So on the first point, it really comes down to whether you classify all government action as anti-market or you think of efficiency oriented policy as pro-market.
(PSJ)
And
The problem is not that most politicians and pundits take economic principles too literally;
the problem is that most politicians and pundits are utterly ignorant even of these principles.
(Vox Imperatoris quoting Don Boudreaux)
At the dawn of time, when nuclear energy was hunted down by knights, and science still was a deadly endeavor,
some people died tickling the dragon’s tail (HN).
I am working toward moving from Jekyll to Hugo, work that is most definitely
not being helped by Hugo’s Jekyll importer (it doesn’t really import, and I assume I have again been
doing stuff nobody else does).
Neither is it helped by some quirks like Go’s time-formatting code: To specify
the intended datetime format, provide an example (instead of looking up strange formatting codes).
Caveat: There is exactly one reference time, and you have to use the exact same year, month, day, minutes, seconds
that are in the example: It’s only 2006, January, 1st, at 15:04. Totally obvious – after having format errors,
and cursing half an hour.
The OpenAI project started with a big boom, but whether this is a good idea we don’t know yet.
People sponsoring the project know about the orthogonality of intelligence and values. Why then an
open-source AI project is the best way forward, I don’t really know.
Scott Sumner wrote The Midas Paradox and somebody explains
why the book is important. It seems to be a good way to be a politician
as an economist. The book is generally well received in the econblogosphere (is this still a word?).
And last but not least, PureScript intros are there to be found. I didn’t
know about this language yet, but it seems to be a well thought-through approach for strong functional programming
with JavaScript, and later WebAssembly as back-end. PureScript extends on some of Haskell’s concepts,
and provides the Eff monad as an improvement to everything is IO, and also provides
some more finegrained typeclasses (HN).
Any similarity to the like of the interface segregation principle are surely purely coincidental. However,
the typeclass universe is far from closed yet, although until recently I didn'even know that in 2015
we don’t have an accepted solution to provide the numerical tower in our programming languages.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Are you a worthy member of society? Scott Alexander calls this an ill-posed question:
modern society, technology and the total focus on economic output mandates that
‘The System’ should be accomodated. Humans were here first.
On fixing this, let’s hope that Finland’s basic income plan
(via MR) will be well executed and successful. Why? We need
to find affordable ways for supporting an ever broader share of our population:
As almost 2/3rd of our current jobs seem automatable in the not too
distant future, we simply won’t have the luxury to just vote ourselves a social democratic
heaven. As a personal aside, I doubt that even my profession (software development) will
have any need for people like me in 30 years. Let’s see how this bet goes.
While we discuss how we shift taxes and benefits within citizens, and whether or not to
mandate burning crops for cars, around 800 million people in the world still go hungry.
The good news:The share of people having chronic hunger is going down..
In the world of geography were people cannot fly like superman,
comparing least and most densly populated areas each amounting to 5%
of the world population gives a nice demonstration why a rising waterline might not be good.
Some people will be even more happy to get access to a slightly less cumbersome C++
compiler in Visual Studio. Sadly, C99 support, better const-expr, better compiler
lints, warnings and errors, and a front-end compatible with a real cross platform tool
will rather prolong the undesirable life of C++.
On reddit, a post bemoaning the impossibility to teach coding got very popular. It complained about
the much worse status of software developers to those in any other white-collar profession. It
complained about the lower 90-percentile pay than those in other white-collar profession. I agree
with some points. I liked it. It even made an important point: Programming is among the most open
and most cheap things you can learn (complains about it being exclusive to rich white people and
in need of more tax subsudied study opportunities are rather… politically opportune than anything
else). Tools, books, examples, discussion forums are free, and there is no licensing
as a barrier to entry (unlike in medicine or law).
If I like all those arguments so much, why don’t I link to it? Because 95% of the article went
into the likely incorrect details that most people are just not cut out to learn programming.
Programming is a high aptitude task, or so they said. So I better promote this
article about the retraction of programming ability having a non-gaussian distribution.
In unrelated news, if you want to buy any kind of GPS watch, @fellrnr is doing
the best reviews out there. If you want to see why I’m unhappy with my Garmin, see his
GPS Accuracy page. Let’s just say that I didn’t expect a two year incubation
period for firmware, even though +xro did warn me about that.
It is now common knowledge, that only terrorists and criminals are using cryptography.
Even if some newspapers are too embarassed to have said such a thing, others won’t. The pressure is
building up, and it’s not wise to believe that technology and open source will protect society.
Via HN.
Slightly related: “What color is your function?”. But consider some HN comments
for a more well-rounded perspective. The world continuously refuses being simple enough for me.
Not simple, but easy: Developing a hatred against passwords. Strange policies and
bad UI have been found insufficient for actually improving security. There are better options,
though. The OP mentioned clef. Looks nice. After having had to implement only parts of
a somewhat acceptable authentication system, outsourcing as much as possible sounds like a great
idea to me. Via HN.
Venture capital is all about money, risk, and status, and therefor the domain of men. Think again.
A look behind the angel investors at YCombinator, and how Jessica Livingston made herself
irreplacable. See also HN.
Unsecuring the world: ZigBee’s home automation redefines using open crypto standards..
Gross incompetence is as good a guess as malicious intent. This problem killed off some christmas
present ideas. It seems, in 2015, if you want home automation, you’re still better off building it
yourself.
On to happier thoughts: Towards the work of actually trustworthy computing (or flying pigs), work
on verified LLVM is progressing. Via HN.
Debugging stories are always more fun than the experience leading to them. To make the latter part
easier, read more of them, for instance “The story of a latency spike”. Via HN.
Remember history: Building PCs for fun. AnandTech seems to start a review series on fans,
and introduces Fan reviews by explaining some engineering background as well. If you, like me,
never cared to explore the trade-off between many and few blades, this is an easy start – with real
numbers from buyable parts.
Closing this already much too long list with forbidden fruits: Rust, the best language of the world
(it must be, I haven’t written a single program in it yet!) is coming of age; since the stabilization
of the core language, work on libraries has begun. Parser/Parser combinators like nom 1.0
and chomp 0.1 (via reddit) are awaiting your commands, and somebody is
cheating on Active Record, leaving ruby for rust with Diesel (via reddit), which looks
like the interface to SQL you always wanted but where afraid to ask for. The combinaton of rust
libraries supporting zero-overhead C calling convention, zero-cost abstraction, and a very high-level
type system featuring not only safety but strong compile-time guarantees could easily be called
the killer argument for it as a library language.
Alas, that point will never come. Still, a human may dream.