nezumi

I'd love to make a small change to the English language. When speaking of speculation and rent-seeking activities, don't say "make money", say "obtain money". Reserve the term "making money" for activities which create value.

Just try it: how successful and glamorous does your rich banker friend seem when you describe him as an obtainer, rather than as a creator of wealth?

Terrible reporting. Improving health outcomes by AI analysis of patient data is a much bigger prize - morally and commercially - than anything which could be achieved through ad targeting. Google is far too smart to squander such an opportunity by abusing patients' trust.

You have to account for competition.

Suppose there are two companies with the same business model, operating in the same countries etc. One files taxes "fairly" and one minimizes its tax burden as far as the law will allow. Which one do you think is going to be in business for longer? Which one would you buy shares in?

You can get as angry as you like at the companies, or the legislators, but in the end it's the system you need to be scrutinizing.

If I were in this position I would find the appropriate internal legal counsel and cc them on the email, including the words 'client attorney privileged and confidential' at the top. This affords some protection against discovery were the information to become relevant in legal proceedings. Taking that additional caution on behalf of the company shows professionalism on your part and will be appreciated by management who will see you're trying to contain and redress the situation rather than put the company at risk, in which case you may be seen instead as the risk.

Another thought- it's possible that your supervisor's manager is aware of the action being taken against you. You might be able to get better advice talking to someone in a different reporting chain if you can find them.

The last time I had a problem with ATT I had to make multiple calls and spent over an hour in total on hold. How would you charge for that?

I'd have gladly paid for someone to take that pain away. There's probably a viable business model in there somewhere if someone can independently put a competent customer service layer in front of companies like ATT.

This would be perfectly fair if there were a reliable way for ad-supported sites to restrict access to only clients which aren't running an ad blocker.

I don't live in SF but I work for a Bay Area company and have often wondered, while waiting to get onto one of those shiny buses, why a city with such a high concentration of rich, smart people is failing its least fortunate residents so miserably and obviously. Why are the technological elite so helpless in the face of this problem on their own doorstep?

Reading the comments here it seems that there is a massive gap in understanding, empathy and plain old data - are there no studies answering the questions being speculated on here?

If you could find a way to address that gap of understanding - provide the technologists with data, and fully describe the constraints - perhaps there can be a useful discussion in the technology community.

Reading the follow-up article he talks more about the 'folk mythology of progress' and speaks of the cycle of nature (intelligent species and civilizations) as a more fundamental truth. Here's a counter proposition: yes, the processes of nature are supremely powerful and yes, humans are apt to make life difficult for ourselves and yes, progress isn't a given. What we call progress is really just humanity fulfilling our ecological destiny of adapting to new niches, just like every other species. But by destroying our environment, we are creating the very evolutionary pressure necessary to force our own adaptation - which we will continue to rightly term 'progress'.

Some features of the quoted 'Austrian School's theory' seem remarkably close to Bitcoin: it "arises out of an unplanned, decentralized process. This takes time. It takes a lot of time. It spreads slowly, as new people discover it as a tool of production..." and "becomes widely used as money as a result of innumerable transactions within the economy".

It's arguable that the 'unplanned' part is not a necessary feature of a currency. In fact, no fiat currency in circulation today has survived without a significant amount of planning.

In contrast, the planning which went into Bitcoin seems to have made it closely fit the theory's description of money. Arguing that its planned nature negates its 'moneyhood' (to coin a phrase... sorry...) seems a little like arguing that an artificial organ won't work due to not having been grown within the host, or that a genetically engineered organism will fail due to not having gone through an evolutionary process.

How about if you could opt-in to cloud processing in reward for no ads?

Since when was Haskell "a member of the Lisp family"?

So, how do surgeons train? The commentary in the videos reminds me of martial arts training. It takes years to become fluent in most martial arts and the requirements are quite similar - a steady hand, economy of motion, spatial awareness, etc. But a good art has a curriculum where those skills can be trained independently of situations where you might injure yourself or others. Another possibility is - perhaps some people just don't have the knack for it and won't develop it. Is anything done to weed them out at the start of their training?

Hang on, I thought 'Solar system' means the system orbiting the star 'Sol' i.e. our sun? Isn't the general term 'planetary system'?

That form is filled in by engineers before they give interviews, to help HR get good coverage when setting up a series of interviews. It's not used for anything else.

I'd also like to mention that you're not going to get many self-identified extroverts voting when you post the survey on Saturday night ;)

I strongly suspect people become more likely to strongly self-identify with one category or another as a result of the concepts recently becoming popularized and would be less apt to consider themselves at either extreme were they not presented as mutually exclusive, and in opposition to one another.

Sort of off-topic, but does it bug anyone else that the militaries and governments of the world continue to refer to 'cyberspace' as if 'cyber-' was current Internet jargon? (Whereas in reality I only see it used for that other thing we are supposed to be making instead of war...)

