tayssir

6 ms·

1.
by tayssir 17y ago
I concede that Lisp's notation probably isn't common sensical; and that learning it is a significant investment for many programmers, who are hardwired to quickly understand the conventional notation. However, many important developments in
2.
by tayssir 17y ago
Hi, great game! Just a few thoughts: * In Act 2, things get more expensive, but I don't seem to pick up much more money. I think many people would stop playing at this point, as it's harder to tech up. (In particular, it makes it harder to
3.
by tayssir 17y ago
There's many ways that governments protect their local industries. For instance, the US saved its semiconductor industry (Intel, etc) from doom at the hands of the Japanese, by aggressive tariffs and other trade policies. (Intel cofounder A
4.
by tayssir 17y ago
I preferred Postmodern last year, for interacting with Postgresql. Around that time, I vaguely recall it was considered faster than CL-SQL as an Elephant backend; and I found it far easier to install than CL-SQL. (I recall during CL-SQL's i
5.
by tayssir 17y ago
The New York Times has a handy little graphic about the link between federal subsidy/research and products which create a $1 billion industry: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2005/04/01/business/200504... (The accompanying article is he
6.
by tayssir 17y ago
If I understand correctly, that's just like Common Lisp's way to specify cyclic references. http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/02_dhp...
7.
by tayssir 17y ago
I don't entirely agree. In CL, people pass around slurp-file snippets like: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/89501db253... Further, Clojure's slurp has an optional encoding argument. (I'm glancing at its sourcecode, in th
8.
by tayssir 17y ago
And a possible future feature is something like statically-checked locking, where order-of-acquisition issues are dealt with.
9.
by tayssir 17y ago
I often wished that I had a cyborg-mode: gaming with a very programmable interface. (With basically something like Emacs and a REPL.) I could teach the computer new things as I explored, and eventually start to play in a very high-level way
10.
by tayssir 17y ago
Well, the many tools for _The Elements of Computing Systems_ are written in Java, which makes it easy for people to experiment. http://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/software.html So perhaps a conceivable bonus is that SICP can somehow be merged wit
11.
by tayssir 17y ago
Well, I think lots of people feel smarter with a better programming language. For instance, my ability to come up with better solutions is better when programming with Clojure than with PHP. It's like that saying, that perspective is worth
12.
by tayssir 17y ago
There's also a Java version (I haven't tried either). http://www.webtoolkit.eu/jwt#/
13.
by tayssir 17y ago
Actually, Ha-Joon Chang pointed out that the economic powerhouses (US, UK, Japan, etc.) relied on enormous protectionism when they were developing. However, now that they're powerful, they "kick away the ladder" and push developing nations
14.
by tayssir 17y ago
You might like Bertrand Russell's 1930 _The Conquest of Happiness_. At least if you're the target audience: "I shall confine my attention to those who are not subject to any extreme cause of outward misery. I shall assume a sufficient incom
15.
by tayssir 17y ago
I agree in the sense that Iraq is current affairs... though invading armies often rewarded useful locals, when setting up client states. (Recently, I saw "Terry Jones' Barbarians," which depicted an instance when this went disastrously wron
16.
by tayssir 17y ago
I like politics, but the connection to Hacker News is a bit tenuous. Compared to links on (say) DARPA, where domestic US techies have gotten federal subsidy due to war spending. There is no need to focus on some Iraqi guy when the US tech i
17.
by tayssir 17y ago
Kernighan and Mashey mentioned in "The UNIX Programming Environment" (1981): "Success or failure often depends on nontechnical factors, whose importance often goes unrecognized by those who evaluate systems on purely technical terms." And t
18.
by tayssir 17y ago
Transistors are an interesting case. AT&T was a government-supported monopoly, allowing it to pursue expensive blue-sky research. And since transistors were expensive, the government purchased 100% of the advanced transistors until they
19.
by tayssir 17y ago
I think this is too dismissive of other forms of revolution. I like Michael Albert's explanation of revolution, which is a fundamental change in at least one of a society's defining institutions. http://www.zmag.org/zspace/commentaries/256
20.
by tayssir 17y ago
I think he means that that argument sounds similar to the ones actually given by slavery's supporters. I've heard an old economic argument that chattel slavery is better than wage slavery (what we have now), because you treat something you
21.
by tayssir 17y ago
I agree. I think that after automation, whatever residue of crap jobs in society should be shared in an equitable way. Participatory Economics (parecon for short) offers one decentralized way of doing this; maybe people know of others. htt
22.
by tayssir 17y ago
I don't think that's true. I know many people who work towards a classless society, which isn't segmented into groups with antagonistic interests. After all, no one believes in the class societies of the past, like under the pharoahs, feuda
23.
by tayssir 17y ago
Women might also be filtered out by gatekeepers: teachers, advisers, interviewers and admissions committees. In an earlier thread, I quoted a physicist who wrote about this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=625431 (Not to mention peer
24.
by tayssir 17y ago
I'm reminded of Smolin's _The Trouble with Physics_: > Note that whereas there have always been talented women musicians, the number of women hired by orchestras rose significantly when candidates began auditioning behind a screen. This