tjgabbour · HackerTrans

He also mentions that new tools designed to alleviate problems and up just causing more. I think this is a symptom of inflexible computing "architecture" -- what Alan Kay refers to in "The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet". Our own tools cause incidental complexity -- complexity arising not from the problems, but from the way we solve them. And so it becomes harder to build things, as we strain against architectural limits.

tjgabbour

16 anni fadiscuss

I do have a problem with going to say a programming conference and seeing that all the programmers are men, while those serving them (like receptionists and waitresses) are women. And generally these women are managed by men...

tjgabbour

16 anni fadiscuss

Yes, that quote seemed odd, so I looked deeper at Le Guin's position.

* Most authors weren't represented in the Google Book Settlement, though they will be severely affected by it.

* The settlement is extremely complicated, and it's difficult to put across all her objections in (say) the span of an interview.

* She does want a global digital library, but not under the control of a corporation like Google. Google of course acts in its own interest (and those of its shareholders), and is not even minimally under popular control.

I agree with these points. However, I wish she'd discuss (more than just in passing during an interview) a fair alternative to Google -- one which is free-as-in-freedom and compensates authors/staff. (Or did I miss it?) Because digitalization is very important, and authors' interests do conflict with those of consumers, under our economic system.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/2010/02/conversation-ur...

tjgabbour

16 anni fadiscuss

Dean Baker is a good economist, who predicted the housing bubble early on, as well as the resulting recession. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Baker#Financial_crisis_of_...

I think it makes sense that some economists are a lot better at their jobs than others. Many may fall into ideological ruts, because industry and government have strong interests in the outcome of this social "science".

tjgabbour

16 anni fadiscuss

Yeah, I didn't understand the reasoning either, and he didn't explain. The context was that a mutual friend introduced us, because he thought we'd work well together. (He knew that the WeatherBill fellow was actually going around to local Clojure meetings to try to find interested people.)

I mean, they have telecommuters on the opposite US coast. Dunno why crossing an ocean is a bridge too far. (And how would this apply to South America?)

Yeah, I'll try to ask him; these managerial decisions puzzle me. I have the suspicion it's two things: a) a gut feeling which is hard to articulate and b) the Google practice of not hiring if you have a whiff of doubt. (WeatherBill was founded by ex-Googlers, IRRC.)

tjgabbour

16 anni fadiscuss

I've seen things like that in the west... for example, in the corporate world, they're often straight to the point about disciplined damage control. Which might not sound so bad, except that corporations are so omnipresent that the media is dominated by them. (Like with this Washington Post article; both the advertisers and the media company are corpoate.) So by an analogy, I guess it feels kind of like working for a really big corporation, where everyone knows you're basically supposed to say what the bosses want, refined by specialized PR organs. (One where they don't merely control the government; they ARE the government.)

Maybe China's censors get to work in pleasant offices, and have incentives like climbing the job ladder, more luxuries and status, greater pay if they move to the private sector, etc. Some might be ideologues, others cynical; maybe most just treat it like a job and they're just cogs who kind of know better but are too comfortable where they are, like the people I know about working on facial recognition for CCTV systems.

But yeah, the Chinese system is a lot cruder. The cost of disobedience isn't just losing your job and healthcare; it can be jail, maybe worse.

tjgabbour

16 anni fadiscuss

There is a company named WeatherBill which I personally know is interested in hiring Clojure users. (I think the only online advertising they did was a tweet which was maybe picked on disclojure.org.) One person there recently told me that they're very friendly to telecommuting -- but only within the US.

(This telecommuting thing probably doesn't matter much to you, given they're IIRC in SF, but others might like to know that...)

BTW, have you tried going to Clojure meetings, if there are any in your area? Some people prefer to go to them to find coworkers.

tjgabbour

16 anni fadiscuss

Oops, I accidentally wrote: "Note: [...] and be more maintainable than alternatives."

That's intended to mean that the the recursive solution is more maintainable than alternatives. (Or so I glibly claimed...)

And of course, I meant "masked fraud".

tjgabbour

16 anni fadiscuss

In cover letters, I've made clear that I enjoy and welcome interview puzzles. You may never actually be asked such a puzzle; but since the vast majority of interviews are non-technical pageants, it "signals" some confidence and that you "get" what position the interviewer's in.

