Good for them for doing something they're passionate about.

There is of course a genuine (world-wide) problem they're trying to solve. As Paul Graham himself has written:

> I also think girls are less likely to become nerds than boys of equal intelligence, possibly because they’re more sensitive to social pressures. In my school, at least, girls made more of an effort to conform than boys.

If this conference could encourage girls to take risks (socially and financially) rather than go with the flow, that would be huge and extremely positive.

In a society that is far more sensitive to girls' needs than boys' needs, however, I do fear that conferences like this further marginalize disadvantaged boys (of all races). The overwhelming majority of boys do not go on to start startups, nor do the overwhelming majority of boys think they have a realistic shot. We all do a great job of completely ignoring those boys' needs, assuring ourselves that "nearly every senator and billionaire tech founder is a man, so boys will end up doing just fine".

It might be time for people to start catering conferences toward this growing, ignored group of young people.

Of course, that is NOT YC's responsibility. Just because they want to work on one issue doesn't mean they're morally obligated to work on another.

I hope this conference goes well for everyone involved.

    set editing-mode vi

    set -o vi

I realize that .inputrc is the config file for Readline, and .bashrc is essentially a start-up file for Bash. But is it ever necessary to use both snippets?

He wrote:

> The people running the government, which uses the taxes to secure loans that they have no intention on paying back, in order to prop up a failing economy that is failing because of the rules and regulations that are setup to maximize the illigit profit for said people running government.. those are the real gangsters.

> Most large state governments amount to little more then just legalized mafias. Ran by political and family dynasties serving the purposes of whoever is capable of providing them the most money and power.

> IMHO, paying as little taxes as possible is a moral imperative.

Perhaps whoever you quoted was making a good case for not cooperating (taxes or otherwise) with tyrannical governments, but the situation in most European countries is that the government is democratic, progressive, and operates in the interests of it's citizens more than it does in the interests of the politicians themselves.

The OP, unfortunately, doesn't get a choice of operating within a system where he benefits greatly from other people's effort and also paying taxes OR doing neither, he only gets to choose whether to contribute to a system that profits him massively or not. While choosing not to contribute, which is what OP did, is not technically stealing, it's ethically equivalent - I present as rationale the Kantian argument - if nobody paid taxes it is obvious that (within European countries) everybody would be worse off than if everybody paid taxes, therefore it is unethical for a single person to not pay taxes.

- there are plenty of ways to distribute "less taxes", and if "mafiaesque government" remains constant, then that implies that taxes just simply need be distributed less equitably to satisfy that condition.

  I'm not sure why, but natermer's past several posts are all dead.

To the authors: you said you used Jison[^1] to parse the text. Did you use any external resources to familiarize yourself with its syntax?

EDIT: It looks like Udacity has a series of videos that touch on it: http://www.youtube.com/user/Udacity/videos?query=CS262+

[1]: http://zaach.github.com/jison/

I have a couple of criticisms. First of all, strange things happen when a semicolon is omitted from the end of a function definition. In the following example, there is no output. What's going on?

    square = { n |
      n * n
    }
    println(square(5));

    square = { n |
      n * n
    };
    println square(5);

Lastly, is recursion possible?

    factorial = { n |
      if (n < 2) { 1 }
      { n * factorial(n - 1) }
    };
    println(factorial(5));

    Error: function identifier expected ('Exp() :3:5' found) at line 3 char 5

Yeah, if you don't leave off the final semicolon, it doesn't return the last value. In that case you would have to use a normal "return" statement. It's definitely a bug, but I left it in there for some time because I thought it was weirdly interesting. I'm going to get rid of that bug though in the next version.

> Second, according to the rules for omitting parentheses

Ah, I'm doing a bad job with the tutorial then. Parentheses don't work like they do in C-like languages. It's more like Lisp in that regard. Your last statement prints "square"="Function" because you're not invoking the function but getting the function pointer. The correct way would be (again, somewhat Lisp-like):

    square = { n |
      n * n
    };
    println (square 5);

I should probably make a general syntax paragraph as part of the tutorial, especially for people coming from C-likes where invokation goes function(a) instead of (function a).

Edit: there's a section on the site now to explain this, I hope this will make it easier.

I do think the semicolon behavior is a bit confusing. The documentation explains that expressions aren't auto-returned if they're followed by a semicolon, but I don't think that quite covers the behavior I pointed out. I might be missing something else from the documentation, though...

Also, I found one more major issue. Your documentation uses the numeric literal "3.1415" in the explanation for named parameters. That really needs to be "3.1416". :P

I agree.

Regarding the named params, the example is:

  f 
    3.1415 
    #name:"I'm using a named param!";

Also, there are definitely a few bugs still to iron out!

I also discovered a scope problem with the recursion example you gave. Turns out, there is (of course) a major bug in there, thanks for discovering that. It's about the visibility of the "factorial" symbol itself, so the workaround is for now:

  factorial = { n |
    factorial = outer.factorial;
    if(n == 0) {
      1
    } {
      n * (factorial (n - 1))
    } 
  };
  println (factorial 5); 

If you right click on an app's icon, you can select "Open as window" or "Open maximized", both of which emulate the traditional model. Unfortunately, maximized apps always feature a pair of floating buttons (unmaximize and close) in the top right corner.

I bought my Chromebook in a desperate attempt to satiate my urge to buy a much-more-expensive MacBook Air, and I'd say it's working.

To be honest, I spend most of my time in the SSH app, but web browsing is surprisingly smooth given the machine's price. The extra-wide (and extra tall!) left control and left alt keys are a welcomed touch, and, like Travis noted, battery life has been better than expected.

Do you tell your editor to hard-wrap each "block" of comments as you write (or edit) them, or is your editor configured to automatically hard-wrap all comments?

Either way, have you considered configuring your editor to soft-wrap comments while leaving your code alone? I'd say that's the most natural approach from a writing standpoint.

P.S. Every day, I use tools you've made. Keep making!

So I just tend to hard-wrap manually, out of habit, even when writing in a .txt file or an email. In fact, it's hard to stop myself from doing it in this textarea ;)