twopoint718

Anything with a good REPL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REPL

I really liked this haskell ambigram: http://www.haskell.org/logos/logos/HaskelmR.png

The shootout makes clear:

"How can we benchmark a programming language? We can't - we benchmark programming language implementations.

How can we benchmark language implementations? We can't - we measure particular programs."

The other thing that I have to note is that "Time measurements include program startup time." Which I think would distort something like Erlang greatly. It takes a long(ish) time for Erlang to start up, but then it runs very fast.

I don't think I even realized what it was.

This was the tutorial shed a lot of light on the issue: http://student.northpark.edu/pemente/emacs_tabs.htm

You get to configure at least three things: how many things emacs enters when you press "tab", what those things are, and if you see a tab in a file how wide it should be.

Whitespace, Shakespeare, LOLCode, Homespring (the Salmon-oriented programming language), and of course, Visual Basic.

Edit: the "Visual Basic" was my attempt at a joke, but then I googled in "Invisible Basic", thinking that some crafty hacker out for a laugh would have made such a thing. Unfortunately, I don't think this http://invisiblebasic.sourceforge.net/ is a joke.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_languag...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_(programming_langua...

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

http://xeny.net/files/Homespring-Proposed-Language-Standard.... [PDF link]

This makes me think of mercury as the Ice-9 of aluminum. Does anyone have videos of this reaction?

I'm so conflicted here, on the one hand there are very old and very good rules for why jurors should be in a sort of information bubble, but then there is the part of me that thinks the more information the better.

You know, that got me thinking. ZFS will do versioning and, as a filesystem, you'd be keeping your binary data in it anyway. In ZFS, this versioning is implemented as a tree of data blocks, only those blocks that change between versions would be "new". If a block is unchanged, ZFS can exploit shared structure to avoid needless copying.

If we're mentioning holidays that we made up, here's mine. March 5 (YYYY-3-5, when you write the date big-endian) is the Square Root of Christmas (35 * 35 = 1225). This allows 10 days between Sqrt(Xmas) and Pi Day. This period of time is called Nerdigras.

http://twopoint718.blogspot.com/2009/03/march-5-is-square-ro...

There's already been a carol written:

http://nedbatchelder.com/blog/200903/square_root_of_christma...

Whatever they do in South Korea, do that here (in the US).

Interesting application.

The way that I'm thinking about it is this: that it is relatively unusual, from the standpoint of the community, for a high-karma user to upvote a low-karma user.

Karma is a measure of the norms of the community, parceled out to users.

Oh I agree completely that it isn't a nice assumption; it is just a simplifying one (like the proverbial spherical cow) that's mostly wrong. But I don't think it is entirely wrong, and the ways that it is right may be useful, as an experiment.

Maybe I shouldn't have used the word bad. But new users may not know the established traditions of a group, maybe they haven't even bothered to read the FAQ. The articles that got me thinking along these lines were: http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html and http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/AY2001/cs6470_fall/LTAND.ht... . The gist is that an important group function is to defend itself against (new) users.

But I think that what it'll do is to make votes matter because they cost something. Mostly, I'm interested to see what the implications would be.

I've been toying with the idea of adapting the Elo rating system from chess to a social site's user score. The basic idea from chess is that you assume someone has an intrinsic skill in some arbitrary units (I think you start out around 1,000 and a 2400+ is senior master) and that we can only infer that skill from how they perform in tournaments. Furthermore, your skill in any particular game is assumed to be normally distributed about that intrinsic skill value. It is also assumed that your skill will only change slowly over time (we don't have to pin down a moving target).

So the mechanics of this system are basically that when you compete with someone that is much better than you and win your score should be adjusted upwards. Conversely, if you lose to someone worse than you, your score will be adjusted downward. Adjustments are done in batches, say after a player has finished a tournament (I use five voting events between readjustment).

My application to a user karma system would be analogous in that a "match" or "competition" would happen every time someone directly rates someone else (stories may be exempt). A high-karma user upvoting a low-karma user would increase the low-karma user's karma and decrease the high-karma user's karma. If there are two users with equal karma and one up or downvotes the other. the number of points exchanged will be minimal (the gain/loss scales with the difference in karma).

The idea is that your ideas are competing with the opinions of the high-ranked users. The assumption is that new users will have bad ideas and that high-karma users will downvote them. A downvote from a high-karma user is expected and doesn't cost the new user very much (they are expected to "lose" to them often).

I've sketched out some of the functions here: http://paste.lisp.org/display/76193

EDIT: grammar fix, typed this before coffee

Convex mirrors will produce a smaller virtual image (behind the plane of the mirror) taken from a wider field of view. Concave mirrors will produce an inverted real image (for objects farther away than the focal length) or a larger virtual image (for objects inside the focal length).

Just playing devil's advocate, but why would that person have to have a better idea? A person doesn't necessarily need to be in possession of good ideas in order to be able to sniff out bad ones.

