tierack

I've been through Clojure Programming, The Joy of Clojure, and Programming Clojure, and this is the one I'm recommending. The review hits on many of the reasons, but I also particularly liked how this book dealt with Java interop (not until after a solid foundation had been built around Clojure). I feel that many JVM language books jump too fast into talking about interacting with Java, to the detriment of learning the language in question.

I don't have a handle on the Python implementation landscape, but the various Rubies all regularly contribute to rubyspec[0] and report on how they're doing. And with rvm[1] it's incredibly easy to test code across rubies. From where I'm sitting, it seems dead simple to find the differences and how they could affect me.

0: https://github.com/rubyspec/rubyspec 1: http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/

Not only does Safari work, it uses this user agent: "Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B334b Safari/531.21.10"

Ruby dev - New York, NY

Hyperlocal news. Check out the description here: http://outside.in/jobs/ruby_software_engineer

Email me if you'd like to chat about it (or apply): [email protected]

I'm guessing it's internal, but made one of their marketing teams. (http://www.notesondesign.net/inspiration/advertising/google-...)

Whatever comes of this paper specifically, it's been a very entertaining couple of days to watch this unfold.

I only looked at the colors/fonts/seo section, and the quality there is abysmal. Web safe colors shouldn't really be a concern anymore. This was the real winner though: http://centricle.com/ref/css/filters/?highlight_columns=true CSS compliance for IE 4 on Mac OS 9 isn't pressing anymore.

See also this story of a biologist thinking that even fruit flies have free will: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN1532077920070516

I was thinking about legal monopolies or companies barely profitable by virtue of tax credits/breaks or companies that don't have to follow certain costly regulations for some (legal) reason.

Would those factors actually make them "not really profitable" or "not actually private businesses"? Or is this where the "In a sense" part of your reply breaks down? (These are legitimate questions, but I'm afraid it might sound snarky.)

Perhaps FexEx and UPS could "destroy" the USPS if they didn't have to worry about guaranteeing relatively quick delivery for envelopes from Kirby, WY to Boone, TN for the same inexpensive price as deliveries within a few blocks. The USPS may have laws supporting it, but don't we have expectations of it that far exceed whatever private business could hope to accomplish for profit?

(And, naively, aren't there many private businesses that couldn't make a profit without laws supporting them?)

This isn't copy protection, or even watermarking to identify who's "leaking the source".

Hand-copying text is error-prone, and copies are often made from copies, so there's the chance to reconstruct a "family tree" even after knowledge of what copied from what is lost.

See, for example, this: http://ahds.ac.uk/archaeology/creating/case-studies/canterbu...

Did you mean that you personally didn't like it? Or that it was objectively bad or unworthy of acclaim?

Yes, there are people who think that Catcher in the Rye was "a load of rubbish", but that doesn't make it so. Having a sympathetic protagonist isn't a requirement for good art; neither is not being boring to you personally at the time you first encountered it.

It's possible that now, with greater knowledge of the sweep of literary history, that you'd recognize what's good (or even great) about it.

I'm cautiously sympathetic to you. I used to think that Joan Miró was intensely overrated, but that was before I got some more schooling in 20th century painting. Now I'm happy to see his work when I visit modern art museums.

Typically, this sort of pattern means that "low income" includes low income students across all races, that's the only selection criterion for that group. The "white" group will include all white students (including low-income), and the "black" group will include all black students (including high-income). Nothing nefarious.

Why would courting a woman need to be couched in terms like "creating attraction", and why would it need to be as efficient as possible?

But the fact that "many psychological studies suggest" that intelligence (not IQ specifically) is changeable makes this a different scenario than outright lying to students as in your gym class example.

Whether or not the students are actually getting smarter is another question. But it doesn't look to me like anyone's getting lied to.

