Are Lisp jobs so rare that they're Hacker News worthy?

Keycard? Seriously?

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

Here we come.

Some great comments here, but I gotta jump off track for a second.

I kind of want to know who or what the lead was for this article. No way the NY Times just goes through TPB looking for the most piquant torrent and write a tilted article about it. Seriously....revenge?

College students are frugal people. Between work and school it's not easy making a living to put food in your belly and pay the costs of student housing month after month. They want to save money, books cost astronomically more to purchase than they do to produce, and this columnist reduces all of this down to "revenge"?

I've got to admit, this is one tilted article if I've ever read one; quotes from publishing companies, none from TPB who if this writer had done PROPER research instead of stating oversimplifications would have seen are happy to talk with the press rather candidly about their operations.

No quotes from students, no quotes from TPB directly about the issues, and Randall Stross has the capacity to call this whole thing "revenge"? The best mention of TPB was on user statistics, what the eff

Pardon my language, but for the NyTimes, this is bullshit.

The thing about the U.S. is that it encourages competition particularly in lower levels - not within the school system entirely, but also partially despite it.

The way public school systems are set up, you get multiple social spheres that are forced to interact. You've got the sports group - the people who push away their boredom for school with a fascination for physical activity. There're the honor students, or whatever you want to call them - the people who study for hours a day, who partake in activities with Machiavellian efficiency. The ones who will do anything as long as it means a shot at the Ivies.

Those are the two ones people know and talk about. The one that ISN'T mentioned, the one that absolutely exists, is the smaller sphere of people who know what they want to do with their life. It's always a set of bright students, but students that have no seeming motivation toward school. They're just as real a group as the other two, but they have no need to announce their presence, so they're really often missed when people talk about them. They're the people, I think, that really propel innovation.

The interesting thing is that beyond a sort of personal drive, those people tend to have nothing outwardly in common. There're very nerdy people in that group and there are people as far from nerds as they come. Quiet people, loud people. They blend between the other spheres - despite a focus on things not school-related, a ton of them go to really top-notch schools. I'd put myself in this category. I very rarely put an effort into any part of school, did no work, and I'm still going to a really top-notch public school. It's not an Ivy, it's not what I've been told for a long time I ought to be striving for, but I've known for a long time what I want to do with life and I don't think that an Ivy League school can help me any more than a really good school can. Me and people like me become part of the statistic that drag schools down a lot. The sports sphere helps a lot, because the sports sphere is the sort that really shouldn't be kept in schools, because the sports sphere just doesn't care. But among the top-tiered students, it's the ones that don't care about standardized testing or academics at all that keep American schools so low.

That's also a huge boon for America, though. I can't talk about other generations, but in this generation it's entirely likely that by the time we're all going to college a lot of us have tried our hands at several things and dabbled in them. A lot of us have some semblance of "real world" experience, in other words. I tried my hand at a web start-up in my sophomore year. In my senior year I published a book. Neither thing is world-changing, but it means that as I work on web development today, when I try writing again, I've got a lot of experience as to what learns and what doesn't. A friend of mine has been learning how to code and create models for game design since something like eighth grade. A bunch of my friends have launched sites and blogs of their own; one friend was mentioned on G4 for a tutorial he wrote. This isn't a particularly exceptional school I'm at, either; nearly every school I know the name of has its share of breakthrough kids.

I can only speak for my culture, not for others. But it seems to me that paradoxically, it's America's inability to handle kids like that that makes its school system so effective in delivering innovation. When you have a culture of youth that's already experienced and capable of learning from its mistakes, you have a core generation that has an edge over even the best-taught students from the rest of the world. You get a sort of encouragement of big ideas and of youth. You grow up hearing stories about Bill Gates at 19 and Steve Jobs at 21; about the Beatles and the Beach Boys and about all the musicians who started in grade school. (Incidentally, I think that the fact that there are no real writers who made it that young corresponds to the fact that so few young people want to be writers.) We get stories about Welles making Citizen Kane at an age when most graduates are just looking for jobs. It teaches this idea that it doesn't matter what your grades are, because you could be getting things done rather than studying, and that introduces a whole new aspect on to your world.

In fairness to the article, it was written in 2001, before git or darcs existed, and while subversion development and awareness was still at an early stage. CVS was the reasonable free choice at that time.

No one has ever seriously suggested using Hydrogen as an energy source - that's impossible. What we are suggesting is using hydrogen as a battery, until we get things like super-capacitors working. And, we can fill the battery with nuclear energy.

Nuclear didn't fail for technological reasons. It failed for political ones. Nuclear Breeder reactors are still, by a huge margin, the cheapest, safest, and most sustainable energy solution that the world knows. Using them to power the energy grid directly, and then to charge whatever portable battery we're using (hydrogen, etc) is sustainable for at least another thousand years.

Of course, there are huge technological hurdles to using hydrogen as a portable energy storage device. But, I think we're closer to production on hydrogen energy than we are with any alternative. Super-capacitors of sufficient energy density and low enough cost are (imho) at least 20 years off. Man made gasoline (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/19/science/19carb.html) shows promise, but no one has ever done it - so we're a decade away from that at best.

The author of the article proposes biofuels, but they are arguably even more inefficient than hydrogen. Not to mention that we have millions of starving people on this planet already. When it takes ~26 lbs of corn to make one gallon of ethanol (that's about an acres worth for every 250 gallons) I really think we should be looking at alternatives.

That's complete nonsense. There's nothing about Godel's theorem that says the physical rules of the universe can't be described. You're babbling religiously.

I'm a big fan of the "build a framework that you'll never use" philosophy. That isn't a joke. You aren't going to be able to match the quality of the thousands upon thousands of hours that have gone into something like Django, but making a framework will make you a better framework user. It makes you understand the flow, what building hooks is like, etc. It also means that you'll be more ready to dive into some of the framework code than someone who just uses a framework.

But that's just my opinion from seeing so many people not understand how frameworks work and try to use them.

It's as if a previously thought extinct animal has just been spotted alive again.

You should have probably read more closely before writin this diatribe: they specifically note in several places that they do not use TCP and can also max out on 4x Infiniband as well as 10GigE. They use UDP as their transport for ZeroMQ messages.