dave_au

There's probably two sets of people at work in the statement.

The people who made the frameworks would require a good understand as well as the idea that an abstraction might make life easier.

The side effect is that if you create a good enough abstraction you'll get people who can handle the abstraction but are a little shakey when dealing with what is abstracted.

See, you can both be right :)

You could conceivably ssh into anything, so you could just leave copies _everywhere_.

I wasn't knocking your blog, and I assumed from your current blogs welcome message that there were other blogs out there and the current one might not be representative. From what I've seen you write pretty clearly and lay your ideas out well.

Also, the linked article isn't that complex once you get past the first paragraph. It's actually about discussing domain specific complex topics, and the first paragraph acts an example. From then on it's written pretty clearly and the ideas are layed out well. But at the end of the day it's more a thought / concern the guy had than an article.

It's not that the domain experts are all snooty and don't want to condescend to explain things properly. It's that they have to make a choice about explaining things to those that are familiar with the domain - in which case they can be fairly concise and get whatever idea it is across with a minimal signal to noise ratio - or they can try for an explanation that anyone could understand - which might take more than a feasible amount of time, and carries a risk that the core idea that got them motivated enough to explain things in the first place would be lost amongst all the new information.

With that in mind, using a highly domain specific first paragraph as an example seems to be a highly effective way of a communicating the idea - if it was at the end, or in the middle and the reader was told it was an example then people would have skipped or skimmed it. The stakes wouldn't be high enough. You don't know that because you didn't read the article - kind of amusing since you subsequently accused the author of having a lazy attitude :)

Anyhow, it seems liked you were offering advice between authors of similarly complex works which is what caused some cognitive dissonance in me. Maybe you've written equally complex works before, but it feels to me that if you haven't then you can't know if your advice scales to the higher complexity description.

I would argue that most of your subjects are reasonably straightforward but perhaps discussed less clearly elsewhere. I didn't see any data or graphs showing lost opportunity costs and probabilities of succes in the "College vs Startup" entry for instance - which for my money would make it more of a complex subject, radically more useful while still being easily explainable. As it is pretty much anyone could have written it - perhaps with a different style - but it doesn't seem like it's coming from a domain expert.

The merchant account article is the exception amongst them, I'm sure that's very useful for the people who are looking at getting a merchant account.

Maybe we just have different levels for what we count as complex, which is fine.

I don't want to be harsh, but I took a look at your blog, and I'm struggling to come up with some kind of reasonable measure for "complex subjects" that matches any of the entries. And with 8 entries the "all the time" bit doesn't seem that spot on either.

It's late here so that's probably a little grumpier sounding that it's meant to be. Just slightly gobsmacked by the wording is all.

Edit: I just re-read this and it does sound pretty snarky and I don't want to come across as a troll or a nuisance, but really, read both the perils of pop philosophy article and the blog and you'll see where I'm coming from.

More than some, I think. Most strong crypto short of one-time pads makes use of NP (or at least problems solvable by NP problems, factoring is probably a little easier than NP).

NP is nice for crypto since it has P time checkable solutions - so just make the "password" an encoding of the solution and you're golden.

It's easy to check that a password is correct, and it takes EXP time to brute force. Hopefully the crypto implementation blocks IPs after some number of login attempts that is less than EXP :)

I thought protein folding was harder than NP.

IIRC, calculating the free energy of a molecule is in #P (count the number of solutions to a problem in NP), and you still need to step it through time or otherwise deal with the actual folding bit.

I might be remembering incorrectly though.

Edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp-P-complete Also: whoops - looks like structure prediction can be done with high accuracy in NP - just don't try to animate it :)

I'd write a kick-ass regular expression engine.

http://perl.plover.com/NPC/NPC-3SAT.html

Answer from Cook: www.cs.toronto.edu/~sacook/homepage/JACMpvsnp.ps

Highlights - Computers could find formal proofs for any theorem with a reasonable length - All you need then is a good recognition algorithm for formal proofs - Then you can just work on recognizers for good novels / music / etc and have it churn out classics

The other example (I forget the source) is that if you have a P time formula for safety checking the designs of nuclear power plant, if P = NP you can efficiently generate a list of the designs of all possible safe nuclear power plants.

So you can go from P-time checkable constraints to P-time enumeration of things which fill the constraints.

I've handed my copy to a few people now, some found it intimidating it first but I don't think it's genius level material. Just take it a page at a time and keep in mind that it'll be worth it.

Oh yeah - and if you're struggling with the math/meta-math examples you should do what he says and play around with the ideas with pen and paper. If I remember correctly they're mostly closer to the start of the book so after that you should be fine.

You could duplicate the system - so you have something like "White House 2" and "anti-White House 2" - try to get each group to focus on getting their ideas / facts / opinions organised rather than on sinking each other ships.

It'd potentially stop each of them from polluting the other, although you'd probably have to have somewhere designated as middle ground for those that want to debate things.

There are other ways to partition the two groups, but having a way for them to come together as well would be interesting. If as well as "Endorse / Oppose" you had "Thought provoking / not" then you potentially slip the more thought provoking ideas from one area across to the other (tagged as having come across from the other side).

You might have to start a new set of comments when it moves across so the old discussion doesn't get derailed, but at least it lobs various ideas over the fence.

Leechblock:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476

Lets me set fairly fine grained time limits on various sites that I'd otherwise spend too much time on.

They're releasing the spec and large chunk of the code openly - if it's a good idea and google stop developing it I'm sure someone else will step in.

Gah - too late to edit.

I was wondering specifically about how would it effect development mailing lists - with wave plugins to look at patches / browse repositories / review code things could get pretty interesting.

Although with non-development mailing lists it could be interesting as long as you could optionally select the group of people to discuss the contents of the list.

