j_baker

Robert Shiller had an interesting analysis of the current stock market's "frothiness": http://www.businessinsider.com/robert-shiller-stock-market-b...

Basically, the stock market is a bit overvalued, and people expect that trend to continue. However, peoples' level of confidence in the stock market pricing is very low. To me, if there's a coming crash, it's going to be because investors are overly anxious rather than because valuations are so stratospheric.

Lithium's really only useful if you're treating bipolar depression. It has mood stabilizing properties, and giving lithium to a non-bipolar patient will "flatten" their moods.

It seems like a no-brainer to me. Training police officers to think like warriors indicates that they're fighting in a war. We already have enough issues with gangs turning our streets into battlegrounds[1]. Why do we need police officers to compound the issue?

[1] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/04/22/how-chicago...

$50 million seems like an arbitrary amount of revenue to expect DuoLingo to pull in. How do you come up with that number?

I don't think becoming a doctor or a lawyer are easy or low-risk. You have to go through years of school after which you are faced with a high probability of being unemployed. If you do find a job, you're likely going to work a crushing number of hours.

You know, every time I personally write a blog post, I've learned to just assume that people will only read the title. If I'm lucky they may also see a subtitle or read the first paragraph. But unless you just write some compelling content, almost nobody will read it all the way through. You can't blame people. We're so inundated with information these days, we have to skim through things.

Does OCaml not already support multicore? Is concurrency green thread based? Even at that, there's nothing stopping a user from starting multiple processes....

"It's ok to build an unjust work environment just as long as it fits with my religion of 'shipping above all else'."

Some people just like to work like that, and that's ok. What's wrong is when you require people to work like that or when people who work like that get ahead disproportionately.

Perhaps because building a diverse workforce that gives everyone opportunities regardless of culture/ethnicity/sex/gender/sexuality is the right thing to do? I mean, having a culture of shipping is great and all, but it shouldn't trump ethical and moral concerns.

I think that's comparing apples to oranges. The $20,000 cost is merely the cost to provide housing. The $100,000 cost is the cost to provide court systems, mental health care, and physical health care.

The problem is that the cost of housing is orthogonal to those issues. People who are in homes certainly commit crimes and go through the criminal justice system. They certainly need health care. That $100k figure may go down, perhaps even tremendously, but I suspect the real financial cost comparison isn't anywhere near so great. Otherwise, everyone would already be doing it.

I'm skeptical. I mean, it's not as though the idea of public housing is new, and it has been used in places far more liberal than the US who have not eliminated homelessness.

My first question is "Where are they keeping all these people?" Previous attempts to just build enough housing for everyone[1] haven't turned out all that well, and they became cesspools of crime.

Beyond that, are the conditions in Medicine Hat such that they can be replicated everywhere? Perhaps Medicine Hat just has an abundance of housing.

And lastly, it doesn't seem clear to me that they actually have eliminated homelessness. Other news sources claim that they will eliminate homelessness "soon"[2] or that they have "almost" eliminated homelessness[3].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe [2] http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/05/14/medicine-hat-homeles... [3] http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/medicine-hat-has-al...

Node.js certainly seems to have a high turnover rate for project leadership. I wonder what role Joyent is playing in that. I don't think Ryan Dahl stepped down on good terms. Isaac Schluter might be a different story.

As someone who lives next to the port of Oakland, allow me to say that ships are indeed an issue in urban environments, and they do cause large amounts of pollution. And besides the ships, there are usually a number of diesel trucks that are coming to ship goods to and from the port.

Recent state and federal regulations have made this less a problem.

> These include the concept of changeset evolution coming to life and the announcement of both Facebook and Google choosing Mercurial over Git.

Perhaps this is true for Facebook. But I can say that Google most certainly does not use Hg over Git. The Go source code used to be under Hg, but they've recently migrated to git.

Someone should create a <script>alert('PAC')</script>

You know, after the "Blurred Lines" incident[1], it wouldn't surprise me if the music industry started pushing for more limits on copyright enforcement.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/mar/10/blurred-lines-p...

> Today it may seem obvious that communication using programming languages is protected by the First Amendment.

Actually, I didn't realize this. Good to know!

