waps

You're absolutely right that cars don't scale well in theory, but when it comes to expanding capacity when that is necessary, cars outperform public transport. This is mostly because space is not often in short supply, but money always is.

Cars seem to have much better support for their expansion from governments, and that this results in better real-world scaling. It seems to me this is in no small part because car infrastructure is way cheaper per extra person of capacity than mass transit.

Both cars and mass-transit have huge subsidies, at least in Belgium.

Good: 4) there's 20 different apps that need access to the same data over the network. This is the core strength of days oriented programming. Using a shared database will work very well for that.

This is generally how erp applications are implemented.

You're right of course. But here's the thing :

Car : euro 0.4/km, travel time into brussels during heavy traffic : about 50 minutes, 30 if I'm willing to work 6am-3pm (I'm not). 21 (working days per month) * 35 (kilometer) * 2 (there and back) * 0.4 = 580 euro/month, 700 if you finance it using a loan (I don't need to). This pays for a comfortable "monovolume" car (big enough for a family, but certainly not a big car by Belgian standards). Note that this effectively comes with all sorts of bonuses, greater comfort, protection from the weather, and much cheaper and quicker groceries. I don't need parking where I work, but if I did it'd be another 50-100 per month everywhere except the European quarter. If we're talking a company car (tax deductible for companies in Belgium and thus very common), cost drops to 200-300 euros, and some companies (ie. if you're willing to do IT consultancy), drops to 100-300, depending on car, deducted from pre-tax pay. This is assuming the car's value goes to zero over a period of 4 years, whereas in practice I've always sold my cars for between 3-4000 euros after 4 years.

Public transport travel time : at least 2 hours (mostly due to waiting). Cost of bus card + train card (for one trajectory only during week days) = 150 to 300 euros (bus, depending on whether you need bus in one or two cities, so if you can get from home -> station without bus or from work -> station without bus, it's 150, otherwise 300. For me it's 300), plus 150 for the train. Add to that the cost of various other trips that you'll need to make that aren't covered by this, but are covered by having a car, and you easily get to 600 euros per month (groceries, going to town, visiting people, ...). Since I drop off kids at school using the car, if I included the cost to do that using public transport too, it'd be over 700 (2*60 euros per month to have the school bus pick them up on a street where I would worry every day they they might get killed, plus it would prevent me from leaving for work until they are on the bus).

Oh, and for that price, you get this : https://pbs.twimg.com/media/By62kxwIAAAX3Om.jpg:large

It's not a contest. Car is way cheaper, even disregarding the difference in comfort. Is that because of government subsidies for the car ? Yes. Otoh, the government also sponsors the mass transit quite a bit. How does it stack up in "real" costs ? I don't know. How much would the other disadvantages of using public transport add up to ? Don't know, but I don't think it's zero. (much less free time, less time working because of the kids limits, ...)

Of course it depends on the trajectory you take. If I had to "cross" Brussels (east-west or north-south), I'd take the train, and I know people who do so, but I'd also find another job or move, because it's simply not doable.

About 35 kilometres from another city.

Having commuted to work in Brussels, a city often described as having great mass transit (and when it's not busy, that's absolutely true)

Here's my observations :

1) despite not paying for itself (the state pays hundreds of millions yearly to make up for the losses of the public transport system) it's a little bit more expensive, per kilometer, than taking a car (train + metro vs gas). Even for longer distances, planes are actually cheaper than trains. If you get a company car and just pay for fuel, it's half the price. Otoh, parking in some places drives the price back up (but then you can park near a metro station and only use public transport for the last kilometer or so. Or a folding bike, I've had colleagues who did that).

2) when you want to use them to commute, they're not just busy, they're off the scale full. You can only stand and sometimes you miss your train because you literally can't squeeze in. (I tried first class for a week, but that makes it a multiple of the price of using a car, and you still need to stand)

3) the comfort level, compared to a car, is off the scale worse. You can take things along in a car, whereas there is a clear and very small capacity limit to what you can take on public transport. 40kg, backpack size, no more, groceries for a week is doable, furniture, electronics, not really doable (I tend to put those on a bike and walk home beside it). And I'm a 200 pound guy, I'd hate to think what the limits are if you're 80 pounds.