I'm assuming sometimes it would be better to discuss the contents of the mailing list (or RSS feed) with a select few of your contacts. Discussing the content with all subscribers can be done already (although perhaps not as fluidly) with blog post comments etc...

Whenever micropayments come up - and specifically with the idea of making the payments from some kind of broker account so that the transaction cost isn't a hassle - it colours my thinking for the next couple of days.

It gets tied into my "vote up" reflex that I've gotten used to from reddit and HN. Normally I'll come across something I like, think "I should vote that up" if I found it from some place with votes. After I'm primed with the idea of micropayments I think "I'd micropay for that".

I don't know what I'd pay, but I get the feeling that the thought corresponds to the same payment amount. It would be nice to have a configureble browser widget that would make paying the default amount as bookmarking something or tagging it for delicious.

The troubling thing is that I'd spend a bit on stuff that I'd optionally get for free, but I don't know how much I'd pay for something like the new york times - the "you must register thing" really bugs me (even now, after I registered with a mailinator account to avoid the hassle). I guess I've just gotten used to trying before I buy (thanks torrent people...)

It seems to be acting like a lot of communication tools at once. If there's some way to partition the usage up somehow then it's like a combination of several quality tools in the one place with the option to let the borders blur.

It'd be nice to be able to set the communication mode for instance - "this is asynchronous, like an email", and then you don't have to worry about the person you're writing to coming online while you're drafting something you want to word carefully. It sounds like they have something like that but I don't know what the granularity is like.

If it can do that you can have your cake and eat it to, and I'd be pretty keen to give it a go.

Hell, I'd be happy with email/chat/feed reader/blog interface as separate apps in the same page, just so I could get status info from everything in the same place that I do stuff. Being able to drag and drop things between them all has a fair bit of appeal as well.

It's probably a fine line between good integration and a huge shiny mess though.

How would this effect mailing lists?

Well, if you're going to try to reinvent email you've got a better chance at making whitelists useful.

Even if your inbox (or whatever the wave equivalent is) could divide incoming waves based on whether they were from whitelisted contacts or from unknown contacts, it gets a lot more useful if people whitelist each other by default.

It doesn't seem like it's about getting a better result. As far as I can see it's allowing people to get a result in less time.

Imagine if CSS made you style every element individually, so you had to specify the full path through the DOM before applying each style. It's still the same language because you could get the same results - it's just a lot more typing.

It seems to be a similar thing happening with CSS frameworks, although there's less inefficiency to remove than with my exaggerated example.

Adding variables and arithmetic to the mix also has the potential to make things more maintainable if used correctly - if you're setting the same number multiple times or setting a number as the result of a calculation an expert CSS coder will have to remember to update everything (and/or) redo the calcuations every time they want to make a change.

It's a medium sized win but I'm willing to take a look.

AFAIK it's reasonably well known as an unintentional troll - there was a stackoverflow question about the FQA (still looking for the link) that basically mooted almost every point.

I was reading it as a neutral party, however some very knowledgeable C++ appeared to convince all comers that the FQA is either based on ignorance or is disingenuous.

Dealing with mass migrations is also interesting in this context. I'm one of what appears to be many reddit refugees, and I mainly left because of what appeared to be a medium size exodus from digg to reddit.

I assume that the people were moving from digg to reddit because they saw that there were generally "better" elsewhere - why would you move to somewhere if you didn't think it was better? - and then some proportion of those people didn't take the time to get to know the prevailing culture, and so they brought parts of the culture they were fleeing with them.

Seeing that has made me stop and think and then think again before posting here. I'll probably start to consider myself part of the community after a year or 500 comment karma, whichever comes last. Unless reddit implodes and they all come here.

The 42 minutes to anywhere idea is covered briefly as well. It's like it's Fforde day. And I'll never complain about Fforde day.

I've been doing this (other than doing it I'm unaffiliated with the site):

http://www.simplefit.org/

It's been good - it's a program of pull-ups, push-ups and squats with 3 sessions a week and a series of levels to work through. Pretty nice if you're busy, none of the workouts go past 30 minutes because there's a focus on high intensity in the workout.

Probably wise to take the guys nutrition advice with a grain of salt, since it doesn't see to be his main area of knowledge.

Other than that I run about 5km 3 times a week.

I don't think it's that much of a miracle - Cobham's "The intrinsic computational difficulty of functions" covered it pretty well - or least explained the intuition behind why it's a pretty sensible idea - and he (along with Jack Edmonds) pretty much defined the complexity class P.

Is it just me or does the article read like the author is calling Tiananmen Square a country?

Comes from Dinosaur Comics for those who liked it.

http://www.qwantz.com

Took me a while to warm up to the comics, but there's some gold in there, eg:

http://www.qwantz.com/archive/001426.html http://www.qwantz.com/archive/001433.html

Also, while I'm spouting random and totally subjective opinions about Dinosaur Comic related things, I much prefer this shirt

http://www.topatoco.com/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_C...

to the time travel one, but maybe I'm just a big kid.

I went there to post a link to

http://skepdic.com/myersb.html

but Alex3917 has beaten me to it almost a year ago.

Dude is drawing something like free body diagrams here -

http://www.theforgottentechnology.com/newpage2

- so he's doing alright sans formal education.

Here's the main website from the guy behind it:

http://www.theforgottentechnology.com/

If you click through you all the pages you get some decent details on what's going on, despite the ancient technology theme extending to the design of the website :)

He's not worried about it on the client side. He's worried about it from the server side. As was really, really clear from reading the article.

Might shed some light on the downmods.

I found the various commenting on the questions he was asked quite interesting because they were coming from someone who does a lot of interviews.

I didn't take the "Great question" as phony exuberance at all because of that, but that could just be me. Different strokes for different folks I guess.