Viewing profile — jtolle

Not directly related to the piece (from 2010, although still interesting), but the first comment has a link to Brad Templeton's website, which was nice to discover!

I've liked other stuff by William Bernstein. His book "The Birth of Plenty" is excellent. I haven't read the pamphlet mentioned in the article, but I just downloaded it. I'll be in…

Isn't there an old saw about every big "Web 2.0" business being something that took what people were already doing but made it "social"? So Facebook made blogging social, Twitter m…

A round of applause for the Clean Air Act!

I remember being so excited that my brother and I skipped school and "snuck in" to the ACS meeting in Dallas. This was after their first announcement, but they came and gave a big …

This is an interesting article by someone who went through the actual coffeeshop version of the coffeeshop fallacy: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/recycled/200...

How awesome would it be if pi + e were found to be rational? Maybe everything starts cancelling out past the zillionth digit...

I am now going to lock myself in the bathroom until I can prove that pi + e is irrational. I mean, how hard can it be?

Relevant link: http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2009/03/23/functional-in-the-s...

But Spain and Italy are in a much different situation than Greece or the other smaller "peripheral" Euro economies. Basically, Greece needs a bailout or must leave the Euro. Italy …

You need to go get yourself a recording of Rubinstein playing Chopin's Nocturnes. Hurry! EDIT: I seek no arguments. Wikipedia says nocturnes are generally thought of as "expressive…

I was going to mention that article too. It's a great explanation. Money and monetary systems are human creations, not laws of nature.

Your point about language mattering is spot on. If your language has the right features (even just `typedef`), I don't think you need any flavor of Hungarian. In the right context,…

I don't have any particular profound comments myself, but this is a constant tension in my own work, and I'd like to see what others have to say. I build a lot of one-off models in…

I don't know, maybe "20% of 2010 U.S. income came from..."? I don't have editing powers, though.

Actually the article is talking about income. The current HN title is wrong. According to the linked article: "Close to $2 of every $10 that went into Americans’ wallets last year …

This of course exemplifies why it's impossible to declare almost any technique categorically "good" or "bad". Sometimes early returns make code shorter and more clear. Sometimes th…

But surely the condition that it's hard to make more of something is necessary but not sufficient to make that something a good "money" candidate. People expect e.g. gold to contin…

Wait a second. Maybe I need some reeducation myself here, but you're pinning the mass-murders of the 20th century on "intellectuals"? And then saying that's the explanation for the…

That's funny, because I look at that and think it's too bad I don't know anything about COBOL. It's not like I'm planning to learn it or anything, but it's quite different from any…

Plus, decent building codes can actually enhance overall efficiency. Lots of things in the code don't really "cost" anything. They just enforce hard-won "it's best to do it this wa…

I think this is key. I answer questions to help other people. I also answer them to help improve my own ability to explain solutions to programming problems. Usually the problems a…