He's not saying we have to recreate old interaction modes, he's just saying let's use all the capabilities of our hands when creating new ones.

I tried it for a long time and just found it distracting. I don't work with images these days but perhaps my background in graphics makes me picky. I'm familiar with some of the research but I'd be interested to know if the approach taken by f.lux actually works - real world light wavelengths and colors faked by mixing red, green and blue are subtly different things.

For a powerful counter-example, look at the industry-standard visual effects system Houdini, made by SideFX. Houdini programs (actually referred to as 'scenes') are comprised of lazily-evaluated pure functions operating on a variety of data structures representing geometry, textures, shaders and so on. The system provides encapsulation, and an embedded expression language for cases where mathematical notation is more concise.

The curious thing about the world's most talented Houdini programmers is that they don't consider themselves programmers at all; their job titles normally include the term 'artist'. I've worked with people who wrote whole procedural simulations, image processing algorithms and shaders, who swore that they could not do programming.

As a seasoned coder by the time I first encountered Houdini, it took me months to get my head around it. It took me days to put together systems artists were able to build in hours. The lesson was: my knowledge of text-based, imperative programming was not directly transferrable to the node-based, procedural world.

Therefore, don't trust the judgement of a text-based programmer who declares that the tools of a visual programmer suck - it's not just a different dialect or different language, but a different medium entirely. And, effective visual programming systems are out there, but they don't have 'programming' written on them, because 'programmers' are not the target market.

Subdivision surfaces as implemented in RenderMan have been a thorny issue in VFX for many years. Most production facilities wind up implementing their own version of subdivision surfaces for other production tools, but still rely on Pixar's implementation for rendering. The nature of the patents in Pixar's implementation make it hard for individual facilities to match the final subdiv output, and risky to release their own open-source implementation for fear of revealing a patent dependency.

So this has been a long-time coming, and while the quality of Pixar's implementation is undoubtedly welcome, the main advantage to studios is relaxation of the patent requirement - something Pixar should have done years ago, since all anybody wanted to do with those patents was better utilize the tools they had licensed from Pixar in the first place.

If the top 0.1% do indeed manage to destroy the US economy, and, say, China becomes the preeminent economic superpower, does anybody happen to know if China's financial system would be able to resist the same sort of abuse? (If, indeed, it's not already too late.)

Yes.

But that world does still exist: I often find myself ssh'd into a desktop tmux session, via my laptop tethered to my phone's internet connection. In that situation, I am highly appreciative of vi's 300 baud history.

It's great to see examples where code can be side-stepped in favour of a quick-n-dirty, 'designer'-type solution - different ways of thinking about the problem.

I have fond memories of my first years in the VFX industry being made a fool of by non-programmer effects artists who, by hooking together a few nodes in the industry-standard package Houdini, could in minutes recreate algorithms that took weeks for me to code the 'right' way, and in a couple more minutes interactively tweak the constants to get results which I would have taken even more weeks to derive 'scientifically'. It was a crash-course in the value of rapid-prototyping, but also in that particular case introduced me to new ways of thinking: Houdini presents a completely different view of geometry and image processing, which is thoroughly non-intuitive to the typical comp-sci graduate. Houdini taught me an (almost literally) orthogonal way of thinking about computer graphics problems.

The lessons are more general: - rapid prototyping is not necessarily coding - sometimes the non-technical, 'designer' approach is the more efficient one (not necessarily in this case - there is plenty of merit in both approaches) - the more tools you learn, the more leverage you have - why not learn some of those design tools and learn a different way of thinking about things.

(This comment is inspired-by, not directed-at, the two dice portrait posts.)

How would the GDrive help you with that?

Hey! That's exactly how my jQuery code looks! I think I just got seduced by all the closurey goodness that comes with Javascript (my day-job languages don't let me do that.)

I'm not going to ask how to write good code, but I think this is a fair question: can someone point to a coding standard / style guideline for Javascript + jQuery?

E.g., when to choose a single-use named function over an anonymous function? When to bind jQuery results to variables vs. go crazy with chaining? Any advice on good selector practices? Good html naming conventions?

I'd love to see all that stuff documented in one place. It must be out there somewhere.

Wombat: http://dengmao.wordpress.com/2007/01/22/vim-color-scheme-wom...

True, I'm thinking more of the dullards who might go from squeezing out more kids so they can collect the welfare, to squeezing out disabled kids in the hope of a bigger payout. It's perverse, but it's hardly as if the first case is rare. I'm still assuming basic disability and child benefits of course.

They should, and I imagine they do, have enough support to ensure the children are clothed, fed, schooled and enjoy a minimum standard of living. However, incentivizing childhood disability opens up a whole new and rather dangerous gray area I think.