nicolaus | 6 years ago | on: Lycos is still around and its search is pretty good
I always read that in my mind as “shit mill” am I alone?
nicolaus's comments
nicolaus | 12 years ago | on: Googling ourselves to death
The article conflates what I can do online with what my government, via projects like PRISM and others we've not heard of. My government using the same tools as I can use, perhaps augmenting it to do it on a larger scale, is not the same thing as my government using its vast resources and monopoly on coercive power to muscle its way into everything everyone can and has said with impunity.
nicolaus | 13 years ago | on: Dear YC companies, I responded. You could do the same.
You can't substitute a cheaper intern for a full time employee in the US for the same reasons you state. It's even questionable to have interns working on anything that adds to the bottom line of your business.
nicolaus | 13 years ago | on: The Web Is Becoming Smalltalk
This exactly. Tim Berners Lee and Roy Fielding both conceived of the web as a giant Lisp machine oriented around the URL / Hypermedia concept. HTML and the subsequent XML is a crippled form of an s-expression. If you change the tags into parens, map the functions into visual structure, you have a Lisp. TBL's first web browser in 1991 was a two-way client: you could edit the page and submit it back to the server and it would publish it. ReST is how distributed computing was meant to work in a homoiconic language. And JSON? C'mon, change the colon, bang, it's a Lisp. Lisp is fundamental; the AST is the avatar of all languages.
nicolaus | 13 years ago | on: The Long Strange Trip to Java (1996)
The sad part about this is how they kicked Bill Joy off the team because he wanted Java to have closures, functions as first class types, etc and nobody else did.
nicolaus | 13 years ago | on: Why We’re Building Collections
I was a boy when I first saw that icon of a hard disk on a Macintosh System 6 desktop. The moment I saw it, I knew, instantly, EXACTLY what it implied and felt a deep sense of satisfaction that the person who came up with that (ostensibly a PARC person, not an Apple person, of course) was indeed a poet, probably someone who could gaze at a Magritte painting for an hour, just enjoying it.
The file-system-as-a-tree was and remains a powerful and useful abstraction ... that very few people are aware of. Not morons: my wife is brilliant, but when she saves that complex XCell doc with all its pivot tables, formulas and summations, she still appears to have no clue what happened to it.
And since the rest of the engineering community has also decided that the file system tree is "too hard" for people to understand, they are doing away with it on tablets now too: ever save or download something on your ipad (or apad for that matter) and struggle to find it?
So if mere mortals cannot understand where a file went on the file system tree, I sincerely feel like these poor guys writing Collections are handing a machine gun to a cave man by which they will be clubbed to death with.
nicolaus | 13 years ago | on: Ask HN: Know of a hacker in Cambridge or Boston who wants a bookstore?
Offer access to one of these as a service? http://hackaday.com/2012/11/16/google-books-team-open-source...
nicolaus | 13 years ago | on: The definitive guide to forms based website authentication
Or use Mozilla Persona. http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/persona/
nicolaus | 13 years ago | on: Mitt Romney Calls Tesla a 'Loser'
When the government set up and fostered the development of the Internet, was it picking winners and losers then, too?
nicolaus | 14 years ago | on: Rob Pike comments on Ryan Dahl's rant
I recall this missive from Linus Torvalds on the design of Linux:
"If you want to see a system that was more thoroughly _designed_, you should probably point not to Dennis and Ken, but to systems like L4 and Plan-9, and people like Jochen Liedtk and Rob Pike. And notice how they aren't all that popular or well known? "Design" is like a religion - too much of it makes you inflexibly and unpopular."
nicolaus | 14 years ago | on: When the elephants dance, the chickens must be careful
I own a Kindle. I like it. I have, however, never bought anything from Amazon on my kindle because of the power this gives to Amazon. I use it to store and read _3rd party ebooks_ only. This is also the reason I do not own an iPad or an iPhone: I will not give up that much control and information to any one company. People like me do not exist in large numbers today. We will exist in large numbers tomorrow. Enjoy this revenge of the CD-ROM / Walled Garden model while it lasts. The lack of privacy / control experiment will not last forever.
nicolaus | 14 years ago | on: Ask HN: Where is the Django community?
You forgot step -1> Write a test
nicolaus | 15 years ago | on: C++ in Coders at Work
In 15 years of experience where Java sadly pays the bills, for example, systems written in that language that had a modeling approach that tended toward immutability and tended to limit the visibility of mutable state throughout the system were also more understandable, more amenable to change and therefore better than those that weren't. Irrespective of concurrency and parallelism!
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