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slashcomon Which programming language do you want to learn next?

Please post results.

slashcomon 100 Naked Citizens: 100 Leaked Body Scans

These weren't nearly as high resolution as I expected. I'm surprised they're even useful.

I guess that's encouraging in one aspect.

slashcomon How Candy and Halloween Became Best Friends

I'd like sources. This article, while believable and fascinating, provided no evidence of its claims.

(Which is about what it aimed to accomplish.)

slashcomon Show HN: Elect.io, my side-project that provides objective candidate information

That's quite clever. I'm impressed at how you can composite fairly objective views from special interest groups.

As mentioned by others, you seem to have a (lack of) data issue. Perhaps you could also work with public voting records (http://www.votesmart.org/) to help mitigate that.

slashcomon Let's just say it: 3D TV is a joke.

"As a medium, 3D remains remarkably self-trivializing. Virtually nobody who works with it can resist thrusting stuff at the camera, just to make clear to viewers that they’re experiencing the miracle of the third dimension."

Reminds me of a film class a took. The professor explained how when prerecorded sound was first introduced into film, the movies ended up people just talking to each other. It took some time for them to get over the novelty of the technology and use it artfully.

But I agree. 3D is way over-marketed and overhyped.

slashcomon Ask HN: Best web text editor?

I vote ssh + (vim|emacs) for most of those situations.

slashcomon College students spend less and less time studying, leisure time on the rise

An extended version of the same paper: http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~babcock/College_time_use_NBER.pdf

While it doesn't have all the information you'd like to see, it does contain a much greater amount of detail and raw statistical information, broken down much further.

slashcomon 'They say Chinese is difficult - European languages are more difficult'

It's kind of like saying there are english words as long as antidisestablishmentarianism.

slashcomon And, Why Didn't Dijkstra Like Lisp?

Dijkstra had some fairly strong opinions on a lot of things in CS.

slashcomon Why functional programming doesn't catch on

SQL is a declarative language, not a functional one. Writing SQL is telling the DB what you want, not how to do it.

slashcomon Poll: Allow override of noprocrast?

Yes. I want noprocrast on while I'm in lab or doing homework, but I want to be able to override when I'm done.

slashcomon A C# REPL in Clojure

http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/...

According to that thread, it's a good 2-8x slower. :(

slashcomon Python: Bitwise NOT and List

You can just use x[-1] to do the exact same thing. ~0 = -1 though, hence the reason x[~0] has kind of a nice feel to it.

slashcomon Ask YC: Thinking of joining a startup - is this a red-flag?

Start working if you're satisfied with the salary alone, but assume you have 0% equity until you've something on paper. If you really want equity, then it needs to be negotiated now.

"It's all bullshit until it fits on a paycheck."

slashcomon You Be The VC -- Your Idea + Our Support = Your Company

No, it's very confusing. The problem is that they use "you" while pitching to two different people.

slashcomon Ask News.YC: What are you doing this saturday night?

I went to a local rock show.

slashcomon Man, weather.com really sucks. I bet I could make a better one in a day.

I love it. The app is designed like a perfect iphone app, but when rendered on the iphone, the huge orange text caused it to render everything small. Other than that, it's perfect; easy to use, immediate information that I want!

slashcomon Ask YC: Is distributing your source code a stupid idea?

A lot of companies have to deal with this. vBulletin and Red Hat both immediately come to mind. I don't see how it would set you back. You know all the people you give the source code to, so you know who to go to about leaks. And most clients won't care about the source code anyway. What's most important is that you be clear about the terms under which your code is released.

Probably should consult a copyright lawyer.

slashcomon Ask news.YC: what are you listening to right now?

Broken Social Scene - You Forgot it in People

slashcomon How would you motivate people to learn on their own as an alternative to going to university?

What I would like to see is more of the Socrates style teaching. I think that's a lot like the kind of pleasant, interesting learning that you're talking about.

I guess my question is this: if you say you're only going to teach voluntary, interest-based things, how do you make things interesting? How do you make math interesting to a kid who doesn't care if he knows how to add? How do you make history interesting to a kid who thinks it's awful?

There's a lot of value to a well-rounded education. If you don't "force" kids to explore a variety of areas, they'll have a tendency to become focused and centered on the one thing that really gets them off. That's great, unless they start blowing off other subjects and whatnot. It's the reason most universities require a variety of general education classes for all freshman.

