anonjon

go fuck yourself guy who down-voted me, you are part of the willful ignorance.

Greenspan was a goddamned Rayndian. Stephen Friedman had super strong ties to goldman sachs, In fact, almost everyone high up in the fed has ties to banking in one form or another. None of the people involved are even interested fair in regulation.

I don't understand why this is controversial. it is a fucking conspiracy and I'm calling it as it is.

Would my post have been better if I had suggested execution, or is the real reason it is downvoted because it is unpopular to call something a conspiracy?

we all tell ourselves these fairy tales about how the world is fair and there are no conspiracies and closed door deals between those in power, but it is all a lie.

It is a fucking conspiracy. fed is run by the banks, banks didn't want fed to intervene bc they were making big bonuses and it was good for the people there. duh.

This is an obvious case of corruption of our government. No one was regulating because they didn't want to regulate it.

This is why there needs to be things like campaign finance reform and people should seriously go to jail without chance of being pardoned for these types of crimes.

Willful ignorance of this shit should have been considered aiding & abetting theft.

But no, no one will go to jail because the rich and powerful never go to jail. They didn't get rich and powerful by not being corrupt.

Tritium is produced by fission reactors, tritium decays into an isotope of helium.

So i think this is different from oil where oil can't really be produced.

I'm not saying we should crap all of our helium away, but I'm having a hard time being concerned about something that we can at least hypothetically produce.

Also, more on deep earth nuclear reactors: http://www.pnas.org/content/98/20/11085.full

I think you are absolutely right. The success of the ipod is all about very clever advertising. At the time that it came out, there were dozens of other mp3 players that were cheaper and just as good (there still are dozens of mp3 players that are cheaper and just as good).

But somehow apple turned the ipod into something that wasn't an mp3 player and was an ipod.

And Apple is really good at marketing and also making their products pretty (so that they can be marketed).

Sansa or Creative, for example, don't seem to spend anywhere near the marketing money on their products as apple does, and it seems to show. (iPod is a household name, no one knows what I'm talking about when I talk about my SanDisk). (I'm sure iTunes had something to do with it too...)

I think that too often we want to attribute the success of a product to rational causes such as technological superiority or 'innovation'...

But really, I think there is a lot more that needs to be said about clever manipulation of your consumer's thoughts/desires.

I also don't get why you are getting downvoted. Disagreement by downvote is not cool. Disagree by disagreeing, downvote when someone is being an idiot.

So, the world is composed of hypercubes. Neat.

If you want to go the other direction dimensionally and technologically, you can get 'Flatland, a romance of many dimensions' off project Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/97

It is a pretty amusing read.

It was clj-oauth and clj-apache-http.

I've been working on building a generalized DSL for http-requests (based on a site structure description generate the request-functions).

I figured it would be interesting to test it with twitter's oauth. It works quite well for http-get requests, didn't work very well for post requests (ex. status updates). Squinted at it, macro-expanded a few times and fixed a bug... now it seems to be generating the right code. Still not working

So I went back to the base case (libraries without my DSL over-top, direct from tutorial), posts still didn't work.

Anyway, the interesting thing is that posts will work for very short strings, or strings that are very repetitive (a string full of s's 'ssssssssssssssssssssss...' would post, as would 'wtf' and 'ww'; 'well this is a nice message', would not...).

Much hacking and fussing and resetting of keys later, it was 4am and I had to get up and work in a few hours (did I mention I was doing this for fun? sigh).

So I'm starting to think that something may have changed in twitter's oauth spec between when I downloaded the libraries and when I got back to using them (it was a few months). Other than that, I suppose my next step would be to look at some other implementations and figure out if there is a bug in the what I am using.

I guess my point is, even easy things aren't easy.

I am impressed that he did this in two hours, but at the same time, I am dismayed that I am impressed that he did it in two hours.

Why are 'simple' programming tasks often so hard?

For example: I spent hours trying to figure out what was wrong with my oauth requests to twitter last night. Just kept getting "401 Unauthorized" over and over. Still haven't figured it out. (The worst part has to be that I was using a library and serious debugging ended with me following the instructions on the tutorial step-by-step; I still got the error...).

