skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It is a logical impossibility to make a language more powerful by omitting features, no matter how bad they may be.

What does "powerful" mean, in programming lanugages? I can think of three meanings:

(1) what it can do. Once a language is Turing complete (call this 1.1), in one sense it can do anything. In another sense (1.2), maybe it can't: I wouldn't attept to write a Unix kernel in Java or a 3-D graphics library in Python because in both cases they are too high level of the task.

(2) how easy it is to program in? I.e. the number of programmer-hours it takes to solve a problem in that language.

(3) how easy it is to automatically reason about programs written in the language. This includes tools such as compilers, source code coverage tools, etc.

Now let's examine the original statement by these 4 criteria. We'll also consider the obverse, i.e. whether you can make a language less powerful by adding features.:

1.1 - if a language is already Turing-complete, removing features won't make it more so. Nor will adding features make it less powerful. But Turing-completeness is a trivial sense, as the article points out.

1.2 - adding eatures can make a language less powerful in this sense, because it can reduce the things it can do. For example, a big complex language with a large standard library might not work on a simple embedded controller, so in that sense it could do less. Or a language might require a certain model of multitasking that means it can't run on certain OS's (e.g. Java couldn't run on early versions of Windows (IIRC either 3.1 or 95 -- I don't remember the details). Or consider that Java is "write-once run anywhere"; adding lots of low level features might imperil this.

2 -- adding features can certainly reduce power here too, e.g. if you have a large C++ program written by a team of programmers each of whom uses a different subset of the language.

3. -- again, adding features can reduce power. For example, in Fortran, an optimising compiler can make assumptions about the code that a C++ compiler can't make because C++ allows pointers to point to anything, e.g.:

int foo(int a, int* b){
a = 1;
*b = 2;
bar(a); /* we don't know here if bar is being called
with parameter of 1 or 2 */
}

So I think the original proposition is false in practical terms.
The latest numbers I could find place Google's search market share in China at 19.8%[0]. Sadly, I think 19.8% of China's internet users is much, much larger than the number of people who decide search providers based on the ethical record of the company.

[0]: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/08/06/google-baidu-sw...
I'm all for taking the high ground, but I highly doubt this will change the Chinese government's behavior. Google doesn't have such a huge market share in China and leaving will only help local competition (e.g. Baidu) that can be more easily controlled by the government. What leverage does Google have? This is really the classic engagement vs. isolation debate.

The only thing that might have any leverage would be to close all their development offices in China. Maybe they are doing this as well?
And interesting to see how Bing responds...
They also say that they are working with the Chinese government to have a completely unfiltered Google.cn in China. Not outright mentioning that the Chinese government was involved could be: 1) a bargaining chip/threat to be in a better negotiating position with the government (i.e. We'll make this evidence public if you don't give us some leeway.) or 2) this could just be a way of making sure they don't sour relations with the Chinese government (in the hopes of having an unfiltered google.cn) before negotiations are concluded/terminated.
Exactly. Parodic or otherwise, he's using his riff on TNF's trademarks for commercial purposes. That seems to be the most important detail, in terms of how suits and rulings have trended, in my (admittedly brief) digging into the topic.
belay that, it was just a confusing error message. fyi, don't leave a trailing '.' on the mx records (even though google explicitly instructs you to).
Texan Wire Wheels-Vintage '83s and '84s wire wheels
pretty bad to pitch your own product on another company's review buddy ;)
Google handles 29% of searches in China (vs. Baidu's 62%) [1] Thanks to javed for the reference.

[1] http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100112/ap_on_hi_te/us_tec_googl...
> Likewise, a child who will eat nothing but fish sticks will likely prefer them to the best filet mignon ever cooked.

Actually the child in your analogue more closely resembles a devoted iPhone user than anything else. The image of a reluctant child being encouraged to try a new food is quite a good match. 'I TOLD you I wouldn't like it' they say.

Of course in the case here we aren't comparing frozen food with high cuisine where 'better' really is obvious. We are comparing the meals of 2 of the most accomplished chefs in town. In that case individual differences in taste are often likely to be the deciding factor.

> It probably won't surprise you that I mostly agree with the hypothetical chefs and authors you cite.

Correlations in taste are to be expected. Within a cluster of highly correlated tastes the notion of 'better' will make more sense. If you chose to define your cluster as being 'better' then by extension you could say that their/your tastes are 'better' in some absolute sense.
Texan Wire Wheels Reinvents The Wire Wheel
Someone wanting to blackmail the activists.
Have you seen http://xpenser.com/ ? Lets you record expenses from email, SMS, Twitter, IM, iPhone, browser search box, voice (call and say it), etc.

