jgfoot

OK, maybe writing arbitrary English as a program won't work; but, I can think of a lot of occasions where it would be useful for a computer program to be understandable by any English speaker. I'm thinking of lawyers, who want to be able to review whether a program conforms with legal requirements, or managers, who want to be able to confirm that business logic is doing what they want it to do. Zed Shaw kind of hints at this in his classic "ACLs are Dead" talk, where he talks about using metaprogramming to make Ruby syntax more readable for lawyers.

No, that list of steps is wrong. Google Wallet doesn't require you to unlock your phone or launch the Wallet app. You just hold your phone up to the reader and enter a PIN.

The old PalmOS also had a global find option. The OS would call every app that registered for this function and pass it the query. Problem was, this meant that having a single buggy app on your device would cause Find to crash for everyone. http://mobile.eric-poncet.com/palm/tutorial/find.html

Was the problem that they were "unable to adapt to the new world," or was the problem that they editorially went off the deep end? Readers abandoned Newsweek as Newsweek's quality declined. Perhaps the one drove the other--with fewer readers, it was tougher to fund expensive journalism. But, from the link: "Last November, she featured a cover story about sex addiction, and in May President Obama was shown wearing a rainbow-colored halo with a headline that read ”The First Gay President.”" The Internet didn't do that; Tina Brown did.

You need to tell it that the source language is Russian; if you tell it the source language is English, it will try to recognize Cyrillic characters as Roman, which doesn't work. Also, it looks like the scan option is not available for Ukrainian at all. But for something like a restaurant menu, you're probably fine telling it the language is Russian--there is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between the two languages.

I have been bike commuting for nine years. The biggest things that change since the initial rush of delight?

First, as time goes on, you care a lot more about safety. Newbies may write about how they can meditate or listen to music while riding, but experienced riders know they must always stay alert. You shouldn't be meditating, you should be focused on potential dangers.

Second, the weight loss? Not as big a deal as time goes on. Don't ask me the medical reason why, maybe it's the same phenomenon as when people who haven't worked out for years start a program and quickly lose 10 pounds of water weight but then find the rest is harder to lose. Commuting usually doesn't involve the intense aerobic activity associated with road racing.

The 300 dollar bike you are satisfied with? I didn't stay satisfied after a few months. After trying many options (too many) I took Sheldon Brown's advice and ride a touring bike, with disc brakes, fenders, rack, and panniers.

I commute to work on bike every day, but I still am a happy member of my city's bike share program. Even though I have a bike locked in the garage under the building, I use bikeshare to go to meetings at other buildings in the city during the day. I would rather that my personal bike remain safe in my office building's guarded garage, rather than parked on the street. Also, heading into a meeting, it takes me 3 seconds to park a bikeshare bike at the station, as opposed to several minutes locking up my personal bike using a U-lock and cable. I know of other regular commuters who switched to using bikeshare for their commutes--the bikes may be slower, but you don't have to worry about maintenance or theft.

Essentially, I pay my membership fee so that someone else bears the risk of owning a bike in a city filled with vandals and thieves. It's a good deal.

Salon published in 2003 a great series of articles by John Sundman about the Loebner Prize. He describes a two-time winner, "ALICE," in a way that doesn't inspire awe for the creator's programming achievements:

"""Wallace’s theory of A.I. is no theory at all. It’s not that he doesn’t believe in artificial intelligence, per se; rather, he doesn’t much believe in intelligence, period. In a way that oddly befits a contest sponsored by a bunch of Skinnerians, Wallace’s ALICE program is based strictly on a stimulus-response model. You type something in, if the program recognizes what you typed, it picks a clever, appropriate, “canned” answer. ... There is no representation of knowledge, no common-sense reasoning, no inference engine to mimic human thought. Just a very long list of canned answers, from which it picks the best option. Basically, it’s Eliza on steroids. ... And this strategy works, Wallace says, because that’s what people are: mindless robots who don’t listen to each other but merely regurgitate canned answers."""

http://www.salon.com/2003/02/26/loebner_part_one/

The Stanford Prison Experiment still gets a lot of ink, but unfortunately the criticisms of it do not. I recommend this article: http://www.swans.com/library/art17/barker82.html

"""over the past forty-plus years, the Stanford Prison Experiment has had a strong, and arguably detrimental impact upon both scholarly and popular conceptions of social psychology. Contrary to Zimbardo's misleading conclusions, ordinary people do not mindlessly and helplessly succumb to brutality; instead the evidence (even from his own experiment) seems to suggest that individuals tend to engage in brutality only when they truly believe that such actions are warranted -- acting upon ideas that are condoned by equally brutal group ideologies. The guards in Zimbardo's experiment were thus coerced by Zimbardo and his researchers to brutalize the prisoners; while the prisoners did not simply submit to the guards' brutality, but instead, actively resisted their oppression, both collectively and individually. This resistance was considered intolerable to Zimbardo, and as this article has shown, he utilized his system power to intervene to increase guard brutality and undermine the prisoners' collective will to resist their abusers."""

