jcdreads

I ran a lunchtime SICP reading group at my last job wherein we read a section or two at a time and someone (usually me) would illustrate the concepts by walking through our own Java code base (a big industrial ad server). It helped that we were already using a bunch of functional programming idioms, and that we had a few little compilers in the code to begin with, but viewing all that agile-developed code through such a pure academic lens remains one of the more professionally rewarding exercises I've yet had.

Even though I'm still mostly a mouth-breathing Java programmer; at work anyway.

I reliably put in four or five 50+ hour weeks per year (especially if I'm at a new startup), but I've learned through hard experience that it's unbelievably counterproductive to do that for longer than a week or two at a time. My personal life and ability to stay awake, much less think/code clearly, suffer otherwise.

Of course, if work is sufficiently interesting then I end up spending what free time I have thinking about it, which can make my work time incredibly productive, obviating the need to be "working" too much to begin with.

But most importantly: YMMV.

With every technology one must weigh its benefit against the risk of abuse.

Giving someone else the ability to shut off my camera doesn't help me at all (and is in fact something I want not to happen), so all that is left is the risk of abuse. For me that's an easy tradeoff to evaluate.

It looks like the legislation they lobbied for pertains specifically to "...a method or corresponding apparatus for performing data processing operations used in the practice, administration or management of a financial product or service."

> who just implement fully spec'd code

If the spec is really complete then why don't they just compile and run that? Put another way: Is there such a thing anymore as a programmer who just implements fully specced code?

What happens if blogging tools become their own HN post bots?

The last few Dave Winer posts I've seen here have been submitted by davewiner. Since he's a dude who rolls his own blogging tools, I'd be not at all surprised to find that he wired up the ability to simultaneously publish and post a link to HN.

I can see good reasons for doing this for one's own blog, but if this practice were widespread or built into normal people's blogging tools then it would (among other things) cause the "new" page here to be useless.

It's a false dichotomy. Also worth noting what Alan Kay said: "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware."

http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...

Can anyone enlighten us regarding the correct spelling in Arabic? Not that I could read it, of course; and I assume that there is one.

Banking and health care data, for example, cannot for the most part live on AWS or some other generic cloud provider. There are financial and legal penalties for leaking a database full of medical histories and Social Security numbers that preclude storing hospital records on slicehost or something. For the time being, and, given the conservative bent of these industries, probably well into the future, there will still be local sysadmins in the classic sense managing physical hardware under physical security.

That said, there's a screaming business opportunity for a group of enterprising sysadmins who want to set up HIPAA-compliant PaaS offerings for medical information shops, or something similar for banks that won't make the SEC or FDIC freak out.

Snow and certain clouds all night near Boston. This is the only winter solstice snow storm I've ever been disappointed by.

http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=42.245293663448...

I know that cooler heads will prevail, and that python won't get this silly syntax change, but...

...everyone seems to be forgetting that i == -j (either squared is 1). Physicists usually describe traveling waves (of whatever) as something proportional to exp(kx-iwt) where that's an omega, not a w, and electrical engineers for whatever reason prefer the notation exp(kx+jwt) (note the minus sign difference). Except ee's sometimes write exp(kx-jwt), depending on the convention in use at the time.

I'm at a startup (that I otherwise like) where the CEO refuses to disclose the total number of outstanding shares. You can bet that I compute the expectation value of my options to be exactly zero.

Get a job at a small-to-medium sized startup. You will learn whatever technology you use ridiculously well, by necessity, because you're responsible for shipping the feature; and you will be forced to finish the hell out of whatever you're working on at that moment, by necessity, because it's a _small_ business; and you will need to understand the underlying code all the way through to the fancy polish and fixing of niggling minor bugs that QA finds, by necessity, because you're making a product. These things are all necessary because this is your job; that's your motivation to finish.

If you're stuck tinkering it might be best to get a real job for a year or two so you can learn to finish. Then when you start a startup you won't have to learn that particular lesson the hard way.

[Edit: reduce ambiguity]

Our pg has, of course, had much to say about the feasibility of this kind of thing:

* http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html

* http://www.paulgraham.com/startuphubs.html

* http://www.paulgraham.com/maybe.html (a proposed recipe for how to do maybe create a new startup hub; that's actually somewhat more modest than what the tc article describes)

The most salient quote from those articles, IMO: "Of course, a would-be silicon valley faces an obstacle the original one didn't: it has to compete with Silicon Valley."

