lvecsey

I'd like to see the department of education put out a list of skills that are needed and for what purpose, or end goal. There needs to be some grand vision, perhaps to unify the country like the moon landing did. Clinton wants people to instantiate jobs by focusing on alternative energy projects. Mostly I just see this desire for jobs, schooling, and a few other things as a means to keep people busy and to fit the mold or dream of a finely balanced social, psychological, utopia.

So do those 8 machines and the code on it represent the system before or after the Wamu merger, or something in between? I've heard many of these banks such as Citigroup have something like 13 different databases or systems, many of which duplicate functionality.

Do articles like this always emerge at a certain point in the boom bust cycle or tied to politics? Because it seems like right now the societal "noise" has peaked, and the 3/4 populace needs a refresher.

I don't think you can necessarily verbally articulate some goals. Someone like Dave Letterman may have had a vision as he watched baseball on a black and white TV, and then Johnny Carson. But presumably it's taken him a lifetime to get close to what he had in mind.

You don't just take a kid and say "these are the heuristics you need. It's clear this is what you want to achieve, so these are the ingredients. Diverge from this at your own peril."

It might work if you want to recycle the existing societal structures and keep them in perpetuity as is. I suppose that's perfectly reasonable. You'll be excluding a hell of a lot of innovation though.

That quote or statement just shows that an individual living a "thug life" or succumbing to the tremendous peer pressure of youth basically is completely out of touch with the larger mechanics at play, such as congressional decisions and corporatocracy.

"One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one president, and nine Supreme Court justices equates to 545 human beings out of the 300 million are directly, legally, morally, and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country."

That's a quote dug up from a (spam?) comment, article or forwarding at reddit.

I agree about the manipulation and control terminology, to a point. Perhaps some people consider that "smarts" but mostly I reserve "smarts" to be a term for people sort of half way in and half way out of the system. It's a compromise of sorts to be nimble and not get run over. The cumulative effect of that might still be bad, though.

I thought it was pretty much determined that most employees just need a minimum amount of salary met, at which point they're fine. Kind of like maintaining a lawn or pool; don't add a stressor by cutting things so close to the limit, but rather keep things plush, so there are no issues.

The combat soldier takes a calculated risk, and is there to assist because not doing so would be too powerful of a demoralizing force and fill themselves with regret. People leap into action at those moments because the alternative is incomprehensibly unacceptable.

I don't think it's fear so much as perceiving a particular conception of simple as bland. It would be a sign of failure to demote oneself to that, and secondly it does not jive with the concept of a long and difficult journey.

Things can be outwardly simple and have a complex underbelly, or vice versa, or some other mix. Anyway, I think this article is tied up with passion because if you lose it, fail to renew it, or actively destroy it, too much resistance develops to proceed.

Didn't GS have a losing second quarter? Perhaps this spin-off has more to do with how they perceive the next quarter is going too, and worries about business beyond that.

I've wondered this before but basically programming gives you this illusion that you can change the world, to the point of self assembling systems and new transportation and construction possibilities. Perhaps it's just an illusion. Or maybe we'll look back in a few decades and think how majorly held back innovation has become, to protect some notion of corporate interest.

It's interesting to consider that entire societies have been built around these concepts. Usually when I see the Implicature thing that has been mentioned here, I often question whether the exact opposite (or something else all together) should be considered first; from there, you can think about whether everyone might be right.

Similarly, with those maxims about communication it's as if everyone is striving for a genuine meaning. However, if you take things to their limit there is nihilism everywhere.

The aliens, asper people, and 3/4's of everyone could just be unaware but also just rejecting the conventional notions of conversation.

In the pursuit of how stuff works.

Actually it's tied to the crisis at NASA, and to a larger extent the country. I don't know why people are afraid of confronting an issue like this. It's as if by ignoring it and saying our institutions are ok, things will work themselves out on their own. No.

Isn't it the case that legal issues are often a bottleneck to getting products to market? The traits listed for "taking the plunge" have been described elsewhere (I think by pg) as the "rat" phenomenon. Basically there are a new breed of super rats which will persist and bootstrap or gain traction, to the detriment of conventional or historic VC interaction.

