mhewett's comments

When I was growing up, Nightfall was considered to be the greatest SF short story ever written. I'm not sure what the current ranking of it is but it is well worth reading.

That's a very good observation. I grew up on the line (in Topeka). I believe it is roughly where Western expansion had reached at the time the transcontinental railroad was finished. I don't know if correlation equals causation there. It's also a line where water starts to be less available in Kansas and areas south.

Join a bowling league and see how many people struggle to add 15 to a score by hand. Seriously.

Some possibly useful advice: if I'm at a conference and someone I sort of know says, "This one speaker is being an ass. He's pestering me about another speaker." I'm like, "yeah, yeah that's part of being an organizer".

But if that person says, "Can you help me? Bill Smith is harassing me." Now they've got my attention.

In this case I don't know what the exact dialog was, but if you want help be sure to ask for it and state clearly why. People will respond more proactively.

The one thing that makes LISP great is the "functions are data" formulation.

Many of the "current best paradigms" of Computer Science are actually fads. LISP was a fad of the 1980s. Java was a fad of the 1990s. NoSQL databases are a current fad. It doesn't mean that one is better than another. It's human nature to think that new technology must be better than old technology. In fact, the programming environment on the LISP machines of the 1980s was far better than anything we had till the early 2000s, despite being "old".

I've seen this as common usage in India. In America it would be more common to say "share her knowledge..."

As an older guy who has been through a number of these economic cycles, my feeling is that this will be a mild recession. Nothing like 2000 or 2008. (I'm not always right about the economy but I did correctly take my money out of the stock market on Thanksgiving weekend 2007.) Joining a THRIVING large company right now is a good idea. Google, Apple, Dell. Not HP or Yahoo. Some of the large consulting companies are also in good shape although from my experience they don't know what to do with good software engineers. Also good would be auto high-tech, like BMW or Mercedes Research. That field is in a growth curve that will do just fine during the recession.

The Wikipedia entry for Jef Raskin has further discussion of "Notzo Basic". It was a project by Jef that was never completed.

Before anyone believes the hype, they should read all the MIT research papers from the mid-1990s that mention the term "emergent intelligence". This was one of the biggest wastes of research money in the history of AI.

For those of you trying to represent this, it will be important to explicitly represent context. A fact exists only in a context. The above statement is a good example. Another is, "Bill dreamed that he thought his dog was playing in the front yard." Which could be extended with "but it was actually in the back yard." and further extended with "When he woke up he found that his dog was licking his face."

Historical correction: The article mentions "AI Winter" as occurring in the 1970s. AI Winter actually refers to the period from about 1990-1997 when the Expert Systems approach was deemed to be a failure, funding for AI dropped considerably, and it was a mistake to put AI on your resume.

This opened a window that allowed the statistical-based AI techniques that currently dominate the field to mature.

Self-deception has been going on for a long time. See the Wikipedia entry on N-rays: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N_ray

>> ...use linear search if your array is below around 64 elements in size, binary search if it’s above.

Back around 1980 when I first looked into this the generally accepted cutoff was 25 rather than 64. I don't think people were unrolling loops in the tests back then so it's hard to tell whether loop unrolling or changes in CPU architecture is the greater factor in moving the cutoff point from 25 to 64.

This is irrelevant. To be transmitted via an airborne vector does not require Ebola to mutate into a flying virus.

You need to look at The Architecture of Symbolic Machines by Peter Kogge. It contains a machine you can implement. I have implemented it in the Jatha LISP interpreter ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/jatha/ ).

Only exceptionally stupid thieves would use the actual serial number from the bike.

This is not intended to diminish the perfectly valid stories in her blog, but about 30 years ago I went to a Silicon Valley talk where Heidi Roizen was the featured speaker. Minutes before the talk started she swept into the room surrounded by a half-dozen very handsome young guys in designer suits, all smiling beautifully. It was exactly the same as if some older guy had showed up surrounded by models in Versace dresses. I thought it was very inappropriate and lost some respect for her. Of course, I may have interpreted it incorrectly...perhaps there is another explanation for the entourage of young men accompanying her.

This happens almost 100% of the time with product updates. You are taken to a page that says "We have released version 3.1.5 of Gizmo. Download it here." with not even a hint of what Gizmo is.

Having been a "young developer" and now an "old developer" (mid-50s) here is how I see the pros and cons of older developers:

Pros of being older: 1. Wisdom from having written a million lines of code and having run into all the bugs before. 2. Can more capably see the pros and cons of the latest fads. 3. Not as distracted by the need to play. 4. Don't drink as much (the younger generation drinks a LOT! 5. Capable of providing adult leadership.

Cons: 1. Even those of us in excellent shape just don't have the energy we used to. 2. Family distractions lead to lack of free time to keep up with new developments. 3. Family distractions lead to more errors. 4. We are sure we've seen everything already. (And boy are we wrong!).

All in all, my next startup is definitely going to have a mixture of wise, seasoned hands and energetic young devs.

That was a lot of fun. It would be nice to have a small explanation of the particle equations on the page for the non-physicists in the audience.