They also have a full set of APIs. Maybe you could build on top of their system.
> If Google were dominant in China or making a lot of money, this decision might be a lot tougher.

Not necessarily. It would also depend on what they predict their future prospects to be. If they predict that 5-10 years down the line they will be hard-pressed to be able to grow their business there, they could make such a decision (even if they are making a lot of money there right now).

But this could also be seen as a hostile environment/market too. You're essentially doing business with a country/government that behind the scenes is trying to attack you and/or your customers.
There is a lot of information about search results in the title, summary and cached versions alone. If the results are "sensitive" to the government, that content is highly likely to contradict the sanitised history that is being handed down.
And here is the latter link already on the front page: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china...
Wikileaks brings up a good point... "Should be noted that Google keeps secret how many user's records are disclosed to US intelligence, others." Nonetheless, good on Google for taking a stand.
The Underwear Bomber and Obama’s Anti-Terror Policy
There are supposedly a lot of hyper-nationalistic youths (specifically in the teens-20s age range) in China right now. I could see a group of them being hackers and feeling that they are doing this for the 'honour of their country' or something similar.
"in order to say 'don't be evil' you must already dwell in that space of evil" -Slavoj Zizek at Google: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_x0eyNkNpL0#t=1h13m55s
One Design for HDFS HA from China Mobile Research Institute
Maybe because those requests are part of a lawful subpoena? I'm sure things would be different if they were busy getting hacked by the CIA and FBI.
That may be true, but the facts lend themselves to the implication that the Chinese government is involved. Though that might not be true, it likely is true that the Chinese government is the the single largest entity with the highest interest in these emails.
This just strikes me as so very open to malicious attack. That I can scan networks to find smart phones on Virgin (or other networks), and do no more than a ping flood those IPs to incur thousands of dollars in excess charges to a unwitting person.

It takes the term Denial Of Service attack to an entirely new level of bad.
That should be VMware, not VMWare.
I dunno. The thing that sold it for me was this assertion:

Q. Look, I’m sorry if you feel put-upon here, please don’t
get hostile. I’m just trying to get a clear picture of the
specs I need here. Obviously if I’m going to write a file
copy method, instead of using one of the many extant file
copy routines in various libraries and frameworks, it’s
going to be fulfilling a specialized set of requirements,
and I’m going to need to have good answers for these
questions. If you want, I can hack something together in a
minute, but I’d have to note that there were many
unresolved issues as to requirements and purposes.
It is not a negotiating, it is a choice that Google already made by not censoring search result. Chinese gov is known for the attitude not negotiating with human right activists.
GhostNet
Harjeet Taggar: "excited to be joining the y combinator team"
Think about all the steps that you take to interact with your computer and get something done.

There are 5-6 steps in this process, from booting up your computer to looking for information on the web.

Google wants a stake in every step.

Why? Google wants to organize the world's information, so they can put ads on it!
It does send a pretty clear message though that Google (one of the best known companies in the world) doesn't think it's safe to do business in China.
> I think it only sounds bizarre because you are thinking of the internet as something that is accessed rather than something that exists.

Yes, you are mostly right. More precisely, I think of the Internet as consisting of the data on it rather than the machinery that pushes that data around, and this does explain most of why I didn't expect the wording of your comment. Still:

> Surely a cell phone is one of those interconnected computer networks.

Yes, I agree! However, it seems to me that that would be better expressed as kl4m did (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1047752), possibly with ⊆ in place of ∈.
They bought DoubleClick for however many billions to change this.

AdMob, too, is not a search-based ad network.
This article fails to mention what rating the app was submitted with. Seems like a crucial point. We know Apple doesn't allow pornography-specific apps but they have allowed in general purpose applications that could be used for this purpose in the past but they have to carry a mature rating since Apple cannot vouch for the content. It would be really trashy if they submitted this as a kid safe application that defeats parental controls. Not sure that's the case, since Gizmodo didn't bother to cover it, but it would be interesting to know what rating this app was submitted with.
Seeking HN Member: Who was opening a textbook exchange website?
And what was the URL?
WildlifeNearYou.com - built by 12 hackers on a fort in a week (sort of)
What reference would you recommend for a compiler developer targeting the Erlang VM?
I can't really spend the time to watch that video right now, nor am I in the right context. Could someone summarize it for me? It can't be that what he's saying is that you have to be evil for "don't be evil" to have any meaning, because that would be moronic. But I can't parse any other meaning from this short little quote.

Edit: no, that's not what he's saying, but I think I might not have the intellectual capacity to paraphrase what he did say well without thinking about it some more.
Me neither! One of the points I try to make at the end of post though is since gmail seems to stop all spam anyway, lets all just start using a nice readable email address on the internet.
The author mentions the "trick" of closing a poorly performing instance and re instantiating it again in the hope of locating away from bad neighbor.

