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thinkingericon Emacs adventures - a couple of things I’ve learned

He doesn't mention emacs-starter-kit, so as a community service, I'm pointing it out. I had used Emacs for a long time, and switching to this made my life much easier. And my customizations still worked fine (although I was able to remove many of them)

https://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit

WARNING!!! The version in git is for Emacs 24. You will need to actually download the earlier version to use with Emacs 23.

thinkingericon Amy Hoy: Fuck glory, startups are one long con

I would label it as "essentially correct". The odds are very slim that you will

a) Find gold in California b) Become a rock star c) Win a lottery d) Strike it rich and famous as an 'entrepreneur' e) Achieve above average, long-term gains by trading tulips

Yet, the selection bias that promotes these dreams doesn't deter anyone who is going to go that route.

thinkingericon Blunt and necessary review of programming language books.

'The Little Schemer' is not intended to be a tutorial on Scheme. To quote the preface, "The goal of this book is to teach the reader to think recursively". Similarly, the other books in the series have well-defined goals.

thinkingericon "My team will be able to program circles around everyone else" (2002)

When I first read the comments here, I imagined Gabriel knocking his head on the wall, Charlie Brown-style. But the more I think about it, the more I think he might appreciate the layers of absurdity.

thinkingericon Show HN: Minimal Lisp in ~70 lines of Haskell

And 'Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours"

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Write_Yourself_a_Scheme_in_48_H...

thinkingericon What I learned from working with my first client

"Then I added a little padding time because everything always takes longer than expected."

If you are implementing something which is almost exactly like something you personally have implemented before, then your estimate will be almost exact because you should have tracked how much time you spent on the original ... and assuming that too was a re-implementation of something you'd already done the R&D on. IOW, this is at least your third time.

If you are implementing something for which you have references that are very close to what you are building (but you didn't build it) and you already understand them, then you can make a reasonable estimate of the time to implement. In this case the OP's advice works .... add some padding. The more granular your breakdown of the problem, the better you estimate will be.

But when there is R&D on the problem, you are not talking about 'padding', but 'factors'. If you are doing something that is new to you, but you think you have (or can find) decent references, then you can estimate based on how you hope it will go (based on your breakdown of the problem), and multiply by 2.

If you can't find references, then factors of 3 or 4 beyond your ideal development scenario will be more realistic.

It's worth noting that if you are in the last scenario, then you probably weren't a good choice for the project. Also, 'agile' pricing would be better, but either fixed pricing or giving clients some idea of what to budget is more typical.

thinkingericon Steve Yegge v. Rich Hickey re: "Clojure just needs to start saying Yes"

No. They are kvetching.

thinkingericon Steve Yegge v. Rich Hickey re: "Clojure just needs to start saying Yes"

Mr. Yegge says, "it only takes a few people to poison a community"

Yes, and it is the kvetchers that are putting a black cloud over a language and community that has been evolving quite nicely otherwise.

thinkingericon Are slide rules still useful?

I use a slide rule regularly. It is neither quick nor accurate, but it is useful in the same way that making approximate calculations in your head is useful. That is to say, added precision doesn't help you understand the relationships in a problem and speed can obscure some of what's interesting. However, this kind of thing is only entertaining and instructive for curious people.

thinkingericon The Montessori Mafia

"most children classified as 'dullards' by the education system just don't understand how to cope with the traditional model of teaching"

Can't say I was ever classified as a 'dullard' but my grade school scores indicated that I was. Even when I went to college, after a stellar start, my performance deteriorated. After considerable time, I was able to go back to attend a world-class university and excelled, largely because I had learned what the goal actually was. When I was young, I mistook the 'traditional model of teaching' for learning, which was something I was quite good at. The goal of being the recipient of 'teaching' (ie, a student) is to achieve higher scores than everyone else. In fact, learning is potentially an impediment because it requires critical thinking, and you won't get far as a student with that. Some students understand the real goal and do quite well. And some may even learn at the same time. Many others are simply frustrated or turn off completely, as I did.

thinkingericon More screen is better for productivity, studies show

Not at all. I agree with Spolsky about needing two monitors for GUI work, but otherwise more screen real estate pretty much equates with shifting your focus between contexts, which in my experience is what kills productivity. Knowing what you are doing is the biggest boost to productivity.

thinkingericon The Way You Learned Math Is So Old School

"teach them to estimate"

I suspect that the 'calculator age' has caused kids (and kids that have now grown up to be parents) and maybe educators to over-value an increase in significant digits in calculations. It's interesting that the method of multiplication illustrated in the article is referred to as 'new' since when you use a slide rule, you operate in this way anyway. And to echo Hans Bethe, this is often "good enough".

thinkingericon Your own company? You can do it

If it makes you feel any better, the guy is talking about 1982. If you were 'in' to computers at all as a hobbyist during that era, it typically meant low-level tinkering. Not at all unusual. My own personal stories from that period sound today like I was a young engineering genius, but I wasn't. The same kids who learn Rails now were the ones doing assembly back then. And plain ol' luck is still as relevant today. And, of course, persistence.

thinkingericon Money Won’t Buy You Health Insurance

Yeah, I caught the 'tort reform' misdirection as well. Also, I think earns north of $170,000 a year, which made his turning down the insurance 'on principle' a bit ridiculous.

thinkingericon Money Won’t Buy You Health Insurance

Also, this is of course over and above what my company pays in premiums. Altogether it is a significant amount of money for a family of four that has no major medical problems. For a small business, the overall burden is problematic.

thinkingericon Money Won’t Buy You Health Insurance

Something to add to the discussion: She says "my recent M.R.I. cost $1,300 at the “retail” rate, while the rate negotiated by the insurance company was $700."

