dusklight

I think this writer of this post is more than a little ignorant of the class that he is in and the class that the people he has been meeting are in. As a personal account from someone honestly expressing his own opinion I still think it was a good read but it makes way too many assumptions that are wrong.

For one thing it is really wrong to talk about the "culture" of America. Even just in the same state, even in the same county, the culture of people can vary widely. Just go to Palo Alto, talk to the super friendly people there (because the billionaires wear hoodies and they don't know how much money you have) then try to find the black people (oh they are there .. there are lots of them .. can you find them?) and see if you can talk to them and get them to open up and see what their culture is like. In the south, go to a white church and a black church and then come tell me if they have the same culture. This sort of thing happens all over the world as well. Unless you have stayed in a country for YEARS I don't think you can even begin to understand the intricacy of cultures in that area.

Generalizing a people by their country is no more (or less) accurate than generalizing people by their gender or the color of their skin. It's not completely inaccurate but it is completely wrong a lot of times.

Have you done any study on our current understanding of the brain and cognitive science?

[http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1290271...]

not everyone agrees on the above model, but I think its safe to say that the part of the brain that deals with leadership existed before we invented civilization .. wolves have leadership, apes have leadership. So much of social nonverbal communication probably comes from the primitive, instinctive part of our brain, not the logical, planning part.

I think if in the past you had to deal with some really irrational people, and you were intelligent enough to be able to use logic to figure out their bullshit, at some point in your life it was probably really helpful to just reject all irrational bullshit. At one point in my life it was really helpful to me to suppress all instinct and rely solely on logic. But since then, seeing how some completely illogical people can in many situations be more efficient than me in navigating life's obstacles, I have had to learn from my mistakes and revise my behavior. I do think social nonverbal communication is ethically neutral. It's not the smartest behavior, but it is faster than the smartest behavior, and there are many situations where that ends up being more important. Not all. Unfortunately at this time I do not know of any better way to figure out which is which other than experience.

I didn't say it was incorrect, I said that the audience should always fact check. I am also not saying it is correct. Boolean logic has stunted our minds. There is not only true and false. There is true, false, unknown, and undefined.

Keeping in mind her "pi = 4" and similar videos, isn't it better for the audience to always be questioning and always be fact-checking than to blindly trust that what she says is correct?

Keeping in mind the section of the video about sports and kids on the train talking to each other, is it possible that she is not wrong, but that you misunderstood what she was trying to say? If there was some misunderstanding of communication, it is at least partially her fault because she made the choices of communications medium and communications distribution, but keeping in mind the overall tenor of her channel, who do you think she is trying to reach and what do you think she is trying to say?

Could you please go into more detail on what were your requirements that Clojure did not fit?

What you have so far IS an impressive, audacious, idea. You can probably tell by the amount of attention you have gotten for it already. False humility is a kind of arrogance too, you know. Honest humility takes more work. Any time anyone starts talking about writing a new language, either they have not thought through all the challenges that would have to be met, like a boy trying to build a rocket to the moon using fireworks, or they are trying to do something impressive. Which are you?

Instead of designing your own language Logos, have you considered using Clojure, which is also homoiconic, is a modern variant of lisp, and was/is designed by programmers who have industry experience, so it's not an academic experiment?

Nope I do this too.

Citation please?

So because it's hard to be ethical we shouldn't try? Because it is hard to quantify greed it is no longer a bad thing?

Because other people are doing it too is a good justification?

I recently watched the movie "Django Rising" and the character of Leonardi diCaprio troubled me greatly. Not because I thought he was really evil but because I thought he really wasn't. Had I been born in that time, son of a slave owner who was son of a slave owner, brought up surrounded by the values of that time, would I have been able to recognize that slavery was evil, would I have had the courage to do anything about it? Would I have behaved any differently from how Leo's character behaved?

Is everything only about money?

Is it really ethical to try to get as much money out of your customers? If you are making a profit after all costs are considered, how much profit is too much?

The question is maybe not too important when applied to something like an e-book, but it becomes different when applied to something people think they cannot do without, like a college education or healthcare. In those situations we have seen vendors will gouge you for as much as they can get, which ends up being as much as you have.

We as a society need to rethink whether that should be considered acceptable behavior. I don't know if legislation is necessarily the right solution (I am inclined to think it is not) but at the very least people should feel shameful for being so greedy.

How is he being barbaric by proposing that prospective parents should reconsider having children if they don't think their children will be able to have a happy life?

No comments about the truth of the prejudice against older programmers, but this study does not prove anything. There is a huge self-selection bias going on here, as not all programmers go on stack overflow and certainly not all programmers answer questions on stack overflow. There could be many older programmers who have not kept up to date with the latest skills and best practices, who know the only reason why their job is secure at BigCorp is because their code is so bad/intentionally obfuscated that no one else can read it, who don't answer questions on stack overflow.

Speaking as someone who has interviewed quite a lot of people, I would say we have an ample supply of kids who started programming in college and successfully graduated with a 4-year degree, or even a masters. But we have a huge shortage on people who can actually write code and be hireable.

