stalcottsmith

9 ms·

31.
by stalcottsmith 12y ago
Passed on a career in science when I was 17 and noticed after interviewing professors that it was mostly full of politics and money stress and precious little science. Fact is there are a lot of fields that are "desirable" and en
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by stalcottsmith 12y ago
I think valuation is the wrong thing to measure here. Open source companies do not seek to maximise value capture. The surplus created through open source by its nature are spread throughout the user base and ecosystem. Perhaps Red Hat h
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by stalcottsmith 12y ago
> Before the Heise story, I naively believed that this sort of automated attack was only done by organised crime You were correct.
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by stalcottsmith 12y ago
Internal features (as you describe them, they sound like virtues) of grit, empathy (or lack thereof) and patience are second-order modifiers of base ability which is largely fixed at birth or at least by early childhood. Some amount of vir
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by stalcottsmith 12y ago
Bill Gates said something interesting a few years ago vis a vis the greatest change in the world since he grew up -- that in the middle of the last century, it was better to be born a person of average intelligence in a place like Buffalo,
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by stalcottsmith 13y ago
It's more complicated than that. As a first approximation inflation is a transfer of wealth from from savers to debtors. However, there are many under-appreciated details based on tax implications of such things as paying real taxes
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by stalcottsmith 13y ago
In my observation, when opposite-sex dating occurs between coworkers in all but the largest enterprises where contact cannot be avoided after a breakup, one or the other employee will end up leaving -- usually the person with lower status o
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by stalcottsmith 13y ago
I think belief in the "founding fathers" comes down to a faith in systems design or the idea that there exists in theory a system which some sufficiently brilliant folks may devise which addresses the enduring human problem of &qu
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by stalcottsmith 13y ago
Macminicolo. Best deal. Been a customer since 05
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by stalcottsmith 13y ago
> The U.S. central banking system ranks among the finest of its kind. I agree... > Central banking is possibly the greatest human invention since sanitation. This is a most deceptive and inherently political statement. Sanitation is
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by stalcottsmith 13y ago
No, it is a widespread and very dangerous misconception. Rights as conceived at the time of the drafting of the US Constitution are not granted but rather inherent. The Bill of Rights enumerated rights the founders believed all people had
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by stalcottsmith 13y ago
Well structured relational databases are an awesome tool. I have built and used hundreds. But they are a bit of cargo cult architecture. Deciding to use one means adding lots of code. It adds a lot of complexity around testing. All of
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by stalcottsmith 14y ago
Slowly the "web" seems to be rediscovering desktop UI development techniques from 15 years ago or re-implenting things Adobe had elegantly working in Flex 5-10 years ago. Binding UI to the state of a data structure seems like magic in Javas
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by stalcottsmith 14y ago
I've seen a lot of dumb Rails server configs and even dumber usages of Rails without any tuning at all. With a couple weeks or a month of work I could shrink the hosting fees or resources consumed by a factor of 5 out of most Rails apps tha
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by stalcottsmith 14y ago
Do not underestimate your importance and the impact you can have for the category 3) students. My first year Calculus professor 20 years ago had very similar feelings and frustrations, but through his passion he connected with some of us.