Will end-user applications ever be truly programmable? If so, how? How about adding some sort of block based scripting language line Scratch or Snap. Make it more approachable and encourage experimentation
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#12> While a lot happened in the US during World War II, it's easy to forget how short the period in question was: American involvement lasted 3 years 8 months and 23 days. How does this stack up against US involvement in other"good" wars, where the foe is the unambiguously bad? I.e not a Vietnam style ideologically motivated confrontation.
A lot will depend on what you personally feel is "good" versus "ideologically motivated".
For example: the US was in World War I for 574 days (declared war on Germany on April 6 1917, and the war ended on November 11 1918), and entered the conflict with the Zimmerman telegram and German submarine attacks as its casus belli.
But the US had been aiding the Allied powers prior to that, and from the German perspective the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, and the resulting attempt to enlist Mexico to join the war against the US, was a defensive move to stem the flow of supplies from the neutral-but-obviously-biased US to Germany's existing opponents.
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#13I really like this format. Asking questions without answering them, this causes the reader to think a lot more than the usual blog post. I also look forward to gaining more insight from the HN comments.
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#14The easy answer for the "Two Sigma" problem is that you... don't try to reproduce it on a large scale by finding some other method.
You provide individual, one-on-one full time tutoring to each student, if that is the analytically best method. It's worth it, since educational spending is close to the most effective public spending imaginable - something in the $3-$5 return per dollar spent, which you'd be hard pressed to find any other available investment that can do that consistently.
This also does away with some substantial percent of the overhead of maintaining separate public schools, assuming that this tutoring occurs in either the tutor's home or the child's home.
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#15"Why are certain things getting so much more expensive?" Because relative prices (e.g. the ratio of the price of a 42" TV to the price of a cinema ticket) are constantly changing due to changes in technology and competitive dynamics. Some things have gotten (and continue to get) much cheaper due to technological progress and economies of scale. So, relative to those, anything that hasn't benefited from the same trend…
Because we live in a very unequal society, things like education that offer a shred of economic security and maintenance of the middle class life are things that people will pay almost anything for.
Unfortunately, most of that effort is noisy but pointless zero-sum re-arranging of positions on the socio-economic ladder, the only beneficiaries being academics, textbook publishers, and campus property developers.
The solution: equality. Guarantee everybody a base level of economic security. From there, give people the freedom to pursue their real passions and interests, rather than waste their lives scrambling over the limited number of economically secure socio-economic positions our dysfunctional society currently offers.
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#16> What's the successor to the book? And how could books be improved? > Books are great (unless you're Socrates). We now have magic ink. As an artifact for effecting the transmission of knowledge (rather than a source of entertainment), how can the book be improved? How can we help authors understand how well their work is doing in practice? (Which parts are readers confused by or stumbling over or skipping?) How can…
I love books, don't get me wrong, but they do age. This is especially true of books that are specialty related. Take a book from the 70s on computers, on medicine or psychology, on prehistory, on history, etc. They are all likely to be significantly outdated compared to their modern counterparts. There is much to be said for the modern way of information transference: it is always most up to date.
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#17> Why can't I connect my editor to a running program and hover over values to see what they last were? Why isn't time-traveling debugging widely deployed? Why can't I debug a function without restarting my program? Why in the name of the good lord are REPLs still textual? Why can't I copy a URL to my editor to enable real-time collaboration with someone else? Why isn't my editor integrated with the terminal? Why does…
> Why can't I debug a function without restarting my program?
This was/is true in C# for 32 bit programs. Being able to code with live data is really productive. Live unit testing also would be a big win.
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#18> Why can't I connect my editor to a running program and hover over values to see what they last were?
What the actual fuck am I witnessing.
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#19Why are programming environments primitive? That’s worth a blog post-length reply, but I think it’s because coding is relatively silo’d and non-standardized (in languages, build systems, deployment schemes, and other tools). The impact of a single better tool is minimal because it could only address a tiny fraction of all developers. This is changing quickly, though, so I’m optimistic. We are working on making progra…
Acrually. For recently popular languages like javascript things are way better than say C or assembly. Resources, tools, debugging, etc.
I'm still wondering why we are forcing people to write assembly with short and rubbish opcode mnemonics when we are going to compile it anyway.
Even if you look at C vs Rust/Go we have made huge improvements. People don't need to write Makefiles anymore. Packages are easily sharable and re-usable. Security is by default. Etc.
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#20> What's the successor to the book? And how could books be improved? > Books are great (unless you're Socrates). We now have magic ink. As an artifact for effecting the transmission of knowledge (rather than a source of entertainment), how can the book be improved? How can we help authors understand how well their work is doing in practice? (Which parts are readers confused by or stumbling over or skipping?) How can…
It seems like PDFs might still work in a hundred years. Just like zip files.
Fun fact: HN's been around for 10% of a century. That makes Arc one of the longer-lived programming languages.
Re: the ability to take books off the shelf and read it, Library Genesis has made a lot of progress in that area. http://libgen.io/