11ren

I have a corollary to Greenspun's Tenth Law, which is that:

  Lisp programmers see everything in terms of as an ad hoc,
  informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Lisp,
  and don't see other benefits it might have.
  That is, Greenspun's Tenth Law is true - for Lisp programmers.

I came to this conclusion because of a tragic pair of research papers, which had a fantastic usability idea. The second half of the first paper took the focus off the usability, and developed it into a very simple functional language. In their next paper, they dropped the fantastic usability idea completely, and made it into a lisp. :-(

Some XML standards fell into a similar trap, by wanting languages that process XML to be themselves written in XML - such as XSLT. It's a nice abstract concept to be able to process yourself... but at the price of abominations like "i < 10".

Adam Bosworth pointed out that XML's XPath resisted this - by making XPath itself an embedded non-XML mini-language. Imagine an XML representation of path components - now that would be verbose!

In a politically expedient move, I'd like to point out that pg didn't fall into this trap: he made the DSL for users of Viaweb to customize their store to not be lisp (though an easily mapped subset, if I understand correctly.) It's a non-lisp mini-language.

Great link from the article, about "principle of least power", for mini-languages: http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Principles.html#PLP Constraints are very empowering, because you know what to expect.

Regarding XML: I'd always thought it was just one of many possible syntaxes for representing hierarchical data; and it really didn't matter which syntax you used. As in a lingua franca (or any standard), provided that it is barely adequate, the key thing is that everyone agrees on it. XML became the Chosen, de facto standard, because everyone was already familiar with HTML, propelled by the mass adoption of the web. So the question becomes: why did we get HTML (based on SGML), instead of S-expressions? The article gives reasons, but I guess the short of it is that if a group of people work towards a specific purpose for years, and are successful at it (as SGML was), it is probably a good base to start from if you want to do something similar, i.e. describe documents.

Also, more directly, if I imagine a large webpage described with S-expressions, I think HTML is a bit clearer.

Nitpick: The article omits that quotes (or apostrophes) must be escaped in XML attributes.

Very telling points about LaTeX - that like XML/HTML, it also uses named end-tags; and that Lisp documentation itself is used LaTeX instead of S-expressions - drinking their kool-aid; but not eating their dog-food.

> merely thinking about the task in more concrete, specific terms makes it feel like it should be completed sooner and thus reducing procrastination

It doesn't say how they drew that conclusion from the evidence, but it seems a bit of a leap to me.

I think it's because a specific concrete task has less unknown in it, and therefore is easier to do; easier to estimate how long it will take; easier to judge your performance; and easier to know when you have completed the task - for these reasons, it is less scary.

Checking, yes, the same text. But as a reader, I didn't see the other one and i did see this one (maybe because it had more upvotes), so, for me, it was a good thing that this one was here. There's an element of competition for most eye-catching headline that I don't think can be administrated away.

BTW: if you state the link directly (not indented), it is automatically linkerized like so: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=431033

great idea, not a full-blown comment, but a small link (like "flag") that gives room for a one line description. Most typos are pretty short, and are covered by something like the below. Even if the description happened to be ambiguous, it would be enough of a heads up for the blogger to find it. I'd think it's not attractive enough to spammers to warrant a captcha.

  s/just up/just shut up/

The Amazon reviews of "XML Schema" agree it's poorly edited - but both are surprised: http://www.amazon.com/XML-Schema-Eric-van-Vlist/dp/059600252...

I think it would enhance immersion, much more than the wii controller (which it turned out people wanted). But I agree the lag spoils it (esp visible with the baseball bat). Version 2.0?

Dragon's Egg (Robert Forward) is an excellent hard science fiction novel, in which merely from knowledge of the fact that it could be done better figures prominently.

I tend to think that ideas are a dime a dozen, and actually doing it is what makes the difference - Boyer-Moore is one of the few counter-examples. But if you also had the idea... could it be that you're unusually smart?

The details of Boyer-Moore seem obvious to me, in that you bump into them in trying to get it working, even if you don't foresee them. They are like workshop improvements. Did you manage to implement a version of it, as a kid? Or is this another instance of showing that actually doing it is what counts?

Boyer-Moore string searching is a good example of a simple but non-obvious "idea" (search backwards; it's much faster).

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/moore/best-ideas/string-searc...

Similar to your gun example, the first seven claims of Morse's telegraph patent were upheld, because they claimed his specific invention; but the eighth was struck out, because it tried to claim the general idea of transmitting information by wires.

