5,213 karma · joined February 22, 2007
Conversely, Google has completely dropped all pretext of its former hesitancy to tread directly on Microsoft's turf, releasing operating systems, mobile devices, browsers, hosted office applications, and working to obsolete Exchange (Google Wave).
In the end, there can be only one...
Here's a serious example:
As it so happens, statistical research demonstrates that increased gun ownership generally reduces incidences of home invasion and violent crime. But if you believe fundamentally in the right of peaceful individuals to defend themselves, their families, and to own firearms, then this is just a happy coincidence. The right of peaceful people to generally do as they please is more important than the impact on some vague notion of social utility.
That is to say, just because you can show that a policy produces gains on some statistical matrix does not mean that it is morally correct to coerce people into your scheme, particularly people that aren't doing anything wrong.
Consider if I could show that eliminating redheads from society lowered traffic fatalities, saving 10k lives per year [1]. Would you argue it proper to kill off all the redheads [2]? Or even to use the minimum force 'necessary,' and require all redheads to keep their hair dyed brown? I hope not.
Just be cognizant of whether the outlines of your argument can lead to nonsense.
--
[1] Perhaps lots of men were rubbernecking behind the wheel to get a good look at those redheads, but the researchers couldn't definitively determine the causal pathway.
[2] Only if the net present value of the expected future gain in lives was greater than the number of redheads that needed to die, of course.
Besides, I object to bondage and discipline in a programming language. If people don't have guns, then they'll use....
Without goto and TCO (goto by another name), you're left to transform your code to be run under a trampoline, which really makes the resulting JS unreadable.
I've worked through various ways of trying to implement goto in Javascript via preprocessing for the parenscript CL library, and have always come away feeling unsatisfied. You can do it, but as far as I can tell, you have to use a trampoline.
A native goto statement in Javascript would go a long way into making JS an acceptable compilation target.
Many people engaged in large organizations might argue that this is already how things work.
In all actuality, I do sympathize with the rational for your proposed metric. I'm just pointing out that the nuance and angle of a story can push something distinctly into that category in cases where simply reading the title might lead one to have a "Not HN!" spasm.
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
Also keep in mind that some of us no longer follow Reddit, so we might prefer if HN took a slightly broader view than Erlang innards.
1. Every extension you add seems to decrease performance by 30-50% (rough numbers) [1]. So live with a bare essential set of extensions. For me that is Firebug and FlashBlock.
2. Keeping very many bookmarks or history items seems to destroy performance, particularly with the "awesome bar." I disable history completely and have it clear everything else on browser close.
Before I settled on this FF usage technique, FF would degrade in performance over the course of months as it built up data in the profile. Eventually it would become unusable [2] until I deleted the profile and started fresh. Now I just prevent it from building up any data.
[1] As much as I used to like this extension, my experience has been that ForecastFox in particular hammers browser performance.
[2] It would take seconds, sometimes 10 or more, to open a new tab to about:blank. With this technique though, I currently have ~ 25 tabs open, and new tab creation is instantaneous.
I don't think that immigration or foreign competition is the primary driver behind the decline in American engineering (if there is such a thing) though. The other mistakes we've made completely dwarf any effect this would have had:
Our fiscal policy over the past few decades has made debt our primary export. Wall Street firms can make more money just dealing in US Treasury debt than the profits of all the successful companies in Silicon Valley combined.
Steadily increasing regulation (SOX, whatever nonsense comes out of the current situation, etc.), litigiousness (often spurred by statue law: sexual harassment claims, hostile work environment, discrimination, etc.), and complicated tax code has made lawyers and CPAs more in demand, while licensing keeps their numbers down.
The increasing nationalization of health care has misdirected a shocking amount of resources into this industry.
All in all, the major reasons why a smart, rational young person, who is primarily motivated to make a buck, should go into law, medicine, banking, (or politics!) have almost nothing to do with immigration.
that's what free markets are - a chump's game
You're blaming the wrong thing. I believe you mean to say, "pretending that the markets we have now are free is a chump's game." Is this the sort of hypothetical story that you have in mind:
"Joe the programmer has gotten laid off from three companies that ended up going out of business while watching insurance giants and bankers get bailed out by the government, seeing people in licensed professions (lawyers, doctors, nurses) remain secure in their lucrative jobs, and observing that government employees never get fired, have great benefits, high pay, and low levels of work and stress."
If so, you can make a case that Joe is a chump. You could argue that he should be using force to get a better deal at the expense of others rather than naïvely working to increase total wealth. But in any case, the problem has to do with the breakdown of the rule of law, disregard for property rights, and neglecting to observe the hidden costs. Free markets have nothing to do with this.
Yes, allow talented workers to come here. No, don't issue so many visas that young Americans are rightly deterred from entering the field.
The American economy has grown to its present level because smart, hardworking people built companies in America -- not because people who were Americans at the time of their birth built companies. How would America be any better if Sergey Brin's father had been one of those marginal cases you had decided to keep out? It's easy to forget that if we keep out X Indian individuals, some Y of those individuals might go on to build the next Cisco -- and if they're excluded from America, that company might be built in India. The other governments of the world would love it if we further closed our borders (to any degree).
After a couple of weeks though, you are really refreshed by those 20 minute naps. It's rather amazing. You wake up much more alert and ready to take on the world than after any normal 5-8 hour night of sleep. And you can continue on this pattern, sleeping only 2-3 hours every day, for a seemingly indefinite amount of time, while feeling great.
That's the personal anecdote that appears (with a small and self-selected sample) to contradict your interpretation of Dement's statements.
The other major downside is a distinct lack of flexibility. In a monophasic sleeping pattern, if you have a situation and need to work and/or be on phone calls for 24 hours straight, you can do it easily. In a polyphasic pattern, tiredness hits you like a brick wall if you put off a scheduled nap just an hour or two.
Still, if I was starting a new business from scratch, I would seriously consider going polyphasic again for a few months to build the initial foundation.
In fact, because you have so many extra hours at your disposal, you can seem almost magical. You can work 12 hours a day and spend another 9-10 hours doing engaging things with other people in your life.
Do you know if there has been a serious scientific study of this technique? Otherwise, you're being a bit disingenuous in subtly applying the "unscientific" label. The set of things that are true is much larger than the set of true things that have been proven scientifically.
Everyone should try the polyphasic experience for at least a few months of one's life. It radically alters the way you think about time.
Perhaps we should pick our battles, and call out more egregious violations such as name calling and thoughtless recitals of canned talking points, rather than engaging in the sort of constant nagging that will just blend into the background noise.