twitchard

Ignorance of what? Bias against who? Religious mystics?

That's like saying it's wrong to use "charismatic" to mean "attractive" because that word needs to be reserved for religious charismatics, or that it's wrong to use the word "agnostic" to mean "noncommital" because that word needs to be reserved for the religious gnostics and agnostics, or that it's wrong to call have "developer evangelists" because that word needs to be reserved for religious evangelicals.

Hmm, medical scientists experiment on rats and then make medical predictions about humans based on analogy from rats to humans. At least, I classify this as an analogy, and wouldn't forbid analogies from having predictive power.

Re: "reveal aspects of interactions in the system I was not aware of" I think this is an interesting point. I definitely am willing to give persuasive force to e.g. theoretical microeconomics, which like system dynamics operates by analogy from a mathematical construct to humans. I think in principle I could believe a non-obvious prediction made by a system dynamics model where I felt that the mathematical constructs in the model were a good analogy to humans -- but the prediction would have to be robust, i.e. it shouldn't vanish if you change the parameters of the model or tweak the assumptions of the model.

Theoretical economists tackle this by making their results super general using abstract math and characterizing the solutions to systems of inequalities in the most general form that they can.

This is a fair criticism.

I think, if I had stopped at "hey look, Will Larson's model in this post wasn't realistic, this proves there's a bunch of people out there being mystical about system dynamics", this would certainly be a straw man -- but my argument went further. It's "hey look, Will Larson's model in this post wasn't realistic -- in fact, it's impossible to use stock and flow modeling to tell a realistic story about this subject matter, yet nevertheless here is system dynamics being peddled as useful in basically all contexts as a fundamental skill of leadership" which is not a straw man.

That's not what resource contention means. Resource contention means two people (or processes) want the same thing and only one can have it at a time.

Words can have multiple meanings, my friend.

The word's root just means "full of mystery", which is completely appropriate in this context -- describing people who accept the authority of fancy equations as a mystery, instead of delving deeper for a justification from first principles.

It's true that mysticism also has a more specific meaning i.e. describing particular strains of religious or philosophic thought and practice that are tied to the idea of "mystery" in a different way, but I see no reason this meaning should have a monopoly on the word, considering the etymology, see https://www.etymonline.com/word/mystic?ref=etymonline_crossr...

That's pretty silly. What "shared resources" am I contending with previous developers for? It's not like "oops, I can't deploy to the QA environment now, it's in use by somebody who left in 2015"

Also all the remedies he suggests (keeping your responsibility assignment matrix small) would make absolutely no sense if "communication costs" was dominated by the cost of communicating with developers in the past. By any reasonable reading communication costs refers to developers simultaneously working on a task (in analogy to parallel processes).

Merriam-Webster gives a definition "vague speculation : a belief without sound basis"

My latest side project I've been doing on glitch.com using node.js, React Hooks, and theme-ui.

I miss my Vim bindings, and I wasted a little bit of time trying to get HMR to work with parcel, but other than that it really feels like the tools mostly just get out of the way and let me build my idea, and when I'm done coding I think I'll be happy to just leave it on glitch. (I paid for "boosted apps").

Still competitive with "sending husband out to get groceries"

A general-purpose library able to hide the necessarily specific logic of how network events and a poker game should interact seems... unlikely?

My team at the Node Knockout hackathon implemented an editor-agnostic version of this feature last weekend. I guess it is an idea whose time is come.

https://www.nodeknockout.com/entries/35-nodeist-colony

For me, the editor-agnosticism is the most important feature I would want my live coding experience to have. My team uses a mixture of Vim, Sublime, Emacs, VS Code, and Atom, and we have configurations we are comfortable with. It's too bad that this seems to be happening well within the confines of each editor's ecosystem, and not by some common protocol that all editors could share.

My hack-a-thon team did it in 48 hours this weekend, lol. https://www.nodeknockout.com/entries/35-nodeist-colony

My team at the Node Knockout hackathon implemented an editor-agnostic version of this feature literally last weekend. https://www.nodeknockout.com/entries/35-nodeist-colony

This becomes more fun if autonomous vehicles broadcast their ethical setting. Then you could overcome the prisoner's dilemma with something like tit-for-tat.

"Prioritize anybody else over myself only if they would prioritize me over themselves, given I prioritize them."

To me knowing the CLI is a little like knowing how to read sheet music. It makes analysis and collaboration a lot easier.

You can put down a sequence of git invocations in a text file or script, stare at them, reason about them, tweak them as appropriate for your use case, copy and paste them to another developer, write about them in a blog post, include them in a README.

It's harder to do this with a sequence of gui actions.

Sorry -- more precisely a "straw man" is usually an argument which you do not advocate yourself, that you construct -- usually in order to argue against it and strengthen your own position.

When the author of the comment says "straw man, not my own view" in parentheses, he is saying "hey, this is what I imagine somebody who likes Java and not functional languages might think".

If it's code - a github repo with issues to track TODOs is sufficient for me.

The "straw man" in the straw man fallacy is the argument that nobody is making. The comment about "Java is right here" is not a straw man fallacy -- but it is a straw man.

As a class project we wrote a Chrome extension that transformed our university's terrible course offering page into something like this (but less ambitious) It was a pretty big hit and continues to be used even 3-4 years later.

https://github.com/twitchard/corsola

If you tdd, you will write the test for the new code while the old code is still available, and you will use the test as a guide rather than the old code.

Even if you don't tdd, I would say that typically if you understand the code well enough to make a change, you should be able to write a replacement without referring to the old code. The diff should fit in your mind, so to speak. There are some exceptions, like when you're modifying a regex or some dense, opaque shell command, but in the course of modifying typical code I can't see a live diff being that useful to me

I've said it before and I'll say it again -- Uber needs to release a tier where you can hire a backhoe or other construction vehicle and arrive at your destination in style.

Is this anything more than the insight that your perception of 'average' is calculated from the distribution of what you observe, not from the true distribution? Or am I missing something

Rats are, in some ways, very different from humans too. But if it's impossible to run human trials, or there are severe deficiencies in the way we are able to execute them, studying rats is still the best argument.

If there is a convincing empirical economic study that widely contradicts a theoretical consensus---yes, that evidence should be preferred. But that is not often the case, and otherwise the theoretical argument is simply the best argument there is.

What drives me bonkers, though, is the people who dismiss the math and its conclusions as being 'meaningless', but then what they substitute is not superior empirical arguments of their own, but their own emotional sentiments and undisciplined intuitions (typically decorated by cherry-picked historical observations).

I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is theoretical economists are doing.

A medical scientist runs experiments on rats, to gain insight into what the effects of a certain phenomenon might be on humans. Rats aren't humans, of course, but we think they share important characteristics with humans. Of course, human trials would be better---butbecause there are ethical and practical difficulties in performing human experiments in controlled environments, we are happy to accept the insights that come from studying rats.

Theoretical economics studies the interactions of idealized 'rational' actors. These aren't humans, of course, but like rats, we think they might share important characteristics with humans. Like rational actors, humans have things they want, and do respond to incentives. Economics is largely the study of systems of incentives.

You can gain insight into the systems of rational actors---and insofar as you believe the analogy between rational actors and humans, into human economic systems---by writing equations and proving theorems.

I'm sick of this theme that theoretical economists are these dogmatic lunatics who write equations on the board that have nothing to do with reality. They are in the business of crafting powerful arguments about human nature by analogy, which yes, aren't always accessible to those of us who haven't steeped ourselves in the math, but I think that is no reason to dismiss their insights as nonsense and saying they have a 'math problem'.