Though I kind of wonder what the limits to this are. Does a reporter have to disclose source code if they use it to calculate something the NSA/CIA/military don't want the world knowing? Can the government jail me for publishing source code it deems "obscene"?

I'm curious, is there any real-world application for this? Or is it mostly interesting from a research perspective?

It seems like this wouldn't perform very well in the real world for most applications, but I could see it being useful for very simple architectures.

I think this is exactly the reason why you should make code generic enough to be re-used. We have no idea what code is going to be re-used where, so it's better to try to make sure it's easier to plug code into other unexpected places.

Besides that, what the author proposes doesn't scale very well. If you're working on a small codebase and you have a few classes that aren't as generic as they could be, it's no big deal. But things get more complex when you have a big codebase where bad design decisions can affect code in hundreds of places.

Blah. I have a smart TV that can use netflix, but I hardly ever use it considering that I have a Chromecast and XBox One that can use netflix.

April fools? It seems like an awfully poor way to do business for such a company to just go under without any advance notice. But then what are the company's customers going to do? Go somewhere else?

Well yeah of course I want the owner to be forced to act in a way other than what he chooses because the way he chooses to act affects me negatively. That's why we have laws.

There are any of a number of things the owner could be doing with the property. For instance, he could build an urban farm and help provide the area with more food. There are property tax incentives for doing as such, but when you're paying less than $1000 a year for property taxes why would you go to the effort? So instead of using the land for something useful, it's blocked off with a chain link fence and laying unused.

> Land taxes are efficient. They are difficult to dodge; you cannot stuff land into a bank-vault in Luxembourg. Whereas a high tax on property can discourage investment, a high tax on land creates an incentive to develop unused sites. Land-value taxes can also help cater for newcomers. New infrastructure raises the value of nearby land, automatically feeding through into revenues—which helps to pay for the improvements.

+1000

Living in West Oakland next to a vacant lot, I think there's a lot of merit to this idea. As it stands right now, there's no harm to the owner of that lot to just let it lay vacant for a decade. If it cost the owner some money, people might actually do something with these kinds of lots.

Perhaps I'm just old fashioned, but I'm making the assumption that people should be rewarded for actual accomplishments. Failure is a learning experience, but it is not an accomplishment.

Being accepting of failure is a good thing, but you have to wonder about the moral hazard that's being set up here. A person should be able to pick themselves up after a failure, but failure should not be rewarded. You should not be able to go to a conference and brag about your failures. You should not be rewarded for failure with an acquihire and a cushy job at a BigCo. This to me is a key component of the new bubble: the idea that your startup can fail without there being consequences or even be rewarded for failure.

I don't think there's anything wrong with being negative per se. I work at Google, and can think of a couple of developers who complain about others' products a lot. And they can usually get away with it, and in fact even be popular simply because they're helpfully negative.

What's wrong is when someone is unhelpfully negative. This is the person who just complains no matter what happens.

The argument (or lack thereof) that the author is making is hardly based on sound economic analysis. This "thought experiment" ignores a few fundamental facets of SF's rent control ordinance. As a "second-generation" rent control ordinance, the economics surrounding the issue are less clear-cut.

For starters, the story doesn't account for the fact that new housing may be built without being rent-controlled. This allows new housing stock to be built without regard to whether it will be rented under rent-control.

Secondly, SF doesn't have a "rent control" ordinance per se. It has a rent stabilization ordinance. Landlords can indeed increase a tenant's rent, but there are restrictions on how much they can raise a tenant's rent. It's based on the Consumer Price Index (though I don't think this is a good choice of index to peg rental rates to).

What it basically boils down to is less about economics and more about social mobility. Between rent control and prop 13, the Bay Area is set up for social stability. It is intended to encourage people to stay where they are. Us techies, mostly being from elsewhere in the world, are more inclined to push for more mobility.

The Midwest would make a good alternative place to grow. It won't be as prone to droughts and will have a longer growing season due to climate change.

Either that or giving farmers a subsidy for growing crops that require less water. Our huge Almond industry is a giant water-guzzler.

I think that Arrays are so ubiquitous and (usually) so fast that most devs reach to them by default unless there's a good reason not to. I can count on one hand the number of times a linked list has really truly been the correct solution to a programming problem I've faced.