4) In Belgium you have one or two days per year where cars can't actually get around in the capital (frozen snow on the road combined with a lot of sloped roads makes it just too dangerous for cars, even if you walk you'll probably fall down painfully). A few more days accidents on the highways will mean you're late by 2-3 hours (I was once 7 hours late due to traffic). That is less than the days public transport doesn't work due to union actions. Because of the amount of times this happens, your boss will not, in fact understand. 5-10 days a year you can't get to work using public transport. With a car, 5 days a year you'll be 2 hours late and 1 day you won't show up.

5) If you calculate cars versus public transit capacities, it is obvious : cars scale better (I think this is mostly because car capacity expansions are cheaper for the government to implement, so they happen every time a rightist government comes to power in a given municipality, car capacity expansions happen, usually by diverting traffic. Public transport expansions happen once in a decade at best, and one line at a time. Recently a public transport line to the airport made traffic on a few lines much better)

Imho, the solution to public transport is fast, efficient, driver-less, door-to-door, car sharing. That can work, and won't be bogged down into a morass of substandard service by unions. We need to improve matters, and I no longer believe buses and trains and even metros are the answer.

Here's an article describing things from the perspective of a commuter http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/pseudosc/masstransit.htm

At least in steam you can turn off the popups :

Settings -> Interface -> Uncheck "Notify me about additions or change ..."

Exactly. This battle ended islam as a political entity, and ended the war between muslims and the west that had existed for a millenium by that point. It was an event that would be comparable to nuking Mecca would be today.

I'm curious. You seem to be saying that one cannot avoid every fight (the Chinese stuff in your post) and that one can avoid every fight ("There are -always- alternatives even if the argument coming from the profiting parties don't frame it in such a way that this is clear.")

This seems to be a bit contradictory. I'm also curious how it meshes with your personal experience.

> We should reduce our population over the next century or 2, we should get off the fossil fuel imperative (it's a single-source failure point for our entire infrastructure) and we shouldn't listen to "big industry" and it's so-called solutions that really amount to digging our holes deeper.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism

The economic problem with your proposal is simple : it's not a Nash-equilibrium (one non-cooperative participant can kill the whole thing). You might as well try to paint the sky red.

> Locally grown produce simply IS better overall (transport energy, health (honey from same region containing pollen and dead microbes from region, vaccine like effects... freshness, wow i could go on and on. it's science not hype) etc. I will contend that the supermarket food system, including it's producers, distributors, etc are the problem, not the solution.

They are the solution to feeding the maximum number of people effectively, not the solution to feeding individuals in the best possible way. The thing is, requiring production methods that would leave 50%+ of the planet without food is going to be very bad for the health of 50%+ of the planet. Feeding them "suits dependant" foodstuffs is going to be very bad for the health of, oh, maybe a percent or two, of them and us (in the sense that they'll die somewhat sooner than in some parts of the west, which for the vast majority of those 50%+ would be an extension of their lifespan).

One might make the argument that you're proposing enabling the already very, very rich to live 1% healthier is more important than the survival of many of the poor. If you truly intend to do things this way, may I suggest building up the military too, because you'll need it.

> naively pitches a solution that clearly has certain economic interests at stake.

And why do you think 6 billion humans can survive in the 21st century when that couldn't happen in the, oh, say 16th ? Exactly because those economic interests are so much bigger now. Economy grows first, then population increases follow. The way to make life better for 80%+ of our planet is to make their economies grow.

"Process automation" is much more coercive automation. Here's the webform, and it's the webform's way or the highway.

Maybe even up to this point : http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

> It's not just that their model is wrong -- and VaR is certainly wrong. It's that NO model is right.

