Past a certain level of detail the brain flips from the conceptual to the specific.

More on the "uncanny valley": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

I love that Scala has more expressive power than Java. I did not love the esoteric bits of the language that seem to come from limitations imposed by being JVM based.

Scala definitely has more expressive power than Java, but I'm not convinced it's better than other functional languages.

I'm still searching for the optimal language for web app development.

OMG: It's the Internet, only wired.

("The IT Crowd" Series 3, Episode 5.)

I've used some of these services and I've yet grokked the point. They make me feel like a baby playing with a mobile: lots of loud noises and blinky lights. MyTown is the best at this.

So is that all there is to these things? Or are they just geek mobiles?

Initially we'll side-step that issue.

First we'll build the equivalent of an online mountable disk so it'll be a natural fit for online storage/backup and sharing.

Building applications on top of this storage layer such as photo sharing and syncing will be next.

As for how to compete, the magic sauce is openness on two fronts. Bandwidth and storage are commodities, and we want this storage tier to be a commodity marketplace as well. The storage providers will compete for end users while cooperating to store and serve up data. A user can switch providers and retain the same data in the system (cloud).

Along with an "open" system, most (if not all) of the software will be open source. We envision a small hub of centralized services (identity and such), a storage provider ring, and the end users.

So basically we'll beat the big guys by creating an open system with open software. Our company, then, will be taking a small slice of a big pie, rather than on these players head-on.

I'm working on an open platform for cloud storage. Imagine something like MobileMe, Microsoft Strata, or Carbonite, but without your data being trapped by a single vendor.

At the moment we are considering Celeste as the basis for this platform. http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/celeste/

I've got the partner (alexkravets), now we're looking for funding to mitigate the risk of having no day job.

We don't have a write-up online at the moment, but we firmly believe in the "ideas are cheap; execution is everything" philosophy, so we'll answer any questions.