Viewing profile — toadpipe

What a crock. The things we know amount to nothing compared to the things we don't, and education doesn't even move the needle on that dial. So what? What matters is what you need …

Niceness is not the same thing as determination. Also, trying to flatter someone described as a good judge of character doesn't seem like a good idea to me. /serious

People who give up too early, for any reason.

Pretty much the entire industry, as well as the academic system, is based on the premise that the vast majority of code can and should be written by programmers who will be borrowi…

If you are not interested in learning how to do it properly, then hire someone who is. Failing that, do not attempt to do it in C.

It can increase people's commitment to compassion too. Like Lisp or Forth, it is an amplifier. Actually placebos are a better analogy. Both are imaginary social support that allows…

Expressiveness in a single line of code is such a stupid metric. magic() What's that? It's a function call. What does it do? Anything. Everything. Why does it need a complex gramma…

If someone could come along and invest the millions of man hours required in making a performance-critical high-level language without the C-baggage As long as it also had C syntax…

This is really tempting, but my guess is that the answer is going to be no. Users want something that just works, and they would probably rather dig through a pile of stuff to find…

In my opinion, a lot of The Software Problem(tm) can be traced back to this tendency to underestimate the difficulty of using magic black box X. Maybe this is because most programm…

So now that I've voted up every plinkplonk comment, my comment is that most people obviously haven't read the book. The post is pretty good, but the book is better. You should read…

The point is that some people are too blinded by their ideology to even come up with a crude solution, let alone an elegant one.

Per Minsky, big brains are a liability until an innovation comes along that allows them to be used properly. IMHO big disks, along with big RAM and big processing cores (now core a…

It's quite interesting to think about how much I've learned about nature socially, vs. directly. It seems clear that I learn almost everything socially, and everything I learn dire…

Individual members of populations of every species alter their environments. Humans may do it more deliberately, but as either civilizations or as a species as a whole it's not cle…

Of course the problem is that 99% of non-conformists are wrong, but all of them believe that they are right, some of them are really dangerous, and some of them are work very hard …

Exactly. Evolution is basically a filtering process that records and compresses memories of past changes to the environment, along with mechanisms for communicating those memories …

So you're saying that "they weren't right for their jobs" is wrong. What about the "burned out" part? What do you know about why they left? Did they just move on the more interesti…

You are standing on the shoulders of people who design languages, vs. standing on the shoulders of people who write libraries. Languages are much closer to the central concepts in …

It depends on your priorities. Many U.S. families move long distances every few years, and many young single people move significantly more often than that. Certain jobs can requir…

The gold box/pepsi/coke/cola/jolt/id/idst/soda languages are indeed interesting, but from the outside of VPRI it isn't easy to figure out what they do. Listening to Alan Kay try to…

This is like the adult version of everything the culture tells you where you're a kid: "you're special! you're a unique snowflake! you can do anything, if you just believe in it! f…

Given that DSLs are hard, it does not follow that sticking "foundational concepts" into "components" is a better strategy than DSLs. If you write a DSL, you are standing on the sho…

Maybe it is possible for lesswrong to be less wrong after all.

The title and content of the post state that, if the UI is terrible, then it was (probably) created by a programmer. They do not say the converse, nor does the converse automatical…