See chaos theory or google "irreducible complexity". There certainly is a model that is right - an obvious model would be just take all actors, their holdings, and their actions, that trivial model certainly is right. There are even people who have this model available to them : the stock exchanges. In theory, no-one else has it available, and we should be sure they're not using or selling this model, right (heh) ?

Black swans are quantifiable. For instance, calculating the current debt loads of governments will tell you that interest rates aren't going back up without killing social security or something like a 300% (cumulative) inflation. Since we won't be killing social security, a sudden crash (at least 40% drop in SPY) followed by a short-term (~1-2 years) tripling of prices is coming. Alternatively, there could be lots of sovereign defaults, resulting in 10-20% treasury interest rates for 5-10 years. There. Quantified.

Black swans happen because we, as in humanity, have this need to believe that things won't change. When they inevitably do change, the first thing we do is to use capital to get us back to the old situation. But that hardly ever works. When it fails, it requires exponential use of "capital" and the capital is gone (so no-one is ever getting their investment back). A recent obvious example I saw of this is Abu Dhabi : the idea that you can have a lush, green, modern city in the middle of the desert. This is wrong, it's artificial. And every millimetre the city grows comes at exponentially increased energy expenditure, exponentially increased stress on all the systems that support this city, and on a regular (as in weekly) basis a sandstorm comes and makes it blatantly obvious what happens if those systems would fail for even single week. But trillions of dollars are being invested to change this, because it was almost reasonable to do this for a small oasis with a freshwater source. As expected, this city is burning an ever-rising share of the oil income of the state just to keep existing. Black swan coming up, right there.

Sure but the AI wouldn't necessarily have to respond. I think the main flaw in the Turing test is it's cultural dependence. I would argue that Eliza has passed plenty of Turing tests, mostly with people who had a chance encounter with it.

But why would an AGI individual have to be able to lie about it's childhood ? It could simply have a childhood. But I understand your argument : "Human" AI is constantly trained for the function "be a human". Machine intelligence is being trained with "is human X cheating", "is this spam", "what is the french for apple", "which way will stock X go" (and other "what will <large number of humans> do in situation X" questions) ... functions.

Keep in mind that your own brain is also simply running an algorithm, with "hidden state". Here's the first thing it hides pretty well : there's no single "you", there's about 300 regions in your brain, that are physically different, in different locations, and not directly linked. And if the rest of your brain gets disabled, each of those 300 regions can use your body to convince your own mother it's really you she's talking to. And the function your brain is executing is not to "have a soul" or something like that, but is mostly a behaviour-copy algorithm. It searches out other humans, observes their actions, learns to predict them and then uses what it's learned to "be you". Most people will not believe this is how it works, not even when they know quite a bit about neurons, and know pretty well that this is what our neurons do.

But when it comes right down to it, you, me, everyone is an "AI algorithm" just like Google search. Aside from the shear scale, number of connections mostly, there is nothing all that remarkable about the hardware it's running on.

I love how an AGI algorithm is presented in the follow up to the Battlestar Galactica series, "Caprica". Zoe Graystone explains it at one point in the series. It's fiction of course, but still. Her algorithm searches the internet, your computer, and everything and anything it can find for pictures and videos of it's "target" and then builds the function "given situation X, what would <human> do ?" and then puts the algorithm in a virtual body that looks like the human, and uploads it to V-world. She runs it on herself, a friend and accidentally on a third person she doesn't know and then proceeds to get herself blown up by a friend/terrorist (they can be both at the same time, you know) in the first episode, and their avatars wake up in V-world, sort of a facebook virtual reality edition, unaware of what has happened (and as V-world is mostly used for sex, dancing and debauchery it's not that easy to find out unless you're looking for it). Currently we don't have nearly enough data on any person to make this work ... but I am pretty convinced it is possible to make this work.

