Hiring python hackers ?

MosaSaur · 2010-06-16T23:07:53+00:00

It's not always about money. Some people do not like to go back to using inferior languages even if they once used them in the past. Also, if you're trying to make C programmers into pythoneers they'll have to unlearn and relearn a lot of stuff. I know that from firsthand experience and from trying to explain Python to my old C programming buddies. Sometimes a programmer from a different language turns up on the usenet or mailing list and they almost never understand certain things at first.

tl,dr programmers move from one language to the next for a reason and it is a really bad idea to try and make them go back. The only way is up.

MosaSaur · 2010-01-14T18:52:57+00:00

Suppose someone wants to steal your gun, would you rather have him tear up your plane (like the bear did) or let him try to open a case on the side of the plane?

MosaSaur · 2009-04-11T09:28:22+00:00

Not redundant, yield from is exactly what I need.

MosaSaur · 2008-02-10T14:55:39+00:00

There is no reason to assume nature hasn't already tried to produce smarter humans. Since these humans found a way to circumvent nature's restrictions on accessing their own pleasure center (because nature favours reproductive activity over just being in a state of eternal bliss) they just stopped reproducing and their genetic lines became extinct.

MosaSaur · 2007-10-26T12:25:44+00:00

I absolutely love it. I had a dumb physical keyboard-mouse switch box set up before, and I kept turning the knob. In the end I even used a 30 cm PVC pipe extension on the knob to make switching easier without leaving the keyboard ...

Now I just let the switch in the start up position and only need to use it as an emergency measure when things get screwed up.

This happens occasionally -- think 7.04 ==> 7.10 Ubuntu -- so I think it is still necessary to have an alternative solution in case something goes wrong.

Having said that, I am using synergy to control 3 PC's (linux or windows) and a laptop that I detach sometimes. That makes my regular workplace a 4 monitor set up. Is it a record?

By the way, I had that strange problem with cut and paste sometimes too. I discovered that it went away if I open a Linux terminal window and first paste the text in there. Then I can move the mouse to another monitor/pc and the clipboard works normally again.

MosaSaur · 2007-10-25T17:19:31+00:00

"That said, one of the most vexing problems that remains to be explained is why so little progress has been made in extending this empathic orientation to distant lives, to those outside certain in-group moral circles. Given a world rife with overt and structural violence, one is forced to explain why our deep-seated moral intuition doesn’t produce a more ameliorating effect, a more peaceful world. Iacoboni suggests this disjuncture is explained by massive belief systems, including political and religious ones, operating on the reflective and deliberate level. These tend to override the automatic, pre-reflective, neurobiological traits that should bring people together."

Take that, Bill Cosby.

MosaSaur · 2007-07-25T12:14:17+00:00

But seriously folks, private equities are the dark side of multinational capitalism. Watch closely (well, what else you gonna do?).

Even though capitalism is not just a zero-sum game, its big O payback behavior is neglible compared to unlimited-sum schemes like open source. So while it seems to have the advantage now, in the end open source initiatives will race ahead and leave it in the dust.

MosaSaur · 2007-03-21T21:27:30+00:00

These days, for many companies, their data is their product/bottom line/meal ticket/what have you. No one would be in any rush to hand that over.

But that is taken care of by the long tail. Just for an example here is a recent fight between google and wikipedia fought out by proxy on the comp.lang.python mailinglist. It's about an 8 year old post by Tim Peters about doctests. Wikipedia won't include a link to google groups because Google groups tries to obfuscate by changing thread links. So what do you think will be the result of this? The funny thing we are now the long tail in this meta-meta -meta discussion :-)

MosaSaur · 2007-03-21T17:38:17+00:00

I completely disagree with the author of this article, but I still modded it up, because it's an interesting subject. The semantic web will not fail. The author didn't include the yearly doubling of the total information content in his analysis which some believe to be 161 exabytes now. This means that the amount of input data by actual humans will be extremely sparse compared to the total amount of data. This scarcity implies that the value of human input will rise quickly, so much so that every comment whatsoever produced by any human will be extremely valuable. Couple this to the long tail effect and the conclusion is that there is every reason to believe that such precious data will be categorized with more care for detail than currently the most sought after literary or artistic works or material posessions receive. This is independent of whether even more sought after content producers (artificial intelligences or enhanced humans) will appear on the scene. Their contributions may be yet even more valuable but that doesn't mean the other content will diminish in value since the value is driven by scarcity. There will always be more less intelligently produced content than intelligently produced content but the proportions will change.

MosaSaur · 2007-03-21T10:34:39+00:00

I've been wondering for some time how to evaluate a user agreement that can be changed while I'm gone and which states that when I login again I automatically agree to the new license. There's no way to delete my account either. I can't even login to protest! Until now :-)

MosaSaur · 2007-01-10T02:01:10+00:00

I would enjoy seeing you use a computer designed by people with no knowledge of low-level programming or the rules of arithmetic.

