dave_au

All good points which I agree with.

It appears that we were using different meanings for expressiveness though - yours was focusing on communicating both the feel and the function of the code, mine was focusing on communicating efficiently[1].

I don't think that they're orthogonal, and I'm not sure at the level that "there's only one way to do anything" is normally applied in Python that it negatively effects either, especially since the implied full version seems to be "there's only one way to do anything if you don't have a reason to do differently".

Not that it helps with communicating the feel of an algorithm, but at least it doesn't necessarily hurt. I was only trying to point out that "there's only one way to do things" may not actually be the opposite of expressiveness. Liberally applied it's possibly neutral or better.

[1] An argument could be made that accurately communicating the feel of the code is the most efficient way to communicate it, although I'm more concerned with the time it takes both to read and to write the code - surely at some point of massaging your code for readability you reach the point diminishing returns :)

Not taking sides here, just bringing up a potential counterpoint. I like Python, Lisp and a fair few other languages as well.

From my understanding, the "there's only one way to do things" idea generally applies at the smaller scales, so an argument could be made that it helps with expressiveness at larger scales, since once you know the idioms you don't need to choose between them - ie you can just type it in and keep going and save the mindspace that making a choice between the multiple equivalent options would have required.

Of course, that only makes sense if the "one way to do things" is eliminating choices that are 100% functionally identical, and you can also get bitten if you need something just outside of what the idiom can do nicely, but I thought it was a point worth bringing up.

This is motivated by the fact that I'm in Australia and our broadband sucks.

Netflix send a whole heap of DVDs through the mail, so they're trust you not to rip them and distribute copies. If there was a massive content distribution network with kiosks in shopping centres where I could put in a DVD-RW or usb storage device (or pay for a blank DVD) and pay for the latest movies and TV shows I'd make a good amount of use of it.

It's mostly about saving bandwidth, but also trying to provide an extremely fast and convinient alternative to piracy. If that existed, I'd probably use it. I already buy TV shows on DVD if someone I trust recommends them highly enough - a much better experience for me than watching them on TV, no adds, pause, rewind, etc...

We get some shows quite a bit later here, and a few of the good shows only come to pay tv. So the timing would be the key. As soon as the TV show is aired anywhere - bam - available from the kiosk. The premium for being ad free and not getting it on the studios timeline might more or less balance out with the savings in packaging and distribution.

Same with movies. Theaters wouldn't be happy, but we're rapidly approaching the days when people will go to the movies for the theater experience and otherwise just get hold of it online (one way or another).

As a bonus idea, if the kiosks kept records of what you'd bought then buying a whole series through the kiosk gets you a big discount on the DVDs if you want the physical media since you've already paid for the IP at the point.

If I remember correctly the Dilberito was designed along those lines:

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

So bluetooth file transfer at 28kbps with some old school modem hackery, awesome :)

I like the first solution in the comments - use mmap, work page by page (or pair of pages by pair of pages).

Maybe next time you could give them a [yourwebsite]/yc URL so you can check the server logs and be sure one way or the other.

I did that and it worked pretty well. I was drinking a lot of Coke.

Six months later I thought "I'll have a Coke for lunch, it's alright since I had one with lunch yesterday". I almost paid for it before I realised I'd only had a very detailed dream where I'd bought and consumed a bottle of Coke with lunch.

I decided to stay off the caffeine for a little longer.

I tried a 28-hour day for about a week: http://www.dbeat.com/28/

I'm glad I did solely because I know that if I hadn't I'd be wondering about both the 28-hour day and polyphasic sleep until I tried it, and I'd probably have more at stake if I tried it later.

It was not good. I tried it in the middle of working on my PhD. I could still write code, but the quality dipped a little. My theory work stopped - the whole abstract complex thought part of my brain shut off - and it took me a while to notice. There was some digestive confusion for a while as well - the body is a pretty complex thing, and it turns out that (at least mine) really likes it's cycles.

I made it through a week and a half - at least I think it was - it really throws your idea of what a day is. The abstract complex thought bit took a while to come back. It took about a month and a half to recover properly. Would not try again.

I've considered something like an electronic notary system a number of times over the years.

I can imagine having a URL like http://[known and trusted e-notary].com/[user]/[date]/[file or md5sum] would do a lot to discourage any shennanigans.

It wouldn't serve the same purpose as having something actually notarized so you'd have to be clear about that, but it could be a source of evidence when a case went before a court.

Doesn't seem all that technically difficult - md5sums for files and an RSA keypair per day are the common starting points for most of my ideas in that direction.

It's alright as an idea, might not be too great as a business depending on the demand.

You'd need decent customer service when things went wrong or if people had questions about jobs / billing, so I imagine you'd need pretty high and reasonably consistent demand to cover that, especially since the markup would probably be tiny.

If anyone once to give it a try I'd like to see how it turns out for them.

If GS really highlighted the unofficial part and also linked to official support pages then companies with good support and / or people who are neutral on whether the company is ignorant or unresponsive get the check out the official support forums first and won't be confused about the nature of the GS page.

People who have already something against the support offered by ShittyCorp will stick around and use the unofficial support provided on GS - why on earth would they follow a link that they know would be unhelpful? It's only a problem if you assume a staggering amount of stupidity on the part of the target market.

