Assorted Links

Always start with politics.

Weapons divide. It’s about culture, but that doesn’t mean you can ignore reason and talk about “multi-automatic round weapons”. I think this links to evil satire, but who knows, maybe it’s real?

Continuing with a take on why meritocracy might not be ideal. I don’t know what other things Confucianism really entails, so I won’t convert to the new social order. Still, I like tieing responsibilities, abilities, and position together. Thanks to SSC.

Because some thoughts on the price of programmer time look superficially trivial, HN comments point out the natural selection bias when comparing earnings in programming to law or finance: Up or out is the money version of publish or perish.

Not only Amazon classifies its customers.. Via HN.

Some photographers found a positive aspect of tobacco smoke. (See also HN.)

If you like little critters, see creatures avoiding planks, having some sort of funny little evolutionary algorithm and cute graphics. Thanks HN.

I don’t know if ads really work best if they are perceived as genuine information, but since Google successfully displays ads as search results I’d give some credibility to this guess being true. Whatever the mechanism behind this, the fact is slightly disconcerting, though only moderately suprising. Via HN.

You don’t just code a function that does it’s thing. Via HN.

I learned that nil is not nil in golang. So, every language, even when meant to be trivial to read, has its warts. If nil would be nil all the time, we would complain that a nil Reader is equal to a nil Writer after comparison behind an interface{}, and the world would still get all the warts it wants. We can never win.

Files are hard is among the top expositions on programmer misconceptions and software quality errors. Go read and be merry. S.a. HN.

One of the futures of software developer hiring processes has arrived. Step one: Announce on HN. Step two: Melt-down. The interest really is that big.

Starfighter are not the only ones trying to improve the hiring process, so let’s continue by reading who YCombinator funded companies like to hire, of course found via HN. They did some nice preliminary research on who likes to hire whom. I already understood “in principle” that soft factors like “I liked you, you are similar to me” account for a big piece of the pie, but now I’m thoroughly shocked to be a members of the most unhireable programmers. I maneuvered myself into obsolescence right at the time when I crossed 30. Duh.

To gap or not to gap, that is the unanswerable question, but (quoting Scott Aaronson):

First, the result does not say—or even suggest—that there’s any real, finite physical system whose behavior is Gödel- or Turing-undecidable. Thus, it gives no support to speculations like Roger Penrose’s, about “hypercomputing” that would exceed the capabilities of Turing machines.