duncanj

It's not like he did an n=1 study. He just assumed it wasn't going to work for him. My impression of the article, given that it doesn't really bring up data beyond the total number of acetaminophen-related cases of liver toxicity, is that the author believes he should be able to buy the drugs separately, and is denied this opportunity by the government. After that, he says everything he can to support his beliefs, and pooh-poohs arguments against it.

Oxycodone is a very good opioid and, if you aren't abusing it, it is affordable for most people, even if you don't have insurance (http://www.rxassist.org/Search/Prog_Details.cfm?program_Id=1...). But if you need it every day to support your habit, it's too expensive, so vicodin and its friends are the drugs of choice.

I suspect that a relationship of this sort is due to Parkinson's law. But I have trouble identifying a power law from his graph.

It's the S&P 500. I agree, though, that it is not a very good sample.

“What we’re doing in a king of reputation management,”

How do these sorts of typos occur in a newspaper? What input device are they using? OCR?

Or, if you don't bring money to the table, but you plan to raise money after an MVP or something, expect less than 50% equity. Showing humility and an understanding of fairness goes a long way towards building trust.

I got into eXtreme Programming during college around 1999. I put it on my resume and dropped the name at various applications. I went around looking for Smalltalk jobs and then got recruited by ThoughtWorks in 2000, probably because I had the XP interest.

I recommend identifying what you want to do, find out who's doing it, and then contacting people there directly until they bring you in. Knowing what I know now, my approach of mostly sending out resumes and hoping for the best was not optimal. I still don't know how to "network" but calling companies that are doing cool things, or asking people on irc where they work and whether they like it, things like that, are probably going to be sort of like networking.

Wow. Prices like it's 1993!

I found the reference to Dijkstra interesting because he was a huge advocate for up-front thinking. The difference between Dijkstra and Waterfall is Dijkstra wanted the programmer to think before working on the feature. The order in which features were developed was at a higher level. Waterfall is about listing all the features beforehand and parceling them out to be implemented or scheduled on a monster Gantt chart.

A formal methods based process can definitely be agile, so long as the planning has a feedback loop that includes iteratively-developed finished products.

It is clear to me that formal methods are avoided because they are difficult. It is very hard (I've tried) to learn to verify programs without formal education in the methods. Yet, we can write software without formal methods and we can make it pretty darn correct without proving it correct.

Formal methods will probably not catch on unless a concerted effort is made by CS baccalaureate programs to teach it from the beginning. I fear that most professors are not proficient enough to teach it. So, it will probably be one of those things that may be a good idea but will be unlikely to ever gain traction.

256, actually. :)

I don't think I could survive very long without an electronic address book.

For those who want to know, ACM membership with access to all their journals (digital library) is $198/year. From developing countries, it is less. Choosing Poland as a random example, digital library access is $100/year.

Aside from being written in compiled languages, are Ledger and hledger not a good starting point? https://github.com/jwiegley/ledger/wiki http://hledger.org/

One reason is that Microsoft's implementation was compatible enough with Sun's to pass tests but not to perform much useful work. Without MS's active participation, most enterprises wouldn't benefit from interoperability.

If someone just has to make up his mind, then he needs to be neither intelligent nor reasonable. I suspect you mean that a person can come to some sort of opinion that would be "good" in the sense that they have chosen the one that most likely prolongs their life, prevents illness, etc.

Perhaps that is true, if "enough consideration" is equivalent something like 2 years of basic medical education and 2 years of clinical experience. Instead, most people have to make do with their own trusts, biases, limited information, etc. I think it's unreasonable to think that an untrained person is going to catch up enough after reading a few articles that they are going to make an informed decision. That's why we have doctors, to help us make informed decisions about our health. We can use their synthesis of education and experience to guide our values to make decisions that are not only self-satisfying but also reasonably accurate.

You can say what you want to say, since it's original, and say, "with apologies to Winston Churchill."

Do you ever mention your ideas to programmers at all? Or do you not know any at all?

