ArbitraryLimits

> Sounds more like Java to me. Let's replace a few words in the article:

Winner, winner, chicken dinner.

After seeing all the web developers of the 90s dump on Java applets all the time, it's fascinating to see the same functionality being reimplemented piecemeal in Javascript.

Also writing "Google" on the moon with a laser.

Without either agreeing or disagreeing with your comment, I'd like to point out your case would be stronger if you actually provided a concrete example like the GP asked.

Seriously. It bugs me when people take the '07 meltdown as proof that the banking system need to be left alone by the government. If the government's regulatory authority hadn't been curtailed, it wouldn't have had to rescue the banking system at all.

Yeah, this is one of my pet peeves. "Feedback" originally had a quite technical meaning that it more or less lost once it became a buzzword in the 50s, in much the same way that "object oriented" lost its meaning in the 89s.

The really important thing about "feedback control" as developed by Black, Nyquist, et al. wasn't that they realized it's a good idea to check to see whether your plan is actually achieving its goal, and correct if it's not. That's just common sense, after all (although the usual disclaimer about common sense being uncommon applies).

The real technical contribution of "feedback control" is that true feedback, in the sense of a dynamic system, can control a system without having to build a model of it. I.e. if your control system is fast enough relative to the system it's controlling, it doesn't have to _predict_ anything, it can just _react_.

Which, if you think about it, is really the _opposite_ of what people usually mean when they say your manager gives you feedback in your performance review, customers give you feedback on your product, etc. When you get that kind of feedback, you still have to figure out what it means in order to do anything with it.

Since the article only quotes total amounts owed (US diplomats owing 7.2 million out of a total of 67 million), it probably just says the US sends more diplomats to the UK than most other countries.

Serious question: is there any point until everyone encrypts their email?

"So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess. At no point have I ever been able successfully to keep a diary; my approach to daily life ranges from the grossly negligent to the merely absent, and on those few occasions when I have tried dutifully to record a day's events, boredom has so overcome me that the results are mysterious at best. What is this business about "shopping, typing piece, dinner with E, depressed"? Shopping for what? Typing what piece? Who is E? Was this "E" depressed, or was I depressed? Who cares?"

Joan Didion, "On Keeping a Notebook"

Apologies for the long quote but this is pretty much how I feel about all attempts at "personal analytics" so far. As other posters have mentioned, analytics are great for businesses who have their FOMs and TPMs and KPPs and whatever to maximize already, but on a personal level the best use of diaries and journals is to force yourself to realize what your goals are, not to help achieve them.

It's interesting to see this article portray Hofstadter as the last of the dying breed of GOFAI researchers.

When I was in college (and GOFAI was still alive) GOFAI researchers themselves portrayed him as very much an outsider.

> Why not read it and find out for yourself?

Because he'll have other things to do in the next year?

> since the first element of an array is zero distance away from the beginning of the array.

That's much less of a win in any language but C, where "array" means something more than "pointer." If you're checking array bounds on every access then the extra assembler instruction to subtract one from your index doesn't matter in comparison, whereas if you're just dereferencing a pointer it could potentially double the cost of array accesses (two instructions instead of one if your instruction set has base + offset addressing modes).

Did the same guy remind you that "i" is a poor choice for an index in Matlab because it's actually sqrt(-1)? And _then_ tell you that you're supposed to do array reshaping instead of loops in Matlab? Because if the same guy had hit me with all three I might have killed him.

> People have tried this. Over and over and over.

Seriously, it's the future and it has been for fifty years.

In California the protected term is "Professional Engineer" - you have to pass accreditation to call yourself that. No civil engineer can find work without it but no one cares whether software engineers get it.

By the way, as part of a cost-cutting measure many years ago, the state government standardized on a single certificate form for all professional certifications, which means the PE certificate looks exactly like the "Certified Hair Technician" certificate the barbers at Great Clips are required to display at their work area.

> But an anonymous free-for-all exchange being a natural right? We aren't born anonymous. In the "state of nature," without government, we are in no way anonymous.

No one's ever been 100% anonymous in the physical world before, but by the same token the government can't watch 100% of what 100% of all the people do in the physical world either.

On the Internet apparently the only way to make sure you can be anonymous _ever_ is to make it so you're anonymous _always_.

Am I just too old for HN now?

I can understand calling something that holds your data and makes it so you don't have to do JOINs a database.

I can understand calling something that holds your data and does JOINs for you a database.

I'm having trouble calling something that holds my data and makes it so I have to "JOIN in my application" anything but a file system.

Agree, except I'd amend it as

The success of MySQL can be tied directly to people using "database" for things where what they really need is "network filesystem".

The success of SQLite can be tied directly to people using "database" for things where what they really need is "filesystem".

Interesting that it's the same dynamic at play.

Not about heap allocators but I followed the "About" link to this text:

> At Intersec, technology matters…Because it’s the core of our business, we aim to provide our clients with the most innovative and disruptive technological solutions. We do not believe in the benefits of reusing and staking external software bricks when developing our products. Our software is built in C language under Linux, with PHP/JavaScript for the web interfaces and it is continuously improved ...

So now I'm wondering whether PHP is actually perceived as being hard-core?

Also, how would one stake a brick?

I'm not saying it's not good, my point is that a "technical co-founder" will want to redo it _regardless_ of whether it's good or not. (Also not trying to disparage MBAs, it's just that's how technical co-founders will think of them.)

> It is surprising you are having a tough time finding a tech co-founder ... you have traction, a site that seems fairly developed, and a decent idea.

It's like a handsome, successful, wealthy, socially well-adjusted man who has trouble finding a new girlfriend because he only goes out with his current one. Any developer's first reaction to a new project is to wish they could raze it and start over from scratch, imagine how much more intense that is when the initial development was done by an MBA.

Let's take that offline.

> pandering to powerful middle class votes.

Don't you think that problem will take care of itself as the overpricing of a college education reduces the size of the middle class?

Some people say to use a perfect hash function in that case, IMO it's more trouble than it's worth.

Because the purpose of school isn't to teach technical skills, it's to indoctrinate the next generation. Dumb kids have to buy into the prevailing cultural mythos also just as much as smart kids do, or society will crumble.

It so happens that part of the cultural mythos in America today is that schools _aren't_ supposed to indoctrinate anyone, but that's beside the point.

I remember from college my Econ 101 textbook had a sidebar on heroin use by military personnel in Vietnam - apparently (according to my memory of an unattributed source) 90% of personnel stationed in Vietnam tried heroin at least once, and then 89% of them stopped when they left.

Why an economics textbook? The authors were trying to illustrate 1) the role of substitutes on consumption of a particular good - there was no TV, no bridge club, no women except prostitutes to go out with, so heroin "cornered the market" on recreational activities, and 2) the fact that people will adjust consumption of almost any good in response to its changing price - heroin was incredibly cheap, so people took more of it.

Anyway, I always looked skeptically at claims that trying it once guarantees addiction after that.

Followed closely by Facebook.

They make Sprite Zero now, I'd do that instead.

I always thought the Encyclopedia Brown case whose solution hinged on the villain's not knowing that was far-fetched.

http://brownencyclopedia.tumblr.com/post/33647027942/the-cas...

You know, for all the ridiculousness of this code, at least it actually performed its function correctly, i.e. it would correctly identify all McGill email addresses. From the title I was expecting another multi-page regexp.

I agree with the sentiment, but in this particular case, do you really think an MBA'd IT manager was in charge of a project that paid $20 per hour? (As opposed to Accenture rates.)