stuffihavemade

"But in the next 50 years, those that excel in creativity-- big picture thinkers, artists, inventors,designers -- will rise to the top."

Let's ignore inventors (because unless you're inventing "the Snuggie", there's a very high chance you have an STEM background) and big picture thinkers (which is a meaningless term). The tone of the article suggests that the author is talking about art for arts sake (e.g. a band) and not design for a product i.e. industrial design or graphic design. If he is including products, who will actually create the products, now that all of the engineers are gone? If he is not including products, then for every million artists, only one will get meaningful recognition, as why would anyone consume less than the best content?

"The illiterates of the future will not be those who cannot read and write or code, but those who cannot connect the dots and imagine a constellation."

A constellation, and connecting dots? That's so uncreative! I hear the stars sing to me, and they tell me that I'm a big picture thinker.

"A recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs from 60 countries and 33 industries identified creativity as the No. 1 “leadership competency” of the future (more than rigor, management discipline, integrity and even vision)."

Because of course, creativity in this context means ability to draw.

"Education and parenting should aim to provide the conventional skills (math, problem solving, and test taking skills) while also encouraging creative, out-of-the-box type thinking. Computers are no match for the average fourth-grader when it comes to creativity."

Again, is the author talking about creativity in the context of drawing, playing and instrument, etc, or "out-of-the-box" thinking? If it's the second, what does he think problem solving skills are? And what exactly does he think programming is?

"Instead of encouraging your child to major in engineering, you might encourage her to study philosophy, ask smart unsettling questions and practice making unusual and unexpected mental associations."

Yes, I've never heard of an scientist or engineer asking unsettling questions, or making mental associations.

"Albert Einstein said; I have no special gift. I am only passionately curious.”

Unfortunately, Einstein's background was in physics. So, while he was curious, he can't be considered to be creative. He should have studied philosophy instead.

Why wouldn't git work? The vast majority of projects I use it for are ones I work on by myself. As far as vim, the only plugins I use are syntax ones and command T, which I could live without.

The difference between the popularity of Emacs, Vim, Git, Linux, and a programming language is that it doesn't matter if anyone else on the planet uses Vim Git, etc., they will work the same to me. But the difference in productivity from pre-made libraries for using Ruby (52,220 gems cut since July 2009) vs. scheme (http://planet.racket-lang.org/) is vast, especially when you consider that the power of the two languages is not that great.

You can think of no reason someone wouldn't want to have every waking moment of their life recorded?

Thanks for the information all.

"from Amazon after her readers click the ads in her articles and go on to make purchases (she sees, and makes commissions off of, the other items they place in their shopping cart, including books that she didn’t link to)."

How does this work exactly? Is there a cookie with the affiliate's id set when you click on an affiliate's link?

anshargal, you're shadow banned. His comment is:

"For several years (2001-2005) we've already had the situation when the single browser engine (Trident, MSIE) had the dominant share of 90% and more. Indeed, this was bad for the Web as a platform, pretty much in ways the article describes.

However this time we've got a difference: new dominant browser engine is open-source with a very liberal license (BSD, LGPL). So anyone who is not satisfied with the development of WebKit is welcome to fork. In fact, Google has replaced JavaScriptCore (part of WebKit) with V8.

So is there actually any reasons for having competitive open-source full browser stacks? I believe licensing reasons (the one behind FreeBSD and Linux) is not very important for browser world (Gecko and WebKit have very similar licensing terms). And I don't see much ideological reasons that can't be fixed by forking.

What else? Usually developers hate abandoning their work and switching to improve competitor's solutions — especially in the open source world. Developers like the feeling of doing important stuff and money. Market share of Firefox is still quite high (~25%) and Mozilla still receives money (company is non-profit, but developers are being paid I believe). Probably for this reasons the struggle will continue for some time.

However it is difficult to assume that there is something useful for web platform in this struggle. Every new web standard feature requires independent implementation from two different open-source projects and the whole platform adoption process goes as fast as the slowest team goes."

If you like this, check out http://www.happstack.com/docs/crashcourse/AcidState.html . It allows for arbitrary Haskell data structures to safely and automatically be marshaled in and out of the data store.

I have a 4 core 2GHZ i7, and it locks up Firefox for me as well.