This would work, since it's doing the same thing your brain does when it hears the question "do you remember feeling happy when your mother held you when you were a baby ?". First, your brain doesn't actually remember that either way. It simply works it's way through to a good answer to that question. The thing it'll do is predict how you should answer that question, given (mostly) how other humans answer that question.

This is a very different problem from "lying about its childhood", specifically it's much more solvable. Can I predict how humans would answer questions about their childhood ? Certainly. Easy. Make the algorithm take enough contextual information into account (so that it both realizes what realistic answers are and either answers realistically or responds in a way that humans respond when they don't have a "good prediction" for an answer, for instance by saying they don't remember, or by changing the subject, or ...)

If you have young kids you will see this process in action. You have to "teach" kids memory. When they talk only a little, if you ask them something about earlier that day, they will respond. And the response makes sense, but it's not actually what happened. You will at some point realise this and correct them. Correcting them teaches them to match up what happened with their response, because they learn to predict that that's what's expected of people. Over time this correcting them will work, and they will have learned memory (and then they learn to lie, especially on questions like "did you hit your sister ?", and when that ends badly they learn to "not lie", like adults do. "Did you hit your sister ?" "She stole my lego").

Note that the underlying memory is also a prediction. If I ask you what happened this morning, and you want to try to answer correctly, you will start with an obvious fact (which isn't necessarily the truth), like "I woke up". Your brain will take that thought, and predict (not remember) what happened next. So I woke up, ok next, brushing teeth, ok next, read cell phone messages, ok next, ... ah ! the answer to the question.

According to the ILO (UN labour organisation) [1], in PPP dollars global average wage is 1480$ per month. So for the US equality would mean that 50% of working age people earn less than that. This is only counting wage-earners. No freelancers, children, elderly or anything like that are collected.

In the US, average wage for employed individuals is about 42000 [2]. Since there are 300 million Americans and 6.7 billion non-Americans, America should shift almost entirely to the average to get income equality. This will mean the equivalent of a 55% across-the-board pay cut for every American, provided prices do not go down. Your rent will stay the same, but your income should go down 55%.

(This is in fact happening, but is manifesting as uneven inflation without corresponding wage rises, so you'd experience an 81% rise in average prices, rent, food, restaurants, ..., while seeing your wage stay the same)

Also note that average worldwide unemployment is at least a factor of 3 higher than in the US. So it would not just take a massive pay cut, but also firing close to 20% of all workers, to bring the US into the worldwide average.

This is why socialists are (or should be) against immigration, and should be pro-isolationist. I think that if you want to improve the conditions of the American working class, that would be the correct attitude to have.

In reality the period of 1950-today has been a very exceptional period in history where not only incomes were higher, by most measures, than ever before, but income inequality was far lower than the vast majority of economic history.

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17512040 [2] http://www.worldsalaries.org/usa.shtml

This post contains a comparison : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9267578

Mind if I ask why these functions are laid out entirely differently from almost every other function in the go standard library ?

Yes, I know the Go authors do it too. And of course we know the answer : they're ashamed of just how bad it is, and mask it by making exceptions in the style guide for this specific case. You also left out the type declaration and the actual sorting call. Here's the full code :

  type myStructSlice []struct

  func (ms myStructSlice) Len() int {
    return len(ms)
  }

  func (sl myStructSlice) Less(i, j int) bool { 
    return sl[i].MyKey < sl[j].MyKey
  }

  func (sl myStructSlice) Swap(i, j int) {
    return sl[i], sl[j] = sl[j], sl[i]
  }

  ...
  sort.Sort(myStructSlice(sl))

And for this trivial example we're at 15 lines of (properly indented) code. You also have polluted the name space with one-use names for types. Is it really so hard to believe that this easily explodes to 30 lines of code for real life examples ? The Less function is not going to be nearly as simple in real life struct examples (natural sort + field precedence).