It's pretty clear that we are not the only animals with brains, so there are other animals who use their brains to make decisions, such as how to hunt and when to sleep and so on. We make what is in our opinion more sophisticated decisions, but that arguably is a human-centric conceit. There are ant colonies that span continents, and they aren't building any nuclear weapons. Are we really sure we are more intelligent than them?

I don't think it is fair to say that our brain makes us more adaptable to new environments than other species. Compared to the many single-celled species that have survived hundreds of millions of years, the bacteria that can survive hibernation for millions of years, and our current inability to agree on the existence of global warming, is it realistic to project the survival of our species beyond even the next thousand years?

Clicked on link -- I am interested in learning about math, physics and CS.

Saw registration screen. Closed window.

Did you get any funding at all?

Did you make at least $1 of profit? Gross?

The "meeting people" problem is asymmetrical. You have a bunch of people who want to meet new people. Unfortunately the type of people they want to meet already know so many people they are not looking to meet new people. Lots of people want to meet Katy Perry; She's probably a bit tired of people wanting to talk to her. How did you go about addressing this issue?

I downvoted you because you added nothing to the conversation by claiming you have a 6 but then adding no details to it. Hey I can do that too. I have an idea that ranks a 7! I am cooler than you! But I am not going to tell you what it is because I think having a good idea is harder than executing well and I don't have many good ideas and I am afraid you are going to steal mine.

I think there is some bug here? Clicking on the above link about booleans leads to code about how to draw ellipses.

I don't really think it is fair to characterize Clojure as conservative. If anything Clojure was created out of the motivation to have the cake and eat it too. Most other languages grant you the benefits of type-safety but at the cost of reduced flexibility/increased complexity. Clojure tries as much as possible to give you the pragmatic benefits of both while mitigating the costs.

I personally think how clojure has been presented so far is its greatest strength and it is the reason why it is so strong so far and why it continues to get stronger. You have to be a better than average programmer, one who has worked with multiple languages from multiple paradigms, who has worked with real production code before, to recognize why it is so much superior to any other programming language currently available right now.

I'm GLAD that there is currently no killer app for Clojure, like how Rails became the killer app for Ruby. IMO Rails killed Ruby. Ruby started out in the right direction but once Rails became popular there was an influx of so-so programmers who started polluting the language with inefficient concepts, constantly reinventing the wheel poorly because they did not know enough computer science to know that a better solution had already been invented. Now the system has been bogged down by so much cruft, it is difficult to see if it still serves the purpose it was originally designed for (a language the people can enjoy programming in).

Clojure is not ready yet. The core team is still working on refining the fundamentals for what maybe can become the 100 year language [http://paulgraham.com/hundred.html] -- look at reducers in 1.4. Right now Clojure doesn't need more people. It needs more smart people. If you are not smart enough to understand why it is worth switching to it, maybe you should wait a bit and let the design mature more. The killer apps will come. Clojure's ability to scale complexity will eventually overcome its current drawbacks, as the tools and the ecosystem matures.

I just want to say I use duckduckgo, but the reason is because I find Google's recent policies to be unsupportable and I no longer want to use them. So far duckduckgo has been inferior in just about every way to google, most notably search speed and search quality. Also I have seen some extremely dubious scammy ads in ddg, which make me uncomfortable for sure.

What if musicians freely allowed the distribution of their music, but charged for concerts? That would be a clear parallel to the "smells" analogy. Many musicians would be able to survive, and it will encourage them to put on more spectacular shows to draw in the crowds.

I think it's kinda dumb to ask for code samples, because while a code sample from a honest candidate can be very helpful in determining how good they are, it is very easy for a dishonest candidate to doctor something up. Also when looking at a code sample you have no idea how long it took them to do it or how much hand holding they needed to do it.

Having a coding question (Something clever but doesn't take up a lot of time to do, the best programmers have plenty of options, they don't need to jump through your hoops if they don't want to) on your website and asking for solutions to that is a better filter imo.

Maslow [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslows_hierarchy_of_needs] would disagree with the fundamental premise of this post.

I have no idea what this does, the explanation is not clear. there is no way for me to try it without signing up for an account. Therfore I am going to ignore it and close the window.

dadgum has been mentioned a few times in this thread .. could someone please explain why that is a good blog, maybe a link to an article that is insightful?

Have you heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect?

I don't fully agree with this, it depends on what type of project you are working on.

There is a certain type of cowboy programmer that depends on thinking quickly and having a good memory. This type of programmer can write code that works, really quickly -- provided the size of the project can fit entirely in their head. Because of this, they can do really well on small size projects but they never learnt proper code design and architecture skills, because they never needed them. This type of programmer ends up not being able to scale as the size of the project gets larger, because eventually they reach the limit on how much code they can remember at one time, and the lack of code design that lets you reduce the number of things you need to be aware about in order to write new code without breaking anything really starts to bite you.

Can you please be more specific about which "liberal jewish values" you are talking about? Similarly can you give specific examples of Japanese cultural values that have taken hold in the US?