Viewing profile — tayssir

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 co…

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…

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 agg…

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 fa…

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/200…

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...

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…

And a possible future feature is something like statically-checked locking, where order-of-acquisition issues are dealt with.

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 exp…

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 …

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…

There's also a Java version (I haven't tried either). http://www.webtoolkit.eu/jwt#/

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 powerf…

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 extrem…

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,"…

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. Th…

Kernighan and Mashey mentioned in "The UNIX Programming Environment" (1981): "Success or failure often depends on nontechnical factors, whose importance often goes unrecognized by …

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 governme…

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 definin…

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 …

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 decent…

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…