"capitalism capitalism capitalism" - Absolutely all countries are capitalistic including USSR and North Korea. The only difference is who controls the capital. To be for or against capitalism is the same as to be for or against the wind. Ironically in free market capitalism capital actually belongs to people and the more left leaning the country is the more capital and power belongs to some of the selected few who got there not because of their merits but for being good politicians or in worse cases by simply using power and intimidation. Results are always bad.
People always wants to better their lives. No one is pushing for diversity for coal mining jobs. It's just that Silicon Valley is this hot place where you can make a lot of money so everyone just wants a piece of that. And that includes the most entitled, spoiled and loud peace of shits who instead of thinking how to provide value are pushing for affirmative action. It's not hackers' and geeks' only world anymore. Leeches are here.
> Good luck suing Facebook for patent-infringement
Protecting from patent lawsuits is not evil as SW patents are bullish anyway. No one except maybe some patent trolls or some other big companies will sue Facebook for patent infrigment and if they do then this is a pretty clever defence. If you really really have something really really unique invented (which is really really unlikely) then just don't use anything by Facebook.
Great advice. Here is what the greatest psychiatrist of all times and probably the person who understood life better than anyone in the last century had to say about insults: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTPqOOPb39s
Yes I am a big fan of Milton Erickson :)
" It turns out that it enabled mediocre software architects to spend great quantities of corporate money coming up with mediocre designs to be implemented by mediocre programmers, resulting in mediocre software and mediocre return on investment."
But most people are mediocre. That's just how the world works.
Where did you get those numbers from? They are most definitely wrong unless you don't vectorize your code and run loops all around. A lot of R is actually written in C so you can squeeze really good performance if you know what you are doing. I would recommend reading Hadley's Advanced R and profile your code, I think you might be pleasantly surprised.
That's definitely sounds like a bad coders. However I would say that if someone comes from other more classic programming language background he will write a bad and slow R code by default. Especially if he is pressured into delivering fast and don't have time to search/learn the best solution. I was amazed how often you can solve something with one or two lines in R and those 2 lines will have so much better performance, better readability, maintainability and reliability than something you would do without thinking. But you have to know those 2 lines and which libraries to use etc. R actually is extremely elegant language and probably most productive language if you know what you are doing however it's not very beginner friendly (especially coming from other languages).
Rules and regulations create market imbalances and no change later is possible because of special interests lobbying. Population is later brainwashed into blaming free market and "evil" corporations. Such a life in socialist dystopia. At least SV is not Venezuela and they really have first world problems. Just remove all the permits to build housing and the problem will go away in a few years. Of course special interests who already extracting very nice rents of their properties wouldn't like that.
I don't understand why IBM is not creating their own cloud services like Amazon, MS or Google. They have talent, they make their own hardware and software they are struggling a little bit with this new software landscape so why not just do it?
It seems startups are coming to consumer goods. It's likely that dollar shaving club's success initiated a new trend. All that knowledge from previous startups about lean development, marketing, growth hacking etc will be passed together with contacts and influential backers. Even here we see Tampons! (which I though is ridiculous first). Interesting how it will pan out. PG and similar companies should be at least a little bit worried.
This is great common sense thinking. We have all the different emotions for a reason. You can even think of them as the tools. Right tool for the right job as programmers love to say. If someone follows article's "scientific" advice and stays angry all the time it will just become really stressful for him. I think if you are really dissatisfied with something it's best to burst out in anger and forget about it after few minutes. At least that's how I use this anger tool :)
Oh of course you self labeled savior of humanity and self taught economist would know how much to reduce "consumer technological progress" and can decide for others what they need and want? Do we need internet? Cars? Washing machines? TVs? Drugs? No? Where to stop? If we don't stop we don't need anything and can go back to the trees and that's how this bullshit leftist nonsense works out logically if we follow through with it. You just hypocritically wrote that we don't need to consume and don't need to advance technologically with your computer. Ironic.
I feel that this discussion about income inequality doesn't do us any good mostly because both sides are kinda right but they fail to realize that and just try to promote their own agenda. Economy seems simple but in reality there are millions of variables. Is the income inequality a real problem depends on a lot of those variables and possible solution depends on them too. Education of population, infrastructure built, society culture, human nature, society homogeneity, corruption, political system, dominant industries, social mobility, tax rates, efficiency in using tax revenue, various incentives etc. Everything matters and if you want to implement some policy you need to take into account as much as you can before deciding what is the best policy. Like a chess player calculates multiple steps in the future so should economists.
For example in some dirt poor country with bad education and huge corruption the higher income inequality will result in even lower total pie while in silicon valley (where Graham comes from) increased income inequality just makes pie bigger to everyone (and that's why Graham argument is what it is). The problem is that everyone choose to see what they want to see and then argue about different thing than the other side.
I understand that some John "The programmer and self labeled savior of the poor" thinks he is very smart economist and argues that if someone has too much and then someone has too little lets just take from rich and give it to the poor. But real world is much more complex. And before we even start discussing what we should do about income inequality we should first agree on what exactly we are arguing about. What is income? What is inequality? What is fair share of taxes? What is wealth? What is capital? Even what is the economy and how it works! How one or another policy will affect various economic activities? Analysis must be much broader than simply stating your opinion that being rich are bad (or good).
It depends how they are programmed, but in general AI(machine learning) algorithms do not forget as they are basically some calculated statistics. They don't have dreams :)
This is laughable. You don't need AI to write program that plays mathematically perfect poker. Play against opponents and adapt to them is a whole different ballgame where you don't have gazillion artificial hands to play against another dumb computer. I am pretty sure Phil Ivey would love to play against that unbeatable program, if those scientist would put their money where their mouths are :)