seri

Unix tools are very powerful, but they are not as intuitive as I would like. It would be nice if we can have an httpie for process management, one for text manipulation, another for system stats, and so on.

I still hold that grief. If not for SC2, we could still be watching another Flash vs Jaedong today. So SC2 basically killed a source of entertainment for me.

> Seems Larry decided he knew better.

Apparently he did. In the same biography, Isaacson wrote that "asking for advice to run a company" was just a clever way for Larry to visit Jobs in peace, playing to his ego, so to speak, as Jobs still held a grudge against Android.

Google is a very different company from Apple anyway. At Apple, innovation runs top-down, from the likes of Jobs and Ive to Foxconn workers. At Google, innovation runs bottom-up.

Very often articles of this nature end up being either too abstract and too vague or too detailed and I would lose focus midway. This is very finely written.

I like advantages (1) and (3). I have a bad feeling about (2), however. And there is one immediate disadvantage I can think of: the required comments for down-voting would dilute the average karma, which is important for some people.

One solution is to treat comments that explain down-votes differently than normal comments. That would complicate the system a bit but maybe it will be worth it.

Huge opening theory and high draw rate are primarily the reasons why I switched to another mind game called Gomoku. Gomoku, when played at a high level, requires as much depth as Chess. Go is a also good choice but I find Gomoku much easier to keep in my life.

I am still patiently waiting for a more up-to-date of Okasaki's classic with examples written in Haskell.

Seeing how down-voted you are makes me scared of the US work environment. Looks like the only way to avoid any potential trouble is to act like a robot not just at work but also at company outings.

I may as well throw in my implementation in Go here: https://github.com/seri/goalgo/blob/master/st/llrb.go

LLRB definitely isn't as sweet as advertised, but saying it's a scam is a bit too much.

Thank you for this. Got me really interested in folly now.

Does anybody know a stable Lua package for HTML scraping, preferrably similar to Nokogiri or Beautiful Soup?

Under free opening rules, Gomoku has been proved to be sure-win for black, aka the first player. This work done by Victor Allis could be part of the reason why Gomoku is undeservedly treated as a toy board game.

We have to remember, however, that this proof is computer search based. There was never an algorithm to find the best move given a random position. In other words, it only proves that these certain openings will guarantee black a win.

Those who loved the game came up with new opening rules. The world championships in 1989 and 1991 used the pro rule. After some evolutions, swap2 now became the standard. Under Gomoku swap2, the first player puts two black stones and one white stone on the board, and the second player can either pick one color, or puts two more stones and gives back the power to choose color to the first player.

I know about Connect6, and also a branch called Renju. But I find Gomoku more attractive. You should totally try it sometimes.

Yup, Gomoku is a much more difficult game than it looks. Indeed, the game is challenging enough that there is a world championship every odd year. You can find the games from the last world championship here: http://renju.net/media/games.php?gameid=45016

I am amazed by the fact that Gomoku can be so hard to master with rules so simple you can explain to a five year old. And unlike Chess where there are a hundred year of theories to learn from before you can get going, Gomoku is still new. After a few weeks studying the standard surewin openings, you can expect to see things in a very different light and the game will get much more interesting.

Perhaps Gomoku is best known for programmers as a problem to solve. But it is nowhere near being solved. In fact, the best software are weaker than many top players.

I find Gomoku hits the sweet spot when it comes to my desire to play board games. It doesn't consume much of my time. I am always excited to find those long and obscure wins. I think the game needs more love from programmers like me.

Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/GomokuWorld Play here: http://www.playok.com/en/gomoku/ Or here: http://fumind.com

    There's a reason these guys don't call themselves a 
    "social utility" anymore... But anyway, that's a whole    
    'nother subject

I am reposting my comment on Google+ as it seems relevant to the point raised here:

"""Social networking has two vital utilities. First, it connects people of different geographical locations but of similar interests. The graph of people connected by shared interests is called the interest graph.

Secondly, it enriches existing real life relationships. This is best described within the pre-Facebook era, the era of blogging. At that point, whenever I read a friend's blog, I was always amazed by how much I don't know about him or her. A blog captures something very different about a person, something one can't comprehend even through face to face conversation. In this sense, online social networking is complementing real life social interaction.

In my vision, social networks of the future will continue to push to the limit on each of these fronts. The interest graph is apparently nowhere near complete, and there are opportunities to look for in what is missing through face to face communication, and how software can help with that.

