wordplay

I'm interested in where this is going. Do you have a citation?

I frequently get thrown into projects with aging codebases, technical debt, and few people around who wrote the original code.

In this scenario using this kind of verbose state logging starts to sound like a huge win, especially if tools exist to visualize how state mutation is different on various legs and use that information to infer dependency guesses between execution branches.

I think this is more about the control you lose with a phone conversation vs. a text conversation.

I am continually impressed with Warren. If only more of the politicians in this country were as interested in serving the public interest as she is.

Subjectivity doesn't mean it's bullshit, we might just be measuring the wrong thing. Genetics + a oral chemistry test might be a far better predictor of what wines you'll enjoy than an expert's opinion.

I've been thinking about the general business plan problem for years. Not only because it's a very real problem, but also because as I'm walking through a swap meet or a grocery store I'm perpetually curious about margins and return on capital for the many tiny to medium businesses for which almost no intelligence exists. If I could figure out a way to bootstrap a crowd sourced resource for these I'd be working on it right now...but alas.

In your case, if you haven't done so already, I'd suggest attempting to buy advertising from a site similar to the one you'd like the build. Maybe even invest some dollars advertising your own product (non-profits are interesting guinea pigs too) to get some idea of the volume of traffic they enjoy and the prevailing rate that advertisers are willing to pay for access to their audience. Once you have data you can start building some models and establishing ranges inside which the business makes sense to pursue. I've done this kind of research myself and for clients on multiple occasions, it's not bulletproof but it's a valuable start.

You may have hit on something here.

There is no guarantee that any item will be worth any amount of another item. You can make claims about the relative likelihood that some item will be exchangeable for some quantity of another item, but you cannot claim that in every future scenario your item will be exchangeable for any amount of another item.

Just because a transaction looks more like barter than commercial doesn't magically convert the ideas underpinning fundamental economics. At this level of understanding economics is more a study of sociological systems and less about banking, fiat currencies, and all the other modern mumbo-jumbo we go on about these days.

This is really key when discussing some utopian reality where we've untethered ourselves from any form of currency--an exchange of value is tied to the very earliest societal systems. Unless society shrinks back into nomadic wandering tribes some form of value exchange (aka: currency) will exist.

TDD done correctly should allow the validation of "speed of thought" changes. It happens to me often that ideas spawned between my ears break functionality in the actual application if the application is complex. It doesn't mean that the idea was invalid, tests simply illuminate what else needs to be changed if you'd like to go forward with the change.

Add to that a willingness to deal with the absurdities of running for and holding public office...that may be the scarcest resource of all.

Would a true libertarian society view nations as pseudo corporations and citizens as shareholders? Would the more highly compensated individuals be considered to have a larger stake in the state?

Can this also be applied to CPU assembly?

http://youtu.be/MShbP3OpASA?t=20m50s "If you think like a computer, writing C actually makes sense."

There's a difference, subtle though it may be to some, between common legal practices in food and drug production and conspiring to criminally poison consumers for profit. Many of the items you mention are likely bad for the long term health of our species--but I would compare them more readily to medical practices in the dark ages than the short sighted and improperly structured health / regulatory environment we have today.

I'm deeply concerned about the world my children will inherit, but it's difficult for educated mainstream individuals to take the issues you point out seriously if they are presented from a paranoid and conspiracy theory embracing perspective. Even taking a giant leap and supposing any of the conspiracies exist to the extent some claim, the presentation still suffers because of a lack of willingness by the populace to embrace such a dark view of a society that they participate in.

They should have a tutorial that walks me through how to accomplish example project in the promo video. From what I can tell I would have to import all those prime minister pages from Wikipedia manually?

PS. I'm very interested in the ideas behind the semantic web, and the video hints that Silk may have gotten closer than anyone else at successfully "building the human" into the software design. IMO it's all about removing friction and I see some promising ideas in that regard, so congrats to Silk for that!

Fascinated by the nascent eco-system of apps built on top of email. To PG's point in one of his essays about fixing email...I wonder if the transition to the future of email lies in using email as a protocol.

As applications are developed that better utilize some of the structured data within email, do we eventually transition to a world where very few emails under a certain threshold are read...but instead parsed for information content. Thus potentially putting the receiver back in control of the overall experience?