__

Same here. I remember thinking it was a cool idea, but they only tracked certain kinds of flights, so the service was useless for me. I checked again a few months later, and there didn't seem to be any progress. I never checked again. Suddenly, Microsoft values them at $115 million.

It seems so obvious, and yet it took me several years before I finally made a cd-ls alias. I made a mkdir-cd alias too.

When an expert ignores a new technology that's not relevant to him, sure, that makes sense. But when an expert responds snidely and defensively to a new technology, he apparently doesn't think it's irrelevant.

JSP.

That statement is false if you're using Merriam-Webster's definition of "lie" ("to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive"). I wrote that with intent to amuse and not with intent to deceive.

That could be said of many so-called paradoxes. I think it has as much claim to "paradox" as the interesting number paradox.

The one I like least.

Dr. Chatterjee: "The way this is likely to be framed is: 'Look, we want smart people to be as productive as possible to make everybody's lives better. We want people performing at the max, and if that means using these medicines, then great, then we should be free to choose what we want as long as we're not harming someone.' I'm not taking that position, but we have this winner-take-all culture and that is the way it is likely to go."

Huh? "Winner-take-all culture"? This seems like a moral issue.

I suspect that a lot of human suffering -- or at least missed potential -- is due to our cognitive biases and other mental shortcomings. I suspect there are many leaders, inventors, and researchers who would improve the human condition far more if they could think faster, remember better, and get tired less. Fighting against a drug that could unleash this potential energy and save huge numbers of lives seems immoral.

Possible benefits from starting an open source project include name recognition, social status in the hacker tribe, a portfolio to show prospective employers, meeting other hackers, more competition for software companies, and the moral benefits of giving away useful tools to others.

If you're not committed to it and don't want the trouble of managing a mailing list and dealing with feature requests, you can still open-source it and wait for someone else fork it.

Keeping your software secret is good for practice and competitive advantage. It's a good strategy if you don't need much help from others and you're working on something difficult and non-obvious that could be useful in a future startup. But good problems like this are rare, so I suspect open-sourcing is the better choice for most projects.

Damn, he's good. He can inspire with a talk on copyright law, of all things.

Not true. They removed some features.

If $29 per share massively undervalues Yahoo, wouldn't Yahoo have spent the last two years buying back huge amounts of its own stock?

They would be sued by their shareholders for breach of fiduciary duty.

y

There's GNU Prolog (http://www.gprolog.org/) and YAProlog (http://www.ncc.up.pt/~vsc/Yap/downloads.html), which look semi-active.

Yahoo recently received a similar email from China.

Emacs subsumes them?

"France Telecom, part owner of the other cable, said it was uncertain when repairs on it would be repaired."

Recursive saboteurs?

Wrong.

I assume rand() returns an index of how much a person likes Atlas Shrugged.

Big companies hire based on experience, education, docility, and quality of handshake. A company can probably do better by "trusting their gut" and taking slightly riskier applicants, because risk is proportional to reward. Makes sense.

But I think there's a level beyond that where a company uses a hiring process designed to avoid biases. Biases based on age, gender, race, nationality, physical appearance, accent, etc. inevitably play a role in hiring decisions, and a company that could neutralize those effects could win big. This is the opposite of trusting your gut.

In fact, a company that specifically recruited ugly people (and other victims of biases) could probably get the same quality employees as their competitors, but much cheaper. It's like value investing. I'm not sure how legal that would be, though.

(This reminds me of Moneyball, by Michael Lewis.)

"When you set your SmugMug gallery to 'private', this is exactly what you're doing - making the gallery and photos difficult, but not impossible, to find."

Is that the usual definition of 'private'?

Don't use Emacs.

The book that goes with this course, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, is excellent. It's available online:

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html

Do more people forgo education today than did in the past?

In San Francisco, the Sunset and Richmond districts might suit you. They're (relatively) affordable, popular with middle-class families, and a nice blend of residential and commercial.

"In effect, every person in the (rich) United States has over the past 10 years or so borrowed about $4,000 from someone in the (poor) People's Republic of China."

Uh, no. I get the feeling that the author doesn't really understand how trade surpluses and deficits work.

Interesting point at the end about the inverse correlation between means-value and ends-value. But I'm not sure I buy it. Health and human rights seem to have more means-value than Rosling gives them credit for.

Even an exploitative factory owner wants workers to be somewhat healthy so that he can hire lots of them, and so that there will be more competition between prospective workers (which keeps wages down). And human rights seem like a prerequisite for maximizing a society's creative output. I suppose frightened and brutalized people can do agricultural or factory work, but I doubt they can do great physics.

Totally overhyped language! Why isn't anyone paying attention to Lintel, my new dialect of COBOL?

There is a huge body of literature on cognitive biases. Under the right conditions, people will reliably make stupid bets. For example:

"Consider a regular six-sided die with four green faces and two red faces. The die will be rolled 20 times and the sequence of greens (G) and reds (R) will be recorded. You are asked to select one sequence, from a set of three, and you will win $25 if the sequence you chose appears on successive rolls of the die. Please check the sequence of greens and reds on which you prefer to bet.

1. RGRRR

2. GRGRRR

3. GRRRRR"

65% of the subjects chose 2, even though 1 provides the greatest chance of winning money. (From "Extensional versus intuitive reasoning: The conjunction fallacy in probability judgment," by Tversky and Kahneman.)

Maybe all those subjects had the unconventional goal of avoiding free money. But it seems more likely that they weren't thinking well.