But remember that War and Peace was not originally written in English, and the quality of translation matters a great deal. With Russian literature especially, the quality of translation varies widely, and some of the best translations into English are still copyrighted. A bad translation might faithfully reproduce the text's literal meaning but badly mangle the literary elegance that made the book so acclaimed in the first place. I'd rather pay $14 for a good translation than spend 1100 pages regretting being cheap.

You don't have to imagine a horse expert getting upset about unrealistic portrayals of horses. Check out this take on the Spielberg film _War Horse_ for a lack of "agricultural realism:" "Ploughing that stony virgin (never ploughed) field with a team of sturdy cobs would have been improbable; with a puny thoroughbred it was ludicrous."

http://www.riverford.co.uk/feed/in:news/ploughing-spielberg-...

Perhaps darcs' most prominent user base is the guys who work on GHC, the Glasgow Haskell Compiler. They still use it, but have not been completely happy: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/DarcsEvaluation

This article is from 1998. A lot has changed since then: Ruby, alternate JVM languages like Clojure and Scala, C#, Perl 6... If I were to make a sweeping historical characterization, I would say that Perl was exactly what people needed in the 1990s when everything was new and nothing worked with anything else and everyone needed lots of duct tape and Perl's wonderful concise syntax made excellent duct tape. I used it during that period, but I just don't use it much anymore.

This completely misses the point. The justice system is already crashing, from being underfunded.

""" “cuts already imposed on the Los Angeles Superior Court, if unabated, will force the closure of over 180 courtrooms and layoffs of more than 1800 employees in the coming years. This is a dramatic reduction in work force and courtrooms. There are approximately 605 courtrooms operating throughout 50 locations in Los Angeles County. The closure of 180 courtrooms includes the closure of nine courthouses. The loss of 1800 employees constitutes a 34 percent reduction in the court’s workforce. The cuts in staff and courtrooms/courthouses (along with the priority given to criminal cases) will result in an increase to the already existing backlog of cases, which, in turn, will slow the movement of virtually all civil cases to a snail’s pace." """ http://www.plljlaw.com/CM/Articles/Court-Budget-Cuts.asp

If you want to crash the justice system, then continue to do what we have been doing: underfund judges, court employees, public defenders, and prosecutors.

Mike Maples talks more about Microsoft back then: (http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/107465/1/oh387mm.pdf ):

"""I can remember going to the first Microsoft Company picnic in 1988. There were only two children. Microsoft had 1,800 employees and there were only a couple of them that were married. You had all these young kids who weren't married and were right out of school. IBM had conventional dress codes; Microsoft - it was very much like a college campus. The only difference in how they lived, the hours they kept and the way they dressed, between a college campus and Microsoft was that Microsoft bought the equipment. They all wore their shorts and half of them wore sandals or no shoes. Microsoft bought a lot of T-shirts and things for them. There weren't set hours - the management system was to let people pick or sign up for what they were going to do, and it was up to them to do it. So there was very little management attention over directing people or telling them what to do - it was a very empowered work force. And my suspicion was that that was the way IBM was in the 1930s and 1940s. They were much more formal, because the time was much more formal in terms of dress. But in terms of the ages and the attitudes and the mission the people were on - I think it would be a lot the same."""

An underappreciated benefit of computer programming "languages" is how human begins use them to communicate with other humans. Once you get two or more programmers working on a project, they have to be able to write code that the other programmer can readily understand. Programming languages advance this goal to varying degrees; assembly does it poorly, and so does obfuscated C or Perl. CoffeeScript, on the other hand, seems to have borrowed language features that enhance this human-to-human communication ability: significant whitespace, easily comprehensible object models, etc.

When travelling in Puerto Rico recently I tried to access Hulu, and got the message that it is available only "within the United States."

OK, copyright infringement isn't stealing. It's copyright infringement. And copyright infringement is illegal.

I am sorry that some people are "frustrated" because they cannot see their favorite programs at the same time that people in other parts of the world can see them. But what a remarkably morally shaky ground upon which to break the law! My great-grandfather stole food once; his father died when he was eight, and his mother couldn't support the family. Today, people steal--sorry, copyright infringe--Downton Abbey because they can't wait to find out whether Lady Mary is going to marry Matthew.