Compare to the same code in Java:

  Collections.sort(theList, (SomeType s1, SomeType p2) -> p1.field.compareTo(p2.field));

D:

  sort!("a.field < b.field")(theList)

C++:

  thelist.sort([](const someType& a, const someType& b) { return a.field < b.field; });

So Golang is 5x more verbose than Java in this instance. This a particularly bad example, but that Golang is actually more verbose than Java is not an exception in my experience.

I don't get where people get the idea that Go is simple.

1) go has generic functions : http://golang.org/pkg/builtin/, they're just not accessible to you

2) go has generic types : slices, maps, and channels, all of which have slightly differing behaviour, including some highly counter intuitive and contradictory behaviour (example: slices are pass-by-reference, arrays are pass-by-value. In other words []int and [5]int behave entirely differently)

3) go has overloaded functions : http://golang.org/pkg/builtin/, they're just not accessible to you

4) go has exceptions (panic/recover), negating all the advantages of Go error checking, and providing zero fixes for the problems it introduces (finding the source line where an error happened and if/how multiple errors are related. Easy in Java/C++/..., hard in Go) (in C++ you have to be aware of whether any external code you use throws exceptions ... in Go you have to be aware if any external code you use panics. And if you say I haven't dealt with it, that means that you quite literally haven't dealt with it. Same as in C++. External libraries throwing exceptions is perfectly fine ... as long as they never actually throw an exception. Panicing standard library is fine ... as long as it doesn't panic ... If you're looking for correct code, it is of course not fine)

5) Go's "simple" threading and panics. Try crashing a Go program with shared data with a null-pointer derefence in the shared data. Someone please explain to me how the resulting output is simple.

6) golang's own compiler and standard library are not in fact idiomatic Go. This goes from small problems (like total lack of unit tests in quite a few places), to larger ones, like not using interfaces for logging.

7) interface{}. I just grepped a reasonable, thoroughly reviewed codebase I've written, of several tens of thousands lines of Go. Result: 2.7 uses of interface{} per 1000 lines of code.

Is this what people here call simple to think about code ? I would argue that you don't understand a codebase until you've read it. That's a certainty. So can we at least agree there's a point where verbosity no longer increases readability ? I hope you can see Go is far past that point.

Go's type system : riddled with exceptional behaviour. Literally it says "type system applies unless it's doing <-, cap, len, copy, new, append or delete calls", in which case we do something custom. The resulting behaviour, of course, is inconsistent with Go's type system (which is really the point of the code of course, unfortunately, there's surprises buried in there, and those calls are inconsistent with eachother as well).

All of these are implemented as exceptions in the compiler. I would warn you about this link : once it is seen, it cannot be unseen :

https://github.com/golang/go/blob/master/src/cmd/internal/gc...

The irritating part is that this sums up Go mailinglist behaviour quite well. Coding practices is for you, not for us, the Go authors. Generics ? Of course we need that, but you obviously don't as you're a bad programmer. And if you're asking for something else that must mean you suck. Overloading ? Ditto. Generic types ? Yes for us, not for you though !

Of course, all of these claims are thrown around and when you actually read the compiler code you wonder ... do these guys know about type systems ? Don't these guys know about the standard coloring algorithm ? Why aren't they using extremely-well-known algorithm X for this ?

In other words, it really looks like the compiler was (and is) written by someone who last opened a compiler book in the 70s. But reading the mailinglist, you'd think they were the central authority on compiler theory and you're stupid. This is in fact not the case.

Go works and feels like a late-90s language like Oberon. Clean at the surface, with lots of buried ugliness. Lots of weird custom datatypes, forms and parts of the standard library that are not implemented in the language itself. It's why I switched to C/C++. Go is simply the same as those old languages we moved away from. There is nothing in Go that cannot be achieved better and more flexible in C++, D and Rust.

> Simplicity is a good thing. It's a virtue. It's part of what made UNIX a success. It's not something to shun or avoid.

It seriously depends what you're doing. As someone put Haskell recently "all the possibilities of advanced algebra combined with all the clarity of advanced algebra".

