forkandwait

I wonder if the individual reward versus collective reward approaches have any actual data for their respective sides?

I am pretty sure Toyota gives collective bonuses or not, and they are kicking the shit out of American auto, but I don't really have the background in this to cite data on either side. Maybe someone on HN does?

I am currently reading a bunch of the Toyota Way books, Deming, etc. and sometimes I wonder if one of the most basic assumptions in the West is that the individual is the root and the system is a derived thing. This assumption starts, maybe, with Christianity which tells us that we stand alone before God judged on our individual character, not on our wealth or social position. Buddhism, on the other hand, tells us that even our perception of selfhood and autonomy is an illusion to be rooted out and discounted.

To toss out an assumption as fundamental as these would require a huge realignment of all sorts of things -- how we punish and reward, our sense of self worth, who is good and who is bad, etc. So we don't really want to go there.

I think the West could benefit from a swing to the Systems/ Wholeness side of the dichotomy, but I wouldn't want to discount how powerful and what a creative force our individualism has been throughout the last 2000 years.

(EDIT, PS: Deming is the real deal, and the Toyota Way/ Lean books and movement tries to take some of his surface ideas and implement them without challenging their readers in the way Deming wanted to.)

(EDIT, PPS: Toyota / Buddha says "You see a problem? Change the system." Microsoft/ Jesus says "You see a problem? Roast the culpable individuals, reward the virtuous individuals.")

(EDIT, PPPS: Hegel and his philosophical descendants have the best take on the dynamic movement between individual and collective, without discounting either of the two viewpoints.)

Probably no one is reading, but ....

Sweden somewhat collaborated with Germany during WWII as well, and probably got a break therefrom, though they also helped the allies and some Scandinavian Jews.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_in_World_War_II

One thing missed by the article is that Sweden was one of the few European highly industrialized nations that weren't ravaged by WWII (due to their neutrality, in turn due their perceived Arianism by Germany), so in 1946, they could start making and selling stuff to Europe which desperately needed, well, everything.

I have a new meta-pet-peeve: people who are peeved by one-indexing.

EDIT: I guess it went into his "differetn" category. Never mind....

Why is one-indexing at the top of his list of bad things, or even on a list of things that matter? It is like getting stuck on adjectives after the noun...

My opinion, not widely shared here, is that 1-indexing is best for scripting and math languages where 1-indexing corresponds directly to the subscripts in the formulas. In Numpy etc, you have spend a lot of time converting those formulas by subtracting one all over the place, introducing bugs and making stuff less readable.

The only reason to use zero index is when, like in C, you are calculating your distance from a memory boundary.

Sorry for the rant.

I wrote a fairly large application (by academic standards) in mod_python, which I babied along until about two years ago when I converted it to plain cgi since the light traffic didn't justify the extra infrastructure.

The only thing I wanted was a simple means to pass around input that I didn't have to write by hand... much to the contrary of mod_python's intent.

I am glad Grisha is working on it again, though. I am always pleased to see labors of love for 20 years get sustained attention.

I think 3 really good programmers, 2 sys admins, 1 non-clueless PM, and 1 person to arrange their travel would have gotten this done faster.

Maybe this should read "Glass wearer [singular]"?

That might actually be better for said news organs.

Streetview is cool. I guess I am impressed by good navigation algorithms. Loons, glass, Go, lots of aerial data -- yeah, impressive, sure.

Google -- solved a single very important problem really well by applying a well known tool (SVD and graph networks) to a novel example, also made android, otherwise not very exciting.

Furthermore, brick and mortar problems are hard -- things break, rot, get lost, require staff to move them around, etc. Not to poo-poo Google or any other pure software company, but it isn't harder because its on a computer, it's actually easier.

Reinvest in infrastructure and put quality ahead of everything, including dividends and share price? Wow, what a concept...

The Hutterites have been living communally for about 400 years (I think), and have evolved an ideal size for a "colony" of about 90 people. At about 110 they start getting ready to "hive off". Colonies have been very successful, often pissing off the less organized (and less successful) locals.

http://www.hutterites.org/day-to-day/structure/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutterite

While similar in ways to Amish, Hutterites rather like new technology and put it to good use on their farms.

> He was not just another member of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, he was Rector of Heidelberg University while Hitler was gambolling about Europe.

He was rector for a year and then resigned. He kept his party membership current though. He spent the last years of the war digging trenches, so he wasn't inner circle in the least.

When you say something like "The only bit of Heidegger I am going read" to absolve me from any responsibility of quoting you chapter and verse. Not that I would anyway -- I don't really care if I convince anyone -- if what I say is something you can build on, cool, if not, that is cool too.

It put a man on the moon, etc, etc. But it also can trip us up sometimes...

> I didn't get anything like this out of Heidegger that I didn't get out of Wittgenstein,

I think that is an important point, actually. Both f'ing brilliant.

Maybe it is Derrida's third generation citers who don't know the Heidegger connection, but I heard a lot about D. and none about H.

In Beyond Good and Evil he talks about how the slave morality of Judeo-Christianity brilliantly overthrew its masters. Go look it up.

Derrida read a lot of Heidegger, even wrote some essays on him before Gramma-whatever. Heidegger used the german phrase "destruktion" of the basic ontology of western society. Go look that up too.

I am about to receive Ph D in the social sciences, an MA in anthro, tons of discussions with sociology students. I am sure that you wouldn't be satisfied, but I am not in the "very little knowledge" category.