The article is useful because it repeats and glorifies this shibboleth: "So America's great 21st century contribution to fomenting freedom abroad was not imposing it militarily but enabling it technologically, as an epiphenomenon of globalization. And for a second act, globalization returned the favor, turning democratic uprisings in developing countries into inspirational exports for the rich world."

First, the Arab Spring protests were the culmination of long-standing movements that magazines like Time paid little attention to until the very end. When Time finally noticed them, Time wrote about the movements as though they were the product of American social networking sites. It always struck me as a very USA-centric thing for an American to look at the Arab Spring and say, "hey, look at what we did!"

Second, the Internet's impact on global freedom is ambiguous; as Evgeny Morozov points out in The Net Delusion, the Internet can be used to promote freedom but also can help oppressive regimes by making propaganda and surveillance easier.

Third, whether the Arab Spring actually promoted "freedom" and democracy remains to be seen; removing a dictator is certainly a step in the right direction, but it isn't the whole journey.

If this interests you, there is an entire hobby that consists of inventing constructed languages. For example, check out this guy's web page, featuring a lot of languages he personally constructed, each with really creative grammar, phonology, and writing systems: http://dedalvs.conlang.org/ That guy is so talented that the makers of the HBO series "Game of Thrones" hired him to create the "Dothraki" language used in that show. (I think James Cameron also hired a linguist to create the alien language in Avatar).

I will avoid getting into a debate about whether replacing phonemes with other phonemes really makes a new language. But I will say that taking English and coming up with replacements for English words means that you are locked into an English conceptualization of the world. In English, we have a word, "go," that stands for a huge set of concepts; other languages conceptualize the concept of movement completely differently. http://www.russianlessons.net/grammar/verbs_motion.php . If you treat creating a conlang as a creative endeavor, somewhere in the creative neighborhood of writing a sci-fi or fantasy novel, then a big part of the creativity comes from these types of decisions.

A revealing part of the article comes when Yale Prof. Hicks says that, rather than develop skills with consulting firms, "There are a half-dozen more life-affirming ways you can acquire those same skills, including taking a class at night at a junior college while you do something more interesting."

This is not a good advertisement for Yale. In addition to costing a lot of money, Yale costs four years of lifetime. Yet, after all that, students are left in a position where if they want business skills, they have to hold down a job and go to night school at a junior college?

Also, the Tea Party has so far found a far more effective means of political engagement than protests like these. For better or worse, they've actually gotten involved with electoral politics, and they've had a huge impact.

I am an employee in a non-technical position working in a locked-down environment with (appropriately) paranoid IT staff. The only applications on my work computer that can talk to the Internet are a mail client and a web browser. There are millions of me.

What I'd like to see is an easy-to-set up way to run my own version of Dropbox on a small server in my own home. It needs to have a web interface, not just rsync, because a lot of people (like me) don't have access to anything remotely like rsync on our work machines.

Airlines have been doing their own research into this, apparently. American Airlines is switching to randomized boarding (one of Steffen's proposed solutions) and United is partially switching to window-middle-aisle. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190423340457645...

I found your article interesting but I was really distracted by your characterization of DLI students as douchebag fraternity boys who love The Fountainhead and think all Arabs are "scary men in turbans." Totally doesn't jibe with the guys I know.

I like this part:

>It’s kind of insulting when I hear the phrase "translate things into English." It puts the blame on the person on the team most equipped to solve the problem. The person, who wants "things translated into English," is the problem, not the coder.

Very interesting: "Tarn sees his work in stridently ethical terms. He calls games like Angry Birds or Bejeweled, which ensnare players in addictive loops of frustration and gratification under the pretense that skill is required to win, 'abusive' -- a common diagnosis among those who get hooked on the games, but a surprising one from a game designer, ostensibly charged with doing the hooking. 'Many popular games tap into something in a person that is compulsive, like hoarding,' he said, 'the need to make progress with points or collect things. You sit there saying yeah-yeah-yeah and then you wake up and say, What the hell was I doing? You can call that kind of game fun, but only if you call compulsive gambling fun.' He added: 'I used to value the ability to turn the user into your slave. I don’t anymore.'"

Another site, mylanguageexchange.com, has a similar service for connecting native speakers and learners, and it has a large user base. It has crude web-based text chat built in, but many people just use the site to make connections and then talk to each other via an IM service of their choice.

Although there are some laws that can kind of be represented as computer code (for example, TurboTax captures a good portion of the tax code, and programming a 55 mph speed limit into a car shouldn't be hard) for the most part the law acts as a system for delegating to judges limited authority to exercise discretion. Ultimately, the decisions are made through that discretion, and they aren't entirely predictable. If you haven't already, take 30 minutes and read Oliver Wendell Holmes' "The Path of the Law" and see if you still think the only obstacle to mechanizing the law is the political power of the legal profession. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2373