PieSquared

I love configuring things and messing with hardware options and such in my free time! How is this better than Ubuntu? (Other than the incredible learning experience you'd get from installing this a few times)

Hah! Pleasant read. I especially liked this snippet, in which he suggested that you could become a 'cat' when the person you are conversing with is trying to make you a 'dog' (cats being assertive, dogs being passive):

  Them: "Have a seat."
  You: "Let's sit down."
  Them: "Ok."

That was awesome! I never believed the idea that actual applications, like work processing or something like that, could shift away from the desktop, but now I think that it actually might be possible.

I was literally open-jawed when I created a new window with the content URL of http://www.google.com, used that to search for Mocha UI, then opened another instance of Mocha UI in itself. I thought that was pretty nifty. Although useless in practice.

It was a good article, with a good point: just because developers say they're not writing applications for Vista doesn't mean anything, since most things that work on XP and Win2k will continue to work on Vista. Well written, too.

But somehow, all these articles about Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, don't really strike me as interesting. Do we really care that much about what other analysts say? Does all that political and religious bickering over operating systems really matter? Somehow, reading the continuous articles about "Microsoft's Problem" or "Why (Mac|Google|Linux|Ubuntu) Will Win" or "Why Microsoft is Doomed" just doesn't really excite me. Maybe it's just me though.

Ahahahah... Snippet from a comment:

"This beats perl by long shot:

Java: FileUtil.getContents("filename") // short but tells you what it does

Perl: <> # yea I know what it does, but really, do you need a non-intuitive built-in operator? And besides this only works for reading from the command line"

It seems that some people are so intent on never learning new things or adopting different languages that they will say "beats by a long shot" when they should say "still doesn't even come close to".

Well, one thing that definitely contributed was that Blizzard had already established the scene for with Warcraft III, so people sort of knew what type of world to expect. Also, Blizzard's other games (Starcraft and Warcraft mainly) were a huge success, so that gave WoW more credibility.

Because they're not techies and don't trust themselves to 'throw up a few servers' reliably? I dunno, that's my guess, since it seems they were looking for an email contract both with Outlook and now with Gmail.

Beat this short Arc snippet using map with a list comprehension:

  (def vector-dot-product (vector-1 vector-2)
    (map [* _1 _2] vector-1 vector-2))

That's from Light Makes Right the raytracer, I think. Equivalent python:

  def vectorDotProduct(vector1, vector2):
    return [x * y for x, y in zip(vector1, vector2)]

I'm pretty sure that the Lisp snippet above is neither harder to decipher nor longer. Though maybe that's just because Arc is nice.

Meh. I had really meant the above post to be a sarcastic satire of the 'this isn't hacker news' posts you all just mentioned. Sorry, I suppose it sounded different in my mind.

Err... What manner of tweaking would solve that problem? Just curious, since to me it seems to be more of a community issue.

In some cases, it might be, such as when you're combining map and filter. Then the list comprehension just looks like psuedocode: include this in the result if these conditions are met. In that example. though, it isn't much clearer. And the 'x for x' seems sort of repetitive.

Just clarifying in case that didn't come through as I thought, that was sarcasm. It wasn't a bad post. :)

Keep this type of stuff OUT.

Account created 14 minutes ago. Karma: none.

Please, people. Stop.

Unusual? Yes. Practical? Not really. Hacker News? er... Nevermind. :)

It is nice to see this type of stuff here sometimes, it's interesting and amusing.

I love it! A web application which actually feels (for the most part) like a well designed and implemented desktop app.

Two minor quirks: Back and forward button cause an ugly sort of refresh. And I forgot what the other one was because it just looks and feels so nice.

I hope this type of stuff gets more widespread. I also hope that browsers don't screw it up, as they're likely to. (Works well in Firefox 3 for me)

Works in FF3 for me.

C. Or some form of assembly. Both of them get you closer to the hardware than any high-level language would, and it's important to know what scheme and python and any other language are really doing for you automatically.

Damn... and I thought all the belly aching about Vista came from the techie people who liked *nix or Mac... but to hear a real live story about it being that bad is almost, well, touching. Good luck setting it up to actually work!

Python. Not all the code is good, but I remember reading a lot of Python code when I was trying to write an interpreter of my own, and some parts of it just left me starting at the screen in amazement, due to the beauty and simplicity of some of the ideas.

Maybe I'm not the best at reading badly commented C code, but Ruby and MzScheme were not nearly as pleasant.

> "Other than that, a self-taught student may be tempted to tackle easy problems. "

I completely disagree, and I'd say the opposite. If someone has the motivation be self-taught, then they will have the motivation to try difficult things. Though I would agree that you can't really be well self-taught unless you really have the determination for it.

Me too - I used to dislike it, even installed the oldbar extension to disable it. Now though, I find it pretty useful: to get to HN, I can type just 'h'; to get to the Arc forum, I can just type an 'a'; It's saved me a many Google search, too, because I tend to remember webpage titles much better than their URLs for most things.

Whoa... 15-year old kid starting a start-up? Good luck! I'm 15 too, but even though I've done some some programming in the past three years (compilers/interpreters, PHP, some Java GUI, reverse engineered a file format) I don't think I would try to start a company, school taking up 8 hours a day and all that. Yet.

I like that definition, and I also think that the above article satisfies it. The only problem is that not everyone may find the same things interesting...

That's encouraging. :)

Of course, I wouldn't want to speculate about then, because who knows what could happen in 7 years... It's humbling to think that the Internet has only been around about double that.

You don't need to imagine - I'll tell you what you could build: you could build an airplane!

that's actually pretty cool, and IMO definitely worth the time. I mean, how many people can say they've build planes?

Yup, I'm still studenting, and have a long way to go. I wonder if all these start-up opportunities and communities will still be around when I finish college...

Hey! That's what I was about to say. Actually, my exact comment was about to be, "This isn't hacker news no matter how you look at it, but it's pretty interesting nonetheless."

Somehow we'll need to find a balance between what is interesting but isn't hacker news - sometimes, non-hacker news is interesting enough to deserve a place here, although most of the time it isn't. Or maybe we can just say, for the sake of safety, that anything non-hacker related is inappropriate? Not sure about that.

I think OpenID may be a good choice, especially as more sites begin to support it. Take a look at ClickPass, it seems promising, though I suppose you should offer a normal sign up too.

Look's like it's down, or something.

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com

"if you use correctly use multithreading" Good luck doing that 100% of the time!

As for Erlang, I'm pretty sure it wasn't meant for numerical calculations, and since it's interpreter, it can't really be used for all real-time apps. Although it's process model is novel, the implementation might not be perfect for everything right now. Correct me if I'm wrong on this (which I might well be, since I have not spent too much time writing Erlang code.)

I think what the parent meant is that writing multithreaded programs easily and quickly (not to mention bug-free) is hard, hard enough to be called a problem.