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tsiki | 12 years ago | on: London's first pay-per-minute cafe

I honestly think public libraries should be allowed to use some of their money to advertise and create a brand for themselves. For a lot of people the thing deterring the usage of library is simply the idea that it's unexciting or doesn't offer enough, while usually a coffee shop is pretty much equal or worse. Of course it'll lead to people complaining how their tax money is being used for ads, but it makes libraries reach a larger audience and, in economic terms, improves well-being of more people.

tsiki | 12 years ago | on: How to guarantee continued operation for an SaaS startup

This makes me think if there might be demand for a consultancy-like startup, which has the business idea of taking over a SaaS service if the company is discontinued, and running it for x number of months/years. The business model would presumably be charging the SaaS company an insurance-like fee, and the value proposition would be that they can advertise their SaaS as a "safe" service.

tsiki | 12 years ago | on: The Code Documentation Fallacy

Probably all of us agree that being forced to comment everything will lead to some bad/useless comments. But the examples you showed were simply bad comments. Just because there are bad coders out there who don't care about the quality of their comments for whatever reason, isn't a reason to avoid comments. I'd treat anyone who wrote that first sample comment in a similar way I'd treat a programmer who writes unreadable code; that is, probably take the time to teach them some good commenting practices.

Many of the reasons that speak against commenting apply to good variable names, too. Maybe someone will come later and change the way the variable is used but won't change the name. It doesn't mean we should avoid descriptive variable names, though.

Also, with comments, as with any form of communication, the audience is the key. Let's say I'm a senior programmer somewhere and I'm writing comments. Often the train of thought seems to be "well, using this variable name/adding this comment clears it up for me". But that's usually not nearly enough for junior coders who are new to the codebase, and who are often the target audience. They'll probably still go "wtf" after reading a comment aimed at a senior programmer with an understanding of the codebase and a programming experience to match.

In addition, the obvious point to make is also that code is good at answering how, not why.

This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, I guess since I've met relatively many coders who claim that good code should comment itself and ditched commenting altogether. Their code has usually ranged from above average to downright awful, and has, on average, been rather unreadable.

tsiki | 12 years ago | on: The Story of Japan's 'Lost Decades' was a Hoax

Absolutely, personally I dislike how it's the single most powerful figure for decisionmakers. There have been many alternative measurements developed for measuring overall progress of an economy, but unfortunately they haven't taken much foothold.

tsiki | 12 years ago | on: The Story of Japan's 'Lost Decades' was a Hoax

It's always hard to tell what's really happening behind the GDP growth figures when comparing countries. The population of US and UK are currently increasing around 0.7% a year, while Germany is around 0%. That's a lot of additional GDP growth for both UK and US, even when excluding the fact that immigrants are at their prime working age and usually more beneficial for the GDP than an average citizen. This has a fairly big impact on what's seen on the news. Since depression is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth, it's much easier for countries like US and UK to avoid "official" depression, and much easier for news outlets to talk about the "stagnating old Europe" or such; and of course, at the same time the living standard of an average German might be increasing and that of a UK/US citizen decreasing.

tsiki | 13 years ago | on: Online Education's Dirty Secret - Awful Retention

I agree with the sentiment, but I wonder if having a low barrier of entry is really the solution, or does having a low barrier of entry average out to a low level of initial commitment. It'd be interesting to see if an online course for which you pay for would be better at retention. From a business point of view, they could even offer to give you the money back if you finish the course, or use some other retention trick, like have people calling you to create some social pressure if you seem to be falling behind.

tsiki | 13 years ago | on: NYC Startup Funeral on Friday (2/8)

Awesome idea, I wish this was closer so I could go. Learning from people who failed with their startups is as important as learning from those who succeeded. Usually the successful entrepreneurs have a lot of failures behind them, but in speeches often concentrate on what they did right, not on what failed. It'd very interesting and educational to speak to the entrepreneurs in a gathering like this.

tsiki | 13 years ago | on: Only An Idiot Would Rob a Bank: How Inflation Deflated the Stick-Up

Except that the Federal Reserve isn't private, its Board of Governors is nominated by the Senate and the President and its dividents are capped at 6% a year. "Fed is private" is just some crap being pedalled by conspiracy theorists who either don't have the intellectual curiosity to do even cursory fact checking or intentionally spread it to further their agenda.

tsiki | 13 years ago | on: A global decentralized encrypted datastore with anonymous publishing

That's true. But, it's also completely possible to make a machine learning algorithms to separate "real text" (text meant for human to human communication) from text encoded images since they differ in significant ways. Granted, you could always try to make a text encoding format which resembles real text, but I'm fairly sure the machine learning algorithm could be constructed in such a way to make its usage unfeasible.
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