christofd

nicely done! very helpful intro.

nice and subtle :)

That explains a lot actually. Powerful and simple explanation for the world we live in. However, pretty much the opposite of the so-called "trickle-down" mechanism... more like "trickle-up".

Well said. This matches my experience living for a long time in Germany (south and north), and interactions with French. I remember (from friends) the problems at DLR in Munich (German Aerospace Center) with senior French engineers trying to pull rank, which doesn't work in team-based German work culture.

Also, spot on with Anglo news coverage not really speaking for/ capturing the essence in continental Europe. E.g. current Anglo news criticizing northern European countries for 'austerity' measures (well, it's their money, so obviously they will not hand it out gladly).

It's an elusive topic with hardly any good information. Quite unusual to see such a balanced reply here.

Pierre Fournier does a super smooth rendering of all the suites... he's like a French machine, technically perfect & soulful interpretation. especially the 6th preludium is a joy to hear as he climbs up the stairway.

yeah, Casals is the man. don't like rostropovich rendition IMHO.

currently playing those Suites on a Carbon Fiber Luis & Clark instrument - luisandclark.com

Yeah, stuff with a scientific bend doesn't get shared, although it has impact. It creates its own niche, with considerably less noise.

Sorry to broaden the scope, but this made me think...

In stock markets, you have the concept of "noise traders", less well-informed traders. They sort of create their own dynamics, sometimes even generating good return on investments, where better informed traders stay out of the market.

Social dynamics... not sure if it's possible to derive some new fundamental laws, because human behavior is too fluid. Maybe in the end (after years of "big data" number crunching) all we get is some empirical observations and weak correlations.

Wow. That's impressive. Big step forward in social analytics.

regarding comic sans use at CERN... often found that scientists like hideous designs. it's a way of saying that we work on serious stuff.

a lot of sites at MIT, CMU have that mark... the more prestigious, the uglier.

of course it has to be a certain style of ugly.

agreed. been looking at this for a while. If you're Canada based you gotta reach out internationally (Europe, U.S., Asia) to acquire funds, projects, ideas. Thinking domestic is not optimal.

well, this was 30 years in the making...

alarms were going off when I read "pitch deck"...

same here, now in Toronto.

great wall of text! you have a weblog or so? interested in the intersection of technology and cultural stuff as well... i'm based in toronto, btw. quite often in nyc. cheers.

Great advice. My Dad always told me I suck at music. But I just wouldn't give up. I destroyed one Cello bow along the way in frustration for my lacking skill, but now 20 years later I got this beast under control.

Then, of course, there are the people that are hopeless, and no amount of practice will get them over the hill.

Cello, turntables (vinyl and a digital system like Serato), dabble a little on piano, sang in a choir

Good list.

Yeah, I play strings and I hated that scene. You can even deduce from this scene that Depardieu hasn't learned to play any type of instrument, which can be said for a lot of Hollywood actors faking it on camera.

Although, there is the rare breed of actor that plays an instrument.

A rough assessment - needs some more thought:

Exactly. This advice might apply more to a creative process, where original thought counts above all else. I imagine being truly creative is an exhausting activity, knowing several professional artists (oil paint). You're basically holding a large set of options simultaneously in your head and try to make unique connections between them. The value is not in how many iterations of connections you go through, but coming up with something unique at all.

Development strikes me more similar to solving cross-word puzzles, or playing mine-sweeper, where activity is more guided, focused along a smaller set of options, with lots of trial and error in the process: it's sort of "focused play"/ experimentation. Here it seems more valuable IMHO to keep on going once you're in the flow. You're not looking for that one special connection, that will make your day, but are solving many little problems that aggregate over time.

I could imagine science-based development work to be creatively exhausting as well, where you're trying to prove some theorem etc. Hemingway's advice might apply itself nicely in this case.

I'd like to see more blog posts on how to solve different types of problems. E.g. I know that walking away from a hard problem after you're exhausted works out well (the subconscious keeps on working on it), or as Hemingway proposes, walking away right before you become exhausted.

My two cents.

Ah, good to know :)

Not sure this is correct procedure, exposing the privacy of a HN fellow. I personally would have second thoughts posting that.

Hmmm... you might be right. Business people, representing capital owners in a world with increasing capital concentration, exert a lot of leverage. Leverage pays well.

Seconded. BS becomes official. (Dilbert doesn't count; The Economist has to say it)

Yes! How to cure the fear of the blank page. One of the first articles that I've found how to deal with this problem.

You can't break procrastination head-on. It's gotta be tricked to defeat it.

Interesting idea. I could imagine whole environments of development stacks being defined: e.g. a Rails 2.3.5 production stack, or a Django stack, or a Clojure webdev/ data mining stack, and all according to exact version numbers.

I could see that for Big Ticket projects such as Rails/ Clojure/ Django etc. people would maintain an up-to-date 'semver' database.

The only thing is that the name 'semantic' is not really a winner (it sets people on edge). Maybe something else will survive in the end, unless people are comfortable enough with the pragmatic value of the idea and will look past the name.

Interesting. I'd second that. More to come.

Something new to play with. Joe hits the sweet spot, regarding powerful & pragmatic, again.

Websockets + Erlang... nice.

Very nice seamless implementation: device, connection, web-based, iphone. Full circle. Very professional. Great Name.

I actually value the notion to try to attach a metric to a fuzzy term like 'happiness', even though it doesn't work. At least it displays the will to measure everything.

Edit: happiness = serotonin level in spinal fluid. Suicide cases show low levels after autopsy.

e.g. I fondly recall the use of the 'Haversine formula' (calc. distance on a sphere with given lat, lng) built in SQL, instead of using one of the available Geo ruby libraries/ gems (although I'm not sure, if those gems were available back in 07).

Really like Michael's clear writing style (remember reading Railsspace back in 07). Thx for this new resource.

Also like the fact that he doesn't use many gems, but discusses building stuff from scratch (regarding Railsspace book).