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kokoito's comments

kokoito | 15 years ago | on: Index Funds Considered Harmful (Possibly Evil)

Just FYI, the point of an active investor is not to accumulate wealth, but to _concentrate_ wealth.

Divide the amount of money index-investors earned by the number of these investors and compare the resulting amount, by the "per-capita" earnings of the hedge fund managers.

Why am I even telling you this?!

I really only have read your piece under the assumption, that as an ambitious marketing professional, you had made a bet with a friend of yours, that you can make the financiers of this world buy-in a marxist-leninist philosophy, by playing on their natural greed ("that damn Joe Six-Pack earned more than I did with my Ivy-League education! The nerve!").

Otherwise I'm leaving Hacker News to start my own private investment consultancy firm.

kokoito | 15 years ago | on: What's wrong with W3Schools

I don't think this is an issue, actually. Developers and hackers are faced with the need to learn new technologies or programming languages every now and then, that have different philosophies or ways of doing things, and hence different standards of quality. Writing idiomatic and good Python code is not equal to writing idiomatic and good C.

So, what makes a good developer is, in my opinion, the capacity to re-learn, to specifically break bad habits. Let's face it, we've all learned (and still learn) crappy techniques first. If anything, people who wanted to learn it the RIGHT way from the start, that I've met, tended to get bogged down in dogmatism of a specific technology or design idea, unable to see the benefits of other ways of doing things.

In the end, if a person who has learned at W3Schools can't recognize some of the things he has learned as inefficient or false, then this person clearly chose the wrong calling to pursue.

kokoito | 15 years ago | on: Oh, right, you're one of those "social justice" people.

I do not live in the US, so could you please elaborate on the violence depiction issue? I was under the impression, that men get their asses kicked in the media _a lot_ more. (partly due to our trouble in telling the difference between "awesome" and "possibility severe injury"). But I digress.

From an international perspective, I cannot take feminism in the US seriously, I just can't. In the original post, for example, the author takes issue with the WORDING OF A TEXT BOOK. Are you f__ing kidding me? Is that a problem, noteworthy for feminists to tackle? No. Again, going back to the international context: do people know, how women are treated not only in the Middle East, but in the Balkans, Eastern Europe, Russia and CIS or Turkey? _THAT_ is discrimination. _THAT_ is what feminism should be fighting against. _NOT_ about some silly issues in grammar and style.

kokoito | 15 years ago | on: If you could only learn three programming languages, which would you choose?

I've chosen C, Python and Lisp: because those aren't languages, but mindsets, that allow freedom of thought and expression.

I am a hobbyist, so I am free to discard anything, that The Man wants to see in a resume. Hence I've never really got into Java (a nice language, turned into the Cobol of our generation -- to all people writting Enterprise: Java's blood is on YOUR hands!) or C++ (if C is a scalpel, then C++ is a chainsaw... while you're drunk... with someone preaching protected attributes and virtual destructors in Fran Drescher's voice).

But C has inherent beauty to it, expressed in terse verses of absolute and utter control.

Python structures my thoughts.

And Lisp is all that is and ever will be.

Amen.

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