wheelie_boy

Absolutely.

I don't hand-create machine code. I don't write assembly.

I write in the highest-level language that still lets me fully specify everything I care about, and then all of the lower levels of code generation are completely automated. Programmers have always automated programming jobs as much as possible.

Yeah, I don't think it's a literal quote, unless it was in a very specific context.

It was making fun of the 640K limitation of MS-DOS, and the implicit reasoning behind that hard limit.

The biggest problem I see with deflation is that it becomes rational to avoid actually using the currency. This massively decreases demand.

Not many people are using bitcoin to buy pizza any more, because there's a hope that if they just HODL a bit longer they'll be able to buy lambos with the same amount of bitcoin.

That makes bitcoin less useful as a day-to-day currency. If the entire world economy was based on bitcoin, there would be a deflationary spiral and no clear way to fix it. This would be the mother of all depressions.

> A whole world currency that is potentially immune to inflation and government manipulation.

There are lots of ways that powerful governments can still put their thumb on the scale. US taxes still need to be paid with US dollars, and they can squeeze / regulate the exchanges, or influence, for example, the devs working on bitcoin.

Also, the design of bitcoin is inherently deflationary, which isn't inflation, but has its own set of problems. Saying that nobody is going to have the power to fix those problems isn't a huge selling point.

> No current conversion fees.

Well, I guess if everyone in the world settled on a single cryptocurrency. But that's also true of any other currency in the same situation.

> The ability to send funds to anyone with no middle man and no fee (besides the miners).

What is the importance of not having a middleman? Is it so that you can avoid regulations/fees that you'd otherwise be subject to? To me, this seems like the entire value proposition of cryptocurrency.

> Also the removal of business and corporate surveillance.

This is a good point.

To me the argument is the opposite: what is the reason for cryptocurrencies to exist if not for money laundering and generally avoiding regulations/fees you'd otherwise be subject to?

Backwards compatibility isn't free.

In this case, the root cause is probably the CPUs changing from 32-bit to 64-bit. There are costs of having 2 versions of all of the system libraries - maintenance dev time, RAM usage, battery life, etc.

In the far future when food, shelter, and other necessities are basically free, attention will be the last valuable commodity. There will always be a scarcity of attention.

If there are people who need an answer, and people happy to provide that answer (and perhaps a bit of kind coaching on how to find answers in the future), what is the downside of letting them connect on stackoverflow? Nothing is forcing people to hang out in the novice area answering repetitive questions if they don’t want to.

The downside of disallowing ‘unworthy’ questions is that people feel made stupid for asking, and unwelcome. Also, people feel made stupid for answering, and unwelcome. There is plenty of elitism in tech, and you could keep the main stackoverflow for unique, well-asked questions, as well as adding the novice area.

The advantage of having a novice area of stackoverflow is that more people will use the site. While not every question will be great, the total number of great questions, and the total number of people helped, will be higher.

I think the core problem is that they've focused too much on being like wikipedia (a single authoritative, comprehensive answer to each important question), and not enough on helping people to learn. Over time a site will grow a culture, and experts on the site will outweigh and overrule experts on the subject matter. In this case, we're also seeing answerers' needs outweigh askers'.

If you could only meet the needs of one constituency, I'd say they made the right choice to favor expert answerers, but I think there are other solutions.

Specifically, if I was trying to fix this I'd set up a two-tier system for questions and answers. There are lots of people who would be happy to answer questions, even if the question is a dupe, and even if it's not framed very well. Give people points for answering these in a kind way, and moderate around that.

For questions that are sufficiently well-asked, and not duplicates, elevate them to a wikipedia-like status: allow them to be indexed by search engines, make them easier to see by the expert answerers that dislike sifting through novice questions, and moderate them for quality. Give points for people that review and elevate high-quality, non-duplicate questions, or that edit questions to become high-quality.

If there are very different personas that you're trying to appease, sometimes a multi-tier system is appropriate.

Same here, I always use an incognito window for facebook.

Yes, it has by far the largest user community.

If you do a google image search for 'grasshopper geometry' or 'grasshopper architecture', you'll see a lot of buildings designed with grasshopper, including many which have been constructed.

There are other interesting things going on, like automated construction with robots or laser cutters. For example, theverymany builds massive organic structures out of laser-cut metal pieces, and the living (new york) did some interesting things with robotic placement of bricks.

New design tools specialized for automated manufacturing methods.

An interesting thing that's happening alongside 3d printing is the emergence of visual programming languages specialized for geometry, the most popular being Grasshopper.

Reminds me of Tom Duff's Essay 'Reading code from top to bottom': http://www.iq0.com/notes/deep.nesting.html

http://winblows.com is available!

Yes, it is good and valuable for a society to be tolerant of diverse backgrounds and viewpoints. The limit to tolerance is being tolerant of intolerance.

The left has intolerant people as well. "No matter what side of the argument you are on, you always find people on your side that you wish were on the other."

However, somehow they aren't running the party like they are on the right.

The issue with the independent as a source is that it is obviously designed to be consumed as entertainment rather than a serious look at the topic. You can cherry-pick studies that show something entertaining, but that doesn't tell you much about the current scientific consensus. It's like how news loves to report that popular indulgences protect against cancer (wine, chocolate, coffee, whatever)

Are you planning on starting to wear red and eat a lot of garlic in order to attract more women?

That's not a great source. It also tells men to wear red and eat garlic.

There might be some interesting analysis there, but the social science underlying it is awful. If you base your analysis on unsubstantiated priors, you get useless results.

Yeah, being hard to forge is necessary, but not sufficient.

There are a ton of electronic currencies that are difficult to forge, for example Flooz, Beenz, and the gems in clash of clans.

Agreed, it's almost like the asset has no fundamental value, and is driven completely by speculation.