globalrev

A lot of web companies raise loads of money and you often read claims of profit or at least enormous revenue. But do they actually make a profit? I have searched and tried to figure this out and there doesn't seem to be…

I am into machine-learning already and I want to get into fabbers and self-replicating machines and nano-technology. Is there any field that combines them all? Like could I use machine learning to figure stuff out in…

Just learned some tricks in #python in IRC-freenode: I have heard a lot of complaints about Pythons lambdas being crippled but Python does allow if-else in lambdas, I didn't know before. Not in the ordinary Python way…

This just puzzled me. I recently found out that you can't run a REPL in VIM. OK, so how do you use interpreted languages if you use VIM? C-c C-l, C-c C-e, etc is kind of the whole point no? Don't you miss a lot of…

Would there be an energy crisis if we replaced all powersources with nuclear power plants? And then started using electric cars? And then put all energy-research into solarpower to replace nuclear power when there is a…

Most OSes and systems programming in general is mostly done in C (and C++?). The language has some clear flaws from what I understand but there aren't really any alternatives are there? Why is C so fast? Because people…

About 6 months ago I decided to learn either Python or Ruby because I wanted a language to write webapps and simple computergames fast. I kind of tried both for a while and Python gave the better impression in every…

Why is it that so many times, even among good programmers, the Fibonacci function is misimplemented? Here it is from the OCaml tutorial: <<#let rec fib n = # if n < 2 then 1 else fib(n-1) + fib(n-2);; val…

Didn't think I'd be the one to say this since my first reaction to Hacker News was that I was very turned off and offended by downvotes without motivations. My rule is: * Upvote good posts that you agree with. * Comment…

Which programming languages should I learn if I want to do mobile apps? Which can you use for each platform? * iPhone: Objective C(only?) * Symbian-phones(Ericsson, Nokia etc): Java and C, Python on some Nokia? Correct?…

What do you think the future OS will be like? Will it be abolished? Here are some (admittedly clueless) suggestions: * The WebOS was first invented 7-8 years ago or so and now there are several. No big success so far…

(Maybe this type of post is not for hacker news since it is pure discussion). Knol. Does Google promise that their search results are always sorted by relevance or would it be ok to list Knol - entries as top results…

Maybe this doesn't fit here but everyone likes music and this site ist just the most awesome ever and I just recently found about it(through hacker news!) though it has been around since 2002. I have been searching for…

What is your political view(ask fast for missed ideologies)? * Liberal * Neo-con * Conservative * Socialdemocrat * Environmentalist/Green * Anarcho-capitalist * Socialist * Anarchist * Commmunist * Social-liberal *…

I am curious about computational complexity, P, NP and so on. Wikipedia gives a good basic insight but doesn't go very deep. What books do you recommend? Plus points for one that discusses how parallelism fits into this.

http://davidadewumi.com/2008/07/06/why-are-black-nerds-so-unpopular/ On this site and a lot of others, most often serious bloggers, there are really annoying ads. Insetad of having them in a nice column on the side some…

Going through SICP, in the last lectures they are going through register machines, compilers etc. Abelson mentions a for LISP-chip/machine that was more parallelized(yeah spell that) than an ordinary chip. What was the…

This maybe isn't suited to Hacker News but is there anyone on this forum that don't use Firefox 3? I just switched from Firefox 2 and having both Safari and IE installe don my computer and while I thought Firefox 2 was…

There is so much talk about concurrency and parallelism these days. Well Erlang is made for concurrent systems right? Not multiple cores. Clojure Scala What other languages are made for programming concurrency? And are…

Guess many of you know this already. But is Reddit really worth that much? Their income-source is one big ad on the right that I never even thought about clicking.…

Is there a review of all the ycombinator startups somewhere? I think I have seen such data before, at least about how many of them were still businesses out of the total number of funded companies. (Btw is it Firefox or…

Just got to say this to all you netbeaners, eclipsers etc out there. Today i finally groked what makes Emacs so good. I havent groked Emacs itself yet but all the IDEs i have tried have disappointed, they are big, slow…