I would note that if the UK are serious about this "entrepeneur visa" then that could get very interesting. Currently I can't imagine fighting through the federal paperwork required to start a company in California if I weren't already an American. Should this hub nucleate properly I can imagine most non-UK non-US citizens vastly preferring dealing with UK immigration to what has to be a frustrating US system. (Any non-UK non-US folks care to comment more informedly on this?)

And real estate is stupidly expensive in London, so they're halfway to Silicon Valley already.

[Edit: formatting]

"I'm thinking about breaking up anyway, and I don't feel like spending a bunch of money on a Christmas gift."

Have no doubt that by the time one of these rebrandings is announced many truckloads of stuff has been printed. The hippie in me absolutely weeps.

There is also http://xkcdexplained.com/

Also, DropBox is a YC-funded startup.

Because he "…will now be editing it and doing the index," presumably.

The difference between good and great is usually pretty obvious to former colleagues who are now at a new company that's hiring.

And here's a paper claiming evidence against:

http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/files/EarthSun.pdf

(Another 30 seconds of googling.)

Fischbach's page, with citations of (but not links to) the original research:

http://www.physics.purdue.edu/people/faculty/ephraim.shtml

A preprint:

http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.3283

Why do publications refuse to post links to (or at least citations of) the original scientific articles? I mean, these links are the result of five minutes of googling; which means the reporter communicated with the authors themselves but didn't bother to ask for a hyperlink or an emailed citation.

The mind boggles.

It's meaningless to add temperatures in any circumstance. You can average temperatures, and you can add amounts of heat energy, but it is semantic garbage to try to add temperatures.

I'd say what it's doing--converting to an absolute scale then adding--is an interesting bug.

Strong agreement on this point. Roads like River Drive in Philadelphia and Storrow Drive in Boston have twisty, blind corners and a 35 mph speed limit, but a regular flow of traffic that is at least 20 mph faster than that. It seems that once people become familiar with a road they fly along way faster than is actually safe. They promote their speed to their level of incompetence, if you will.

On the other hand, it makes me consider (but doesn't remotely convince me of) the possibility that all of Boston's rotaries maybe aren't the dumbest road designs possible.

By editing your ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict file you can set up a gigantic subset of emacs navigation keys (including almost-but-not-quite versions of C-k and C-y) in every Cocoa text widget on your computer, including Safari textareas.

Do a search for DefaultKeyBinding.dict, or just start with mine:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5431919/DefaultKeyBinding.dict

Turns out that the FriXion ink is still there after being erased, but it's on the other side of some kind of (reversible!) phase transition. Any kind of heat makes it go away, and cold makes it reappear, as this video shows:

http://www.jetpens.com/jetpics/?p=172?

Very cool ink.

Check out the literal web log:

http://literally.barelyfitz.com/

Sadly, it seems to be dormant.

You may find that undergraduate physics is a good match for your learning style. There is plenty of ridiculous math, but all of it is based in simple (!) models of the way the world actually works. Differential equations and vector calculus are relatively easy for visual thinkers, and the need to get the math to tell you precise answers drives you pretty naturally to some reasonable approximation of mathematical rigor. Where heavy mathematics demands insane amounts of rigor to make progress, physics is merely descriptive, so you can enjoy learning about the symmetry and beauty of things (like how all of chemistry falls out of quantum mechanics) without (all of) the mindlessly mechanistic formality (like proving that legendre polynomials are really a complete basis set).

Also know that math (and physics for that matter) is almost universally poorly taught, so don't get discouraged by that.

While I wouldn't doubt that excessive debt is bad for any company, I think the recent collapse of advertising and broad decline in circulation are the most proximate causes of newspapers (and lots of other print media outfits) losing money.

A-and I'm not sure there's much the President can do to avoid right wing papers calling him a socialist, subsidy or not, but at least under this scheme a paper's right wing (or left wing) editorial board could then plausibly claim that their opinions reflected a considered take on the news, and that they were paid only (mostly?) by the blind subsidy rather than by some corrupting influence like a right wing (or left wing) political machine.

According to both the last president and the current one, neither are American citizens, necessarily.