My question: Why should this app take 2 hours? Why shouldn't this take 2 minutes? All it is is a little form that stores the number of push-ups you did and the week. Why is everything so hard? Why is so much of my life painful library wrangling?

Thanks for the links, I will check them out.

It would be cool if you could integrate their APIs into what you are doing. (Create Alikewise account based off of already existing Goodreads or Librarything account).

I guess what I'm concerned about is that it becomes a very niche site without a community that is hanging out and talking about the books that they are reading.

Presumably if you go on, you find someone, and you leave, you don't have the 'all my friends are on it' factor. (It is also kind of limited group, a lot of people will not be looking for partners that read the same books as they do). It kind of appeals to people you might think of (or who might think of themselves) as intelligentsia.

But is a cool idea, and is definitely intriguing at very least in terms of social experiments, kind of figuring out if people are compatible because of similar intellectual interests. I hope it goes well for you!

I'd like this better if it weren't a dating site.

Like, a place where you can find people who like the same books as you, and then talk about books.

okay this does match up with practice.

However, this makes it a poorly designed link sharing system. I never know where the link that i'm clicking resolves to, and it isn't really optimized for parsing the links out of the message (as a developer i've got to do a regex or something to pull the http:// garbage out of the message). Why isn't there a seperate field for links?

Looks like the world might have not exploded, HORAY! I was almost nervous about that.

He's not kidding, C precedence rules are weird. Even D. Ritchie thinks so. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_operations#Programming...

Oh, and it isn't strange to grok FP bypassing C altogether.

Static typing and testing are not replacements for structuring your code so that when you read it at each level of structure you know that it is right.

Infix languages eliminate most of these.

No, they don't.

They eliminate some of them, mostly ones associated with math. The rest of them they replace with different types of parenthesis.

Brackets, braces, tabbing and carriage returns, semicolons. They are all structure delimiters. In lisp you have one structure delimiter "()", in non-lisps you have many.

I don't see how it is terrible for complex arithmetic. Lisp order of operations is explicit. Code does not become more clear because you add a bunch of implicitly defined structure, (no matter how much you were drilled in math school, it is still another thing to remember). Besides, what makes math different from anything else? I end up parenthesizing infix math anyway, simply because it is hard to keep track of the order of operations.

You are certainly entitled to your opinion, and I didn't meant to imply that you aren't, I was just interested in your reasoning.

To me, 'readability' is a vacuous claim, being that they only thing that 'readability' really means is 'what I am used to'. (I write lisp code for a living, am used to lisp code (lisp was my first language), and I find it much easier to decipher than other languages).

However, I'm also less and less convinced that the one really killer feature that Lisp allows, macros, really makes up for the downsides of the s-expr syntax.

Sorry, what is the downside? (foo x) vs. foo(x) doesn't make a difference to me.

Is this an implied downside that amounts to not having used the language very much?

Clearly the death of reputation will be a good thing for tech crunch.

you could, but then you would be needlessly breaking the regularity of the language. the whole point of lisp is to make stuff super ultra regular so that it is really really easy to manipulate unambiguously.

I have a Da Vinci action figure: http://www.shakespearesden.com/11520.html

I'm not saying he's better than Charlie, but I find it easier anthropomorphizing a (brilliant!) action figure. (Not only is he great at debugging code, he's also pretty darn creative).

126 years and the scope of the problems solved.

You give an excellent example of the scoping issue: Someone can write a computer program that will run detailed mathematical models of a bridge and cross-check against established data. I can also write a program to simulate flutter, run simulations of car engines, the power grid, the stock market (You can program almost anything imaginable).

I challenge you to write a program that will run a detailed mathematical model of a computer program and cross checks against established data gleaned from other programs. Even if you did, it wouldn't be terribly useful as it would just tell you that the program runs in such and such a way; you'd still not know if it actually does what it is supposed to do. Does it fit the problem domain, or is there some 'flutter' that you didn't know about?

