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There is also Ecukes[1] which lets you write Cucumber style integration tests for emacs. We use these exclusively when writing the elisp part of clj-refactor[2]. These are so high level, and readable, that they can often double as documentation.

The only real gripe I have with Ecukes is that the diff of the actual and expected output could be better. Turning on whitespace-mode while writing these scenarios have often solved an otherwise inexplicable test failure.

[1] https://github.com/ecukes/ecukes [2] https://github.com/clojure-emacs/clj-refactor.el

The Tesla isn't priced as a luxury car in Norway. Electric vehicles are exempt from taxes and fees, which is mostly where the money goes when you buy a more traditional vehicle. They also don't pay anything when passing toll booths, IIRC. Where I grew up, people now pay ~$10 just to pass toll booths to and from work every day.

There are other benefits as well, like free parking, Tesla's free charging station--and most importantly for many--you get to drive in the lane reserved for buses and taxis instead of dealing with traffic to and from work.

I think part of the explanation for why the software products with estimates performed poorer in terms of productivity can be explained by parkinson's law[1].

Now, this phenomenon isn't always deleterious imo. I've noticed in myself that my work 'expands' in two ways: if I'm working on something dreadfully boring, then it expands through time wasted on hacker news or time spent on side projects. If on the other hand I'm doing meaningful work, then it's quite often that the work expands when I take on refactorings and minor additions that will benefit long-term productivity.

If the work is indeed expanding in a meaningful way, then even though the measured productivity might not seem 'optimal' it doesn't necessarily indicate a big problem either.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law

The benefit of standardizing on a tool that is "good enough" is worth it imo. Learning git is easier than learning svn, darcs, hg, perforce and git and juggling between them when you want to submit patches to open source projects or get new clients.

I haven't counted the number of packages I use, from MELPA, but it's likely around 100. I have problems associated with MELPA about 2-3 times per year.

One of these times was yesterday, when cider-test was added to cider. Melpa excludes files ending with -test.el by default, so a file was missing. I grabbed the file manually from github and went on with my evening. An hour or so later the pull request fixing the problem was merged.

For developers, the criticism against MELPA is just FUD. If anything goes wrong you can fix it easily enough.

I'm glad I live in a country (Norway) with a ton of guns and very little gun violence. I don't think easier access is going to change that going forward. Perhaps a little bit.

Other countries are less fortunate. It is my hope that instead of building higher walls--in the literal sense, or in the form of checkpoints--we can take a closer look at what drives the gun violence. Inequality seems to be a big factor. Access to psychiatric treatment might be another.

It saddens me that the easiest solution might be to simply ban 3d-printers. This would get someone a cheap political win, not actually solve the problem, and ruin something great for everyone else.

From the FAQ:

You can track 5 key health molecules: inflammation, vitamin D, fertility, influenza, and testosterone in just minutes, at home.

I was trying to figure out what the device can tell you about yourself, and it appears it can't tell you very much at present. Also, these things aren't 'molecules'.

As an MVP this is exciting stuff! In a few years we might have something that is actually useful.

It's already easy to test for political affiliation / religious beliefs as part of the interview process, but people aren't doing that. No reason to believe that something like this will be different.

The benefits of lisp 'syntax' are legion, to the point that I've come to feel that your position is unprofessional. Why wouldn't you try to get passed something as superficial as syntax, in order to better _make_ stuff?

1) Easier to learn and remember syntax for polyglots. No more Googling, shit like "what was the syntax for try-with-resources or the new multi-catch feature in java"?

2) The language tooling is so much easier to get right. The parser for Ruby is 10k lines. What the actual fuck? How can you expect people to make good tools if they can't get past the parse step?

3) Macros!

4) No fucking precedence rules. I don't want to memorize that the precedence for 'and' and && is different in Ruby and how 'and' interacts with the precedence of other operators like assignment.

5) Structural editing.

I might have forgotten a few, but 2) and 3) alone are killer features.

2) Clojure has sensible math with auto promotion to bignums, you don't have to worry about overflows like in Java.

3) You don't pay the price for the JVM startup time when running unit tests. When developing Clojure you have a JVM active at all time for your REPL. The JVM startup time is really only a problem if you want to write scripts.

Your first issue with Haskell is a plus! Everyone in #Haskell on freenode are incredibly helpful, and well, if they're all professors you likely to get some quality help, right?

