rnprince

You can be into understanding the media around you without actually wanting to produce it yourself. However, if you are interested in adopting some of the takeaways, the strategies can be used tastefully and ethically.

If you don't like the harmful ways that media manipulation is used, you might actually like that the book explicitly warns the industry how vulnerable it is to this practice, which can be used by anybody for any purpose. This warning came four years before the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

If you're into this kind of thing, I enjoyed reading "Trust Me I'm Lying" by Ryan Holiday.

This is just another form of marketing, and marketing does create value. It's true that some marketing is dishonest and harmful, but I don't have a reason to think this is one of those cases.

This person is providing a service in reviewing products for people making buying decisions. As a result, they waste less time being unsure about their decision, and less money is spent on purchases they regret.

Does FMLA leave apply for cases like yours?

How many large tech companies decide to fire programmers because they communicate directly? For male programmers, that's actually a stereotype.

The reason they gave for firing her is just bizarre, making me wonder if there was a different reason that they didn't want to admit.

What about Java makes you like it more, or about Node.js that made you particularly frustrated?

I wish JavaScript were statically typed, but I'm not convinced about switching to TypeScript yet. I can see other ways Node.js could be frustrating.

This could be the beginning of a thriller movie. A nefarious hacker group demonstrates a powerful zero-day for a dangerous client by creating national panic over stock prices.

Sorry to hear about what you went through. Any tips about how you recovered, or what you would have done differently?

After working with MUMPS for some time, getting to use Node.js has been a religious experience for me. I feel as if an incredible weight has been lifted off my shoulders.

What is statistically special about 200?

I don't know if you were looking for feedback about the game, but the ease of losing progress quickly made me stop playing; because I was more likely to stop playing right after losing, you might want to make it take a longer time to advance levels, or to add multiple lives so that you don't lose all your progress suddenly.

But I don't know how that would affect my likeliness to see the ad. To improve that, maybe add more natural pause points to the game, so people can have more chances to click?

"You are not buddies, you are interviewer about to decide whether they get hired. Many people shutting down might mean that they are not comfortable juggling "buddy" social role and expectations and "serious job interview" social expectations simultaneously."

Very good point.

What important problem in this domain does the author think plain text uniquely solves? I'd say that the arguments aren't specific to education, and that they're also pretty weak.

Remember that one of the major breakthroughs of the World Wide Web was that HTML meant documents were no longer plaintext.

This amber contains Aerodactyl?

It seems to me like this allows some incredible augmented reality once a computer vision system can perform do the user-provided analysis of the scene's geometry and light sources.

Hi - Thank you for doing an AMA.

One factor when evaluating startups is how long it will take to get everything ready. Some can launch in a month, but some depend on breakthroughs or environment shifts that will take a decade to happen.

Is there a Goldilocks zone that lends itself to better outcomes? How far into the future is too far?

The scoping issue I mentioned was function scoping, not variable scoping. The language would be better for organizing code if it supported functions as methods of particular classes of objects, or functions with private scope. As a codebase gets large, how well organized the code is makes a big difference in how easy and how risky it is to change things, so it really pays for your language to make code organization as natural as possible.

I am actually not able to find statistics matching up M databases with non-M databases at the moment, but I'd be interested in seeing something like that. I don't know what you mean about having to roll your own C extension to talk to your database.

Thank you for this reply!

Yeah, MUMPS was pretty prescient in this way. As someone who's experienced the changes first-hand, what do you feel are the most important NoSQL developments since MUMPS?

Do you have a preference on NoSQL vs relational databases?

There is a section called "'MUMPS' vs. 'M' naming debate" in the wikipedia article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS

"Some of the contention arose in response to strong M advocacy on the part of one commercial interest, InterSystems, whose chief executive disliked the name MUMPS and felt that it represented a serious marketing obstacle. Thus, favoring M to some extent became identified as alignment with InterSystems."

Sorry, I can't hop on board. My opinion is that implementing anything complex and new in ANSI MUMPS would be irresponsible given the better options available.