This sounds reasonable, but the method could be improved by instantiating a new instance first and then removing the old one - this ensures you don't instantiate in the same location as before.

I don't know EC2 architecture well enough to know, but there may even be some ways of telling if your new instance is located in the same problematic instance as the original one (perhaps by tracerouting the problem instance and finding it to be v near by). If this happens presumably you can instantiate a 3rd and repeat until you find a suitable instance at which point you kill the others.
Here's the site we made:

http://www.wildlifenearyou.com/

Hiring a fort for a week long hacking session is exactly as much fun as it sounds. We got Fort Clonque in Alderney for around £1600 for the whole week - which works out at around £130 per person (the cost of two nights in a hotel). I can't recommend it enough.
NetBSD already did toasters: http://www.embeddedarm.com/software/arm-netbsd-toaster.php
There's a difference between not wanting to know (lack of interest and/or lack of education) and not being able to know.
The Times' has a source with an interesting addition to the story:
Google did not publicly link the Chinese government to the cyber attack, but people with knowledge of Google’s investigation said they had enough evidence to justify its actions.

A United States expert on cyber warfare said that 34 companies were targeted, most of them high-technology companies in Silicon Valley. The attacks came from Taiwanese Internet addresses, according to James Mulvenon, an expert on Chinese cyberwarfare capabilities.

Mr. Mulvenon said that the stolen documents were sent electronically to a server controlled by Rackspace, based in San Antonio.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/world/asia/13beijing.html
I have no opinion on global warming itself - I don't know enough about meteorology to form an opinion (and don't know enough to know whether an opinion can even be formed with any reasonable degree of confidence). However, every time I see far more explanations post factum than predictions, it raises a red flag in my mind.

Anyone can make up explanations after the fact, and a good expert will make them sound so convincing they'll even fool themselves (a great expert will know better). Consider: if the chill didn't happen, they'd say we're witnessing global warming in action; now that it did happen, they're saying it's a perfectly natural consequence of global warming. Real science would be predicting the chill before it happened and explaining how it relates to global warming. We have yet to see this type of analysis. If climatologists can't predict weather for a laughably short period of one month, what gives you confidence they can predict it long term?

After all, predictive power is one of the key pillars of science. Without it all we have is old wives' tales.

EDIT: Sorry, I realize that "real science" is too strong a phrase, I actually edited it out in other places but missed this one. My main point, however, still stands.
"Code is data" is orthogonal to smart/dumb code vs dumb/smart data, as it's a property of reflective (introspective?) programming languages, not functional ones. You could conceivably use imperative or OOP techniques in JavaScript to construct a string to eval(), but then Dijkstra would shamble out of his grave to give you a very stern glare. An array of functions to invoke is really more like a cute functional way of expressing a complicated switch. "Code is data" refers more to meta-programing, which would be having the language write the functions for you based on a higher-level description.
For some background information:

GFW research team tried heavily to crack down the SSL certificate for gmail (thus, they can censor the gmail content through GFW).
Yes, it's just a joke, but while it's a moderately entertaining implementation of the FrustrateTheInterviewer response pattern it's really not especially unique or noteworthy.
On top of a profitable business in China, Google now has some ability to leverage some change in China. At the least, other corporations and governments will reconsider their relationships or expectations of China. Google had no influence before they opened google.cn, and as netcan pointed out, it wouldn't have been very useful to show sites not viewable through the Great Firewall anyway.

Business and an opportunity they didn't have before. Be charitable, this looks like a better outcome than had they stayed out of China altogether.
Just awesome. I'm so glad google did this I can barely describe it.

I can't help but think of the old saw about "feeding the alligator hoping he will eat you last". It appears google has realized that the alligator sometimes comes after you anyway. This is a wakeup call to other companies that tolerate oppressive regimes all over the world.
Depending how this unfolds, I would expect a shallow but broad effect on Chinese business. Imagine that all Google properties get banned:

Interoperability with foreign businesses becomes a minor issue. Small business-to-small-business gets a little bit of friction (eg, cannot read your spreadsheet). Some classes of (especially outsourcing) Chinese companies cannot compete. They cannot provide ppc or seo services. Chinese web designers cannot add some Google maps app to a site they are developing for a Canadian client. A Chinese can't reach something on Google code. Annoyances, friction, slight inefficiencies. Being a little annoying (can you use a Zoho spreadsheet instead of Google please) repeatedly can you you client if you are an outsourcing company.

