nmac's comments

-> "I believed Microsoft Windows was only platform worth to develop software."

This sounds like the first line of a Kafka-esque horror story.

Just looked into this, and I am quite surprised with the fluid UX. Thanks for the suggestion!

I recently migrated to clojure from the php world. I have to say that although I am still learning the language, its actually fun compared to php, which would sometimes feel like pulling teeth to get some basic functionality. Way less boilerplate, and as can be said of anything good, it just works.

Also, the idea of thinking in the problem domain versus the subset of problems that arise in languages like php is an acute difference. Just being able to focus on the product as your programming keeps you on task and thinking about new ways to implement features, etc. -- big difference.

I think this is a very interesting game with an important message. However, the UX could be more engaging by having a more vertical leveling up structure. I felt as if I wanted to get to the next level but the onslaught of questions seemingly never ended- after a bit this becomes disengaging, specially when you aren't shown how many more units are needed to graduate.

Im not sure why there seem to be some negative comments, this is absolutely amazing- albeit a little scary in a sci-fi clockwork orange kind of way...

Additionally, consciousness gets commonly defined in philosophy of mind as the "likeness" of sensation and perception (i.e. its "like" something to smell roses and its "like" something to hear Mozart). So, this study cuts at the root of consciousness.

If by intelligence you mean something along the lines of information processing/synthesizing ability, then intelligence has been shown (hedging- strongly suggested) to be dynamic as the result of neuroplastic brain events. Assuming you believe some version of the brain = mind identity theory (otherwise, your intelligence may not depend on physical events and my example fails).

This article is interesting but it overgeneralizes. I don't think its fair to say of tech entrepreneurs that they are somehow managed by their investors. Sure, some might be, but they are the exception, not the rule. If you listen to the rhetoric and read stuff (like venture hacks) about top VC firms, they ultimately serve the entrepreneur. I'm sure that if they own a majority share of the company and the entrepreneur is going off the rails they would intervene and run the show-- but they are in the service business. This is the golden-age of awesome entrepreneurs ditching the "pointy haired bosses" that the author points to-- a bunch of pg's essays extrapolate on this concept.

At the other end, however, are startups that never make it big by design. Not that they do not have the capacity to scale (it technically would not be a "start up" in the traditional sense if it didn't), but they just strive for organic growth in a niche market. These cases blur the distinction that the author strives to make between the tech and main street entrepreneur.

"Creative had a technologically superior MP3 player, but customers preferred the iPod, to the utter dismay of the Creative managers. They just couldn’t understand how customers were so irrational!"

I think design is just as integral to 'technological superiority' as any other factor might be...

First, I agree with the sentiments of some of the above commenters, "coders" just sounds ridiculous.

Now, this question is ambiguous between two different interpretations of being "worth it". Clearly engineers are "worth it" by any economic metric--viz. high employment rates and high salaries (when mean rates are compared to other disciplines/jobs). But I take the OP to have an existential dimension built into the query. Meaning: does a hacker value what she does when contrasted against what she could be doing? So, whether or not hackers value what they do is completely different from what they do being worth while. Perhaps someone working on something at Google may value what she does less than working on her own startup idea. In this respect, to each his own.

I agree. At the end of the day, it always comes back to personality types and drives. Each startup needs different things in different phases. Maybe a really smart coder is exactly what a non-technical co-founder might need, whilst a resilient hustler is what a well groomed hacker needs. In general, universal quantification over statements that are not law-like are doomed to fail. (<- yes there is an embedded pun there).

Be careful with definitions (sets of necessary and sufficient conditions) to any concept... counterexamples lie around the corner.

I think people like Jerry Fodor define computation as the manipulation of logical symbols by some algorithm. The idea is that you use a standard functionalist analysis (see someone like Putnam 67) to analyze the inputs(X) and outputs(Y) of a cognitive system. So you have (schematically) something like: X->?->Y. Where the "?" defines the project of cognitive neuroscience (i.e. figuring out the physical instantiation of the manipulation of intercalated proteins & neurotransmitter). So, in this picture cognition is not a "state" that needs to be defined a priori but a "black-box" process that needs to be spelled out empirically. At bottom, stuff is continuous, not discrete.

But too much ink gets spilled over this philosophical issue. It seems much more fruitful to analyze the mind as a Turing machine (contentious) and apply computational complexity theory to define limits on human computation based on the hierarchy-- my two cents.

Its a nice touch including portmanteaus and 'incorrect' ebonics on the list (like "ery'day"), since authors like shakespeare, joyce and others took the same liberties with language. Arguably, that's how language develops and makes it interesting to study and think about. The OP could have easily stuck to words in the OED, kudos.

Interesting, since I heard Paul Steinhardt give a talk not too long ago concerning some skepticism towards the inflationary model's ability to explain the issues that it set out to model (such as the horizon problem, etc.). I wonder if the skepticism on the theoretical side will still linger given some empirical data.