> It has limited commands and is whitespace-aware

Limited commands to a certain extent just means a more dangerous language. Being able to give functions private scope is something that's really important to me personally, as is having named constants, and objects with methods. About whitespace awareness, I consider it a fascinating design choice that the difference between one or two spaces between tokens within the same line of code can mean different things.

> Newer developers can jump right into M, precisely because it lacks higher-level abstractions like first-class functions or closures.

The language does not support first-class functions, but it does support the "xecute" command for running arbitrary code strings, which is particularly risky if you ever use user inputs as parameters in the strings you try to xecute.

Also, I primarily want knowledgeable developers working on my healthcare and financial systems, not the newer ones who would somehow be incapable of using a first-class function.

> wicked fast at reads and writes. Great for a fast key-value store.

This isn't a differentiating feature.

> you're very unlikely to find a bug because it's been in production so long. This makes it good for mission-critical applications like healthcare and finance.

What happens when you need to change the code? Do you wait a long time until bugs are no longer found?

I used to work at Epic, where this language is used to implement much of the leading healthcare system in the United States. Many people there encouraged me to refer to it by different names like "M," "InterSystems Caché," "Caché," or even to my surprise "C."

I'm very, very happy to not be using this language anymore. After my first year on the job, I read some JavaScript code, and I nearly wept at how comparatively beautiful it was.

It's awesome to hear that you're doing well doing freelance work. Do you have any tips for how to find clients, especially the first ones when you can't get them through existing ones?

I agree about the AA shirts. They're a key part of my wardrobe, I love them. Unfortunately, the company's really struggling right now. I hope they make it.

Personally, I'd say yes to his question - and indeed, this is a question, not an argument; and it's a question that presumes a knee-jerk reaction against Medieval History majors...

Gross world product has been growing along an exponential function for some time, and machines are threatening to allow us to be comfortable even if we don't work as much as we physically can. Maybe giving everyone some years in their youth to enrich their lives would be a good way to organize the economy once it's a viable option. Maybe a lot of people agree with this, and in wealthier nations it's ~just~ now close to being within reach, but it isn't quite there, so what we're feeling would be considered friction in the transition.

If you consider this argument fully, It's hard to defend retirement - or anything else people do without profit motives.

I'm listening to music without any expectation of profit, giving up time I could spend making money. I consider this life enrichment. Actually, besides opportunity costs, I paid literal cash money to be able to do this.

Because this (arguably) medical experimentation was done without informed consent.

Schoenberg, on writing four-voice chorales:

"Even in the limitations of the individual voices, in their relative incompleteness, there are advantages.* The necessity for utilizing them within the narrow range of their effectiveness demands characteristic usage and treatment consistent with the material. Thus the pupil learns by this simple example to heed an important principle of handicraft: to make characteristic use of the strengths and shortcomings of the material at hand.

"*I am taking such pains with these things ... to establish explicitly that these principles are not derived from aesthetics but from practical considerations. If what is known as aesthetics does in fact contain much that is merely practical handling of the material, and if what is known as symmetry is perhaps often not much more than an organization of the material that reveals a sensible regard for its properties, yet I consider it worthwhile to set down these observations. For the conditions of practicality can change, if we take a different view of the material and if the purpose changes."

--Arnold Schoenberg, Harmonielehre

The S&P 500 is the go-to index for a lot of people when they think about the "market return;" an important idea in finance. It's a portfolio of a large enough number of companies that the portfolio return converges pretty thoroughly to the market return. Not sure why the S&P 1000 isn't used as much, but using the S&P 500 is a convention.

Why choose all companies with female CEOs from the S&P 1000? The S&P 500 as of last year had 26 female CEOs, and if I had to guess, I'd say that number is higher than it would have been in 2002. The portfolio of "S&P 500 companies with female CEOs as of 2002" wouldn't have been diversified enough to reliably converge to the "market return of companies with female CEOs" that they were trying to investigate.

I had exactly the same reaction as well.