api

396 ms·

16441.
by api 16y ago
Not too bad, but sort of like trying to describe an elephant as a bunch of balloons and a water hose glued onto a bail of hay on a table. I also dislike those sorts of analogies because they are loaded with aesthetic value judgements that d
16442.
by api 16y ago
Maybe, though I am concerned about processing power stagnating. Advancement is governed by economics as well as technical capability. There must be demand for new technology, or a field stagnates. Witness aviation as an example... utterly
16443.
by api 16y ago
I'm a life-long programmer who presently works in software, but I studied biology in college... mostly because I wanted to learn about learning by studying how living systems do it. Biological systems are nothing like anything we would ever
16444.
by api 16y ago
The problems with rails are pretty much universal to frameworks. Frameworks make it easy to do what the framework makes it easy to do, but eventually you end up paying back all that time you saved early on by fighting the framework later wh
16445.
by api 16y ago
When you're running your own business, you work on the market's terms. The market is the most unforgiving, inflexible, demanding, and heartless boss of all.
16446.
by api 16y ago
"Why introduce this HTML/HTTP thing when we have Gopher? Don't re-invent the wheel!" Re-inventing the wheel is good. It's the only way we'll ever get better wheels.
16447.
by api 16y ago
Dubai is the Pets.Com of the real estate bubble. There are things like it in China that have yet to crash. Look folks... cities must grow organically. You cannot create an instant New York or London with loads of debt. Buildings do not make
16448.
by api 16y ago
Hmm... so you could use patents as a club to enforce dual licensing with GPLv3 then. Violate the GPL and you lose your patent license, so now you're a patent infringer too. At the same time, you're FOSS-friendly since your patents are meani
16449.
by api 16y ago
Umm no. Deep brain-churning scholarship is hard! Let's have spiffy whizzy pop science talks! (TED can be interesting, but this article is WTF.)
16450.
by api 16y ago
Next submission: DuckDuckGo raided for child porn... (unfortunately)
16451.
by api 16y ago
Right now this looks like gorillas arm wrestling. I'm sitting on the fence until I see real anti-open-community action from Oracle.
16452.
by api 16y ago
We are fantastically wealthy, but we have a gigantic parasitic entity that sucks most of our surplus wealth away and burns it in endless pointless wars and in building bridges to nowhere and similar things.
16453.
by api 16y ago
I have never believed in retirement, nor have I ever thought that I would get social security or that any magical financial system would allow me to "retire." I would like, in my later life, to maybe step down into more scholarly pursuits.
16454.
Best toy store ever.(unitednuclear.com)
3 points by api 16y ago|2 comments
16455.
by api 16y ago
Maybe it's that the job market in computers especially is so much more dynamic with better opportunity for advancement, so it attracts a greater share of the best and the brightest. It might also be accessibility. Anyone can play with a com
16456.
No longer self evident: is all Internet content created equal?(mbs.edu)
1 points by api 16y ago|0 comments
16457.
by api 16y ago
This actually opens a profound issue: why has progress in areas like computers and biotech been so breakneck fast but has utterly stalled in areas like energy, propulsion, aviation, etc.? I think I know the answer: those fields are capital
16458.
by api 16y ago
... and a "thought leader." [vomit]
16459.
by api 16y ago
In my experience, a lot of smart people have tried psychedelic-type drugs at some point.
16460.
by api 16y ago
The key events that I see are: 1) The outsourcing boom 2) The Nixon Shock: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_Shock 3) The elimination of Glass-Steagal #1 killed the well-paying blue collar job and unions. #2 killed the stability of the d
16461.
by api 16y ago
How's that different from TV? It often goes over the same pipes, but it's not internet.
16462.
by api 16y ago
I've thought that before too... Actually, maybe I'm being a little bit too hard on the greens. The thing is: human beings respond to hygiene problems by creating religions with moralistic prohibitions. By the 50s, pollution had started to g
16463.
by api 16y ago
I think that resource constraints and environmental damage are real, but I don't think they're the cause of collapse. It seems to me that complexity itself is the cause of collapse. The problem with human societies is that there's no mechan
16464.
by api 16y ago
I've always seen conservatism as being rooted in the immutability of human nature and social structures (and a related protectionism for existing social structures) and liberalism as being rooted in the idea that improvement in the human co
16465.
by api 16y ago
To be more precise, I think green ideology is a secular rehash of Calvinism. It follows the same basic sin-and-redemption narrative. I've often wondered if the failure of green ideology to take off is Asia is due to the absence of the Judeo
16466.
by api 16y ago
As George Carlin said: "the planet is fine! we're fucked..."
16467.
by api 16y ago
"What went so wrong? The answer lies in a change in the nature of progressive politics in California. During the second half of the twentieth century, the state shifted from an older progressivism, which emphasized infrastructure investment
16468.
by api 16y ago
There's a great point here that the post doesn't really go into enough detail about: in many (most?) places, business and financial types are focused on the goal of trying to find ways of making money without actually creating any value. Th
16469.
by api 16y ago
The mission of MIT seems to be: gather together lots of smart ambitious people and get them to work on problems of DOD interest.
16470.
by api 16y ago
I think that's good advice for many situations. But the problem with this and all business advice is that it's very situation-dependent. Good advice for a B2B company might be horrible advice for a B2C company. Good advice for a software co

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