zupatol

He argues that a job interview is a different situation than being at work with access to google because it's 'a competition'. If he likes to select people on things unrelated to the job, why not ask them to sing and dance too?

I speak french, but I wouldn't know how to spell it phonetically in english.

However this text to speech site pronounces it very well:

http://www.acapela-group.com/text-to-speech-interactive-demo...

When I am programming I need a sense of aesthetic to choose among all the possibilities. I strive for clarity and expressiveness just as any other writer. When discussing a design with other programmers, I know that ugliness is always a strong argument.

It's no surprise Richard Gabriel proposes a bachelor of fine arts in software: http://www.dreamsongs.com/MFASoftware.html

I don't like the word professional. When I mention I make comics, those who ask if I am professional really just want to know if I make any money. But just like I program, I make comics with great patience and attention to detail, and to get through the painful parts I need the kind of discipline and seriousness you could call professionalism.

Meditation is something I would like to try. Recently I went to a zen dojo to try. They sit on this zafu cushion in a position I am not flexible enough to do. Even trying half of the position hurt incredibly. But the worst part was after the meditation, when one of the students asked a question to the master. The master then talked for a very long time, digressing on different parts of his life, mocking his students, and boasting about his superiority, which he tried to demonstrate by misquoting all sorts of people. I wondered if listening to the master was also pain the students are supposed to overcome. I won't go back there. I'll have to try meditation somewhere else.

Being able to travel to rich countries is a strong status symbol in poor countries, and corrupt rich foreigners risk not being welcome in their country at some point.

But in a sense you are right, such a scheme would lock out the foreigners who have most to gain from immigration.

Good quote. There is something suspicious about the whole idea, it sounds too much like an economist trying to solve every problem with the same hammer.

But Gary Becker is not a loon. He has a Nobel prize in economics. Before dismissing his ideas it's worth having a very close look at them.

Well join should be on sequence instead of list then.

To me it seems unnatural to see join on string because string feels more 'basic' than a sequence, so I would expect the sequence to know about strings rather than the opposite. But the argument against join on string is not as strong as the argument against sum on array.

If this article wasn't from a reputable source, I would have simply dismissed it. So many things sound wrong.

I studied economics, but not business. Since when do business schools work with complex mathematical models? I thought they were just the place where 'soft' skills like leadership were trained with lots of exercises, in a practical but completely unmathematical way. Surely they would not study agency theory?

I don't think studying economics affected my greed or my guile, and I never had much of either. It did brainwash me in another way. Economics is the religion of the invisible hand, and I really did believe that if you just let the market do its magic everything would fall into place. There is this belief that greed will make you do something useful in order to get paid. For me this has never meant that 'greed is good'. My interpretation of this was that the market will reward you for doing useful things.

I went on to do useless things anyway, but it took me some years to be proud of it. And having lived through a few bubbles I don't find the market so magic anymore.

I noticed a similar effect on my opinion about movies and books. I am extremely influenced by what I hear, to the point that a movie that I love when I see it for the first time is completely spoilt the second time if I heard a disparaging comment by someone I respect. The same thing almost made me stop listening to music. I've heard so many bad things about Houellebecq that I know there is no point in even trying to read his books.

This sounds like I can be easily influenced, but it may also be that I am more conscious of these effects because I find it very important to judge things by myself.

I just read the fifth child by Doris Lessing, a novel about a family destroyed by a child who is a 'throwback', a kind of neanderthal, or troll. On amazon, there is a comment from a woman who claims to have lived through that, which made me really wonder. Real life trolls?

And now in this article an autist is described as a warty monster from a Grimm fairy tale, and I suddenly understand what this novel is about. I am a little shocked to see an autist portrayed as a troll in a horror story.

Another interesting question would be what alchemists got right about psychology and religion.

C.G. Jung was heavily influenced by some alchemists. Jung probably isn't a psychologist in any scientific way but I really don't know enough to judge his contribution.