(edit: refactoring language)

In that case, /([^@]+)@(.+$)/.match("[email protected]")[0] returns the whole string matched by the expression, and [1] and [2] return the first and second groups. That's why the throwaway is there. To get rid of the throwaway, this is a possibility:

  username, domain = */([^@]+)@(.+$)/.match("[email protected]").captures

Of course, your string better match, otherwise you'll get a NoMethodError.

It seems like it would only work for subjects where students have the capacity to figure out errors on their own. It would be disastrous in a foreign language class if you were told the word for "mother" was "banana".

As I've mentioned in another discussion, I once had a math professor who would sneak in impossible problems into the homework (e.g. prove the continuum hypothesis). It worked very well to get us to spend countless hours just trying things out, and eventually to spur us to prove decidability of the problems, all of which made us much better. But I imagine it would get old fast if every class I took did something similar.

The stripe is perpendicular to the direction of the magnetic field of the galaxy and not in line with the ecliptic plane. The interview I heard here (http://ww.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyI...) suggests that the hydrogen that makes up the stripe is being continuously accumulated, not leftover from old times.

They're mostly gimmicky because they were all made for a middleware contest. Even their gimmickiness doesn't really go against the goals of the contest, the primary one being "to encourage Ruby developers to explore the possibilities".

In the end, even if very few end up being actually useful, there will be plenty of good short examples using a variety of different Rack tricks.

That said. Rack::Cache. And I wrote myself for one site that displays some extra info if a request comes from certain IPs (i.e. mine).

In a slight twist, and one that may only work for small classes of highly motivated students, I took a set theory class where the professor would sneak an impossible question into the homework. He warned us during the very first class that he would do that occasionally.

So every few weeks, the four of us in the class would spend days trying to prove the continuum hypothesis or something, and going over the homework, he'd get to the question and ask casually if anyone solved it. We'd all say no and he'd tell us no one could, and show us proof. But we all learned a hell of a lot trying. Sometimes an avenue we tried ended up proving something interesting on the way, and it sharpened our thinking.

Of course, we also got into the habit trying to prove something was provable before we started (which turned out helpful when, at the end of the year, we collectively recreated [with help] much of the groundwork for Gödel's big theorems).

There are a couple of reasons I'm not a huge fan of plans like this. I have a friend running for state legislature under a similar goal (though only district residents would vote on his votes, not all state residents), and these are the two big points I made to him.

1. Most people aren't equipped to think about the kind of issues that come up with legislation. There are subtle interactions between laws, small economic provisions can have huge market effects, and many sentences end up meaning the exact opposite of what they seem to say. Ideally (for me, though you may disagree), the person getting voted in is equipped by experience, education, and general smarts. I want someone voting who is studying law, proposed and current, and making informed decisions. I don't always get that, but I'm more likely to get that with one person than with many.

2. Many Americans are terribly prejudiced. Pick any poll you have handy showing that more than 50% of Americans believe in something ridiculous and imagine them voting on a law related to that belief. Historically, perhaps, this vision is dimmer. It's a cultural issue, not an absolute one, so if we get better as a people, this argument against will become less important.

I do like when these kinds of ideas are brought up, however. Lots of interesting talk happens.

I used to work for a online golf tee time company, and you're absolutely correct in saying that building a better online reservation system wouldn't be that hard (the bar is pretty low). I'm not sure about what smaller providers give the course, or how they charge, but the bigger ones also:

1) Provide a 24-hour call center, so no one at the golf course is answering reservation calls much anyway.

2) Provide POS systems, which means that almost all revenue is reportable through one interface.

3) Have rewards and tournament management built in. And also something to report scores to golf associations.

And instead of being paid in totally in cash, they're also paid in tee times, which the company resells itself.

But those are the big guys. I'm sure there are plenty of courses using simple webapps to manage tee times that are horrible. It'd be a good thing to shake that up.

From your first post (and my real contention):

> Placebos aren't working better because people have more faith in medicine, they're working better because of the Hawthorne effect; people feel like they have someone who cares about them.