Simplicity is only a real success if it doesn't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

> Adding features adds complexity and complexity is not free.

And taking away features is free ? Why aren't you programming in LISP then ?

If the code was equivalent you might have a point. Unfortunately it is not (tokenizing/line scanning vs. copying). One has a shortcut in Go, the other does not.

Would you say that Go is not excessively verbose in non-trivial use cases ? I recently had to sort a struct list in a program. Added lines of code for sorting a single list once : 30. What the ...

Car insurance does not cover paying passengers. There is a special, more expensive, kind of insurance for this generally referred to as commercial transport insurance.

I feel like something like oculus would be better suited. GPU and storage are the size of a cell phone these days. Look at 128G sd cards. How many of those would fit in an additional 1mm thickness of an average cell phone ? 50 ? 150 ? Won't work for the monitors, of course. Also 30"+ monitors are expensive, because they require a large amount of silicon to be precision manufactured, whereas resolution is only really limited by the speed of electronics (that's why a cell phone 1080p screen is 60$ whereas a 30" one is still $300+, and you can barely have higher res displays in bigger sizes. It's cheaper than cpus and the like because it's few layers and very large features, even the worst fab can produce perfectly adequate monitors, but you still need the material).

But an oculus rift can use a 60$ screen to make you think you're in a room with a 600" display (really, check their cinema demo. Wow. Just wow). Or a room with 50 600" displays, no problem. Nimble VR can track your hands, and their competitors claim they can do it accurately enough to make you see a usable a virtual keyboard [1].

Why sit down at a docking station with GPU, monitors, storage when you can take it with you ? Why can't I have 5 30" monitors with full computer games while sitting on the train ? In an airplane ? In a 1 sq meter room ? Why would employers bother with any computers/peripherals other than a cellphone at work when a cellphone + occulus can provide a better and more useful experience ? Why can't I sit down in the morning train, snap my fingers, and have 3 large monitors with my working environment appear around me, usable ? Why can't I sit on a plane in an economy seat and do the same, all the while my mind convinced it's really sitting in a huge outdoors open space ...

Additionally I wear glasses. Let me tell you, there's no way to have the perfect glasses for every environment. Some part of the monitor is a bit blurry. Just enough to be irritating. The bigger the monitor, the more distance difference there is between the closest pixel to my eye and the furthest. That degrades quality. But I can see every pixel on an oculus rift display perfectly. So, at least for me, such an environment can actually be higher quality than reality (or at least compared to real displays).

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/24/dextype-virtual-keyboard/

No, because it's a violation of the law. The federal government is supposed to keep records of everything they do, for several reasons :

1) they are accountable to the people. Granted this is a principle. At some point in the future, everything the federal government did will become open knowledge.

2) It must be possible to get them in front of the justice system. This is a basic principle of a separation-of-powers democracy. The justice system is, by law, entitled to access any and all documents, emails, everything any agency has (just so we're clear : not talking about the judge down the street, although they have some access, but the supreme court has full, unquestionable, access)

3) FOIA (freedom of information act). Citizens and others can petition the justice system to make government documents public. Unless the justice system and the federal government agree something can not be made public, it is made public.

This is extremely prominently mentioned on every computer system anywhere near the federal government. Record keeping requirements this, email archival that.

Ms. Hillary Clinton did not miss these requirements. She knowingly violated the law and conducted official government business in an illegal manner. Ms. Clinton knowingly, and with the aid of dozens of people working for her on the public's dime violated the law. In theory the minimum punishment for this is to become unelectable for 5 years, but "somehow" I doubt that will happen. Also there seems little doubt that the emails she will make public will be a filtered version of the original.

This is comparable to fraud (though technically not fraud) : if you did this as a CEO of a publicly traded company, it would be considered fraud, and you could very well go to jail for that.

This is a misunderstanding. Lack of liquidity can cause both. You forget that prices are valuations and are very different from prices actually paid.

