nefreat

I just picked one egregious example to compare to Korolev and other researchers that suffered. If you want to compare systemic examples like the Gulags then the Jim Crow system that effectively instituted slavery [1] and likely killed way more than 1.7 million people. Alabama alone imprisoned 200,000 blacks as effectively slaves[2].

Again I am not trying to dismiss the crimes of the Soviet Union but I almost never see the same analysis applied to the US.

[1] https://www.aclu.org/news/human-rights/captive-labor-exploit...

[2] https://www.newsweek.com/book-american-slavery-continued-unt...

You're right it could've been a lot greater however you should apply the same analysis towards the USA as well.

If you're black you're all but barred from participating in the space program. This was only recently acknowledged in a Hollywood feel good movie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures

The space program was bootstrapped by Nazis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

I'm saying they achievements could've been a lot greater if the system didn't try to mutilate and murder it's subjects: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/history/40-years-human-exp...

Мир

Abel Prize is pretty popular and has esteemed winners. The only requirement is that the person being nominated be alive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abel_Prize

I find the criticism of cprop a bit bizarre. Configurations of apps have many use cases. Some people package config files with the app on the classpath others use fs. Some do a combination of the two. Others use environment variables. Any practical configuration lib should be able to handle these use cases if the need arises.

The fact that the author finds it odd that cprop parses edn and calls it "type coercion" like it's a negative is strange. What would the author prefer? max-connections-num to be a string? If you want strings put quotes around the values.

> This is backpressure: your home-grown configuration system resists being extended, and it’s a good thing.

Or there's the real world where you need to address a business concern to get things working where someone asks a reasonable request to be able to override a setting with an environment variable. Luckily your configuration library already handles this and you can go back to doing interesting work instead of bikeshedding your home-grown system that resists change.

Many people in the tech industry don't realize the tradeoffs they are making by participating on FB. This is to say nothing of the nontechnical crowd who make up the overwhelming majority of the site.

My wish is that mainstream news media would cover these issues. It'd be great if most of FB's users thought about the troves of personal info that they are providing not just about themselves but their friends as well.

I think it would be pretty hard to write something like algo.monads in python when macros are not available.

https://github.com/clojure/algo.monads

Because Mickey Mouse is an idea while a farm is not. Claiming ownership of metaphysical concepts like Mickey Mouse is very different from claiming ownership of something that's scarce and rivalrous such as the farm.

There's a thread on reddit a while ago that explains this quite well. http://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2j3xar/til_tha...

There is a great book available for free about the topic: Against Intellectual Monopoly[1] which does a great job detailing how IP is actually destructive to innovation and hurts society as a whole. The authors cover many topics from pharma to tech.

1. http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.h...

> You seem pretty accustomed to economics. Can you explain how exactly or why would anyone buy any items (that's what currencies are for after all) using a deflationary currency?

This is identical to arguing: Why would anyone buy computers when they are getting cheaper every year. At some point you make a choice where your preference for owning a computer is greater than your preference to save money.

> So actually, in my view, BTC as a currency is already failed. No one will be eager to buy online (perform an actual exchange) when he can buy the same items using USD, because BTC will possibly have a higher value tomorrow. While the USD almost certainly will not.

Gold is deflationary. When gold was the primary currency for the world commerce was very vibrant. Gold not being currency is a fairly recent development. People currently purchase things online with bitcoins when they could use dollars but choose to use bitcoins. I think it's very early to write off bitcoins as a failed currency.

SICP shows us how to do this as an exercise 1.19. http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-11.html...

In scheme:

  (define (square x) (* x x))
  (define (fib n)
    (fib-iter 1 0 0 1 n))
  (define (fib-iter a b p q count)
    (cond ((= count 0) b)
          ((even? count)
           (fib-iter a
                     b
                     (+ (square p) (square q))      ; compute p'
                     (+ (* 2 p q) (square q))       ; compute q'
                     (/ count 2)))
          (else (fib-iter (+ (* b q) (* a q) (* a p))
                          (+ (* b p) (* a q))
                          p
                          q
                          (- count 1)))))

> The reality is that there is massive state intervention in the productive economy and the free-trade agreements are anything but free-trade agreements. That should be obvious. Just to take one example: The information technology (IT) revolution, which is driving the economy, that was based on decades of work in effectively the state sector – hard, costly, creative work substantially in the state sector, no consumer choice at all, there was entrepreneurial initiative but it was largely limited to getting government grants or bailouts or procurement. Except by some economists, that’s underestimated but a very significant factor in corporate profit. If you can’t sell something, hand it over the government. They’ll buy it.

> After a long period – decades in fact – of hard, creative work, the primary research and development, the results are handed over to private enterprise for commercialization and profit. That’s Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and so on. It’s not quite that simple of course. But that’s a core part of the picture. The system goes way back to the origins of industrial economies, but it’s dramatically true since WWII that this ought to be the core of the study of the productive economy.

Can someone comment on this? I am of course aware of ARPA and DARPA but is it really as one sided as he says?

This sounds like a more care-free way to do the same thing as http://unlicense.org

Personally I'd choose unlicense instead of WTFPL.

You may be interested in learning how Hollywood came into existence (http://www.free-culture.cc/freeculture.pdf) or America's roles in industrial revolution (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-01/piracy-and-fraud-pr...).

Most of the industries that vigorously support intellectual property now benefited the most from public domain knowledge and blatant piracy of ideas.

I think a better way to phrase the poll would be: Which alternative JVM language do you actively use most?

I've met a lot of people who like and use groovy and have it in production but almost nobody who actively uses clojure or scala. Maybe I am biased by my social circle or maybe people are just answering the poll based on what language they think is coolest and not the one they actually use.

I wonder how effective cramming it all in 5 days. I would be interested in how much he remembers after 2 months.