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Re:Challenging Clojure in Common Lisp (2014) on Sunday January 08, 2017 @05:21PM (#13352408)
Clojure doesn't just "strongly prefer" immutable data but syntactically ensures that all data is immutable unless governed by one of four concurrency mechanisms. Persistent data structures aren't just a popular convention in Clojure--the language is literally built around them.
Re:Perl 6.0 released on Saturday December 26, 2015 @05:34PM (#10795531)
Oh, I'm not asserting that it is, just that it sounds like it might be, based on the description in the Github README. If you're actually familiar with Perl 6 and don't view that to be true, I'd trust your assessment over my hypothesis!
Re:Perl 6.0 released on Saturday December 26, 2015 @02:09PM (#10794883)
Except that Ruby's translation into English was literally the cause of Perl's decline.

Perl was intended to be a highly concise shell-like language that excelled at text processing. Partly in order to achieve such concision, the syntax overloaded various symbols to mean completely different things in different syntactic contexts, which made it very difficult for humans to parse quickly unless they worked in it very frequently (I recall the authors of either the llama or camel book estimating five times a week as the minimum). As Perl grew in popularity, objects were added on, and the whole language felt cobbled together. Perl users mainly used it as a shell replacement or for CGI scripts. Larger projects tended to be the domain of Python (or Java if concision was no longer a requirement).

And then came Ruby with syntax that was friendlier to Perl programmers than Perl itself, yet was semantically consistent, had built-in object support, and could rival Python for projects of any size, while surpassing it for the "quick and dirty scripts" that Perl excelled at. The conversation stopped being about Perl vs. Python and became Ruby vs. Python. People stopped using Perl 5.

So Perl 6 might very well be a lot more similar to Ruby (and even to Python if we exclude syntax) than it is to Perl 5.

Re:Perl 6.0 released on Saturday December 26, 2015 @02:18AM (#10793550)
The bulleted description sounds almost exactly like a description of Ruby, and I don't mean this sarcastically.
Pretty sure it used to be <$20k for the same ~7%. The main value of YC has always been the training, network, and vote of confidence, not the funding. Not everyone finds it worth it for their particular situation, but many do.
Nope it's very clear once you know what to look for, as long as you're looking at something highly polarized. I still have this superpower about five hours later.
Took me an hour but I got it! Staring at a solid background on my Nexus 5 on full brightness in a pitch black room did the trick. Horizontal linear oscillation was more noticeable for me than vertical for some reason, which meant holding my phone in landscape mode. The brush pattern is significantly fainter on my laptop than my phone, and I seem to lose the effect every few minutes when using my laptop. I've been able to bring it back by glancing back at my phone in landscape. This is really, really cool by the way.
Re:Ask HN: Who are your favorite poets? on Monday March 30, 2015 @05:55PM (#9292887)
I'm not sure who the poet was, but here's an old Chinese poem that I love. My translation doesn't quite do it justice, but...

少小離家老大回 鄉音無改鬢毛衰 兒童相見不相識 笑問客從何處來

I left my hometown as a young boy and returned as an old man.

The local speech hadn't changed, but the hair on my head had.

The children looked at me but recognized me not.

Laughing, they asked from where this visitor had come.

Re:How Betty, Who Is 89, Gets Her News on Wednesday March 11, 2015 @06:59PM (#9188045)
It would seem they also have far better short-term visual memory than typical humans. Or maybe that's the result of practice. Time to find out...
Re:Vimb – Vim-Like Web Browser on Sunday March 08, 2015 @04:15AM (#9164990)
VimFx too - It's basically a clone of Vimium for Firefox, meaning it alters Firefox far less than Vimperator/Pentadactyl. There was previously a Firefox add-on that shared the name Vimium, but it doesn't seem to be maintained anymore.
Re:I Am Releasing Ten Million Passwords on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @12:39AM (#9025566)
Strange. Almost every article I'm finding echoes the EFF's statement about 48 months, but Judge Lindsay's own explanation of the sentencing is as Orin Kerr says. I wonder where that 48 figure came from.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp-cont...

Re:I Am Releasing Ten Million Passwords on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @12:00AM (#9025463)
The threats actually accounted for 48 of the 63 months according to the EFF article that the OP linked to.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/01/eff-statement-barrett-...