But what Facebook has been doing is much more pervasive than that. They are partly replacing real life interaction. There are less questions to ask of a person as Facebook already shows you whether she has a boyfriend and which bar she went to last night. They are exploiting the narcissism in each and every of us. Every other social network solves a problem and then stays out of our ways. Facebook is trying to become the social life itself."""

I independently ended up with the same impression with the OP. Go feels just like a statically typed Lua. Not only does Go inherits Lua in some specific language features as pointed out by the OP, but it also learns from Lua's design philosophy: be minimal.

When I was going through my journey with Go discovery, I noticed that the Go authors obsessively tried to keep the syntax size small. There is only one looping construct. The only polymorphism mechanism is interface, but interfaces are both very simple and flexible. This is like what Lua does with tables.

This also means that when a feature introduces complexity into the language, the Go authors choose to discard it. There are advantages and disadvantages with exceptions, but I think what ultimately motivated the Go authors to leave exceptions behind is that it may complicate things. And Go also doesn't have any kind of compile-time generic, so one can't write functions like append() and copy() in pure Go.

First of all, I should state more clearly that I am describing my view of a dream editor rather than what I think should be done right in the Vim community. That editor will keep the core functionality of Vim, and probably the core code base, but it will have to rewrite the interface from scratch, with Lua being chosen as the only embedding language.

I am not too unhappy with the current situation by any means, but it's precisely because I have a biased relationship with Vim that I feel uneasy seeing how civilized it is to write extensions for other editors.

That said, while my dream editor probably won't be Vim 8.0, it may be in the form of a brand new fork. I do think that sounds practical.

About your first concern, historically speaking, programmers as a community don't seem to mind porting things from one platform to another. It's actually quite a fun thing to do, especially if the new platform is polishedly designed.

Your second point is interesting. I admit it's something I haven't thought of and only sounds obvious now that you say it. I would say my dream editor will have to sacrifice the command mode altogether. If there is something you type in the command mode very often, you write it as a Lua function and bind to a key.

Likewise. Although the API documentation for ST2 is not yet mature as the API itself is changing, having written against ST1, I must say the experience feels much more intuitive and modular than writing for Vim.

Pathogen is great, but I would love to see a near-complete rewrite for the Vim ecosystem. This rewrite will inherit the bundle structure from modern editors like Sublime Text and Textadept. Sorry Vimscript, you just have to go. And I would pick Lua rather than Python as the interfacing language.

I'm saying all this because I still prefer using Vim to anything else.

I was less impressed with Microsoft's performance than their team spirit. After all, the mere fact that MSFT has way more employees than the other teams already means that they should be stronger. However, I was surprised that they set up an internal league to select who will get to play, and that there were many MSFT people watching together live on the grand finals day. It just seems like they take fun seriously (to quote Day9 himself), and that's pretty cool IMO.

That was awesome, sir. I love the attention to details in the scenario you described and your analysis. I only picked up the hobby of watching Starcraft about 6 months ago (I watch more Broodwar than Starcraft II), but I used to play a lot, albeit at an amateur level. I watched popular casters like diggity, Klazart, Nuke, and moletrap. However, sometimes I don't quite understand why the winner wins even though I have consumed a lot of theories in advance, perhaps for the exact reason you just pointed out. There are good comments on Team Liquid every now and then but the site is hard to browse with 100 pages on average for a popular game.

Do you write game analysis like this somewhere, or do you know where I can read something similar?

Day9 hosted an event called The After Hours Gaming League in which eight tech companies will compete each other for charity. The event has just finished its first season with team Microsoft crushing everyone else. Zynga is the runner up and Google claimed third place.

Games: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ahgl Homepage: http://afterhoursgaming.tv/

There are a number of interesting game theory articles on competitive Starcraft. This is one: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=258... (and my comment to it: https://plus.google.com/116918963723558831013/posts/A8DRTY11...).

  I disagree that our country would be a better place 
  if we all spent even more time blowing sunshine up 
  each other's butts. 

I completely share your view. In fact, the software industry is a perfect one to be in if you want to enjoy life without having to make noise and conform to social norms. And while I personally like to have diversified relationships, the industry as a whole has a rich enough culture for us to be comfortable on our own.