I have insurance and the insurance company (BCBS) will only pay what it thinks is appropriate for a service, not some negotiated rate. That is, if the doctor, hospital, or lab says that it costs $1,300, but the insurance company wants to pay $700, I'm stuck for the other $600. The result is that in order to meet the high deductible (at which point I no longer have to pay out of pocket like this), I pay way beyond the amount of the deductible since only the approved rates are applied. In practice, I end up paying out 175% or more of the deductible amount.

I suspect that our experience will soon become the norm, if its not already.

thinkingericon The unfortunate math behind consulting companies

"lower the client's perception of risk"

That is a profound way to put it and certainly accounts for a lot of the premium that clients are willing to pay.

thinkingericon The unfortunate math behind consulting companies

His breakdown is applicable to service work in general.

thinkingericon The unfortunate math behind consulting companies

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. This kind of analysis is required for any service business. Having done so for our company, I have the following observations on 'What to do?":

Scale -- Bingo! The goal is to make the fixed overhead (incl employees) an increasingly smaller percentage of revenue. But to handle the increased revenue (ie, workload) you have to concentrate on increasing efficiency/productivity. This has a lot of influence on decisions about process. Obviously, the more routine those processes are, the cheaper (and more easily replaced) the labor can be. Also, if the work is done under a fixed price contract, you can achieve a greater effective hourly rate if you are efficient and manage risk well.

Charge more -- "charging more pushes away your existing client base". This is not such a bad thing if you have your eye on 'scaling' (ie bigger projects). Bigger clients have deeper pockets (although they also have more unique needs, which introduces more risk).

Build a product -- See Nassim Taleb's discussion about 'scalable work' in "The Black Swan". The odds aren't good that this will pay off.

thinkingericon What is the most effective thing you did to improve your programming skills?

I'd add to that having already been paid for it and needing to hand off to others to maintain. I guarantee that the next project you do will be at a whole new level.

thinkingericon I'm a pregnant hacker. Please review my side project.

I'm sorry I don't have time to go through your app more, but here some things that occurred to me (I have 17 month old and 3 yr old, so just out of your target):

1) Try to collect data and offer up suggestions 2) Try to get a good Facebook presence. (etsy.com). Your target market lives on Facebook now. 3) Can you email your registry?

Gotta go. Good luck

thinkingericon 47% of the world’s wealthy people are entrepreneurs

Not to mention that they can inherit 'assets' other than wealth: connections, experience, confidence, cushion, as well as less consequential financial support that just makes their lives a bit more fulfilling.

thinkingericon Readability and Naming Things

Here is a quote from that essay that says it much clearer than my pithy 'guideline':

"I prefer minimum-length but maximum-information names, and then let the context fill in the rest. Globals, for instance, typically have little context when they are used, so their names need to be relatively evocative. Thus I say maxphysaddr (not MaximumPhysicalAddress) for a global variable, but np not NodePointer for a pointer locally defined and used. This is largely a matter of taste, but taste is relevant to clarity."

thinkingericon Readability and Naming Things

I use an additional guideline: things that are created near where they are used can be abbreviated more than something that is created 'far away'.

thinkingericon The Dilbert Black Swan Portfolio: a skeptical/practical guide to investing

http://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/indiv.htm

Also perhaps money market funds.

thinkingericon The Dilbert Black Swan Portfolio: a skeptical/practical guide to investing

The progression in your list of 'safety net' investments is 1) Cash 2) Savings accounts 3) Certificates of deposit 4) Bonds. That last step is a doozy. Considered this coursely, BND is perhaps appropriate. But it is hardly 'safe'. I think Taleb's idea of safe is more oriented toward catastrophic events. Think LTCM, Asian crisis, S&L, unregulated derivatives.

thinkingericon Easing into SICP

Thank you pointing this out. The audio is nice to listen to with the slides.

thinkingericon Easing into SICP

The downvotes to my response to his self-proclaimed precociousness indicate that others find my implication to be 'irritating' as well. However, anyone who is bogged down in the math would most certainly benefit from the sources in this list, many of which are explicitly prepared to avoid the math difficulties. SICP is not the place to learn basic mathematics, and it seems to me that it would be distracting from their message.

thinkingericon Easing into SICP

This is a noteworthy objection, and applies to much of Harvey's course at Berkeley as well. I think the rationale for his approach is so that student's don't get tripped up by using only math examples.

Several people have brought up HTDP, which is very much in the same SICP-inspired vein as these other books in the list. I personally find it to be different enough from SICP as to not be considered a precursor to SICP. YMMV.

thinkingericon Easing into SICP

If you "did" this book at the age of 14 and came away with the idea that it was about "hard" math, your learning/time ratio might not have been as high as you imagined.