Take a look at snap (http://snapframework.com/) as well. I'm working on a small project with it, and I'm really enjoying the type system after getting over the initial hump. Also, it has great concurrency performance characteristics (http://snapframework.com/blog/2010/11/17/snap-0.3-benchmarks), though that wasn't much of a factor in me deciding to try it.

"Instapaper, but for Location"

Rand McNally is Web 3.0 certified!

It's possible(even likely) that what you typed is enough for a crawler to try that site.

Does the behavior change if you take out the even condition, or if you make the algorithm tail recursive?

Is it appropriate for Hacker News though? It fits better on http://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming

Another important point is that the VAST majority of software is not pretty consumer iphone and Rails apps. Some of the products I've worked on have been ugly as sin, but no company truly cares about that vs. the value gained. Imagine two scenarios: 1) A beautiful designed piece of software that increases company revenues by 10%. 2) An ugly (but same ease of use) piece of software that increases company revenues by 10.1%.

Which would you rather use at your company?

Do I think design is important? Sure. But to say that "designers are eating engineers" because it's easier now to make a twiiter/instagram mash up is ignoring the multi million line code bases that account for most of the "valuable" software.

You still create FSM's in functional languages though. Consider:

data Light = On | Off

toggle :: Light -> Light

toggle On = Off

toggle Off = On

So, the data structures represent the possible states, and the associated functions the transitions.

It doesn't scroll as smoothly as a vertical scroll in firefox for me.

I strongly recommend you offer a demo without needing to sign up. I was intrigued enough to take a look, but not enough to go through a sign up process.

I think that's wrong philosphy to have. If I've built something (especially a 3 day project when I haven't invested too much time yet), I want all the criticism I can get. Comments like "that seems cool" are just noise. On the ohter hand, someone pointing out a legitimate showstopper can save you 6 months of time working on a dead end idea that could be spent working on something else.

I worked on something similar to the MVP shown (not about jokes specifically, but a "gimic" dating site). The real problems have to do with gender imbalance, men shotgunning messages, and the fundamental issue with these gimic sites: attractivness is all that matters online. It really doesn't matter how witty you can make yourself appear (which, I'm not sure this site allows for that? seems to just see if 2 users have the same sense of humor, not how funny someone is), if you're not attractive. Where in the real world, personality and confidence can have a much larger effect. The unspoken assumption is not that people want girlsthatlaughatmyjokes.com and guysthatmakemelaugh.com, It's hotgirlsthatlaughtatmyjokes.com and hotguysthatmakemelaugh.com.

I would be shocked if you've used a dating site before. Not to critize your product (the site looks pretty nice), but it's solving a problem that doesn't exist.

But if we Mark your words, how can we trust that you won't change them later?

[Sorry for the bad joke. I myself hate seeing jokes on Hacker News, but I just couldn't resist.]

If anything, I'm surprised they allowed you to rent out your place without that verification in hand. There is enough possible legal/liability quandaries around the idea of AirBnB that is seems risky to sanction the rental of a place without confirmation of the owner's identity.

"When you write 1111 = 4 you are sneakily using the length of the number on the page to encode the value. The length of the number on the page isn't supposed to matter. In base 10, 17 = 017 = 0017 = 00017."

I couldn't find a rigorous definition of a base system offhand. If you require that number N prepended with additive identity I, so IN = N, I agree with you. But every number in the system I described certainly has a unique representation. Also, this is incorrect: "The other problem is that the only number you can write in base one is zero, because the only possible weight (the only integer between 0 and N-1) is 0." Try taking a look at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peano_arithmetic

0 = 1

1 = 11

2 = 111

3 = 1111, etc. {1,2,3...} and {0,1,2...} are isomorphic.

Can you expand a bit on what you meant by "...and that model can and will extend into the server."?

I think it makes more sense to go JS -> Erlang, because the valuable thing about JS is the language itself (and trying to achieve code sharing), while the valuable thing about Erlang is the vm/concurrency model/OTP.

I wonder how hard it would be to make JS compile to Erlang like Elixir. I think the big problem would be some kind of actor model in the browser with everything callback based. Other than that, they're both dynamically typed, functional (Erlang obviously more) languages.

Sure, but a lot of programmers' dream (not mine) is to be the creator of the next big thing and gain accolades from other programmers. That won't happen if you're strictly contributing to other projects.