cconroy

It seems noteworthy to point out in the GP in how he expresses class warfare. When this is invoked (here and elsewhere) it's always the poor who are committing "class warfare" against the rich. When in reality, with evidence abound throughout history it is the rich who actually commit class warfare on a continuous basis against everyone else. Even HN is not immune to this propaganda.

Euclid's Elements too for geometry is fantastic. (I think reading "from the horses mouth" is necessary but not sufficient. With guys like Newton especially, since there are no translation barriers (for us English speakers), and they are quite relatable.)

I have noticed that excursions? in history of a topic; its people, places, culture, enhance the quality of the book. Feynman goes on historical asides, as does say, Apostol (in his calculus texts), and it has been a while but I believe SICP does too. I think the teaching of something should be coupled with its history.

In this same vein, I'm too am interested in a book covering evolution and biology, but I have not found one, or heard of one, so if anybody knows I would greatly appreciate it. Two good bio books I have read are The Selfish Gene, and The Machinery Of Life (Goodsell), but they're more auxiliary.

Unfortunately most people (including myself) don't deeply reflect on a new medium/technology, to figure how best to yield it to amplify human intelligence (or make human progress).

I argue "cutting cord" for news via TV and the web may be the best thing to do now until more is understood of its affects on humans. People don't realize that it is the medium that is the problem and there is no amount of "filter" that will help them and they suffer unnecessarily.

And OOP here means these two things from Kay: (i)'In computer terms, Smalltalk is a recursion on the notion of computer itself. Instead of dividing "computer stuff" into things each less strong than the whole--like data structures, procedures, and functions which are the usual paraphernalia of programming languages--each Smalltalk object is a recursion on the entire possibilities of the computer.'

(ii) "Four techniques used together--persistent state, polymorphism, instantiation, and methods-as-goals for the object--account for much of the power."

i, ii are from http://www.smalltalk.org/smalltalk/TheEarlyHistoryOfSmalltal...

Also computer science might be the worst -- there is zero science in CS. Science has to do with nature![0]

[0] R. Feyman: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL4wg6ZAFIM

One thing I found troubling about all this is you can't expect the victims in other countries to decouple the intentions of the American gov't from American citizens.

Except (even more troubling) is that citizens seem to support drone warfare (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/10/m...).

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_III_of_the_United_Kingdo...

"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing." -Alan Perlis

Also it being deflationary (to me) is as much as a problem as USD being inflationary. I don't spend all my USD as quickly as possible fearing next week those things will be more expensive.

EDIT: Also rereading the post there is nothing substantial in his arguments to support his conclusion -- mostly focusing on red herrings to discredit it: He may not like it politically.

The jobs the OP is referring are not coming back and that is good, but new jobs will be replacing them. I don't see why for any reason why new jobs will not be generated.

If meaniful work does go away what does that mean? Everybody has everything they can imagine?

In my spare time I have never had more fun programming then writing interpreters for scheme, prolog, and smalltalk. It would be amazing to get paid to work on tomorrows languages!

The grocery store will not sell half a loaf because they cannot figure out how to keep them fresh enough to sell them. They don't try hard to sell half a loaf and they basically tell the public to accept whole loaves as a fait accompli.

A the growing demand for half loaves meets a innovative group of people who found a way to deliver fresh half loaves to people. They sell them on the city streets -- without a license -- near the grocery store. Customers are happy again.

The grocery store finds out they have been losing revenues to the street dealers and the engineering efforts they developed for delivery are based on knowledge in the public domain. Instead of using this knowledge to serve their customers the fresh half loaves they want, they try to stop the street dealers from selling because they operate without a business license.

Let's say the assailant does this again in the future -- hurting somebody marginally. And they do press charges.

To the court this looks like a first offense and they let the assailant off gently.

Now suppose the assailant attacks again and this time causes significant injuries.

Had you originally reported your attack, then it is reasonable that the court would see a second minor attack more seriously and could bring more severe charges, deterring the assailant from subsequent assaults and improving the not only the assailant's life, but also the community (as a whole).

This is a specific instance of the more data a deciding entity has, the better chances their making the right choice.

val = if (person === "Homer") { return expr } else if (person === "Bart") { return expr } ...

----

val = { "Homer": expr ,

"Bart": expr , ... }[person];

Would the literal be simpler because it uses data over syntax, or rules instead of conditionals?

I dunno about you guys but I seem to spend almost all my professional time programming in javascript these days. This is perfect!

If the employer values you they will either tell you not to work more than the 40, or tell you when you can -- shifting the power to you.

There is no rule -- or should there be, about negotiating such terms.

Switching back, I think this should arrive more from our culture as it takes an assertive individual to do this as of now. I am a little hesitant to make such terms gov't mandated -- but I would like to hear arguments for it.

The first part of this sentence seems strange.

If you assume your healthy 75yr young body doesn't die of external forces (drowning, fall off cliff, etc.), which you don't seem to be implying, isn't this a contradiction?

In this context, the "senescence" is a precondition for death, right?

A pure guess (based on personal preference) is a mix of remote and local working, favoring remote -- would still produce big successes. (Although, this balance should be kept flexible depending of the state of which the project demands.)

This could stem from programming requiring a mix of social and private time, which works naturally with local and remote working.

Backend web dev? There are lots of nice simple frameworks or you could build your own. Do you really need everything rails / django offers -- I find minimal and lightweight is best. You are essentially building an service that can interpret http.

Devices? If you want to do iOS or Android you can use javascript, css, and html instead of the native approach (see phonegap et al.). Javascript is a functional language -- in that it supports higher-order functions like scheme. (See http://yuilibrary.com/theater/douglas-crockford/crockonjs-3)

"...world of pain and waste of time experience..." or getting shit done in what I know how to do is not a good approach for a programmer.