301–310 of 493 posts
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The same is basically true with Seattle. Well, not so dark (the sun is out til 4:30), winters are quite mild, but wet enough to keep everyone focused.
the most boring weather is reflected in the most boring software
> Why are there so many successful startups in Stockholm? Several reasons. First, you need to recognize that any Sweden-based startup will, when it gets to be known internationally, have a Stockholm-based office. So it's not about a city of 1 million inhabitants, it's a country of 10 million that's the true number here. As an example, I believe Spotify opened their original offices in both Stockholm and Göteborg more…
Without disputing the technical correctness, Spotify's Göteborg office was literally a single desk at a shared office for the first three years of its existence.
> Is Bloom's "Two Sigma" phenomenon real? ... one-on-one tutoring using mastery learning led to a two sigma(!) improvement in student performance. When I tutored, I found students often had some misunderstanding, somewhere. So my task was to listen , to find that misunderstanding, so I could correct it. This "teaching" is listening, more than talking. The idea is they are lost, but to know what direction they need, I…
I tend to believe in some of Stephen Krashen's notions of language acquisition. Specifically that there is a difference between learning (being able to remember and repeat something) and acquisition (being able to use it fluently). Also that acquisition comes from comprehension. I also believe that language acquisition is no different than any the acquisition of any other skill. Many people don't agree with these ide…
strongly disagree. learning chinese by youtube. I comprehend 15% but I pick up new patterns and words all the time.
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lol, I hear people frame the self driving car discussion that way regularly, but it is just wrong. Noone is going to be making human driven vehicles illegal. They may be more like classic cars than regular vehicles at some point, though.
Nah, you'll just see the insurance cost spike to the point where driving is a weekend activity for rich weirdos. Give it a generation and it will be as strange and morally suspect as smoking.
You could have picked a better example. I see tons of young people smoke and wonder what the hell is wrong with them, whether or not they haven't been paying attention for the last 40 years and then I realize they didn't because they weren't there to begin with. So the tobacco industry can work their nasty charms on them with abandon because there are new potential suckers born every day.
> Why are there so many successful startups in Stockholm? Several reasons. First, you need to recognize that any Sweden-based startup will, when it gets to be known internationally, have a Stockholm-based office. So it's not about a city of 1 million inhabitants, it's a country of 10 million that's the true number here. As an example, I believe Spotify opened their original offices in both Stockholm and Göteborg more…
Sweden's social safety net is among the strongest in the world. If the floor on failure is that you still have access to food, housing and healthcare then quitting a full-time job to start a company becomes much more possible.
More people starting companies, more attempts at big targets, more outlier successes.
> Will end-user applications ever be truly programmable? Emacs, Smalltalk, Genera, and VBA embody a vision of malleable end-user computing: if the application doesn't do what you want, it's easy to tweak or augment it to suit your purposes. Today, however, end-user software increasingly operates behind bulletproof glass. This is especially true in the growth areas: mobile and web apps. I'll pick this one: end users b…
And today, many systems automatically personalize themselves for us, in very complex way. If the machine learning senses what i want to do(like in Google Search's personalization, which for most people it's probably better than advanced keywords), why do i need to bother with programming ?
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"I think this is a cowardly and inaccurate belief" Throughout history you find the people who believe this are not the ones who's safety is sacrificed in pursuit of some grand project...
You’re assuming a lot. I’m assuming your OP thinks “better safe than sorry” is stupid because it doesn’t actually help you make decisions. I would much rather drive on a bridge of someone whose motto is “do it right.” This isn’t the Apollo program. We know how to make safe bridges. It’s not a matter of being cautious and talking to every stakeholder. It’s a matter of hiring actual engineers,* letting them work, belie…
Better safe than sorry MEANS do it right. It means that human life is more valuable than material wealth.
If you are hiring amateurs to build your bridge, or you are “crossing your fingers”, then you are not being “better safe than sorry” — in the sense that what you are doing can not be an implentation of “better safe than sorry” that can be reconciled with the broader cultural context in which people use the phrase and discuss it.
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> Development convenience was also among the collateral damage. Don't you find that web & javascript are pretty much a straight denial of your argument ? They're "secure" (meaning we let anyone's javascript code just run in our browsers, even embedded in other people's code, and seriously expect no ill effects) They're extremely inconvenient to develop with. Especially compared to those "run-time above all else" envi…
> Don't you find that web & javascript are pretty much a straight denial of your argument ? You should probably direct that question at Patrick because his original question was kind of based on the premise that the answer to your question is "no". My personal opinion? No. OMG no. Javascript and HTML are both poorly designed re-inventions of tiny little corners of Lisp. In that regard they are improvements over C. Bu…
I'm not a programmer, so I'm imagining you hook in to the call that addresses the function (like modify a jump instruction), overwrite any registers that need changing, nullify caches, so the program runs new code -- this I think is how some hacks work?
Ultimately couldn't you just write NOP to addresses used for a function?
Is it something structural about C/C++ that stops this, like the ownership of memory (I'm assuming a superuser can tell the computer to ignore that addresses written to are reserved for the program being modified).
How does the computer know that you pushed a different long jump in to a particular address and stop working, rather than keep going processing instructions.
Apologies if I've misunderstood, please be gentle.
"End-user computing is becoming less a bicycle and more a monorail for the mind." I shall steal this quote. The humble spreadsheet is just about the only 'programmable' application left on the typical corporate endpoint/educational client PC.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/17/highlights-from-the-com...