A lot of the improvements in reliability of engineering disciplines of the last 50 years have been because of the ability to simulate things better... mostly by use of the computer.

There are therefore two types of error in a piece of software:

1. 'Stupid' error (I used the wrong units or I used the wrong function).

2. Thought error (I didn't understand the problem or I goofed in my reasoning about it).

I'd argue, therefore, that the 'stupid' errors are the errors that can be solved by software engineering. (Using higher level languages, better compilers, better type systems, etc.) The issue being that there is only so much that you can actually do to solve them with software.

The second set is a bit more difficult. Am I going to validate my bridge simulator by using a different bridge simulator? Sometimes we certainly do do this, and this is kind of the basis of iterative development (if each version of a program is a different program). At some point, I will need to understand Civil Engineering as well as Software Development to get my program to function as a Civil engineer would expect it to.

This would imply, that at least in some domains, software engineering is the equivalent of meta-engineering. (I am programming the set of rules used by civil engineers).

It gets more difficult the further away from engineering/scientific disciplines you get. What exactly would be the discipline be behind web programming or writing an HTTP server? Where can I get my thought guidelines to understand how I should think about the different problems?

I'm sure that there is progress to be made in software engineering, but I'd guess the progress won't come from looking at engineering disciplines, and I'm pretty sure it is wrong to say that the only difference is timeframe.

I think that this largely misses the point.

The first thing to point out is that writing software doesn't map very well onto civil engineering. In civil, your base requirements are supposed to be very well defined. 'I need a bridge from point a to point b, it has to support x amount of traffic weighing y kilos'.

The point of the Tacoma Narrows incident is that 'flutter' was something that was hereto unmentioned in the design requirements of the bridge. It wasn't accounted for, therefore the bridge collapsed. To imply that 'proper engineering' would have prevented the collapse is wrong. They used proper engineering... they just didn't account for everything that they needed to account for.

No one is going to argue that solid design, trusted components, testing and QA are not important parts of programming. (They are good, especially the components, testing, and QA bits).

What the original Spolsky 'duct tape programmer' post is railing against is the disguise of over-engineering (because of incompetence) as the above things (particularly the design part).

The point being that the extremely competent don't need to disguise their software in an elaborate drapery of buzzwords and patterns. (Because they don't need a justification to fall back on if it doesnt... 'well we used x and y and z hot new thing').

There's no reason you can't go in to work at 5am, or just work from home at 5am.

"Another telltale sign is that instead of going directly to web pages, they use the search bar."

I've seen this as a 'test' for the unsophisticated user a couple of times, and I don't understand the reasoning behind it.

I do almost all of my web navigation via search-bar and auto-complete.

It works quite well (this particular Facebook page is weird though).

This is mostly because I don't like managing bookmarks (Bookmarks get too cluttery if you actually use them as bookmarks... I only use them for temporary stuff like saving pages for a product i'm researching).

If I really want to find something and I can't remember the name of the site (which is a rarity), I'd just use browser history or search for keywords anyway...

I think that there is something ergonomically wrong with the way that we name websites. http://news.ycombinator.com/ does not stick in my head (it does not come to mind first anyway). "Hacker News" totally does, and it is easier to type.

I think that implying people are unsophisticated when they are really just lazy/apathetic about specific technical details leads you to the wrong conclusions about what type of things they can handle.

computer science was the philosophy department, the psychology department, or the math department.

you never know what will be useful.

I'm not sure about that.

People who get the kindle are more likely to read a lot, whereas people who get the ipad (as opposed to the kindle) are more likely to read fairly casually. (You get the ipad because you want the internet and all of the games/apps).

I'm not really sure that it holds that people will read less on their backlit device than on a normal kindle. I'm a software developer and I spend all day staring at a computer screen (8+ hours). I take periodic breaks, and yes, it is bad on my eyes, but the back-lighting of the screen isn't enough to stop me from doing it (I only really notice at my yearly optometrist appointment).

If the iPad app allowed you to pick some mellower colors for the text/background, that would probably go a long way towards making the device usable. Black on Grey (or dkgreen on black!) is a lot easier to look at prolonged than black on white, for example.