In comparision, I love Mathematics, but the field is too narrow. I have heard stories about how investment bankers hate their crowds. And lawyers are always in stiff competition with one another. Looking from this perspective, the software community is similar to the designers' community. We share a lot and we genuinely like each other. Well, maybe that's a problem itself. We tend to form into cults and we are too ignorant with what else is going on in the world, hence we tend to be more socially awkward. But that's an internal problem and not an external one. We have to fix that individually.

However, while I don't think we should strive for more publicity and social status, not having enough cash can hurt. This is a real issue. In my country, on average, a programmer gets paid as much as an accountant, if not less. I know a lot of couples where the guy is a coder and the girl is an accountant, and they eventually had to break up partly because the girl is earning more.

The content of the orignal post may be questionable, but I feel it was written in a way that would trigger a heated debate. For that, mission accomplished. There has been many wise comments, but they all choose to take a branch of the post to dig into. Not to blame them, as the question raised here is basically:

    The software industry has huge impact on human lives 
    but such impact has not been materialized in terms of
    both cash and social status for its practicioners. 
    True or false? 

And it boils down to too many things to talk about all at once. Maybe it would help to break them into sub-topics to make it easier to link the seemingly disconnected but insightful points posted here:

1. Are lawyers and investment bankers overpaid? If they are overpaid, one can't say software engineers are underpaid by comparing to them.

2. So the software industry impacts lives, but is it all positive? Maybe society isn't that much better off with all this digitalization. There is a chance that the total value of the industry is being inflated.

3. Are we concerned that the median and average salaries of software engineers are too low (a), or are we concerned that the elite programmers are not being paid as high as top attorneys (b)? We can solve (a) by raising barriers to entry, much like in other elite fields, but is that a good thing to do? As for (b), elite programmers are now called startup founders. If entrepreneurship is made easier in the software industry, then things seem fair.

4. Now speaking of social status, I think programmers aren't cool because nerds aren't cool, not because they are paid less. Pick a programmer and an accountant with the same salary, and the accountant is more likely to shine in social outings. But if the whole industry raises its average salary, then yes, the social status of being a coder will increase. We are back to the question raised in (3a).

5. About political power, I think this is more of a problem with motivation. To be motivated enough to run for office, you have to be hungry for fame and power. However, it's a good point that the government could benefit from having more top engineers. See a related post: http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2011/08/22/linux-and-the-fina...

6. Is China really on the right track?

I use FuzzyFinder (http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1984) instead of Command-T, and I would also add:

Endwise: https://github.com/tpope/vim-endwise, Matchit: https://github.com/tsaleh/vim-matchit, NerdTree: https://github.com/scrooloose/nerdtree, Surround: https://github.com/tpope/vim-surround, Snipmate: https://github.com/msanders/snipmate.vim (compulsory)

You caught me. In the past, I used to express my opinions, which are often strong and controversial, aggressively, but over time, I learnt that it's in my interest to make a consolation point toward people with opposite opinions in public places. "So this is my opinion and that is yours. We differ a bit but we are still friends, right?" I don't do that in my own writings, however.

And IMO isn't nearly as good as the earlier one. "I Am Nothing" has a self-help tone that puts me off, and the number of sentences per substance is too low for my liking.

Paul Graham did end up with a similar conclusion, but on the process of leading to it, he kept exploring possibilities. What social behaviors could be objectively explained by the excess of identity? Although he did end up telling his readers what to do, that was just a coincidence. He looked out for the truths and they happen to lead to something that could be applied in real life.

But it all comes down to a matter of taste, and I do greatly admire Paul Buchheit as a person.

I wasn't impressed with the original article. It didn't attempt to define intelligence at all. If it tried to make the point that the social perception of intelligence is only for economic convenience, I found this short comment more insightful: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2884857. If it is about how academics overrate their intelligence and are therefore reluctant to get out of their comfort zone, the point wasn't very well made (http://www.theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-el... is a detailed treatment). And if it is about telling a story, I find yours much more inspiring.

I'm with you. The discussions around Airbnb are a living example of how HN has turned into Reddit. When I read about this event elsewhere, I do expect to see mob mentality and cheap sentiment, just so I can confirm what the majority is reacting. Not on HN.

As in: I have a Highschool circle and add my highschool classmates in it. I can then share it to all my classmates so they don't have to do the same work again.

Or: I have a circle containing all great hackers. I then post the link to it here on Hacker News so everybody can have that whole circle with a single click.