Another interesting place where alchemy comes up is in Valis, Philip K. Dick's semi-autobiographical attempt at making sense of his purported visions. I think he writes about a continuity between christian gnostics and alchemists. I love this book but I haven't the slightest idea how I could find out if anything in there makes any sense.

'The end of the banking secret' was yesterday's headline of 'le temps', the most serious newspaper of the french speaking part of Switzerland. I didn't read the paper, but I watched a debate on television. The main thing that changes is that Switzerland drops the distinction between tax evasion (not mentioning some of your money) and tax fraud (forging documents). Now both are illegal.

This article is weird, it quotes the times of london as its source and gets the capital of Switzerland wrong (it's Berne, not Zurich).

I think most people don't consider artists are superior, but everybody tends to ask these questions. I think it's more a need to fit people into categories.

Oh well, it's in french. Here is a link to something I put online last year:

http://grandpapier.org/La-presse-independante

But most of what I publish is in print, and some is out-of-print. I know I should put more effort in making my things available, but this definitely has a lower priority than making new comics.

(hrm. I notice only now I was replying to a comment by pg. It made absolutely no sense to write 'same here')

Same here. I am a programmer, but I spend so much time making comics that I consider it a second, very low-paying job. When people ask me what I do, I say programmer so I don't have to justify myself.

And people understand what programmers do, that's easier to imagine than many other jobs. My father was a marketing manager and I grew up not really knowing what he did.

And even if he had discovered a valid correlation for this period in this country, there is no reason for calling it a 'law'. There is no indication that the correlation will hold up in the future or in the rest of the world.

I like how he emphasizes that economists really don't know much about the economy and often change their minds. Nobody knows what effects the stimulus will have. Whatever happens will not be the effect of the stimulus alone, so the question of its success will most likely remain unanswered.

But this completely destroys his point that the stimulus is a mistake.

If there are bad apples in a team, they deserve some kind of presumption of innocence. The manager should at least try to find out what's wrong. I've seen bad apples who were frustrated because they weren't listened to, and they did have good ideas which they could explain. In those particular cases I did not witness how this situation developed, but I have no doubt that bad management can produce bad apples.

All you can say about bad apples is that they point to a problem. To fire them without asking is shooting the messenger.

He's jumping to conclusions. "Get rid of bad apples" sounds horribly intolerant. In the real world it is possible that the pessimist, the sceptic, the unmotivated or even the jerk may just see a problem the others don't want to aknowledge.

It's just as easy to jump to the opposite conclusions: a bad apple makes a group question the validity of its goals. A group who spends time making sure its goals are worthy is bound to be less productive, but is more likely to do the right thing.

The GIMP still lacks full CMYK color model support.

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/CMYK_support_in_The_GIMP

That makes it unsuitable for working on anything that's going to be printed.

To some extent, he confuses the beauty of the problem with the beauty of the solution.

It is of course possible to write interesting software in boring domains, make beautiful portraits of ugly people, joke about serious matters, write poems using swear words or intelligent plays with stupid characters.

It's funny this comes at a time when business leaders are increasingly seen as dishonest and irresponsible profit-seekers. I'm thinking of the bankers seem to try reap profits from the bailout just like they did from the bubble.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Thain#Obama_administration

There is also this other fashionable topic, psychopaths in management:

http://www.management-issues.com/2006/8/24/research/beware-t...

http://www.aim.com.au/DisplayStory.asp?ID=566

(But to be honest, having read the article, turning crack dealers into entrepreneurs sounds like a great idea.)

To sum it up: the bike system is operated by an advertiser, who is now using negative PR to strenghten his position in negociations with the city of Paris.

Why on earth is an advertiser operating bikes?

The city of Paris lets him use its outdoor displays for free. It seems the only advantage for the mayor is that he can claim the bike system works at no cost. This is probably the reason why he lets the advertiser keep secret the amount of his revenues from the displays. That barely honest financing scheme looks like the main problem.

