Viewing profile — purpledove

The implication being that he is too good to waste his time on math.

I can't take this seriously - blaming an individual, especially a CEO, for destroying a corporate culture is ridiculous. I know essentially nothing about the history of HP, but wha…

Please see Dennis M. Ritchie's short bio: http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/bigbio1st.html He has deep mathematical talent. Ken Thompson also has deep analytical abilities as d…

Clojure, like Lisp, has terrible syntax that is difficult for human beings to read. This is one of the reasons the academic community kept Lisp alive - independence from industry, …

I'm 30, and I've worked at various corporations, both small and large, for 5 years. I've never once been told "I can't do things". Not once. Rather the opposite - I've worked with …

All of the fears he mentions are present all of the time when coding - fear of working on the wrong thing, fear of not being able to solve problem X, etc... Those fears are healthy…

This is an excellent suggestion. Other suggestions: read the wikipedia articles on Simple LR and General LR parsers; google "python descriptor" and read the top results.

I fail to see how Chris was a "casualty of the system". I have a little trouble buying his stated desire to transfer to a vocational school for training mechanics...in any city the…

Oh wow, overload. Tempted to leach, but... Anyway, here is a recommendation: 2006.03.26 - This is a good long mix I listened to many times.

I agree - there is a vagueness issue with the rule, and it is not obviously falsifiable. But as stated, the rule does not discuss unpublished works - it is a statement about publis…

Quite right - he goes in the second list.

The equal-odds rule is simply wrong. A few examples: Andrew Wiles, Charles Darwin, John Forbes Nash. These people produced a small amount of work, but they shook the earth. Some pe…

It wasn't a comparison of companies, it was a rebuke of Microsoft's leadership. The criticism is certainly valid, and all the more convincing because Microsoft HAS shipped high-qua…

Speaking of evil, let us not forget Goldman Sach's treatment of Sergey Aleynikov. Makes Oracle look like Mother Teresa.

She is saying that the start-up mythology of success, which is vital to keeping up the spirits of the best of us, can lead the good-but-not-great astray in their lives. She is sayi…

I recommend A. K. Dewdney's "The New Turing Omnibus". It is a series of articles and is very easy to dip into.