glomek

That absolutely may have been a factor.

However, what 26 year old computer nerd without a black belt wouldn't give suicide some thought when staring at an unjust sentence in a federal prison of fifty years, AKA five decades, AKA half a century, AKA the majority of their remaining life expectancy, AKA about twice as long as their entire life up to that point and more than twice as long as they can remember?

Who wouldn't at least consider suicide when faced with the realization that even with time off for good behavior, by the time they got out they'd be closer to retirement age than to a reasonable age for restarting a career? That they'd have spent the most productive years of their life rotting away in prison instead of producing?

Weighing your pain avoidance instinct against your self preservation instinct is entirely rational. We don't put all of the blame on mental illnes, even if the person was mentally ill, when someone jumps to their death from a burning building or when a cancer patient opts for euthanasia. It's inappropriate to do so for Aaron Swartz.

Aaron Swartz being dead is becoming annoying.

MIT needs to be shamed publicly, regularly and continuously until they publicly apologize for their shameful behavior.

Giving this award to Swartz, and giving the money to his parents, along with a public statement of remorse and a public commitment to behaving more honorably in the future, would be an excellent way for them to do this.

It doesn't matter if Aaron Swartz is ineligible. We should still nominate him. We should nominate him so many times that granting the award to anyone else makes this award an obviously disingenuous publicity stunt.

> Every platform that is public and anonmyous runs afoul of this, this isn't just twitter. You can look at Youtube comments, reddit, pretty much any forum.

We had ways of dealing with this on Usenet back in the day. 1) Thick skin, and 2) killfiles. Generally, killfiles weren't for people with whom you disagreed (though they could be, if you wanted), they were for people who were assholes.

> Free speech has a legal definition, and Twitter doesn’t qualify.

The legal definition of free speech is based on a moral principle, for which Twitter does qualify.

When a platform such as Twitter or Facebook becomes the de facto public square, then a ban from Twitter or Facebook is a de facto ban from the public square.

I don't care about Milo in particular, but I do care about the fact that censorship by Twitter or Facebook is real censorship.

LiveCode looks very attractive, but I have trouble comprehending your interpretation of the GPL.

At http://livecode.com/support/ask-a-question/at-what-point-do-... you say: "The FAQ on the FSF website states that the GPL does not apply to code simply “executed with an interpreter”. LiveCode is far more than a simple language interpreter and each language call utilizes internal libraries within the platform. These libraries provide the platform’s entire functionality and rich feature set."

However, every interpreter works by making calls to "internal libraries within the platform" which "provide the platform's entire functionality and rich feature set." If an interpreter did not contain the code to do the things that the interpreted language can do, then it wouldn't do anything at all and it wouldn't be an interpreter.

While I find LiveCode attractive, this license weirdness makes me uncomfortable enough that I haven't explored it even for my Open Source projects. It's not often that I find license interpretations that make Richard Stallman look moderate.

Yikes! That's different!

But it still doesn't have the one feature that I've been wishing they would implement forever. In a collection of audio files, I wish they would provide a podcast feed. It would be so nice to be able to listen to Old Time Radio shows as podcasts.

As I understand the code, an "Atom" is like a tagged pointer. It gets passed around by value, sometimes it contains the value itself (numbers), and sometimes it contains a pointer to something malloc'd. So an AtomType_Pair is an atom in the sense that it gets passed around by value like an atom, but it is a pointer to a malloc'd pair.

What strikes me is that Atom's are being copied by value all over the place, even when a good chunk of them don't matter. I don't know whether the optimizer can help with that or not, but it seems like there could be a lot of unnecessary copying during procedure calls and returns.

That sounds like a way to write programs that use a bluetooth attached gotenna. Is that correct?

What I am asking is, could I talk to a gotenna using another radio setup of my own creation. Are you publishing enough information about gotenna for me to do that?

Do you intend to release the specifications for the protocol you are using? For example, would I be able to hook a computer with gnuradio up to a MURS radio and write software that could communicate with a goTenna?

Netflix just keeps creeping one tiny step at a time farther and farther away from the awesomeness that they once were.

I used to love Netflix. I was a loving, loyal, evangelical customer and fan.

Now I just find them somewhat useful. In the future, who knows?

The Serval Project is already working on this: http://www.servalproject.org/

Unfortunately, they are limited by Google's very long standing lack of response to requests to support peer to peer WiFi on Android. See https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=82

It's a pity that there is no discussion of the fact that the 2 interpreters use different scoping. The 1st uses lexical scoping, and the 2nd uses dynamic scoping.

