Viewing profile — waveman2

One other factor I would mention is the massive uncoolness of Ada. This seems to come from three directions: 1. Invented by and for a bureaucracy known for its extravagance and was…

To put it another way "It's the ecosystem, stupid." Apologies to Bill "It's the economy, stupid" Clinton.

In a number of countries you are not allowed to ask someone's race, let alone record it on your computers. In the USA it is compulsory so you can provide these stats and protect yo…

> it is their responsibility to fix it. This seems to contain two embedded and unexamined assumptions. 1. That this is a problem. If women prefer not to go into sciency fields (oth…

> I would hypothesize that this is false Citation required. And if women are less interested overall in CS and/or have less ability on non-verbal tasks overall then you would expec…

It's unavailable in the sense that you can actually buy it now. I just did. That is, in the sense that it is available . And right now the claim made is demonstrably false, if not …

> maybe older developers have a blind spot towards opportunities that have failed in the past Yes. A lot of things have to come together for something to work. Something can fail m…

Protip: the government scans and keeps the exterior of all mail that is sent. So, put the returning address on the inside of the envelope so that it is harder to work out who is se…

I think this reflects one of the fallacies that people from other languages bring to Lisp. They think that all languages are more or less immutable. If something annoys you (like f…

Two comments 1. Machine learning is moving more and more towards indirect programming i.e. you program the computer with a learning algorithm and let it work out what to do. Google…

From personal experience I suggest you never buy a children's book on your own account. There doesn't seem to be a way to tell Amazon "Hey this purchase was a one-off, don't use it…

His argument seems to be "computers cannot do X yet, therefore computers will never be able to do X".

> they're just far more likely to make wildly incorrect mistakes than understandably incorrect ones Have you spoken to some members of the general public and asked what they think?…

One of the criticisms of the study is just this point. A lot of the "upward mobility" is people moving to more expensive areas where they get somewhat higher pay but the cost of li…

The studies seem to be confusing causation and correlation. They seem to assuming that there must be an environmental cause for the differences in people's IQs. This may seem like …

> though no one really knows at this point This is half the problem. After 30 years in IT, I note the NBN has no feasibility study, no cost benefit analysis, and is running way bey…

No I am saying that trivia is trivia. What happened is at worst micro-bullying. Actually I suspect the daughter did not want to do the course, was pressured into it by her mother a…

According to the author she did nothing about the problem at the time ie did not talk to the teacher, but is now more than happy to create drama by the track. The author's qualific…

Worth mentioning also that India has one of the world's oldest and richest cultures. It is hard to describe the feeling visiting some of these places, perhaps it's a bit like visit…

> You clearly meant billions of men. Plenty of women believe this too.

It is a reasonable position I think. Given the progress with understanding many other things, it is reasonable to expect progress here - bearing in mind the incredible complexity o…

This seems like an obvious point, but when you are dealing with complex systems second-order effects often result in totally perverse outcomes. Often the result of pushing the syst…

Google, along with Apple, will always be the company that beat him.

His foundation makes great play of the claim that they are evidence based and totally, totally use metrics and quantitative feedback to guide their work. So I go onto their site an…