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patfla

117 karma · joined August 30, 2010

Software Engineer SF East Bay
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patfla··on What Thomas Edison expected job candidates to know
I'm speaking only from my own experience but as a software engineer observing other software engineers a surprisingly large percent of the the (imo) very best have striking degrees of general knowledge. That is, that could speak very well to many topics other than just software engineering and they have eclectic and deeply developed 'outside' interests.

I believe this runs counter to the current politically correct understanding of intelligence or if you prefer intelligence(s) - although I do believe in the latter.

patfla··on Scott Forstall leaves Apple
Is this an instance of Think Different?
patfla··on As We May Think (1945)
Vannevar Bush's idea for the PC (and web) as an aid to memory is coming true big time. For better or worse, it's often those who already well educated who benefit the most.
patfla··on Ask HN: What programming blogs do you read daily?
I came here with the thought of adding John Cook's blog but I see the name already.

Second the recommendation.

patfla··on Once Greece goes...
I found this more compelling and succinct:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/andrewlilico/100010332/...

patfla··on Functional languages will rule (but not this year)
All the machinery of functional programming languages that's creeping into non-FP languages is great. I actually think that FP one-liners are usually _more_ transparent than the corresponding non-FP loop.

However if I'm not mistaken an important point of FPLs was to eliminate side-effects and that the ultimate goal was program verification (not validation). I.e. you could prove a program correct in the mathematical sense. That seems still a long way off.

patfla··on Eight Out Of China’s Top Nine Government Officials Are Scientists
My reading of the Chinese classics - or rather their authors - is that, historically, the single greatest ambition of China's intellectuals was to advise rulers on better governance. Which didn't seem to me a particularly productive or healthy relationship between the intellectual and political classes.
patfla··on Ask HN: Do you think intuition is as valuable as rational thinking?
Nature (and evolution) can be both abundant and parsimonious. Abundant might refer to the explosion of life-forms around the time of the pre-Cambrian. Or, in our day, the extraordinary way that insects and flowering plants interact (and drive the speciation of each). Maybe one can think of these as evolutionary windows of opportunity.

In this case (emotion), my guess is that parsimonious applies. When there’s all that useful circuitry in the cerebellum (emotion), why reinvent it in the cortex? The cortex obviously has new and very useful circuitry but there will still be many applications where the old circuitry - and thus the cerebellum and emotion - are what’s needed.

Emotion has been around a much longer time than reason (and is found in a wider range of animals). It’s true that it was probably easier for evolution to invent emotion but history is also telling you that the evolutionary advantages of emotion are longer-standing and better tested than reason. Current events tell me that the evolutionary jury is still out as regards human-type reason - or at least the way these various quantities (reason, emotion, intuition, etc) are wired together in the case of human beings. Evolution may need a redo.

patfla··on World’s fastest supercomputer unveiled in China
Adding GPUs seems a no-brainer in retrospect. Have top500 institutions outside China been trying this approach?

Except one thing. Until recently GPUs have only done single-precision calculations. Double precisions has been added with the latest architectures but double is, I believe, still very slow. So this means that single precision results are sufficient for the top500 tests as well as the particular applications (in the Tianhe’s case: weather and oil exploration)?

patfla··on Goodbye to an old friend: 1-800-GOOG-411
> Makes me want a smartphone a little more

That’s part of the point isn’t it? Google extends the service for free (for a limited time) and people without smartphones grow to like it (glad that 1800FREE411 is still there) and then when the free service is withdrawn that iota more of dump-phone users are more inclined to buy a smartphone.

Smartphones may be growing like crazy, but there are still vastly more dumb-phones actually in peoples’ hands. Big market, right?

patfla··on What makes US health care so expensive? Hard numbers, no easy answer.
Among the reasons (first list): #s 2 and 3 are ways in which the AMA restricts supply in the US. The AMA may claim 'quality' (and who can gainsay claims of quality in health care) but one suspects that restricting supply and keeping salaries high is an at least equally valid (note the round about elocution) reason.

Claims that something is 'complicated' can be used to obscure and it seems to me to that one very clear source of problems in health care is the AMA. On the other hand, the AMA represents pretty much all doctors in the US and if they're earning above market salaries you can bet that most of them would strongly defend that. "They spent so many years in med school"; "they have so much student debt"; and "health care is unimpeachably a matter of quality" - right?

Financial markets are 'complicated' and that's why we can't do anything about those either.

patfla··on Jason Fried: The Truth About Real Estate
I'm wary of any article that begins: "The Truth About ..." and I haven't read this one yet.

"The Truth About ..." is designed to get your juices flowing and to get you to read.

Caveat lector.

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