It's also a pity that there is no discussion of the “label” special form, even though its implementation was right there in the code being discussed. This is a very fertile area for conversation.

For example, why is it that McCarthy was able to implement recursive procedures with “label” so simply without using any assignment or mutation?

Wonderful story, but I kept wondering the whole time, why weren't they printing out every useful bit of survival and geographical and machine maintenance and biofuel making information they could find online in preparation for the generators running out of fuel?

> you treat them like the primary creators of value for you company, and yourself as their support staff

Bingo! The best managers I have had over the years spent far more time getting me what I needed in order to do my job than they did telling me what to do. They also got the most value out of me, and ended up looking the best in front of their bosses.

> How do you incentivize the good ones to work for you?

Easy. Instead of giving the programmers managers, put the programmers in charge of their own projects and give them administrative assistants to handle all of the non-programming and non-decision-making parts of the job.

This really is an amazing opportunity for Amazon.

If they were to drop DRM and allow third party applications on the Kindle, they could blow Apple out of the water.

Scratch is an amazing piece of work. It's sad that the license prevents it from ever being part of a default OS install.

Now is it just me, or is finding the person you want to hire, and then advertising for the position locally, getting the cart before the horse? Whadaya bet the advertisement is overly specific and tailored just for the guy they want to hire?

Seems fine to me. If you want the captured variable to be different each time, you need to create a new environment each time. How about this?

    >>> fs = [(lambda x: (lambda n: x + n))(i) for i in range(10)]
    >>> [f(4) for f in fs]
    [4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13]
    >>>

It's partly a matter of definition. I usually don't feel like I'm getting work done during meetings, but sometimes I still need to be at them. I usually don't feel like I'm getting work done when I'm talking with coworkers about workplace politics, but I find that it's necessary in order to avoid being blindsided by politics that I wasn't aware of. I usually don't feel like I'm getting work done when I'm waiting for or pestering someone else to do something so that I can proceed, or when I'm waiting for a long installer, but I can't leave it because it asks me questions every now and again. I usually don't feel like I'm getting work done when I'm doing paperwork, but it still needs to be done.

All together, four hours of work a day that feels productive (like I'm "really working") isn't that far from the norm for me, and some weeks I don't even get that far. But it's not because I don't want to do more, it's usually because I can't because of other things that are very much "work" and that I am very much expected to do by my employer, but that just don't feel like work to me.

While four hours a day of "real work" may not sound like much, my employer is actually much happier with me than it would be if I spent 8 hours a day doing "real work" and ignoring all of the "fake work" that I'm also expected to do.

There are many ways to affect others. You can help them, comfort them, share with them, remind them that not all Christians are fundamentalists, ...

No, some Christians are bailing on GoDaddy because of the ads. Many of us just don't care.

A whole lot of Christians are not Fundamentalist Christians who want to control your life and dictate your morals. Unfortunately, the sane ones don't get nearly as much press.

I dumped Mathematica many, many years ago when they turned evil and started making it stop working after a month if you haven't registered it.

I heard years ago that Ruby 1.9 was going to have tail call optimization, but I can't find it anywhere in the news file. Does anyone know if this made it in or not?

My guess is that CS degrees are not valued because most of them are not particularly valuable.

The average CS department would flunk out most of their students, whither away, and die if they demanded the level of ability that MIT or Berkeley (for example) demand. It would be better for the industry as a whole if this were to happen, but not for the instructors teaching in those average CS departments.

Top schools can afford to be demanding because they have talented people trying to get in. Top schools can afford to teach theory and start with Scheme, because their students have some trust in them. If Unknown U's CS department started with SICP and Scheme, a bunch of their students would go "This is useless!" and leave, so they use Java.

As it stands, a motivated self learner who buys and reads the textbooks used by top schools is likely to end up knowing far more CS than the average person with a CS degree. Of course, this same motivated self learner, if they got a CS degree, would probably also end up knowing far more CS than the average person with a CS degree. Net result? You need to judge each individual on their own merits, and most CS degrees won't give you any shortcuts.

> Far too many people go to college.

I am convinced that many people go to college only to become employable, not because they have any academic interest to pursue.

If a high school diploma actually meant that you could read and write and multiply and divide, then maybe there wouldn't be as many jobs out there requiring college degrees when all they really need are the skills you should have learned in high school.

Has anyone been able to find the original "Mindset Profile" from "Mindset Media" about this? My searches so far have turned up a bunch of commentary but no original references.