Also, Google provides a lot of non critical, but useful stuff. In many cases, Google is best and the competition can be either close or far. Adwords, Analytics, Docs, Search, Mail. Google does a lot of stuff. In some cases, I would be measurably less productive if I had to use some other product.

They can't just cut off Google with no impact.
Not true. A group does not "out compete" another group. Individuals only survive and reproduce or don't survive or don't reproduce.
It doesn't seem to have occurred to the author that bot authors may not want to be identified. This is an adversarial setting and needs to be tackled as such.
True. I don't doubt this at all.

But.. imagine that the reason you couldn't reach these sites was not political (eg, pay wall). Wouldn't you want your search engine to give you ten links that work.
You are making a narrow statement about human social groups and extrapolating backwards to the much more general case of evolution in all species.
"Something about this affair must have stung Google."

Maybe China had promised Google clean networks in exchange for censorship?
".. in other markets maybe even a gain"

Google may lose out in other markets as well. Authoritarian governments will become weary of Google even more now.
You can vote me down all you want, it's still not misspelled. Or are you planning on voting down English dictionaries as well?
the cloudkick guy sohuld either use a consistent scale for the graph or make the difference more obvious
If you rely on business leads where the sender is also contacting competitors, those "others ways" won't always matter and you'll just miss the job. That's my concern.

That said, I openly list my email address online (and have with the same address for 12+ years) and have really average filtering that leaves me deleting spam that slips through and chasing down false positives.
"The candidate has a myopic focus on documentation and best practices, as demonstrated by his failure to apply a simple solution to a simple problem. No hire."
Note definition 3. See also ensure.

Gawd. Do you guys read before you vote?
I am talking about 19% of Chinese who have Internet access (from a total of 200 million people) and you're talking about 17% of population. Here is some actual numbers/data.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/23/comscore-internet-popul...
It's not being a grammar nazi to point out that something is not misspelled.
It is a joke, but I've heard similar sentiments expressed seriously so I made a serious response.
Why don't they just make their data plan overage the same rate as the the plan itself ($30/1GB = .03/MB overage fees). Hell it even happens in canada.
Developers should know better than to use a GET request for teleportation.
Yesterday Was Twitter’s Highest Usage Day Ever. Today Will Be Bigger.
maxklein was introducing a key point in the debate here, and was downmodded. I think negative votes should be reserved for spam, offtopic and that ilk. Otherwise, people will not voice dissent, thus ignoring an entire branch of reasoning, which ironically is what this entire debate comes down to.
It'd be more like 1 hyper nationalist cherry picking the best hackers through tests and exam results and then telling them (ie forcing them) to weed out dissenters and whatever else they can get.
I was under the impression that it was neither "macros" nor "first-class functions", but rather something that encompassed both of them: basically, the idea that the programmer shouldn't need to treat one part of the data differently just because the processor does.
Reference for 17% market share: http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/12/28/googl...
AT&T's domestic wiretaps were (are?) "lawful", but still a threat to civil society. So why isn't Google open about the volume of data they relay to the state?
Actually, "Hey You, Get Off of My Cloud: Exploring Information Leakage in Third-Party Compute Clouds" (http://people.csail.mit.edu/tromer/papers/cloudsec.pdf) documents "the tendency for EC2 to assign fresh instances to the same small set of machines", and exploits this tendency in order to co-locate a malicious instance with a victim instance. Rapid re-instantiation seems like a bad way to improve performance.
The problem is, this is exactly the same kind of argument you'd hear from someone whose programming ability extends merely to the ability to string together API's, or from MIS students who don't understand the point in learning how to write a compiler or OS kernel.

Alternatively, you also hear the same thing from the types of people who want to sit down and gather ALL the requirements before writing a single line of code, rather than just prototype and iterate.
They probably risk questioning, regardless. Google execs did what they could, a good thing.
That looks surprisingly consistent to my eye.

Any data on how other similar sites (e.g., reddit) have changed?
Ruby, not javascript.
I registered a complaint with the ACCC with this a few years ago - they kept it on file, but couldn't really do much until there was a flood over epic bills (and they admitted it was hard for them to understand what the likelihood of this sort of thing happening, but they did appreciate it was unsavoury).
I'm having difficulty matching the key with the graph for the thinner categories, and for some similarly-colored categories.
> Where they might lose in China for now, will enhance their reputation elsewhere

If this was Google's intent, I has certainly worked with me. This gives me more confidence that if I use Google's services, they are unlikely to fuck me around.
PG and idlewords had it out in the comment section here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=984475 PG definitely gets the best of the argument, IMO.
From the official blog:

We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

So they haven't fired that bullet, but they are willing to fire it.

I would presume that this still open as a negotiating point.