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goldmab's comments

goldmab | 13 years ago | on: Actually eat healthily for £1 per day

Thanks. I think a lot of them agree that low-carb approaches work for weight loss and some other outcomes, since that's what the science shows. But his "insulin hypothesis" is pure pseudoscience and I'm not aware of any papers about it.

goldmab | 13 years ago | on: Actually eat healthily for £1 per day

It took me a little reading to figure out the agenda, but some key phrases like "obesity is a growth disorder" tipped me off. This is a Gary Taubes project. He is a writer of books in favor of low-carbohydrate diets, and he often badly misinterprets the scientific literature. He has a selection bias about which studies he thinks are worth talking about, so as to make it appear that low-carbohydrate diets are the answer to everything. No actual nutritional scientists think his "alternate hypothesis" is credible.

goldmab | 13 years ago | on: Not Lisp again (2009)

This is a fun demo of functional programming, but Lisp isn't so special anymore. In Python:

  >>> def deriv(f):
  ...   dx = 0.0001
  ...   def fp(x):
  ...     return (f(x + dx) - f(x)) / dx
  ...   return fp
  ...
  >>> cube = lambda x: x**3
  >>> deriv(cube)(2.0)
  12.000600010022566

goldmab | 13 years ago | on: How Valve hires, how it fires, and how much it pays

Does this bother you? I think they are just trying to eliminate management overhead by using peer evaluation to set the company's direction by consensus. This could maybe be chaotic, but I see it as a trade-off. A traditional structure is chaotic in its own way. Like, who gets promoted to upper management? The most deserving people, or lucky people?

Arbitrary decisions from an executive may or may not be better than popularity contests. I guess it depends on the executives and the culture.

goldmab | 13 years ago | on: Longtime tech recruiter shatters the engineering shortage myth

CRUD wrappers with a pretty GUI are actually really hard to do well. Think of all unusable and unstable CRUD apps you've used. I wouldn't drill someone on dynamic programming for that kind of job, but I would want them to be smart enough and dedicated enough to do it well. In my experience that's rare.

goldmab | 13 years ago | on: Skype advertising update

While on a 1:1 audio call, users will see content that could spark additional topics of conversation that are relevant to Skype users and highlight unique and local brand experiences. So, you should think of Conversation Ads as a way for Skype to generate fun interactivity between your circle of friends and family and the brands you care about. Ultimately, we believe this will help make Skype a more engaging and useful place to have your conversations each and every day.

How can Skype pretend something is desirable if it goes away automatically when you pay? That's nearly the definition of undesirable.

goldmab | 14 years ago | on: Python is a voluntary language

I'm a Ruby developer who never uses Rails, and I think this is a major problem. It makes it hard for me to embrace "Ruby developer" as a career path because that means I'll be typecast as a Rails dev, and I don't want to use Rails.

goldmab | 14 years ago | on: Why do web sites and software take so long to build? And why is it so hard?

I call bullshit. If this guy was bored because all of his software projects were exactly the same, he should have automated their creation and reused his code so that they took an extremely short amount of time to create. Anyone who can't do that is either encountering novel problems that require decisions, or just not a good enough programmer to automate and reuse.

This is the same way I feel when programmers complain about writing "just another CRUD app." CRUD apps are in fact very difficult to write because of usability concerns. If all of your "create" screens look exactly the same no matter what is being created, that means you are making no effort as a UI designer to anticipate common creation patterns. Even assuming a cookie-cutter UI, a CRUD programmer has to properly model the concepts in data, which is not trivial either.

goldmab | 14 years ago | on: Rethinking Programming Language Tutorials

If you want to learn to play guitar, the wrong approach is to pick up a book about music theory and a chart showing where all the notes are on the fretboard.

I found music theory knowledge very helpful when learning how to play guitar. In fact, if somebody knows what intervals a minor triad and a major triad are made of, and they know what note each string of the guitar is, then they can work out how to play a lot of chords.

goldmab | 14 years ago | on: Is Psychology About to Come Undone?

Of course brains produce false models and find wrong patterns. Modeling and pattern-matching is what brains do. So they're going to get it wrong a lot.

The interesting thing isn't how funny it is that the mind screws up sometimes, it's knowing the actual mechanisms of perception, cognition, memory, behavior, etc. Edge cases and failures are only the beginning of understanding, because they hint at how things work.

For example, visual perception is heavily based on detecting edges. So there are a set of optical illusions where you fail to accurately perceive the colors or shades of different areas (like the chessboard illusion), because the relative shading of adjacent areas is more important for producing edges and shapes in your mind.

goldmab | 14 years ago | on: Is Psychology About to Come Undone?

We have no better idea what the typical mind is like than we did a hundred years ago

I can't take this statement seriously. Have you ever even taken an intro cognition or perception class? Almost everything is about how minds typically work, and all of the findings are less than one hundred years old.

goldmab | 14 years ago | on: Where’s _why?

My favorite part was this analogy by Guido van Rossum:

In Python, I would just say something like, ‘Get up and go through the door.’ In other languages, I might have to say something like, ‘Stand up, but not with so much force that you fall over, take three steps to the north, take one step to the east, approach the door, check that it is open, if it is not open, open it, then step through it with this amount of speed …’

goldmab | 14 years ago | on: New: Apply to Y Combinator without an Idea

The advantage that Zuckerberg got from writing Facebook himself wasn't that he could "spend less on coders," it's that Facebook got created at all. Meanwhile, he had been contracted by the Winklevoss twins to implement their idea, which he didn't do because why would he?
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