Though I admit, it would be weird if someone can tell an idea is bad, but not be able to say why. In that case I think the detractor deserves to be ignored on the grounds of insufficient proof.

It doesn't seem that clear, but it does look better for TPB than I would have expected. Half of the charges against them have already been thrown out, and they are making the argument that, as the administers of the site, they don't post torrents, users do. The prosecution has to point to these specific users (who may have screennames such as "King Kong", hence the title).

Yuck. I had heard previously about how difficult it is to completely remove yourself from FB, but this getting unreasonable.

Also I have an issue with the article:

> Someone can still take your photo, slap it on Facebook, and now neither you nor the author of the photo can stop Facebook from using the photo in whichever way they please.

I doubt that that's the case. If someone takes something to which I have a copyright and then places it on Facebook without my approval, I would think I have legal recourse. Isn't this what a DMCA takedown notice is for? Unless I'm misreading that quote.

Disagreement isn't being a dick. And I agree more with you that Doctorow, I have cases and cases of books (my back remembers this every time I have to move). But I, and I may have misread Doctorow's article, take it that his point wasn't that "the screen" (phones, e-readers, laptops, etc.) is a good device to read things from but that it is good enough.

I think of this as similar to the comparison between a live concert, a CD and an MP3. The concert is the one that really moves me, that's the one that makes me want to get up and dance or at least tap my feet. A good band vibrates my guts just as well as I hear them.

A CD is nothing like that experience, it's flat by comparison, the tones aren't as low or as high and I can't feel the music thump in my stomach like I can at a concert. But at the end of a great show, I'll plunk down $10 so that I can hear a really great band again.

Now an MP3 is even more flattened, I don't know what the science is but I think that on a lot of rips I can hear some sort of difference from the CD. There are parts that don't feel as crisp, etc. But MP3s, (and by this I mean "compressed digital music files") are doing really well out there. Apple sells a lot of them. In other words they seem "good enough". Or it may just be that when people evaluate different formats, concert, CD or MP3 they choose the most portable one and don't care as much about the quality.

That's what I was trying to cite, without judgment, that it seems people will sacrifice a lot of quality for a gain in some other area. I don't see why it would be different with books.

I remember reading a book ("Scrolling Forward" by David M. Levy, Arcade Pub., New York, 1st ed.) the author was an alum of Xerox PARC; he had written his thesis on one of the first WYSIWYG word processor typing systems, an early machine with a mouse. After this experience he went off to learn the very analog art of calligraphy. He felt that he had lost his connection with the feel of the page and the art of writing, he also wrote this whole book about what "document" means in the digital age. I mean to say that there may also be a more expanded notion of what reading and novel mean in the future. Or maybe not.

I have a question that maybe you can answer, having really perused the PDF spec. Is it true that PDF removed the turing-completeness of PostScript?

I had heard something that the main reason for creating PDF was that you couldn't render a single PS page without rendering all the ones preceding it.

I'm kinda in the Cory Doctorow school of thought. Whenever I see it reported that this or that e-book reader will soon be the thing, I can't help but think of: http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2007/03/cory-doctorow-you-d...

Those waiting for the e-book to "arrive" may have already missed the fact that it's here.

That's really a job for google.

I also have a naive question, does a .com really have "additional credibility" over something else? Why? How about independent of what other websites are doing?

I don't know exactly why but that sounds very funny to me. I would boast of this ability all the time.

Yes. I'd probably pay double that.

I think that there is a huge difference between $0 and $ANY, in that it forces the the user to place a value on it. I think that the model to look to is MeFi, which has very high-quality comments, high-quality posts, and as others have stated, it seems to have more memory than your average site. Old posts are frequently referenced and there is a strong culture of DRY (don't repeat yourself).

The main objection seems to be that the site will shed users that can't/won't pay. For those users that don't have credit cards or Pay Pal (I, for one, hate PP with all my heart) could there be other options to make payment more flexible? What else is out there if you don't want to limit yourself to payments of only those types?

But I do think the $5 barrier to entry will improve, or maintain, the quality. If you don't want to pay, sorry, but I like HN more than I like J. Random Bozo's troll.

Seconded, plus there is (at least one) for Linux as well:

http://gmail-notify.sourceforge.net/

I chuckled at that, but it's true!

I just end up using Mutt as my MUA and Gmail as my really fancy sorta-half-MDA. To finish it out I have to use something like fetchmail (which is okay), I usually end up using Mutt's built-in imap feature.

I have a mix of methods. For sites that I rarely visit or are of no real consequence if the password were compromised I use a memorable one for them all.

For sites that I care about the security I generate a random password with something like this:

    dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1 count=12 | uuencode -

then store that in psafe (http://www.hep.wisc.edu/~dan/psafe/) with a master password that I remember. This way if some site's password does get compromised, it doesn't translate to any other site. I suppose I could also carry around the encrypted psafe file with me on a USB key, but I've found that I don't really need to log into these sorts of sites when I'm out.

I second "Odyssey 5", great TV show.