api

292 ms·

16381.
by api 16y ago
I have recently rediscovered the book. (Well, mostly eBooks via Kindle apps...) I read a lot when I was younger, but for some reason kind of stopped for a while. Now I read quite often again, and I love it. eBooks make it easy too. Click, b
16382.
by api 16y ago
1964. It is truly amazing just how much of what we use, from big ideas to little ones, was invented in the 1960s.
16383.
by api 16y ago
You have a point, but what I'd really like to see is something more "meta." First a little background. I had a discussion with a business guru around MIT once about marketing. He related a story (possibly apocryphal) about Larry Ellison of
16384.
by api 16y ago
The average person is only motivated by hate, fear, and superstition. That is the main constraining factor.
16385.
by api 16y ago
" Transhumanists must come to realize that in order to control history, and thus their own destinies, they must leverage their way into a position of control over the ideology, morality and direction of this civilization. To fail to do so
16386.
by api 16y ago
It would make sense if you had to write LISP to run on 30 different LISP implementations, all of which had weird quirks that you had to memorize and work around.
16387.
by api 16y ago
What we have is everything that is bad about a private healthcare system combined with everything that is bad about socialized medicine. Over-regulation, high cost, and impossible to get without an employer or some other kind of large gro
16388.
by api 16y ago
You really want your typical driver flying around in a helicopter? I think this is the reason we don't have flying cars. We could build them. We could do a lot of things. But nobody really wants them, given the danger they would pose. (En
16389.
by api 16y ago
This just shows how difficult prediction is. For every one of these, there is an equally wrong wildly positive prediction. A few of those are included, like von Neumann's "nuclear power will make energy free!" prediction. The future will su
16390.
by api 16y ago
Apple can do this because they have a monopoly on good design. Almost nobody outside Cupertino understands that design, user interface, and user experience matter.
16391.
by api 16y ago
I was referring to Oracle.
16392.
by api 16y ago
Java is a great platform for long-lasting robust apps. It is invaluable to both the business and the scientific community, providing stable code longevity and long term reusability beyond any other current platform. It provides near-C++ per
16393.
by api 16y ago
The key phrase here is "political people," meaning people who spend more time and effort on political game playing than value creation. Such people destroy everything they touch, yet they have an uncanny ability to skate from thing to thing
16394.
by api 16y ago
Here's a suggestion: have Boston develop a culture in which people have actual friends (as opposed to colleagues) and discuss things other than their careers. Boston is a weird place. In some ways it is incredibly liberal and progressive, b
16395.
by api 16y ago
Yes. The power! The prestige! The early death of easily curable disease! The paucity of knowledge and culture! Muhuhuahaha! But seriously though... I'd rather be middle class now. That starts to change for me around 1950. At that point it s
16396.
by api 16y ago
He is referring to an under-appreciated virtue of good software: installability. apt-get install php5 Usually you don't even need that.
16397.
by api 16y ago
The cyberpunk writers like Gibson were the most prophetic of all the sci-fi authors of the 20th century. This is straight out of the Sprawl trilogy.
16398.
Paradise Regained: how resources from space could re-green the Earth(lesjohnsonauthor.com)
2 points by api 16y ago|0 comments
16399.
by api 16y ago
That interface looks like ass.
16400.
by api 16y ago
No, discovering that is market research. I don't see how McMethodologies help there.
16401.
by api 16y ago
They're forgetting it because they want to forget it. Businessmen want (for reasons that are somewhat rational) to commoditize everything, including labor. Programming labor has been stubbornly difficult to commoditize. Programmers differ i
16402.
by api 16y ago
The biggest determinant of success that I've seen is the skill of the programmers on the team. No McMethodology can make crappy programmers write good code. Period. (However, really bad management can make good programmers write crappy code
16403.
by api 16y ago
"Scrum consultants stay way past their usefulness, turning into self-aggrandizing organizational vampires." s/Scrum/Management FTFY.
16404.
by api 16y ago
I'm not really anti-Agile, but I like seeing people question the crazy hype around it. Agile is really just a collection of mostly decent project management and coding advice. It is absolutely not a silver bullet, and it's also not best sui
16405.
by api 16y ago
Complexity is also laziness on the part of the customer. The story about the customer who thought a product wasn't up to par because it was simple, tried it, and then found that it did everything needed is illustrative of this. Marketing ru
16406.
by api 16y ago
You can never rely on the past as a predictor of the future in any market.
16407.
by api 16y ago
"Emergence" seems to me like a placeholder term. These are terms that scientists throw around for "something interesting is here, but we don't understand it yet... but we sort of know it when we see it." Other examples: dark matter, dark en
16408.
by api 16y ago
I'm still skeptical, but I have always wondered whether the idea that life originated on Earth might be the last geocentrism. Maybe life is everywhere and it's just something that matter does... like solid, liquid, gas, plasma, etc. The onl
16409.
by api 16y ago
This is a great example of why the net still needs a lot of work to make it less centralized. The problem here is that Wikileaks is Wikileaks. It is an entity with a face, a central location, etc.
16410.
by api 16y ago
I think a culprit in age-related decline of fluid intelligence is Careerism. I don't mean the idea that you should take your career seriously. That would be lower-case-C careerism. What I mean is the idea that you should evaluate every aspe

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