Simply put:

1) valuation = price of last share sold * number of shares

2) value = price at least one buyer is prepared to pay for the entire company

Lack of liquidity in private companies generally comes from the fact that you can't buy or sell shares without agreement from the board. So "price of last share sold" is quite simply directly set by the board, people who have a vested interest in this number being as high as possible.

It is normal for valuation to be larger than value (for public companies), but not by much. You could actually buy (very nearly) all of Microsoft for 360 billion dollars (it's market cap). A bubble can probably be best defined as valuation >> value.

It's much worse than that. You'll erase everything, and likely won't be able to hold on to the new skills unless the plasticity was temporary.

Brain plasticity evolves in very specific ways. Simplified you could say that a young brain learns "short-term" things. It learns things (and learns how to cause things) that last tens of microseconds at and just after birth, then over the years moves to seconds, minutes, hours and longer.

But circuits are massively redundant. Until you lose about 90% of the part of the brain that fulfils a certain function, you won't notice a thing. Go over that, and ...

Every memory, every skill, everything in your brain is built on the basic premise that the shorter term neurocircuits work a certain way, that they have solidified. Every memory made when you were 10 years old is filtered through and interpreted by circuits established when you were 9. Memories made when you were 11, get filtered through the 10 year circuits, then the 9 year circuits, then ...

So if a neurocircuit changes that was built when you were 14 years EVERYTHING after that is gone. Every memory younger than when you were 14 years old gets filtered through the now-scrambled 14 year old circuits, which will transform it into noise, which the rest of the brain will promptly ignore.

This is why you regularly have demented people thinking they are much younger than they actually are, failing to remember they have kids, and so on. They suddenly start doing what they did at that age as well, leaving for work at 6am despite being pensioned for 30 years, in many cases to companies that have long since ceased to exist. Not recognizing kids (and especially grandkids). Note that this is usually emotionally very, very hard for those kids.

So if you successfully reset your brain to the plasticity it had when you were 14, every memory, every skill, every detail after that will disappear. The next day you will wake up, likely terrified, in a room you think you've never seen before, wondering where your mother is, not knowing what the hell a cell phone is. If there is damage that did not just do a one-time scramble of the circuit, but actually keeps it from re-solidifying, you will wake up like that every day of the rest of your life, not remembering the day before.

It also works in reverse : you can teach kids about long term effects (e.g. money) for months, and it just won't stick. Don't be fooled they'll be able to repeat the lesson back to you, but they can't apply knowledge that improves their long-term situation because it gets erased.

Are you making the argument that Go is finally the magic language that can make bad devs write good code ?

Let me be the realist here : it isn't.

Go is just a very young language that, for the moment, only has developers that are curious and therefore either good or willing to learn. This has the additional consequence that for the moment the mailinglist is very helpful. History teaches us that both effects have nothing to do with the language and are temporary (unless the language never sees any "real" acceptance, like Haskell).

You can look messages from some years back showing the same sentiment for Delphi, Visual Basic, Java, Python (especially Python had lots of people making this argument), ... And when those messages were posted, they were true. It didn't last long for any of them.

> But people would struggle without Visual Studio debugging and a big run button.

Sadly this is being used as an excuse for making language with substandard (to put it mildly) debugging facilities and editors.

And of course, like for every other argument, the Go team itself is just being extremely arrogant about this. "Why do you want this ?" type responses, or just dead silence, or outright declaring the people asking the question to be substandard developers or some such.

You may want to take a look at http://quantopian.com/, who make an engine that does just that. A lot of brokers actually support this.

The reason appears to be that there are lots of stock trading packages that people want to use (and to be fair, most brokers' interfaces suck somewhat. Also one interface for 2-3 brokers sounds appealing to me).

Here is an article about one such trading API:

http://www.quantstart.com/articles/Using-Python-IBPy-and-the...

Most API's also let you play with the "fake money" accounts of the brokers. But keep in mind that they usually cheat on transaction costs in those modes.