So I think we have to "force" everyone to study different topics, not just the ones that intrinsically interest them. The key here is "forcing" the kids to like the material. How do we do this?

Well, I don't have a great answer to that. The only thing I can point to is that one great teacher we've all had (or I hope you've had). That one teacher who was able to just turn you on completely. But it was the teacher that was special, not the material, not the procedure, not the tests, not the class.

My favorite example is Mrs. Sams, my calculus teacher. When we got to the fundamental theorem of integral calculus, we held a mock wedding between the derivative and the integral.

slashcomon How would you motivate people to learn on their own as an alternative to going to university?

I disagree.

"Education and religion are two things not regulated by supply and demand. The less of either the people have, the less they want." -- Charlotte Observer, 1897

There is very much a reason that it is the law that children must go to school until 16: we want to enforce a certain amount of education on them, otherwise they'll think they never need it.

The difference between me and my sister is a nice anecdote. I love to learn; I read books out the wazoo, etc. My sister, on the other hand, hates it. For the longest time, my parents had to watch her do her homework, or she wouldn't do it.

The thing that eventually got my sister to do her homework by herself? Getting it through her teenage head that if she reliably does her homework, my parents won't be on her case every 5 seconds. She's now learning, not because of intrinsic love of it, but because of extrinsic reward: independence from my parents.

slashcomon Puzzle: 100 Prisoners and a Light Bulb

I just realized I used "one" instead of "on". :-P

Some statistics from my little python simulation:

n: 1000 (I ran my simulation 1000 times)

Mean: 10425.721 days

Stddev: 1005.34467779 days

Min: 7506 days

Q1: 9711 days

Median: 10391 days

Q3: 11074 days

Max: 14090 days

Note: can someone tell me how to do single linebreaks in the comments?

slashcomon Puzzle: 100 Prisoners and a Light Bulb

The prisoners elect a counter. His count is initially 0, but increases to 1 the first time he walks into the room. Whenever he visits the lightbulb he will do the following:

1) If the lightbulb is off, leave the room.

2) If the lightbulb is one, turn it off and increment his count.

Every other prisoner follows the following rules:

1) If the lightbulb is on, do not touch it.

2) If the lightbulb is off and you have not flipped it on before, flip it on.

3) If the lightbulb is off but you have previously flipped it on, then do not touch it.

When the counter reaches 100, he may tell the guard that everyone has visited.

slashcomon Ask Hacker News: What is the most undervalued web technology? (2me RSS)

I'd say there are really only two reasons that have stopped widespread adoption of PNG:

1. The file sizes can be rather large (less of a problem these days)

2. IE6 improperly displays PNG alpha (This is big one).

Even the "IE7" javascript hack (http://dean.edwards.name/IE7/) didn't really catch on.

slashcomon Running Hunchentoot behind Apache

Why wouldn't this be particularly slow? You're running a potentially inefficient web server with a proxy webserver in front of it. Doing this with Python's built in webserver (as seen in Django and such) with Apache proxying is very inefficient and performs poorly compared to Apache with mod_python or cgi. Even replacing Apache with something LigHTTPd only marginally makes things faster, since the bottleneck is Python's webserver.

I don't understand why this wouldn't also occur with Hutchentoot. I would think a CGI interface, or a mod_lisp written much like mod_python or mod_php, would be significantly faster.

So, all that said, is Hutchentoot a bottleneck?

slashcomon Hackers' screen shots

Girl Talk: excellent choice of hacking music.

slashcomon Ask YC: Is it a bad idea to...?

I'd say there's nothing wrong with this. I work for a small company that solicits specifically to one specific kind of organization. Our entire business model is based on targeting and sales, not open registration or enterprise solutions. The company was started around 2000, so it's worked well for almost 7 years now.

slashcomon It is an interesting concept but why are efficient houses ugly as sin?

This is cool timing. I go to NCSU, and just last night we had a paneled discussion with Charlie Rose about sustainability in the future; one of the men on the board was Thom Mayne, a noted architect who's doing work on sustainable buildings (though mostly office buildings).

One of his key themes from the talk was about how it used to be that design (making buildings artsy) and efficiency (in an energy sense) used to be kind of divided in the architecture world, particularly when he was a student. He said that there has been a major paradigm shift and a merge in the two philosophies.

For examples, check out the Phare Tower that he's working on. The entire tower is optimized for using natural light and airflow, rather than artificial light and air conditioning.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phare_Tower

He had some other awesome examples, but I don't know where to find them.