davesims

43 ms·

301.
by davesims 15y ago
If musicians had nearly as much stake in their distributed product, from a percent standpoint, as a startup founder has in his/her business, or if the music industry were remotely as equitable, all things considered, as the software industr
302.
by davesims 15y ago
I guess that means they'll be sunsetting this guy: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/nosqldb/overview/...
303.
by davesims 15y ago
Those Trinity Rail Express cars are now used for the Denton-Dallas A-train commuter rail, soon to be replaced with new Swiss-made cars. I like the old ones actually, extremely comfortable and seats like a massive couch. http://www.dentonrc
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Modern Ruby Development(ascarter.net)
83 points by davesims 15y ago|53 comments
305.
by davesims 15y ago
"simple and deterministic" -- I do like that better, although "dead" does indeed convey the essence here: it's not alive, it's not thinking. Occam had prior philosophical assumptions to support the Razor of reknown, namely his metaphysical
306.
by davesims 15y ago
I really appreciate this answer. What you're doing here is some good philosophical reasoning, setting up an epistemological foundation for the practice of science. Popper would have something to say about your use of inductive/Bayesian re
307.
by davesims 15y ago
Nice to see this thread keep going. So.. "I fully expect science to confirm or disprove nearly every philosophical insight there ever was" "Any philosophical result prior to the science that falsified it can be disregarded" These are the no
308.
by davesims 15y ago
Likewise, this is all good stuff. I think we've exhausted the dialectic limits of the HN comments section. As a parting shot I'll point you one last time to the Jonas essay, "Is God a Mathematician?" It cuts straight to the question you jus
309.
by davesims 15y ago
Nice, and a very cool explanation. But I find it a bit ironic that a snipit of code meant to be a form of self-identification has the output: "i is not defined". http://jsconsole.com/?%28function%28%29{var%20k%3D[]%3Bretur...
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by davesims 15y ago
"the origin of the organ which produces human thought was fundamentally misunderstood without the evolutionary framework." This is a concise version of the fundamental category mistake Dawkins makes. In one sentence, we've dogmatically blow
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by davesims 15y ago
Whenever I see the Great FSM, I feel nothing except the need for Parmesan and a fork. Would that be like Mass for Pastafarians?
312.
by davesims 15y ago
Ok, let me apologize. "Laughable" and "benighted" are the kinds of uncharitable language I'm arguing against using. The charitable read of this statement would have acknowledged its substance -- the idea that after Darwin there was a 'clear
313.
by davesims 15y ago
"Understanding our reasoning capacities as the outcome of a natural physical process leads to my agreement with Dawkins's claim that any philosophical result prior to 1859 can be disregarded." I'm sorry my friend, but... no . I'm open to a
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by davesims 15y ago
I'm glad Dawkins can play that role for you. But for me the chasm between Dawkins and Nietzsche is...vast.
315.
by davesims 15y ago
Ah, here we go. Don't really have the space here to unpack the metaphysics behind this, but I'd start by pointing out that there's a difference between pursuing causality on one plane of experience, and demanding dogmatically that every asp
316.
by davesims 15y ago
Hacker is a state of mind, a kind of deep curiosity about how things work and what I can do about it. This topic, therefore, is about the ultimate hack...why are we here, how does the world work and what can I do about it?
317.
by davesims 15y ago
Sorry, I wasn't saying "there's no difference", I was lamenting that there are those who think "there's no difference." I don't disagree with pretty much anything you've said. There's a huge geographic and societal component to religion, an
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by davesims 15y ago
A clarification then (the reply tree seems to halt, so I'm posting this higher up): I run into a lot of atheists these days who've read Dawkins, Dennett, Sam Harris, maybe even Stephen Pinker, heck maybe even the whole John Brockman crew of
319.
by davesims 15y ago
From reading a couple of replies now, I'm thinking that I didn't express myself well. I respect atheists, especially ones that have taken the time to think about the world and their place in it and the nature of truth. Most atheists are eng
320.
by davesims 15y ago
Fair enough point. Both sides tend to exaggerate their own martyrdom. Atheists are treated appallingly in many quarters of society, and for that the anger is understandable. And if you're referring to my post (re: dismissing atheism) then I
321.
by davesims 15y ago
Not sure I follow you. Are you saying its content is simplistic (meaning an argument that oversimplifies an issue by ignoring complexities) but rhetorically useful to get a rise out of your opponent? How is that productive? This was the poi
322.
by davesims 15y ago
Dawkins doesn't bother me any more than any other atheist I've read. The fact that he lives and is popular in my time makes him no more threatening to my faith than Thomas Paine, Voltaire, Lucretius, A.J. Ayer or Bertrand Russell. I know wh
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by davesims 15y ago
I disagree with OP's advice about the job boards. Yes, you will be inundated by cattle-call outsourced call centers. Yes, 90% of them will be: URGENT NEED 6 MO CONTRACT 8+ yr experienced J2EE 35.52/HR. Totally annoying. My advice: get over
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by davesims 15y ago
"Anyway, feel free to argue about this all over again..." This was just as applicable when you first posted three months ago, Laurie. : )
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by davesims 15y ago
You seem to have worked with a lot of lazy hack developers, and I can only sympathize. I hope you find a better group of colleagues soon, and maybe you'll find less use for words like 'never' and 'doomed'.
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by davesims 15y ago
Wow, kunley, I just had a flashback to 15 years ago when Object DB zealots were making these same kind of dogmatic go-back-to-set-theory arguments. Yes! We get it! We got it years ago: ORMs are a compromise over an irreducible set-theoretic
327.
by davesims 15y ago
"But the whole idea of an ORM was supposed to be avoding that." Maybe some ORM zealots said that in the past, but that certainly isn't the common conception now. ORMs as they're actually used properly today allow devs who know SQL really
328.
by davesims 15y ago
Early vs. later isn't the problem. You can write n+1 queries in your first model or your 1000th. The problem is developers who don't know how to watch logs, don't know how to write efficient SQL, and projects that don't use adequate monitor
329.
by davesims 15y ago
Laurie, this is a good restatement of the age-old problem of Object/Relational impedance, the perennial bugaboo of many an architect, developer, and DBA. It's true that ORMs are merely bandaids on what is essentially an intractable set-theo
330.
by davesims 15y ago
We have to decouple the idea that "It was within the bounds of the experiment" from the question of Sam's individual action within that. Any judgement about the final outcome is a judgement on Johnathan Stark's idea. Sam's own actions have

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