You may want to read a lot of the algorithms on Quantopian. To be frank, the only one that really makes sense to me is the "auto-rebalancing" approach. What this does it it keeps your investment at what you set it.

Say you invest 50% in automotive stocks and 50% in nasdaq stocks. Nasdaq goes up 10% -> it sells 5% of the profit and invests it into automotrive stocks. This is one of the few algorithms that seems to :

1) beat the market

2) actually spreads risk around (or it seems to me it does, depends on your investment spread I guess)

This provides some details :

http://thehackernews.com/2015/02/hard-drive-firmware-hacking...

So no, they'll get a rootkit process running on your machine and (for instance) upload everything on your hard drive through your web browser.

Another thing they've done is to upload hacked drivers to cause other hardware connected to the infected machine to physically destroy itself.

If I was a lawyer, the basic requirement I'd have for a statement like this is to make it so it can't be construed as an admission of guilt, because that may later be used in court to extract damages.

You probably should blame legal, not PR.

1) cost : contractors without work are free. No insurance (not even with ObamaCare). No providing infrastructure. No nothing ...

2) risk : contractor fucks up, contractor is legally responsible. Employee fucks up, firm is reponsible.

3) Ease of firing and the resulting pressure that can be applied to employees. Contractors don't even have to be fired to be fired.

4) Customer/payment risk. Suppose a customer doesn't pay. In the case of an employee, the employer has to pay the employee and the infrastructure. In the case of a contractor, the contractor is screwed (in some cases they actually have to pay transaction costs even if the customer doesn't pay)

But you hit on a very interesting point, but don't follow it through to conclusion:

> What the West was able to do is exploit that technology to create a new economic system, ...

> Furthermore it's an assumption to think that conflict creation is inherent in human beings, because it's really not, and there are many instances of various government being satisfied in their own domains. China, and India being an example where incredible wealth meant a stable state, ...

A stable economy is not a Nash equilibrium, and therefore unsustainable (not necessarily, but ...). Those nations were defeated, because they settled in a non-Nash-equilibrium and they were destroyed because of that. The west created a new equilibrium and it absorbed the world.

This is not the fault of the west, or of anyone at all, any more than my wet coat is the fault of the rain. If you live in a non-Nash-equilibrium state you are one change of tactics by one of your friends or enemies (or pets, really) removed from extinction (or at least massive change).

These states would have been defeated and replaced sooner or later regardless of whether any individual player felt the need to do so. It was easy to do, just requiring the first domino to get pushed over. The west was there at the right time with a better system, no more, no less. And most of the destroying would have been done, not by western soldiers, but by people in those old systems who very likely enormously benefited from introducing the new system.

As a general rule, decision made due to regret ... well tend to lead to more regret. That happens to me a lot. What a lot of people don't do after a project is to first evaluate how well the whole thing worked.

How many bug incidents were there ?

How many times did a design decision have to be refactored out ?

How many times did you really have a problem ?

Then, first things first, take out all problems that were obviously not project related. The team moved ? Someone went on holiday ? All of those don't matter.

After that, you'll have problems left. If it's 3 problems, none of which delayed more than 2 weeks/10%, your project went as well as you can reasonably expect. Don't change a thing. If after that you arrive at the conclusion that the project went ~80% as planned, then you've simply done it right. There are no lessons to be drawn from mistakes, because the fixes are likely to screw you up more than the "mistakes".

Even when this is not the case, you should limit fixes. Take the top-3 problems, at the very most, and implement a fix for one of them. Then try to mitigate the second and stay away from everything else.

If you don't you'll have seriously more regrets about your next project a whole than your current project.

Lots of people generally don't do this. They do a project, then switch programming languages. That's a decision you should make once in 5 years (unless you're switching back after a disappointment). People seriously overcompensate. From management to developers. Redesigning an entire organisation because one bad apple leaked something is very likely not justified, and similarly a rewrite is almost never justified.