Over the last decade SSDs have increased their storage capacity at an incredible rate. This growth has mostly been fueled by adapting better process technology. I read a while back that the move to ever smaller scales (now 19nm) came at the costs of increased errors rates and that the limiting factor going forward would be error correction. Has this situation changed, or is SanDisk just throwing chips at the capacity problem, along with better controllers, and targeting an enterprise segment willing to pay the price?

This series is fantastic and I can't wait for a better Clojure debugger!

This is a good example. There is indeed nothing that prevents an EU based company from filing for a software patent in the US (or other markets). This particular patent has likely been so lucrative (~$100m in revenues) because it's so easy to spot infringements.

There are no software patents in Europe. I've seen nothing to suggest that European software companies are less competitive. In my daily work as a developer I've not once heard anyone talk about the competition 'stealing our ideas'.

The reason I think software patents are a net negative is that it's the sum of the parts that make a software product valuable. Patenting some of the algorithms used to develop this software product is not going to protect you from the competition in any meaningful way.

Contrast this with pharma where the end-product is simple, often a single easily reproduced compound.

The blog post is from January 12, 2011

tl;dr: read 750 to 1000 pages per day and think deeply about what you read.

Easy!

The herman miller chairs offer far better adjustability than the IKEA Markus chair. The Markus is a good chair for its price, but they're not comparable.

It's not ours to spend. It belongs to future generations as much as it does ours.

The money is invested and some of the yearly return on that investment is spent each year. At present the government is at liberty to spend up to 4% of the fund each year (though they don't always do this, due to risk of creating inflation, heating up the real-estate market etc). The investment fund is well-managed, but some argue that spending 4% each year might mean we're eating into the principle.

The amount of books you're able to get through in a year is amazing! According to Goodreads, you're also able to do this consistently, which is even more incredible. How many hours do you spend reading in a typical week?

The title is pretty misleading. Even if they wanted to the tax authorities in Norway don't have the authority to determine what is and what isn't a currency. The only thing they've determined, once and for all, is that you have to pay taxes when you profit from trading in bitcoins (like everything else!).

If bitcoins are going to be used for anything at all, the rise in value is likely to continue for a while longer. One can argue, and I might agree, that the velocity of money is greater in the bitcoin economy, but I still think the small size of the bitcoin economy (little over $5 000 000 000 atm) is limiting.

The value of bitcoins is tied to the size of the bitcoin economy. If you believe the size of the bitcoin economy is going to grow over time, then the value of each coin will also increase (as there will never be more than 20m coins).

If bitcoins are to be used as a niche instrument to make financial transactions easier, the total value of all bitcoins should probably be more more than a few billion dollars.

The two situations where time zones are relevant is a very good observation, but I still think we should optimize for the more common case, which is communicating across timezones.

You are complecting two problems: 1) When does the other person sleep. 2) What does his watch show.

Making 2) easier does not change anything with regard to 1).

I wish we would go one step further and just stick to UTC as well. That way when we try to set up a video conference at 0900 we don't have to translate between time zones. We can just ask if 0900 works, and everyone would know what time that is.

There's no reason 1200 should be midday. If we changed this today the next generation would never stop to think about how "weird it is that it's dark at 1200" where they live.

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Another effect leading to weight fluctuations upon starting / ending a diet is the body's usage of glycogen stores as an energy source. For every gram of carbs the body stores as glycogen it stores around 4g of water along with it. Thus, when you burn through all the glycogen in your liver and muscles you will lose a lot of water weight, several kilos in fact. This weight will also be regained when you start eating normally again.

The key thing here is that these pellets are designed to work with existing reactors. If you want to start using thorium it is a very hard sell (given the popularity of nuclear power atm) to build new reactors/plants, but changing the fuel in existing plants to something that can be said to be 'cleaner' or 'safer' might be doable.

The law of jante is slightly esoteric and so everyone feels the need to bring it up when the Scandinavian tech scene is discussed, just to show they are in the know. Nobody in a position to do a startup gives a shit about the law of jante. Neither is an investor going to turn away from a pile of money while muttering under his breath 'who does he think he is?'

Of all the people I know that could have done a startup, the main reason they did not is because the alternative is so good. Everyone in my class (5 years of computer engineering) who bothered with early interviews, had a job lined up 9 months prior to graduation. Even my mediocre classmates were being courted by multiple companies. Starting salary in Oslo is $80k, about 60k more than what a typical student lives off in Norway.