Viewing profile — paulajohnson

A formal specification language is a programming language that we don't know how to compile. If we can use AI to automatically implement a formal spec, then that formal specificati…

This reads like a case study from "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Clayton Christensen. TL;DR: big incumbents (e.g. IBM) get out-innovated and replaced by scrappy startups even when th…

This has much the same design philosophy as the original Land Rover: tough, reliable, simple and maintainable. It was originally developed as the UK answer to the Jeep, but rapidly…

Gentrification doesn't reduce segregation, it just moves the boundaries of the segregated areas. Poor people mostly rent because they can't afford or can't get a mortgage. When an …

This is the Paradox of Tolerance. If you tolerate intolerance then intolerance wins, and you don't have tolerance any more. Intolerance isn't just "causing offence", it is the crea…

I think the parent comment is about the likelihood of recovering enough money to make the exercise worthwhile, rather than the propriety of getting ripped off.

Yet another reason why not to be a sharecropper.

The 10 LOC/day includes the entire project, including analysis, requirements, design, documentation (user and tech), test, management etc, in a large project. Saying (as many do) t…

If you are ever in Stockholm do go and see the Vasa. The picture does not do it justice. Seriously amazing.

Taking care of the elderly is a labour intensive business. Automation doesn't clean an old person's glasses (real life example), make their bed or cook their meals.

And what happens when your consultant bills you for a big but vaguely described fee?

In Roe vs Wade the Supreme Court found a right to privacy. The fact that this is not in the Bill of Rights is irrelevant, as per the Ninth Amendment.

Makes Kim Yong Un look like a minor nuisance.

The point is that option types let you explicitly state which values are nullable, but null references mean that every value is potentially null even if it doesn't make sense.

But today we have people paying for high quality content streamed over the net. Its the business model of Netflix and Amazon.

Aleynikov was charged with stealing trade secrets, which does not apply to GPL software.

Cease and desist selling your core product until you replace the GPL bits, or else make your core produt open source.

I think you are erecting a straw man here. The article 1: identifies a set of social norms which it names "thar". 2: Asserts that these norms tend to occur together (i.e. a society…

The way it was explained to Joel Spolsky in the article linked earlier is that Gates just pokes away at increasingly fine details until he finds some question you can't answer, and…

3a) If research doesn't exist, find some impecunious person with a PhD and pay them to create some.

Other governments take note: this is what good electronic security looks like.

For those who don't know, the Robert T. Morris quoted in the text turned out to be the author of the worm, and the R. H. Morris also quoted was his father (who also did a lot of wo…

That doesn't make sense. As soon as the developer wrote the code (I.e. fixed it in tangible form) he had copyright in it. Copyright cannot be transferred except by a specific writt…

Neal Stephenson, not even you could have invented this!

I love the statement “Humans violate the rules in a safe and principled way”. Really sums up the problem. So when you break the rules, what principles (i.e. rules) are you followin…