As long as ShittyCorp doesn't have the option of making the GS page automatically redirect to the useless support pages all is good.

I remember one of their chief expenses a while back was under-utilization - they need enough capacity for the christmas rush etc, but it does unused during the slow times. It looks like they're letting other people pay for their under-utilized computing power and also deal with the utilization problem themselves beneath the 1 hour mark.

Every now and then I wonder if there's a market for someone to do something like app engine on EC2 in order to cater to the 10 minute job market.

With something like that you could just leave the EC2 instances up and just swap jobs in and out, track the time and charge some small markup for the convenience.

As long as the demand was there you'd just have to bring more instances up in peak times then let them die off one by one when things slow down. Put a nice client side API on it and use Amazons billing API so the client can handle all of their computing payments at the one point and you're ready to go.

Posted on Hacker News an April 2nd, but posted on Lipton's blog a day earlier...

It's far from a trivial task but one thing I keep wondering about LLVM is - what happens if they worked on (optional) incremental parsing/compiling?

Seeing the errors as you type is pretty handy in Java so I figure it'd be pretty nice in C or C++.

It also means you'd have enough information about what's happening at the point you are editing to do some pretty impressive things in terms of autocompletion - there's still a lot of autocompletion in C++ that there is no open source solution (as far as I've seen from looking around for a while).

And with the appropriate debugging hooks you could implement something like edit-and-continue from Visual Studio. I haven't used that in years, but it'd be a nice feature to have.

I think that templates would make it a complex problem, but I can dream. Or I can start hacking away when I get some free time :)

I'm ashamed to say that I paused for a while when Bug Me Not asked me to register.

Interesting.

My first thought was that I'd seen that list before - nothing wrong with that, some content makes its way around the net a fair bit.

My second thought was that it's only tangentially related to zen - again, nothing wrong with that.

My third thought was that the recent posts and next / previous posts like similarly non-zen and reasonably generic.

And then I saw the links in the last two paragraphs. I smell someone playing games with pagerank...

I don't see how this does a better job at increasing security beyond the built in anti-malware/phishing stuff in Firefox.

Sure, you might have more people reporting stuff but you don't have credentials for any of those people. If they went to 20 sites in the last hour and now have some malware, are all of them going to make the correct decision on which of the sites it came from?

After reading this from the privacy page:

=====================================================

Background information such as age or gender is used to provide statistical information about website preferences. This statistical information is stored without any personal information.

=====================================================

I think that someone might be selling website demographic data...

I can't think of any other reason why you'd write a Firefox extension that competes with a built in feature of Firefox, especially when the data coming in isn't vetted in any way.

For anyone struggling to find the time to get some exercise in, http://www.simplefit.org is pretty nice.

The workouts are quick, can be pretty intense, and are staged based on your progress. Not for some people, but I've been doing it combined with some running and have found it to be pretty good so far.

The last time the LLVM backend was mentioned on the PyPy blog it was mentioned near the phrase "unmaintained and at least partially broken"

Link: http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2008/10/sprint-discussions-rele...

If you can arbitrarily modify the server side of any instance of the application then you can also just pay using someone elses credit card details.

Although I think what Stallman would probably prefer is the source to the site / web application being available so that people can run their own instances.

HN and reddit have their source available. I don't see anyone using the reddit code in a way that's any threat to reddit, mainly since the size of the community is an asset that's hard to compete with.

Potentially off-topic, since I'm not familiar with the prevalent licensing, but the various django applications look pretty nice for this kind of thing.

I'm sure that a lof of the people who this could help already know about it.

If you're in Queensland, Australia, the Climate Smart Home Service costs $50 and you get: - a wireless energy monitor - up to 15 compact fluro lightbulbs - a water/power efficient showerhead all with installation.

http://www.climatesmarthome.com/

Citeseer is down at the moment so I can't find the paper on the big hurdles any given visual programming language has to deal with.

I've used LabView a little, wrote the backend code for a startup that was trying to create an ambitious visual language and have a friend doing a Phd in the field (which is where I got the paper reference from).

The biggest problem I've found - and it's on the list of problems from the paper - is that there's a mental cost associated with the layout and wiring in 2D. It starts off as fairly negligible but eventually becomes a huge monkey on your back. An auto-layout feature can alleviate that, but then you've got to keep track of where everything is.

Some people seem to be immune to this, so I guess the proportion of people effected (along with the average size of a logical unit in the language - function, module, program, etc) might in turn effects the potential of a visual language to get mindshare.

Talking to a number of people who've used / written / studied them about this problem over a couple of beers the best solution we've come up with is to have a visual language for beginners and a textual dataflow language for the more advanced users, and the ability to convert between the two for the people making the transition.

Thoughts?

I have a friend who does his programming from an armchair and I often wonder how long it's going to be until his wrists start to be effected by the massively subergonomic elbow/wrist placement that it forces on him.

Anecdotally, my sister is a chiropractor and the Aeron (when properly adjusted, which can take a bit of doing) blew her mind in terms of back health goodness, which served as a pretty big recommendation for me. She also recommends yoga balls as well. I'll have to ask her about armchairs :)

Talking to your local chiropractor or ergonomics person is probably a good plan if you're going to be buying any furniture you plan to use intensively.

Does anyone know how different this version is from the final version that went to print? The site for the book talks up the difference but is hardly an impartial source.