Card College by Roberto Giobbi is pricey but provides excellent instruction. If you don't mind reading older, more formal language (though not as old as Erdnase!), The Royal Road to Card Magic by Hugard and Braue, and its sequel Expert Card Technique, cover more material than Giobbi at a fraction of the cost, albeit with slightly less attention to the subtleties of finger position.
Re:Why the snow forecast for New York City was so bad on Tuesday January 27, 2015 @02:19PM (#8955066)
Agreed if you can only report one figure, but the point of the article is that forecasters did only report one figure when they should have made it clear that there were competing models with very different predictions.
Re:The Ronco Principle on Tuesday January 20, 2015 @02:28PM (#8918909)
Conversely, one might not realize that "famous investor X" is actually a really awesome, caring human until getting to know them in person.
Re:Be My Eyes – Lend your eyes to the blind on Thursday January 15, 2015 @07:30PM (#8896469)
Contributions to Wikipedia are not time-sensitive, and the ability to load a Wikipedia article is not dependent on the availability of volunteering Wikipedia gnomes. Here, the availability of seeing volunteers at any given time is the limiting reagent, and the free market is one proposed solution. The Uber/Lyft/taxi analogy is that the availability of friends with cars and free time at any given time or place is the limiting reagent for getting free rides. The existence of paid services allows us to increase that availability by orders of magnitude, and hopefully the same would apply here.
Re:Obama calls for municipal broadband on Wednesday January 14, 2015 @08:16PM (#8890340)
Right. Free market alternative should be able to beat government, so in cases where the free market isn't producing acceptable results, rather than forcing them to change through legislation, government can just compete with them until they beat the government.
Re:Obama calls for municipal broadband on Wednesday January 14, 2015 @07:53PM (#8890255)
I think the parent is asking/claiming that public options are almost universally less desirable than the product of self-interest in the presence of competition, so their main effect is just to ensure that the private would-be monopolies need to actually provide a good service.

In domains like Internet infrastructure and health insurance which are empirically pretty terrible when there's no public option, I think there's a lot to be said for that argument.

Is it "fair" for a monopoly to have to compete against an organization that has nearly infinite resources but terribly inefficient operating ability? I don't know. Maybe yes, maybe no. Is it fair to huge ISPs to impose net neutrality on them? Maybe yes, maybe no. But it's no less fair for them than not having net neutrality would be for companies who want to use that infrastructure. It's certainly no less fair than life would be for a child who can't afford access to health care in a black market-like total laissez-faire economic system. I'd prefer to live in an imperfect implementation of capitalism that tries to regulate out negative externalities when possible (despite often failing) and provide as much fairness for as many people as possible, to one that provides so much "fairness" to certain corporations that they can make the game unfair for everyone else, people and companies alike.

In addition to incorrect instinct, heuristics, and prejudice, there are also cases where a hiring manager's instinct correctly identifies problems with a candidate but where they then lie about the rationale because being direct would seem too insulting (e.g. "You strike me as a dishonest/unfriendly/lazy/[insert insult] person").
Re:Elon Musk AMA on Tuesday January 06, 2015 @02:28PM (#8846397)
I think you're confusing the parent's use of "primary" + "source" with the lexical item "primary source". The parent presumably meant "one of the most main sources [to use as one's only or first point of research]".

Sort of separately, but as threeseed points out, Wikipedia is frequently used as a corpus for primary research, so technically it's that kind of "primary source" too.

Re:A tiling window manager written in Rust on Wednesday December 17, 2014 @02:06PM (#8763707)
Agreed in concept, but you can get similar if not greater productivity gains from stacking/floating WMs that let you move and resize windows into a tiling-like configuration. Examples are goomwwm and subtle.

This "manual tiling" approach is also probably the only viable option for tiling-like window management on OS X. While not nearly as powerful or productivity-promoting as the above-mentioned WMs or conventional tiling ones, the OS X program Spectacle (http://spectacleapp.com) makes life a lot easier on OS X for those of us who are used to the screen real estate and keyboard control afforded by tiling WMs.

Edit: Another commenter mentioned the non-free Optimal Layout (http://most-advantageous.com/optimal-layout) for OS X. I haven't downloaded the trial yet, but the website makes it look very promising.

Completely different. The Microsoft employee beating his wife would be analogous to an Uber driver beating his wife, neither of which has anything to do with their company's products or services and neither of which would be interesting to HN users. The point here is that this is a case of a driver raping a passenger, which immediately challenges the safety of Uber's model. This is now a component of Uber's perception, much like Elon Musk's blog posts are of Tesla's, and those make it to the front page of HN all the time.
Re:Why Inequality Matters on Thursday October 16, 2014 @12:12PM (#8465662)
The parent was almost certainly referring to the publication the New Yorker.
Re:Move Fast and Break Nothing on Wednesday October 08, 2014 @04:48PM (#8429383)
Well, given that "move fast and break nothing" does have that catchy je ne sais quois (at least to me) that makes a motto resonate, I'm assuming it is controversial in some way. Maybe not in whether it's a good idea but in whether it's even possible. I think it is a pretty controversial/shocking claim to say that you can move with startup efficiency without sacrificing the reliability that slow-moving large corporations with pointy-haired bosses seek. If the industry readily accepted that claim, the industry would look a lot different from how it does now.

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