Some films by Alain Resnais deserve to be on this list:

Je t'aime, je t'aime: a time machine experiment gone wrong. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063152/

Providence: a story told while it's being written. Sometimes the writer changes his mind, sometimes his imagination takes him where he doesn't want to go. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076574/

Smoking / No Smoking: two films that explore different possible 'forks' of the same story. The first fork is the decision by one character to smoke a cigarette. In the first film she does, in the second she doesn't. There are three or four forks in each film which all completely change the fate of the characters. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108167/

Other films that come to mind:

Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys , by Michael Haneke. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0216625/

Akira has an ending just about as powerful as the ending of 2001. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094625/

Beyond a reasonable doubt (Fritz Lang) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049006/

(but why am I writing this on hacker news?) Vertigo (Hitchcock) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052357/

I actually studied economics and worked 4 years in the economic department of a bank, but I can't say I understand much about the economy. My feeling is macroeconomics itself doesn't help understand much of the economy. There is hardly a topic where all economists agree.

If you want to have an idea about how the best economists think the economy works, read the economist. Don't be surprised if they completely change their minds now and then. Only last year I would not have believed they would support a stimulus package today.

The article links the anti-ad movement to anti-capitalist feelings.

Advertising is not essential to capitalism. While economists built countless models that show the superiority of competition and free markets, advertising is something they have barely studied. One of the fundamental assumptions of most models is that consumer preferences are fixed. Advertising works by changing user preferences, so the typical economic model will not be able to say anything about its effect on the economy.

I studied economics in the early nineties, and I remember having a look at the literature about advertising. There was a study that showed cigarette companies competed only through advertising, leading only to higher prices, not to better products. Another study showed that the introduction of advertising for glasses led to lower prices, and concluded that in that case advertising had helped competition work better. I think there was one weird model that somehow argued advertising was good because it allowed people to enjoy life more.

I concluded that there is a good part and a bad part of advertising. The good part is conveying information that helps making better choices. The bad part is bringing products to your attention regardless if they are good or not. My personal impression is that the bad part drowns out the good one.

I found no transcript so I'll try a short summary, although I'm already forgetting the beginning.

Damien Katz worked on lotus notes, later he had a startup, from which he was fired. He started looking jobs but regular jobs didn't seem to interest him anymore. He believed he was a competent programmer, but felt that he could contribute more. He decided to live on his savings and build something before knowing what he was going to build. His wife liked the idea of living differently. He soon dropped his first idea which turned out to be horribly complex to realize. He then tried to somehow extract the essence of what was useful in lotus notes, leaving aside the unnecessary complexity, switched from c++ to erlang along the way, and ended up with couchdb. He was running out of money, so he took up a job at mysql, (although he had never used mysql, and barely knew sql). The development stopped until he took a break for the birth of his second (or third?) child, and brought couchdb to a point where suddenly ibm was interested in it. Negociating with ibm was so frustrating that he ended up calling them douchebags in a mail. This led ibm to agree that couchdb should be open source and to pay Damien Katz for working on it.

He says many more interesting and funny things.

I listened to it only once, without taking notes. Please correct me if I'm wrong. (I posted this on reddit also)

I downmodded only that one because it gave an incorrect and unnecessarily aggressive version of what Kent Beck wrote. Joel is 'a bright, experienced guy' in Beck's words, became 'Joel is an idiot' in yours.

I upmodded some of the answers you were given because they were informative and calmed the conversation down. That is the opposite of detracting.

This book tells about so many miracles that I mostly appreciated it for its weirdness.

I liked the part where the immortal himalaya yogi instantly makes a palace appear, walks in it for a while with his pupil, and makes it disappear again. The point was just to get rid of a desire for luxury that remained in the pupil's karma (or something like that).

I think it had something to do with the paperwork specific to their trade.