The advent of online trading (with the floor traders going bye bye) is another peg in the coffin, I think. It very well may be possible to day trade as a primary means, with only a secondary concern of bootstrapping or working on a startup. With priorities like that the startup just becomes a passionate "can it be accomplished?" pursuit, because by comparison the profit incentive just isn't there.

Can any savings be had by committing to a data center instead of paying the amazon hosting rates? I fear if they're at yet another crunch point, the next one will be too much. Granted the pressure to "do more with less" is always there, but something has to give.

At some point the light switch and the faucet controls will have to go. But we can't get to that stage if people have trouble with a side swipe or other twist and tweak.

I agree that it's brain dead to have a major site like Dell always changing their website interface, just to keep things "fresh" or make it seem like some layer in management actually did something every 3 months. The concept of a mouse and menu choices however goes back to the Xerox photocopier developments, and have yet to be shed. For example a better input scheme could be using keyboard input for navigation but only if the prevailing rule is to be smart about it. Consistency is important but secondary!

Society has a little bit of iTex in all its products.

I don't think anything is really ever lost so long as you support the system by remaining a US citizen. Losses in the financial markets and in business just get carried forward, at the very least in terms of experience. It feels like time is being wasted but I think that's just an illusion from the Obama doctrine of spreading the wealth around; at some point down the line, money will be made again hand over fist to both confirm the system is in play and that people are being taken advantage of.

I don't think the article mentioned it but there was a point well after the Linux kernel reached prominence that it was understood the HURD was just a back burner project. GNU has still had a huge impact on everything from IT data centers to Apple, and arguably you wouldn't even have initiatives like Wikipedia without it either. It's like the building block that allowed everyone else to place a cherry.

How about a 4chan style message board in the sense that posts expire very rapidly, but also in that only single topics are allowed for certain time intervals. For example the site could start off with a 24 hour cycle in that dialog can take place on a certain topic (such as BP oil spill) based on the first message that has come in that day. It'll need some means of aggressively pruning out (marking as spam) messages that are deemed off topic, but this can be a voluntary (karma based) or a machine learning approach that could also be tweaked or plugged in beyond the 4 week development period. The initial version would just keep topics on lock down for an additional 24 hour period, before permanent deletion. So basically there is one active topic, and one previous topic for review.

I was listening to a project proposal the other day and had a similar set of questions to guide the conversation. It was actually with a psychologist and I think that field and way of thinking represents the exact flip side of the type of rational thought that is reinforced and developed by programming. I'll likely end up turning down the project; my biggest fear is getting sucked into something that won't conclude well, so I'm going to use this fleshed out guideline next week and see how many of the steps I can reach clarity on.

Even the notion of being human is outdated. There were previous century views and now we're in a new era, with deeper understanding of what makes us up. We've gone from a blob of living matter, to a horrendously intricate biological machine.

Xerox is another example. I think these areas thrive on the surrounding incompetence and that you can't really have one without the other.

Need a monster version built out of top fuel dragster components.

There is no sense of competition anymore in this society, with yourself or others. Everyone just wants to blend into to previously considered notions of normality.

Hacker news might need a vector arrow over it. In other words, has the direction of conversation changed from one where "hackers" (those that grok a vast or complete portion of a given system, and can identify and implement a clever tweak) can have vibrant discourse to one where the VC side of the coin has come here to observe, and essentially squash out the dialog in the process? (uncertainty principle involving observation and position)

As the hackers post less they become lurkers observing the commentary of the business folks. Eventually, interest is lost in even that. I recognize a VC professional could be redefined, interpreted, or understood as a hacker operating within the domain of the larger business and financial world, so I give them credit for that.

I think this article shows that there are broadly two types of people. Those that perhaps hold onto notions of living from their very early years, and others that are constantly questioning and delving into things to see where they lead.

I don't know if there is a simple term for it but another thing this reminds me of is how often people that actually take time out to think through a solution for something are considered "dumb" by the majority that just prefer to tap into the existing knowledge base. I think that'll change but there might not necessarily be a way to force the progression. It'll just start to happen when there are no other options.

It's almost like there is an attempt to normalize all of human behavior, nearly to a borg-like state but with a "I am human!!" undertone. Neurotypical for the win, is the motto.

I think people try to use his age against him. But too bad. It's his company and let him run it the way he wants.

Particularly if it goes against the old, ingrained ways of thinking I'm all the more for it.

Too bad the printable version omitted the diagram.