rahelzer's comments

The human genome has less information in it than a playlist. And even at that, we share most of our genes with mice.

Our brains can store at least 5 and probably 10 or 15 orders of magnitude more information.

I'm not saying that genes don't influence our behavior, but if you pick a random human behavior, it orders of magnitude more likely to be learned than to be determined by genetics.

People who disagree with us are not somehow less evolved than we are; they just have had different life experiences that we did.

A couple of German Shepherds.

This is so wrong on so many levels.

1. If it were collective code ownership, there would be collective compensation. But programmers are compensated individually at market prices. Since programmers don't own the profits from the code, Programmers do not own the code.

2. The code is owned by the company. This isn't a Marxist set-up. This is a capitalist set up. The capitalists are the owners. The programmers are not capitalists, i.e. they don't have any capital. They are laborers. They just have their labor.

3. The code is developed in such a way as to minimize costs and maximize profits. The market does not care if the code base is "consistent" or "modular" or anything like that.

4. You may be thinking to yourself that consistent, wonderful code would be the cheapest to write. Not so. Programmers are willing to work overtime, over the weekend, overnight, etc. The reason they are willing to do this is because--as labor--they do not have the power. The capitalists have the power. The programmers must work as hard as is humanly possible, or they will simply be replaced with other programmers who will.

Please actually READ SOME MARX before sounding off as to whether something is marxist or not.

What is correct when responding to scientific evidence is does not change with one's political views.

The correct response is the same as for any other scientific result: Was the experiment designed correctly? Was it executed correctly? And (most importantly) has it been reproduced by other investigators?

There is a subtle difference between this and reductionism. Suppose your big problem is you are hungry. You could break this big problem into little problems in many different ways, e.g. [drive to McDonalds, get food], or [go to fridge, eat leftovers], etc.

Either way, you have solved your original problem, but you haven't reduced your original problem. Your original problem was not that you had to go to Mcdonalds, nor was it that you had to got o the fridge. Your original problem was that you were hungry, which is distinct from the solutions.

The general principle that any problem you face, no matter how big, can be broken down into smaller and easier to solve problems, recursively, is the most important idea in human history.

Atomic theory is just a special case of this insight.

If feel you man, but a submariner really doesn't go with a tux.

Acceptable? The whole point of a programming language is that you can do whatever you want to with it.

Anything "Acceptable" has to be something which follows a pattern everybody has seen before, and is familiar to the point of being accepted.

Do something shocking--(ie. something which nobody accepts), because they've never seen it before.

Not a good idea. Its about 100x worse than tracking down your stolen iphone using GPS to find the guy who stole it from you and demanding it bck. Do not do this. Its not worth your life.

Mentor Graphics has private offices. When our company was acquired by them, I thought I would really love them. But to my surprise I didn't like how it changed the culture at all.

Private offices really do make developers more insular. It discourages communication to a degree I wouldn't have thought it would.

Another aspect which might not be obvious at first is that offices come in difference sizes, so when somebody comes to your office--or you go to theirs--you both immediately know your relative positions on the pecking order.

This induces an unwelcome power dynamic. Good ideas come from everywhere, but its human nature to buy into these symbols of status. "You know how I know I'm right and you are wrong? My office (and salary) is bigger than yours." Not necessarily said in as explicit terms as those, but the effect is real and pervasive.

Back in the 90's, I was the "minister of truth" for the student group "Purdue Libertarians". Since then, I've evolved into a socialist. Both my former and current selves are appalled at this. Never in my wildest nightmares would I think that Purdue, of all places, would implement student tracking.

This isn't like the techniques described in the novel 1984. This IS a technique described in the novel 1984.

Tracking of law-abiding citizens has no place in any free society.

Excellent. Notice also this solves the problem of outragious CEO pay. If we figure the marginal value of the CEO as how much more the company would earn if it added another CEO, its at best zero, because the company only needs 1 CEO. Two CEOs would probably just fight with each other so much it would harm the company.

Therefore, CEOs should be paid at most nothing at all, because their marignal value is at best zero.

Of course, CEOs which have big egos and are therefore more likely to be in conflict with an additional CEO, of course, have negative marginal value, and therefore should actually pay the company for the opportunity to be its CEO.

Free Market Capitalism can solve ANYTHING!!!!!!

Any problem caused by an aging population cannot be a long-term problem.

This is kind of like saying why should you buy a $200 mechanical keyboard when you can get a perfectly serviceable model for $15?

Its not even false.

Of course. Because we spend most of our time fixing our own bugs, no other profession confronts someone with their limitations and shortcoming as much as computer programming does.

But a cheesy pop-culture reference rings true here:

Q. "Can a man be brave when he is afraid?" A. "That is the only time a m an can be brave." -Game of Thrones.

The best way to quantify something like this is a "wisdom of the crowds" method: basically let everybody vote and then aggregate the results.

For this to work, however, each of the people voting have to come to independent decisions. The crowd can be as dumb as the dumbest person in the crowd if the crowd falls victim to groupthink.

What I'm trying to say is that you shouldn't let anybody tell you how to vote. Just vote for what you want to happen. Make the decision based as much as possible in complete absence of being influenced by anybody else.

If everybody does that, chances are the result will be the right result.

Lets think about this analytically for a minute. Why do you use Google? Because it gives you the answers you wanted to find. If Google didn't give us what we wanted to find, we wouldn't use Google.

Google isn't optimized to give you true answers. Or false answers. Google is optimized to give you the answers you wanted to find.

So this joker goes on Google, what does he want to find? He wants to find evidence which coheres with his pre-existing beliefs that Hillary Clinton is only winning because of some giant conspiracy.

So that's exactly what he finds--what he wanted to find--i.e. a whole bunch of results which support what he already believed.

Same thing goes for Creationists, Birthers, UFO nuts, etc. Google will give you what you want to find.

When stimulus is suggested in a Keynesian context, it is not to create new factories, etc. It is to provide demand to fully utilize the productive capacity which the economy already has, but which is not currently being used because of lack of demand.

Please don't forget that this might very well cause VW to have to withdraw from the U.S. market entirely, and could even pose an existential threat.

As far as morals go, by all means skate as close to the edge as you possibly can. Bend the rules when absolutely necessary.

But don't break the rules. The person you are now would not like the person you would become.

Well, you have to fix the problems you have.

1. You must become a jedi-knight of white-board programming. For this, go to HackerRank and work absolutely as many problems as you can. But don't program them in an editor, get a whiteboard and use that. Then type in the program when you are ready to get it graded.

2. You need to fill in some knowledge you would have gotten in college. For this, read the first few chapters of "Introduction to Algorithms" by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein.

There's no royal road. Treat this as your full-time job until you get a job, i.e. work on it 8-10 hours a day 5 hours on the weekend.

This is what I did last time I was laid off.....I got nothing for 6 months, then after 6 weeks of the above regime I was able to slam dunk every interview I went to and got an awesome offer. Best of luck.