hxa7241

33 ms·

271.
by hxa7241 17y ago
The other important thing needed is: Make your message concrete and specific. It is no use reading a first sentence that says something like: "We created a novel abstraction to improve software development.". Yes, it is concise, but it sa
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by hxa7241 17y ago
> ". . . most design problems we face in creating software can be resolved only through experimentation with a partially running system. Engineering is and always has been fundamentally such an enterprise, no matter how much we would li
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by hxa7241 17y ago
You don't resolve Brand's maxim by going wholly from one side to wholly the other side. Copies should be practically free, it is the effort to produce that is not. Articles like this half realise that something has changed, that something
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by hxa7241 17y ago
Sharing an idea doesn't really devalue it, it increases its value. Keeping ideas private seems sensible -- in that you gain individually, but it doesn't make sense globally. The situation can be addressed with the economic concepts of 'gain
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Programming language power versus genome: can they be compared?(hxa.name)
3 points by hxa7241 17y ago|1 comments
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by hxa7241 17y ago
That other mises article also couldn't help ending with: > "In other words, government involvement accounts for the internet's continuing problems, while the market should get the credit for its glories." It is a, rather juvenile seemin
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by hxa7241 17y ago
> "No reflection on this topic can fail to credit the market economy for what has happened to us. Despite every attempt by governments to hobble it, the digital universe as we know it was made by the market economy. It is a market-built
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by hxa7241 17y ago
There is a better article on this at: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427331.100-generatio... Research discussed there suggests that what appears in peripheral vision may be important. That may also explain why myopia gradually ge
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by hxa7241 17y ago
Yes, copying is fundamentally moral/ethical. (Although where it conflicts with a law, like copyright, it is another question -- does the law have precedence?) (As I have written in other places:) To evaluate something morally, we can follow
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by hxa7241 17y ago
I am not sure how to measure and compare complexity of buildings and software. But I wouldn't immediately dismiss buildings as being all simpler than all software. > if there are n software modules, there are n! possible communication p
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by hxa7241 17y ago
> most engineering is based on inviolable physical rules Don't rules such as those of algorithmic complexity have the same status and position? They are as objectively certain -- more so, in fact, since they are purely logical. At its b
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by hxa7241 17y ago
I understand the difference, which is why I said 'lower resolution, spatially and dynamically'. Are you saying definitively that chrominance is not encoded at lower spatial resolution? I also said it might be another cause of difference,
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by hxa7241 17y ago
Yes, software can possibly be engineered. It comes down to there being an objective, complex or sufficiently interesting, and usefully applicable material at the base. Software has this, it is just abstract: instead of atoms, it is bits a
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by hxa7241 17y ago
I would think there would be another cause of different results: chrominance being encoded at lower resolution, dynamically and spatially. So converting to RGB then to gray would make it more quantised and blurrier . . . well, I haven't tho
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by hxa7241 17y ago
Prediction is just fiction without the artistry.
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by hxa7241 17y ago
Boilerplate is an implicit abstraction: recognisable generality, but lacking a coded mechanism. These could always be manually transformed to fit standard abstractions, such as functions or classes. But Lisp's macro facility instead allows
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by hxa7241 17y ago
First, it would be 'use by', not 'best before'. But you don't really mean 'use by' either, you mean: 'consume within n days of opening'. How about a simple, lo-tech solution: when you open it, write the date on the label -- then check how
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by hxa7241 17y ago
> Also, I believe research has shown that the size of a fine has relatively little effect, and it is the perception of the certainty of being caught that is most effective as a deterrent. The original paper does note that the principle
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by hxa7241 17y ago
An idea is really rather like a very abstract, high-level kind of source-code. And are we not convinced that open-source is a good, if not the superior, way? In itself, duplication and spread of ideas is firmly defensible on Kantian ground
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by hxa7241 17y ago
Some research (probably see Cialdini) shows significantly improved compliance when a question is asked that requires confirmation from the subject. So it would better as: "Will you add a thoughtful comment?". How that can be best realised i
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by hxa7241 17y ago
I suppose if it is unnoticed, it is symbiosis -- like those hordes of bacteria (and viruses?) that live within and without all humans. (Assuming any remote harm would be noticed too.)
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by hxa7241 17y ago
My experience seems somewhat consistent with this. I became moderately myopic after doing professional calligraphy for a few hours every day for a year or so (a few hundred thousand words total). But I decided not to get any glasses. Over t
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by hxa7241 17y ago
The scenario descriptions are distinctly reminiscent of Berners-Lee's scenario descriptions for the 'semantic web' several years ago. Of course, that is now rather out of fashion, but not entirely justifiably. The 'semantic' angle was somew
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by hxa7241 17y ago
I think this is much better than the first article.
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by hxa7241 17y ago
The idea that file-sharing should be illegal is objectionable.
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by hxa7241 17y ago
If you look at research papers in software engineering, you will notice a significant thing has happened in the last several years. With the rise of, first the WWW, and then open-source repositories, there is now a large body of code availa
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by hxa7241 17y ago
Postscriptum: Saying "wheel!" is crude and invites a simple counter. But the point is there is a simple, important thing where artifice has a substantial lead. And without well-chosen application of design, the large-scale evolution might b
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by hxa7241 17y ago
> Your wheel example is not good. Well, no it isn't too good. But it does basically fit: It is a small feature of larger systems, as you describe, and it has been done better by artificial design.
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by hxa7241 17y ago
Natural wheels exist, but I wouldn't call them best.
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by hxa7241 17y ago
Natural evolution is best? One word: wheel . . . Linux as a whole was not designed -- that is easy to accept, and also that it is a strength. However, design is not so entirely opposed to evolution as might be inferred. Design seems essen

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