The problem isn't that placebos are working better, the problem is that they're working better relative to medications. If it was merely an issue of "someone who cares about [the patients]" then we'd expect that the actual drugs would benefit from the same effect too. As it stands, the problem is that placebos have been working better, while the same drugs have been basically steady. If Prozac couldn't beat placebos now, it tells us something, but doesn't tell us anything about how much better things were back in the old days when when we were participating more in civic organizations and church.

To be blunt: citations needed.

The article not only talks about conditions that are clearly mental (depression) and ones that are arguably mentally related (IBS), but also ones that you'd have a hard time attributing to "lifestyle 'choices' that aren't really choices at all" (Parkinson's).

> Placebos aren't working better because people have more faith in medicine, they're working better because of the Hawthorne effect

The article talks about both effects and more (placebos working less well for conditions that are locally under-diagnosed, for example). The article presents a rich collection of causes for the rise of the placebo effect instead of a single cause. And I think Occam, who could appreciate the complexity of the brain and see that they've got data, would agree that it couldn't be as simple as you suggest.

(Also, across populations we don't all get exposed to the same media. Something tells me that there aren't constant erectile dysfunction commercials in Bangalore.)

The shortest path would be my maternal grandmother, who came to the United States from Australia after WWII. The longest path (on my maternal grandfather's side) goes back to before the Revolution.

Topologically speaking, the Earth is a 2-sphere. It's irregularities don't change that. On the other hand, a hairy coffee mug must be combable (since it's a doughnut).

As someone who received an MFA in creative writing I get nervous when this question comes up. I'm pleased, though, that the article matches my experience.

I think zimbabwe has a point that "the classroom rarely adds more than what students could get in a focused extracurricular group," but finding that group would be nearly impossible. Writing is a very solitary activity, and sharing unfinished work is (for the vast majority) a horrifying experience. You're not going to easily get those people together to recreate a regular (and good) workshop.

The workshop itself was pretty widely reviled by professors and students, and contact we had with writing departments elsewhere showed we weren't alone in that feeling. But I agree with the final thesis of the article that "workshops work". I'm pretty sure my stories and novel got better throughout, from criticism I received and from the sheer amount of practice I got. I ended up not writing after getting the degree (programming was more fun), but a few people I graduated with have started making names for themselves, and I feel pretty good about that. It suggests that maybe I could have if I stuck with it.

I sometimes think that a writing workshop could be nicely transferred to programming. It's been my experience that programmers are much more willing to share and accept advice on unfinished projects, and the little writing games that seem so lame to writers might translate better too.

The brief description of this little Arduino project why did was enough to get me started: http://twitter.com/_why/status/1065757843

I'd love to see it in person. Someone made and documented a similar idea here: http://www.urbanhonking.com/ideasfordozens/2009/02/the_git_b...

"It's not about discussion" is accurate, but not because Twitter is a narcissist platform. I think it's more akin to sending UDP packets (with no guarantee of delivery to the recipients) than email (with its excessive guarantees). It's even less like mass emails when it's being used like a low-priority broadcast (like when I use Twitter to say I'm headed to a particular bar, my friends are implicitly invited, but with the need to arrange times or RSVP, etc.).

In another sense, Twitter is about delayed discussion. It can set up future conversations that bypass some of the introduction. A friend tweets that he bought a house, he closes on this date, and moves in on that date; the next time I see him we have the chance to jump into an interesting conversation about the house and the process instead of him having to repeat that information for the millionth time.

And there's something else Twitter's done that I'm not sure could have happened before. I wrote a tweet about being in the Salt Lake City airport, and a friend of mine calls me to say "Hey, me too. Let's grab a drink." We hadn't seen each other in a while and neither of us knew the other was traveling or where. That wouldn't have happened a year ago. We would have missed that chance.

(I went a little further than I expected here. But Twitter has some real use cases people are still figuring out, and they're different than email or text or IM or phone calls. People using Twitter for "Here I am! Here's what I think is important! Listen to me." are doing it wrong.)