dschoon

As many people have already observed, ideal rationality and reality are very different. This is one of the reasons why assertiveness and risk-seeking behavior is rewarded in {dating,business}. The game theoretic calculus might not provide the optimal course of action, because its assumptions might not sufficiently model reality.

I'd offer that we don't see many beautiful, single women because we irrational agents take the risk to chat her up anyway. And HEYYO, turns out that, empirically, maybe that's the right thing to do.

Totally agreed; this is exactly the generalized message I took away.

How many "lessons" (goals) could we tailor to the desires of the "student" (user) as a substitute for enforcement mechanisms? Surely not all, but many more than we're presently doing.

PDF: http://www.ma.rhbnc.ac.uk/~elsholtz/WWW/papers/papers28liste...

The full PDF: http://www.ma.rhbnc.ac.uk/~elsholtz/WWW/papers/papers28liste...

Similarly interesting research modeling bee colony nest choice through individual agents: http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2009/03/bees_nesting_an.ht...

The paper is rather straight-forward for anyone here, so I'd recommend just reading it directly.

I was kind of hoping there wouldn't be release notes, heh.

Are there speed metrics on Parrot vs CPython, SpiderMonkey, V8, etc?

> if you died anything but alone and penniless, you hadn't done your job. To me, that doesn't sound like a business plan for anyone on HN.

I think following the moral behind that quip makes it unlikely you end up alone and penniless :)

I think the goal is to prevent other robots from accidentally crawling the Google corpus. At the end of the day, robots.txt is a stab at comity. There are many well-known services which use crawlers that fail to obey it (or identify themselves). The file merely announces, "This is all recycled content." -- notice that none of the Google corporate pages are disallowed.

Aside: let's say you've whipped up a spiffy new ranking algorithm, and you just need an index to launch your search engine. What's faster: crawling the web, or crawling Google? I don't think such an entrepreneur would pass on a big speed up just because of a text-file.

I'm pretty sure ChromeBug (http://getfirebug.com/releases/#chromebug) lets you do this, though it has some trade-offs.

On one hand, it's built on top of Firebug; this adds a lot of power (chrome inspection, javascript debugging/breakpoints in the chrome).

On the other, it's alpha, and not the focus of development (as far as I can tell)--it hasn't had a new release in some time.

This is as dry as it gets, folks. If you can say "If only there was a way to get POW to run PHP.JS" with a straight face, there is nothing beyond your reach.

Personally, I greatly enjoyed the post because it embodies many of the concepts I've come to agree with. When it comes to humans, perception creates reality.

However, I think it's an idiosyncratic point of view (not ironic!). It's not the recipe of success for everyone, which I think should be obvious. The man doesn't own a bed for chrissake. But I do think it is a concise summary of the philosophy that motivates certain people to great success, and that makes it a good read.

Upvoted.

I did a few quick calculations, most of which were uninteresting. The only thing that's remotely notable is:

0.07% of the users (the top 100) account for 34.7% of the karma.

Numbers in easily consumable python form:

http://tire.less.ly/hacking/junk/karma.py

I love how simple and practical this is. This is exactly the sort of tool I never know I need until I desperately need it, and by that point, I typically don't have the time to build it. Wonderful.

It would be a slight undercount if karma didn't follow a power-law. How many users are there again? How many were loaded when you ran that?

Though not a critique of medicine (or of what could potentially be an amazing treatment), it always saddens me when I read the headline of a medical breakthrough only to find that we really have no idea how it works. Some day, we'll understand the architecture of the brain. That day is still not today.

I am offended by your disrespect for Erlang.

Personally, I think the blog-post author deserves the traffic. He through the trouble of putting up that PDF (which is excellent, btw) and will bear the cost of the bandwidth. Would you have dug it up otherwise?

This doesn't solve everything, as many commenters have already pointed out. There are going to be legacy app-holdouts. There are going to be upgrade skeptics who stay with "what works". There are going to be lazy people, dumb people, and all manner of launch bugs which scare people off.

So let's say that's 50%--A HUGE PERCENTAGE--of IE6+IE7 users. That means 50% less IE6 and IE7. Like we just said: FIFTY PERCENT IS HUGE.

I'm more than happy to lump IE8 in with the Gecko and KHTML browsers as being "good enough" from a developer's perspective. This nudges the web in the right direction, and the specter of NO auto-update was the big pisser on this parade.

I think this is a giant step in the right direction. Let's imagine that IE8 keeps on the good path, with more updates rolled out in the next year. Maybe it pulls close to parity in standards sometime. Auto-update makes all this meaningful.

I'm thrilled. The world's not gonna be perfect overnight. At least now we have a reason to hope it'll get close someday.

Irrespective of whether you agree with all the points here--and there are many thoughtful ones--let's all take a moment to agree the writing here is excellent.

I enjoyed this article enough to wander about James' site for a bit. But I didn't appreciate his core point until I read several other articles: judge a language by the problems it solves. Or even more harshly: the problems it has solved. He hammers it home in this gem, which may or may not have appeared already:

http://prog21.dadgum.com/13.html (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516718)

...And I reluctantly agree with him. I love functional programming. The code is art.

But I cannot justify building a business around it: he hits many good points, but to me the killer is library availability (it's the natural extension of judging based on achievement). When I start a new project, I want to write as little code as possible. I can't do that if slightly-more-complicated-than-basic structures and patterns aren't available to me.

Sadly, this isn't even a criticism of the languages I love. It's circumstantial. But it's still killer.

Man do I love Erlang. I rushed over to HN as soon as I heard a new Erlang community had popped up!

I think the article is brilliant for exactly one sentence, which in my experience comes up all the time in organizations filled with smart people:

3. The more perfect I think it is, the less willing I'll be to let anyone change it.

I've seen so many pointlessly elegant projects cast aside for exactly this reason. No collaboration is possible on art: your beautiful unique snowflake is your own.

Sure, maybe the rest of the thing was a bit fluffy, but if every article had even one hidden gem, writing on the internet would still be doing far better. :)

See, I like this article partially because it invites the reader to reflect on these thoughts, rather than provide an explicit, pre-packaged way of approaching life.

I agree because I think this is another way of searching for authenticity in all our decisions: "complacency" is another way to say you're not re-evaluating the choices you've made.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authenticity_(philosophy)

Hacker Culture: Taking itself only seriously enough to look ridiculous.

You're not. I've been tethering my jailbroken phone for a week now, and the process is exactly as you describe.

The only difference with the app is the ability to trade one line of typing for $10.

While switching operating systems or avoiding email/IM in the modern workplace is more than a little unrealistic, the core message is good.

Distraction undermines productivity.