It seems to accept C-[ as a replacement.

Unfortunately, Chrome OS seems to trap C-n before it makes it to the browser.

Keepin' it real fake...

ln -s real fake

I'd be surprised if that were true, but things may have changed in 8 years.

That's true. The problem is that source code is only a fraction of the knowledge contained in the system. In most source-code-based systems, you would write code for building a lookup table, or for reading one from storage. This code would be executed at application startup. In Smalltalk or image-based lisp, you simply make the table and save the image. Unfortunately, the source code now doesn't fully describe the system. Systems like ENVY are intended to provide a process for putting the data in the source.

It's definitely true that to understand your own position you need to come up with the best arguments for the opposing position. It disappoints me when I read lousy arguments made by those who do not share my viewpoint, and even more when an entire position shared by many people is based on emotional reasoning.

Torture is a topic that lends itself to emotional reasoning. How can you be such a meanie? How can _you_ put children at risk while terrorists are running free?

DU also lends itself to sloppy reasoning. People take for granted that it is a radioactivity problem when it's actually a heavy-metal toxicity problem. Radioactivity is more emotional.

Rhetoric on both sides. Informational IEDs?

How was the decision made on your torture/DU debates?

I come from my own point of view that I have difficulty learning something when it is not likely that I will apply it. I learned basic calculus while learning physics, and it was immediately apparent why calculus was required. Without calculus, the problem domain available in physics is almost so trivial that it feels worthless to study.

Basic trig does have other interesting applications, such as computer graphics and what not, that could probably all be integrated into an interesting high school course. So much of a trig class is about memorizing identities, though, and it's hard to see why you might want to do that unless you had something else to do, like integrals. We end up re-learning trig in Calc 2.

I have heard arguments that setting calculus as a "goal" of math education leaves out the stuff of math that is actually "cool" and makes math seem boring. But calculus is interesting (at least) when you use its applications.

Mathematica can, indeed, solve a lot of problems, but is something lost when students never gain the ability to symbolically solve math problems? I suppose there is a wide space for research in this area, and I haven't heard of much being done.

But at some point in understanding probability, as it is actually used in the real world, you need calculus. The same is true for economics, which you didn't mention but often comes up as something everyone should learn. I think by not covering calculus, students are forced to learn things (economics, physics, statistics) the hard way and without understanding them deeply. Unfortunately, calc generally requires trig. It should be taught while teaching calculus.

I think I can explain some of the dogmatism seen with XP practitioners. XP is a set of practices for customers, developers, and communication. XP consultants think that teams should try all the practices. Most XP people don't oppose removing or modifying a practice, but they don't see why you should remove it before you've tried it, especially when the reason is something like, "Pair programming will never work here." Try it for real, then make it your own.

In discussions between agile groups, XP people are often confused by, say, Scrum, because the Scrum consultants teach fewer practices and use funny vocabulary. But I'd say that most XP people would prefer to work in a Scrum environment than in many more traditional environments, and they would say so if you asked them.

I feel like the two things economists need to know are:

1. You don't know what you're talking about.

2. You don't know it yet.

I read "The Easy Way to Stop Drinking" by Allen Carr. I had already stopped smoking after reading his smoking book. I haven't had a drink since summer of 08, and I have much a much better ability to do productive work, get up in the morning, etc. I think it's great you want to quit drinking.

For those who have never read the books, they encourage you to consider the reasons why you drink, the excuses you give yourself for not stopping, and what to expect when you quit. The alcohol book also criticizes AA, because AA is a belief system that says that you will never be a non-drinker, whereas Carr thinks that's bogus. I agree with that, in that I don't need meetings or anything, and I'm not constantly tempted. I simply don't want to drink anymore.

When I had Tivo, I definitely watched things like Modern Marvels, Mythbusters, etc, more than other things like whatever was supposed to be on at 8PM. If the model was based on recommendations and voting, like Tivo, I think a lot of those shows could definitely survive.