gordianknot

23 ms·

1.
by gordianknot 14y ago
And authoritarians, believing in criminalization of both. Gun laws reflect a society's general property rights, and drug laws their intellectual freedom.
2.
by gordianknot 14y ago
No, but it is a Brave New World. We're the ones out on that island with the artists and scientists. We make tools of change, but sell them off so that we can go on bike rides. It's hedonism; this is the New Gilded Age.
3.
by gordianknot 14y ago
Humans are social animals, and awareness of a negative state of our community makes us sad or mad, which seems meant to drive us to action. Evolution appears to be mostly about the code (genes), not the client (mind) or machine (body). From
4.
by gordianknot 14y ago
I hear you, and can relate to the romance and frustration! I was in grade school when JS was released... but've been writing it for over 10 years now. I tried "everything" else, and it's made be a better JS hacker, but I feel like I'm doing
5.
by gordianknot 14y ago
I use Python at work because I have to, but I'd rather be writing JavaScript.
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by gordianknot 14y ago
To me that's the value proposition actually. Invest in learning and collaborating now, then be ahead of the curve in a few years (if interested in getting hired) or be ready to capitalize and know how to hire and make software that only cou
7.
by gordianknot 14y ago
Adoption isn't the problem. We don't need Congress to use such a system initially; we need bills, the US Code, etc. mirrored on Github. When it's there, people will get it. The information is out there, it just needs to be processed into a
8.
by gordianknot 14y ago
"Consider the source" is always relevant, and always a weak argument. Regardless of who wrote it, the main point of the article seems to be that hackers working in essentially utopian communities risk being out of touch with their users. It
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by gordianknot 14y ago
Or we just migrate to self-driving electric cars, with the batteries serving as Intergrid energy storage.
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Blizzard has learned 11 lessons on innovation that can help almost any business(innovation.freedomblogging.com)
26 points by gordianknot 19y ago|3 comments
11.
by gordianknot 19y ago
You should write What Made Basic Different.
12.
by gordianknot 19y ago
I'd tend to agree on those who want to replace HTML/CSS/JS with some other abstraction. What I'm suggesting is that they're arbitrarily divided and should be unified under one syntax, which then compiles into the served "bytecode." JSON w
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by gordianknot 19y ago
Built-in data structures are a big point of categorization of langs on my end. To me, the defining feature of Java is its classical structure. If you got rid of classes, you'd have a different language (in the interface sense). And interfac
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by gordianknot 19y ago
Okay, and I would look to hashtables as the best way of describing these "sets."
15.
by gordianknot 19y ago
Maybe they have. What system are you using?
16.
by gordianknot 19y ago
I was only talking about the code itself, the primary metaphor of the programming language, not what the language actually represents. Most langs that I've encountered are structured as semi-formalized strings (i.e. C-derived langs), where
17.
by gordianknot 19y ago
I've never looked at CLOS. But, what I mean is the "dominant metaphor," which I suspect is still lists. I'll just go through my probably plebeian understanding. Arrays are to lists as hashtables are to objects. An array, in my mind, is a li
18.
by gordianknot 19y ago
Really what are classes other than sugary hashtables?
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by gordianknot 19y ago
Thanks for the tip. I've heard some good things about Lua, but never gone further than Wikipedia.
20.
by gordianknot 19y ago
I mean failure like the tyrannosaurus rex. That is, from an an evolutionary perspective. Not at the arbitrary present. And I'd wager that Perl is still actually more used than Python or Ruby, it just doesn't get the love on social news site
21.
by gordianknot 19y ago
Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby are all interesting failures. They are important for their effect on languages that will last longer (Lisp, ECMAScript) though. Edit: I don't mean these are "failures" now, just that they're doomed in the long ru
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by gordianknot 19y ago
The power of a programming language is proportional to its capability for innate abstraction. If that's true, it follows list-oriented languages are inherently inferior to their hashtable-oriented brethren. (These orientations are often mis
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by gordianknot 19y ago
What makes Lisp a "smart" language?
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by gordianknot 19y ago
Noise != usage. Don't confuse attention with popularity. I think about the language and post comments about it on forums and read great Lisp code (e.g. Arc), but I'd never actually use it for anything non-trivial. Why? Because I write web a
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by gordianknot 19y ago
What's the misunderstanding exactly?
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by gordianknot 19y ago
It's not "syntax," it's human parseability. Lisp is hard to parse because humans don't think in lists. Some people are smart enough or naturally able to overcome that obstacle, but most aren't.
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by gordianknot 19y ago
Can't wait for the Google Trends API. Holiday sex searches skyrocket, news stories plummet: http://www.google.com/trends?q=sex%2C+porn&ctab=0&ge... Ramadan? http://www.google.com/trends?q=sex%2C+woman&ctab=0&g... (note t
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by gordianknot 19y ago
Exchanges are much more primitive than search before Google. I'll hold you to that assertion... :)
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Grand Theft Auto IV Hands-on(kotaku.com)
1 points by gordianknot 19y ago|0 comments
30.
by gordianknot 19y ago
Same here... Using Safari for the moment.

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