I think that the idea that Amazon is selling hardware is missing the point entirely. A lot of the time companies lose money selling hardware (ex. the price to produce a PC is more than the selling price... they make up for it by being paid to put 'trial' software on the windows install).

So, in parallel, amazon doesn't really give a crap about whether they sell a ton of kindles. What they care about is that the amazon kindle store makes a crap-ton of money. If everyone goes out and buys an ipad, and "kindle on ipad" is a killer app for ipad, amazon ends up making way more money than they would trying to match their own hardware against Apple's.

I'm an avid reader and I got the DX when it came out (it is freaking sweet). I'd probably be too distracted/eye-strained reading on a tablet PC for the number of hours that I do. (I realize that I am an outlier, however).

My one complaint is that there are actually a lot of books that I cannot get for the kindle, and it is hard to take notes in the margin so I end up reading certain books on dead trees. (Maybe the ipad touch screen will make it easier to do margin notes?)

Your assumption is wrong, as clearly indicated by the data. Countries with less competition and more regulation at least appear to receive closer to optimal value from their money (in the realm of healthcare).

Healthcare doesn't make sense when viewed as a market economy.

First off, there is a potentially infinite demand for healthcare. (How much will you pay to live a little longer? As death approaches, the amount you will pay can be seen as an asymptote towards infinity. You have to be a particularly well balanced individual for this not to happen.)

Competing for actual finite resources (hospital beds, doctors, nurses, medications, the drafty-but-fashionable hospital-johnny), with a number of people who are going to die anyway, but are willing (if not able) to pay non-finite sums of money, clearly points us towards a conflict. The only conclusion is for the price of the finite resources to increase indefinitely.

I personally carry a notebook around with me to write down ideas and stuff, but this has potential from the planning perspective.

Is there anything keeping you from printing these out double sided to save on paper?

You are assuming that we are getting anywhere near optimal value from the 2.3 trillion that we already spend. Clearly we do not. Compared to other countries there has got to be absolutely TONS of wastage.

We die sooner, we spend more of our own money and we spend more government money.

lose/lose.

I think the idea that government naturally has to overspend is wrong. It is a meme that people tend to trot out whenever there is a political discussion (along with the other side is bums and politicians are unethical crooks).

In this particular case, the idea is that we pay $100 billion a year of tax payer money. (For comparison sake, the F-22 program alone cost 65 billion including development. You could only buy 500 F-22s for $100 billion)

With that 100 billion dollars, we attempt to bring into line the 2.3 trillion dollars that we spend a year on healthcare. (16% of GDP).

16% of GDP is way more than other western countries spend on healthcare. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_compared#Cross-coun...

Other western countries spend about 8-10% GDP on healthcare.

So lets do the math. Lets say we spend tax money on healthcare and we only manage to get it down 1% from 16% to 15%. That would be a 1/16th reduction on 2.3 trillion dollars... approximately 140 billion dollars. So if we even manage to knock 1% off of the amount spent on healthcare by doing this, we've sent 40 billion dollars back to the taxpayers.

If we get more than 1% off of our %GDP towards healthcare, we start making some serious bucks for Americans. If we got our % spent on HC down to even 10% we would have made a 540 billion dollar win on this issue.

(Yes, it comes in the form of taxes, but it also means that in the long run you aren't paying as much for insurance premiums... health insurance premiums might as well be a tax that doesn't go to the government, as having healthcare isn't optional if you plan on living for a significant amount of time...)

Or woman up and not grow a pair. It isn't really harsh or not harsh. There are merely realities of being human. (It may, however, require a drastic change in perspective).

In reality, your circumstances and actions are immaterial to your mental state. (I think this is obvious from the number of depressed people in the USA).

I think instead of asking 'what can I do to be happy', you really have to tell yourself 'I am going to be happy', and then go out and do things.

If you do it the first way, you spend your life coming up with millions of unsuccessful 'get happy quick' schemes, that never quite pan out.

If you do it the latter way, you start out happy, so you don't really need to do anything. But you do do things, because people who are happy go out and get stuff done.