plesn

"All interesting questions are causal." I like that punchline !

This seems to me like Ideology disguised as Tautology.

"Saving = Investment" is an accounting identity and not a causal law. He shifts by implying that 'saving' drives 'investment'. In accounting even unsold inventories are forced into the 'investment' bucket.

No wonder he returned: he can focus on meaningful work without direct financial pressure, with full access to people, decisions, and resources.

If only we all had a time in life to do what we love, get paid, and face no paywalls. I call that "liberated work". If only at least retirement was like that.

Thanks for this punchline which starts better than a long an laborious argumentation.

free doesn't imply that the service/product has no costs, only that your transaction has no costs. Google is also free but it has costs (mostly paid by ads which are then included in products costs).

Indeed, I copy-pasted in emacs but not in vim, my bad...

How do I see those invisible characters in emacs or vim ? In emacs I thought that whitespace-mode would do the trick but apparently it doesn't.

Could you provide more precisions / examples of this C code-style ?

Those are only for fun, but real stuff are designed to be deliberately inconvenient (e.g. against homeless people): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_architecture

I would kill to have this module in the batteries included…

I didn't know the last one. Nevertheless I find the mix of functions with no arguments, function values and optionnal parenthesis quite confusing syntax wise.

What about the end of life of solar panels ? Did they manage to build recyclable ones ?

There is a gray scale of "entrepreneurs" and "companies" based on the means they use to gain power and influence, so this is rather natural,just as people already read Machiavel or Sun Tzu before. Law, customs, means of legitimation (media) and force are fuzzy and moving barriers.

But one should not forget that this is only one aspect, one dimension, the "power and influence" one. Companies are structures for making things together with others : people spend much time there so we should also seek other aspects within them. E.g more "horizontal" and "democratic" structures preventing mafiaesque hierarchies can also bring fullfillment to much more employees : this is especially important in companies employing well-educated and smart people like programmers at the lowest positions.

Yes, thanks for reminding this essay. I think though that de-duplication is a lawyer oriented smoke-screen. It is based on a complete misunderstanding of Colour because Colour tracking happens at the wrong abstraction level. Colour does not exist in the computer but it is a property of the whole process. Therfore tracking content ownership doesn't happen at the bit-level of storing a copy or a pointer, but it is rather the consistency of the owner/content association.

Many things are "externalized" in the process and we are pretty naive about risk.

Do we count the cost of side-effects like wars and oppression in our energy ? Think about Libya for oil or Niger for Uranium. Do we count the cost for democracy of the impact of energy lobbies ? Centralized production entails centralized structures which often have a tremendous influence (in France there was never ever any democratic feedback loop about nuclear energy).

The cynical view though is that this is nothing compared to other "industrial risks" and to the insiduous and continuous risk we are producing by saturating our planet with garbage.

Haskell's Data.Typeable kind of does this. (http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base/Data-...). It does not feel like python though…

Interesting article, clear explanation. One minus : in the conclusion it is assumed that the problem of pursuing nuclear power is about risk assessment on nuclear plants. This is partial truth biased by current events, in fact many side effects are at stake (the plundering of uranium producing countries like Niger, centralized energy production and its consequences…)

No problem : play and further autoplay could be authorized on a per app basis.

Give me easy audio but no autoplay and I will be happy. The same applies for video. In fact, in unicorn-land I would like it also for heavy animations. At least one advantage with flash is Flashblock ;-)

Agreed, but precisely only through the mirror of our own desires and fears :)

Aah, economy on HN… : ready, fight! More seriously, as Einstein put it quite briefly, economy is not a science because it is not testable. I would even add, following some philosopher's wisdom, that behind all those pretty theories you can sense their authors' fears and desires (plus some coherence and maybe even some stats…).

Interesting, even though i'm not suprised knowing Einstein's affinity for Spinoza : he must have carefully read Marx and other materialist philosophers.

This gives some hope, especially the Gini graph. I'll wait for more information to have a more definitive opinion though as autonomy is not always well captured in those quantitative data.

For example if more people live in big cities, is this growth enough ? (1$ can mean something different : in New York $400 certainly makes you poor…). Is this growth compensating former hidden markets, like self food producing and local non monetary exchanges ? (you can sell cotton and have more money, while still having it harder to buy food). Do their subsistance depend more or less on external factors like speculation ? Are there less wars/civil wars ?

For the server itself or for permanant storage ?

Is it possible to run a web server like, say, Snap, directly on top of it ?

Maybe it would be usefull to gather this kind of commented experience about evaluation order and memory behaviour in a little book of case studies (or several blog posts). There are some slides by dons and book chapters in RWH, but it is still something difficult.

I feel like reading stakhanovist USSR propaganda. Work more and the world will be better and you'll be a hero. Look, those french required to work 35 hours, they should be ashamed. Do like those couragous doctors, you tiny humanoid working daily at your java bigco, and even you doing this thrilling job for this missile company. Or even you changing the world for the benefit of this great sexy monopolist company. Let's rather be passionate and honest in what you do, "work" or not.

Haskell has a cool macro system : template haskell. So it comes down to typing.

The first answer is interesting but I don't understand step 10. Imperative is a model with state and deterministic sequence and Haskell constructs like state and IO monads form imperative DSLs (with some typing burden/advantages). I don't see why the strategy pattern is particularly interesting here (but I see why imperative structures like mutable arrays and associative arrays are interesting). I don't see either why I would especially forget all those design patterns outside of imperative code : for instance the presentation of Connal Elliot "Tangible Functionnal Programming" is a great exemple of the use a kind of MVC pattern precisely to avoid using imperative constructs.

For me at least, the balance lies more in the use of state (easy in python) or the cost of abstraction (no inling and TCO).

> my feeling that diminishing returns have set in to investments in higher education

That's seeing people only as a black box slave-like "workforce", giving them "education" as well as food to sustain your busyness

> Now it is true that college has a consumption as well as investment function. People often enjoy going to classes [...]

It has many other functions too, for the human beeings beiing "educated". If done well, it can even give them critical thought process, and knowledge about certain topics of their environement. In eastern europe countries, the aboundance of educated people in a beauraucratic regime which did not propose so much interesting life openings contributed to its fall.

> [...] increasingly costly and unproductive forms of special pleading by a sector that abhors transparency and performance measures.

Just like the banking sector, the pharmaceutical sector, etc... Performance is a word people often use meaning fittness to a metrics relevant to their particular interests.

> Higher education is on the brink of big change, like it or not.

Which only means the balance of powers is changing. Care to ellaborate about why and how ? Otherwise it is just saying : specialized labour is less needed by US industry, so less people have to be trained. Ok, agreed (or not), so let's give them education instead.