I've been asked twice to solve out-of-interview puzzles, and once an in-interview puzzle. In each case, I asked for other people's (anonymized) solutions/times. In both cases, this was with Common Lisp using companies. Your experience may differ, but:

* Everyone else took shortcuts in out-of-interview puzzles. Most wrote almost no comments (a couple had overly chatty ones), nor was the code packaged in an easy-to-run way. Even most good solutions would cut a corner by (for instance) assuming that the input was magically pre-parsed from strings into symbols.

So, there'd be a couple of good-but-somewhat-unpolished answers, a few which were visually messy and over-simplified the problem, a couple where it wasn't really solved and the programmer maybe apologetically produced a best-attempt, and one which wasn't even in a known programming language. (The last one deserves the most sympathy, as he/she almost certainly had mental problems.)

In contrast, imagining that everyone else was a hyper-professional Programmer O' Doom, I packaged it all with ASDF (including instructions) and polished it as if, say, generations of island-stranded maintenance programmers would use my solutions to figure out where to sit in order to not be eaten by a cannibal.

One thing that probably goes over well is to point out a possible problem with a part of your code -- and a justification. Like a comment saying, "Note: Some Lisp implementations don't perform tail-call optimization. However, for real-world inputs, they would nevertheless suffice and be more maintainable than alternatives."

* People are human, and often have problems with in-interview puzzles. Part of my mind mysteriously blanked for a short while when asked what I felt was a trivial question -- permute a list of 3 elements (performance irrelevant, run the solution in Common Lisp). My imaginary Programmer O' Doom no doubt typed it from finger-memory in seconds, after whimsically sketching a solution where she randomly permuted the elements until enough unique ones were uncovered, or enumerated them all at read-time or something.

So, I stammered out an apology because I took a few minutes, jarred and ready to crawl into a hole for being unmasked as a fraud. Well, it turns out that the previously fastest solution took over an hour. (Of course I remained a fraud, albeit a still-unmasked one...)

Maybe it helps to think of such interview puzzles as a symptom of society's diseased way of working; then there is less stress. They're fundamentally mindless and people often derive an elitist thing from them; it's hard not to. I may welcome them, but it's also the case that each side whores out natural curiosity for the sake of filling some corporate job.

tjgabbour

16 anni fadiscuss

What is the advantage of XML over JSON for nontrivial, non-naive data structures? Do you mean things like XLink/XPointer? (Or where can I go to read more about this?)

I've gotten the informal impression that incidental complexity (you know, complexity arising not from the problem but the solution) is a factor behind the hugeness of the XML ecosystem, but I'd be happy to learn otherwise...

tjgabbour

16 anni fadiscuss

There's nothing wrong with voicing an opinion on the economy which you depend on, particularly if you've thought about it a lot. The world would probably be a better place if this were more common. (After all, wars are even fought over economic incompatibilities. Take the US and old Soviet Union; their economies even had crucial similarities, like top-down workplace decisionmaking.)

In probably any country it's very difficult to be an economics prof if you go outside narrow ideological bounds. Like if you wanted to pursue Participatory Economics or something, rather than forms of capitalism or marxism-leninism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_economics

tjgabbour

16 anni fadiscuss

I think it's similar the right to food. _Human Rights, A Very Short Introduction_ mentions that the right to food is shorthand for a complex set of obligations concerning "food security":

* Obligation to respect: Immediate, basic obligations include that a government can't undermine food security (like unjustified crop destruction and land evictions), must plan for the population's needs, and can't allow discrimination regarding access to food.

* Obligation to protect: A further level of obligation is protecting people's food security from interference by others. (This may include regulating food safety, ensuring that indigenous people with a close cultural link to land have a title to it, etc.)

* Obligation to facilitate: A further one is to facilitate food security. Like stimulating employment so people can afford it, land reform, and developing distribution and storage facilities. Or providing food or social security to those who can't work, such as the infirm.

Almost all of this could be applied to internet access.

tjgabbour

16 anni fadiscuss

I think countries often inflict these problems on themselves. For example, systematic unemployment/underemployment isn't a particularly natural phenomenon (above a minimal level when people shift workplaces and so on), but is a known consequence of certain economic systems and policies. These countries decide to pursue policies where idle hands aren't offered anything to do. Despite their desire to work.

Further, higher-level professions tend to have obstacles to decrease the supply of their practitioners.

Immigration problems are also often self-inflicted. France is in the news for having them, but clearly many immigrants came from countries they invaded. When France invaded, they sent soldiers who alter society through violence and intimidation; whereas immigrants typically want to achieve better lives for themselves and families, and ideally participate in a functional society.