> compensate all the people who made possible the compilers, algorithms, programming courses, books, hardware, and so forth that put them in a position to have their brainstorm ... eventually everyone will own parts of our communal knowledge base

A bit alarmist, as patents are time-limited (20 years), and much of our software technology is older than that. For example, everything in the Dragon compiler book (1986). Of course, that wasn't true when Abrash wrote the above (1996).

It's bigger than an eee PC, the defining product of the "netbook" category

    eee PC: 8.9 × 6.5

    Vaio P:  11 x 7.9

When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.

> it's like a drug

I think criticizing is enticing because it gives a feeling of superiority, without the hard work and risk of mistakes... and risk of criticism. Even more insidiously drug-like is that habitual criticizing makes one more reluctant to take those risks oneself, because one is more self-critical, and one expects criticism.

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat." - Theodore Roosevelt

eee netbook is about 1 kg, this is 635 grams; and it has a built-in cell phone. http://www.obsessable.com/laptop/sony-vaio-p/specs/

Not sure on the price-point, but I think there's a market need for netbooks in the direction of these specs.

"Technical success needs technical skills; business success needs business skills."

    # You don't want to be Tesla. He was one of the greatest inventors,
    but it's a sad, sad story. He couldn't commercialise anything, he
    could barely fund his own research. You'd want to be more like
    Edison. If you invent something, that doesn't necessarily help
    anybody. You've got to actually get it into the world; you've got
    to produce, make money doing it so you can fund it.

The other Edison vs Tesla difference that strikes a chord in me is:

    Edison: "Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration."

    Telsa on Edison: "just a little theory and calculation would have saved him
    90 percent of the labour. But he had a veritable contempt for book
    learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his
    inventor's instinct and practical American sense." 

Edison was a hacker - and I mean one who hacks, like a bad golfer or a bad novelist, but who actually gets the ball in the hole, and actually writes the novel.

When you are the only one who has done something, you are automatically the best. No matter how bad you are.

The second last quote sort of reinforces the "learn through mistakes" attitude of Edison:

    # The thing that matters is experience. We have lots of executives
    from failed companies; they learned a lot from these things. They
    say, 'We can't do that -- we tried that and it didn't work.' So
    failure is useful.

Try tweaking down the trailing edge of the wing and/or the trailing horizontal edge of the tail, to counter it. Mine was diving, and tweaking these surfaces upwards made a dramatic difference.

He talks about this after the instructions: http://www.zurqui.com/crinfocus/paper/air-fly.html

Now there's an opportunity for a startup search engine.

The idea that human intelligence isn't so much a fundamentally new thing, but a mix of existing things, appeals to me.

I see two features: (1) that we can intercept senses, so a car, bike or horse (or spear, axe or hammer), is neurologically an extension of ourselves; (2). (I think) abstract reasoning has an identical neurological basis to that used by rats, crows and dolphins to solve puzzles, except over abstract concepts instead of over concrete instances.

> a possible test for whether a cognitive enhancement is likely to have downsides, is the ease with which it could have occurred as a natural mutation

Our environment is different today, and traits that would have often killed their possessors 100,000's of years ago could be beneficial today. I'm thinking things like Asperger Syndrome, even Autism (which might have factors that are advantageous in a different combination, like Sickle Cell anemia - one grant malaria immunity; two kills you).

Even the earliest agriculture could have profoundly distorted the fitness function, so we may been evolving very rapidly over our recent genealogical history (rather than stagnating as is often claimed).

Better short-term memory would increase effective intelligence (in my personal experience, anyway), and it seems that evolution could improve this without harm...? Or maybe that's just von neuman bias... it could be that short-term memory is intimately integrated with intelligence - eg. each chunk in working memory is connected to everything else in long-term memory, allowing you to recognize similarities etc. You couldn't afford many buses like that.

It would seem embarrassing to write up in a paper; but excellent filler (and justified) in a thesis. The thesis goes online, google indexes it; now it's available as lit.

Some university libraries have a public terminal or two (mine does), which has access to all the electronic journals they are subscribed to (ACM, IEEE, JSTOR, Springerlink etc).

They don't advertise this; you have to ask.

So this is Apple's "netbook"? But sans keyboard.

Apple made a tablet PC in 1989, the Newton. It was attractive, but never really took off. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton

Microsoft had a Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, which likewise went nowhere.

Typing is simply a better technology than writing, for text entry.