And I am very pro-science, which is why I am anti social science. THe latter would be more intellectually honest to say "really, we would be lucky if we were in the same place as the alchemists were in the 12th century". Instead they fill journals with ideological crap that (in) directly supports their power struggles.

> All of these fields are intensely focused on empirical evidence, statistical testing, and sturdy experimental design.

Yeah whatever. The use of regression as the end-all be-all scientific magic that justifies a theory is the basic problem. What most sociologists don't understand is the difference, in real science (Physics, say), between a linear and a non-linear system. Most systems of any consequence, including orbiting planets, are nonlinear; if we could actually model human interaction, it would be nonlinear too. So a regression method might be able to describe a very local effect, but it has as much validity as a complete (global) model as a straight line does in describing the elliptical movement of the planets -- ie, none.

Furthermore, we have no real way yet to test social theories, which have too many moving parts to get a clear signal in an experiment, much less get consistent between repeating experiments. Without repeatable experiments, we don't have science. Post-hoc regression is not the same as an experiment. No offense, but most of the "science" in these fields is, in my estimation, nothing more than a Roman soothsayer making sure to get the incantations and the colors of his robes just right. We just have no fucking clue why stuff happens, for the most part, just like them.

Here is my take on deconstruction, based on an MA in anthropology from a good university and some further interest and reading:

First of all, Deconstruction should be credited to Heidegger, not the French. The French of the 50s and 60s read Heidegger, stole and (further) obfuscated some good ideas, then wrote books without citing him for political reasons (he was member of the Nazi party throughout the war, in good standing at the beginning and bad standing at the end, but he never rebelled or retracted publicly -- complicated person...) Then the students and readers of these French guys think the (derivative) French guys invented the idea.

There are two ideas of deconstruction I find useful.

The first is basically Nietzsche, and I paraphrase it thus: Every metaphysics hides an implicit morality of the universe, and every morality hides an implicit and very down-to-earth will to power, and this will to power is a good thing and the drive of Life itself manifesting in human ideas. N's big example is Judeo-Christianity, and how by inventing a selfless morality a bunch of folks took over Western Civilization in very concrete ways. So when the Libertarians have an "objective" system that shows that markets are best in an objective way, or the counselors/ psyches have an "objective" system that shows that depth psychology is best, they are all just protecting their jobs.

I extend this to our modern science loving era as: any supposedly scientific system that explains things but can't be rigorously tested just becomes wishful thinking to support the vested interests of a social group. This is basically all the social sciences, from econ to psych to anthro, and in all cases I think you can point directly to the group whose jobs or power the supposed "science" supports. (Owners in the first case, counselors who want more billable hours, locals fighting off outsider meddling, etc). And, yes I know about multivariate regression and survey data, and all I can say is what a joke.

Now that I have rambled too long, idea 2: I think one of the best things about Heidegger (who is fucking brilliant if you can get through his ridiculous prose) is that he asks us to question not whether something is an X or a Y, but rather to get "meta" and start examining what makes it possible for us to go through life assigning things too ontological categories (X or Y) in the first place. Because the mechanism of ontology -- that everything has a "being", that it "is" something -- is not a given, even though it comes so naturally linguistically.

Anyway, I should get on with my life now....

Oh -- I do believe he had a better marriage than Bill Clinton. Who cares? He was still a laughable fuckup as president.

Cool. His friends like him and wrote a blog post about it ;)

I still think history will judge his administration as being 8 years of screw-up, class warfare, and embarassment. Note that I am not saying that about his Dad, Ronald, or Richard....

What evidence shows Bush Junior to be particularly bright or competent? His grades at Yale? His running into the ground of multiple business? His embarassing performance as President?

Don't get me wrong -- there are a lot of smart, competent conservatives I think are sometimes wrong and or just on a different side of class interest from me. Say, Dick Cheney, Bush Senior, Ronald, Nixon (off the charts smart, really). But George Junior was, indeed, an idiotic stooge.

This argument, while plausible, seems completely untested.

It should lead "AirBnB scares me..." not "AirBnB is definitely [anything -- good, bad, indifferent]". Until there are data and real experiences, you don't really know.

I run freebsd or OSX, basically for the aesthetic. FreeBSD is the least annoying of the OS's I have run (never tried OpenBSD), and most of the stuff I want compiles on it, though not as well as Linux stacks.

I refuse to do what I think of as "building for inventory" -- working on things that I don't see a clear downstream consuming process for -- and I try to make everything I bother with perfect and part of a flow process (never one-off). I am one of the most productive people in my office, while my coworkers are always busy, busy and can't seem to get things done quickly.

Interesting. I find with small utilities that I download, Octave runs matlab fine. With bigger things (optimization packages in my case) you do hit incompatibilities. I guess I don't use the latter that much.

I have used Julia, R, and Numpy/Python, the latter two extensively (10,000s of lines, if you count all the scratch work). What turned me off from Julia is that it encourages looping instead of vectorization; looping is both more verbose and farther away from the way a mathematician would articulate a problem. R is ... well, really really ugly in that 1970s way that makes me want to choke whenever I read SAS. Pylab etc is nice, but (1) I have come to detest syntactical indentation, (2) I hate zero indexing almost as badly, and (3) it can be a bit brittle in its type hierarchy -- and it is still more verbose (slightly).

So, I am back to Old Faithful. Really, I hate all languages, I just find Octave the least annoying in the mathematical programming space. (I used to love all languages, now I am old and bitter ;) )

Don't get me wrong -- lots of great ideas in all of the above languages. If Julia were to make vector / matrix thinking natural, I would switch.