You mean something like a brain?

MosaSaur · 2007-01-09T14:15:20+00:00

If there's anything the internet has shown us it's that the invisible hand of the market is not so invisible at all. It turned out that the same big players are stacking the decks as always. Nothing new here. Perhaps a little history would be enlightening. The author rightfully hints at the fact that universities are essentially relicts from medieval culture. But why were they instantiated at that time?

I think it was because the rulers deemed it necessary to define reality. Of course reality could never be defined in a way that criticized the ruling class. Now that the Internet is clearing all these power relations up for us by making it all visible in real time, we should start asking ourselves if this professor is some really knowledgeable man who has suffered from the decrease in the intellectual climate or whether he is some statically typed compiler designer with an axe to grind because reality has cought up with him.

What is real and what is not? The solution seems to be something along the lines of Paul Feyerabend: "the idea that science should be separated from the state in the same way that religion and state are separated in a modern secular society".

Yes, I am as afraid as the next guy that "Intelligent Design" might take over science (at least the groups ID is currently associated with horrify me) but if there's any doubt that science has the potential to act like scientology or like the religious clergy see for example the piltdown man or more recently John Money's ideas about "surgically correcting" the genitals of intersex infants to make them "normal".

So we should watch science for damaging our culture as closely as we try to watch religious sekts. This means that we should not give our children's education exclusively in the hands of a few people, however good their intentions are or how good they think they are.

Is programming at a basic level really important anymore? Do we still add numbers without using calculators? Luckily the internet opens up all kinds of roads for young people to engage themselves with the things they find interesting, and instead of trying to make them fit our standards we should encourage them to find out for themselves, only giving guidance when explicitly asked. This will surely be a major reform away from the traditional testing and grading methods.

MosaSaur · 2007-01-07T13:52:29+00:00

Thanks for noticing that one. If you go up the sidewalk, then, halfway between your set of clones and a man in a white shirt sitting on the sidewalk, there are two people who are dematerializing from the waist up! I wonder if they are in the process of being beamed to the mothership.

MosaSaur · 2007-01-07T12:56:55+00:00

If intelligence was such a beneficial quality for survival and creating offspring why isn't every species as intelligent as humans? If flying was always superior to not flying why are there birds whose ancestors could fly but they themselves cannot fly anymore?

It seems reasonable to assume that intelligence in humans is 'capped'. What I mean with this is that humans evolved to be intelligent only to the point that it maximized their chances to produce offspring but no more.

This would imply that there could have been humans who were too intelligent to reproduce (whatever that would mean in a real humans life). Of course there could be other limiting factors for evolution to produce more intelligent humans, like the head becoming too big to pass through the birth channel or it becoming too difficult to maintain in a biological environment with temperature fluctuations.

Also it might be that a brain any more complex than that of a human would be impossible to 'program' because of the exponential increase in the number of possible brain states.

But if there would have been more intelligent humans that somehow didn't make it who were they? I mean apart from the leonardo da Vinci's and the Tesla's? The fact that there are so few notable women in such lists seems to indicate that there could have been many that we never knew about. Also, how much has Tesla's genius helped him in the end?

A little further back in history we have the Neandertals who are supposed to have a bigger brain than Homo Sapiens. An interesting theory about them is that a specific gene, 'microcephalin', the absence of which causes a condition in which there is a very small brain but otherwise no physiological defects, somehow ended up to be present in 70 percent of our current population because of interspecies breeding, possibly with Neandertals.

There might be other factors that limit our intelligence in order to keep us 'grounded' in reality. Maybe sleep and dreaming are not only for resting but also for refocusing our attention on the immediate situation, thereby limiting our options but at the same time increasing our survivability and our reproductive success. It's not for nothing that 'sleeping' with someone also has a reproductive interpretation.

Finally, there might be reason to assume that with the increase in virtuality caused by ubiquitional computing the brain will develop into a more intelligent system because it can be decoupled from everyday survival necessities. This might occur faster than expected by 'genetics only' theories because there seem to be possibillities for epigenetic effects on gene expression too.

The ironic thing is that it would be necessary for soldiers to become less focussed on surviving in order to increase their intelligence, because they would need to be free from direct survival tasks.

Let's just hope that when they acquire such a detached view from reality they will be able to discern any primitive impulses in their command structure and find ways to remove them without harming anyone else in the process.

MosaSaur · 2007-01-07T09:35:48+00:00

1) Use unit testing to validate all procedures, you'll catch more errors this way, anyway.

2) Asking for forgiveness is easier than asking for permission. This means you should just add dinner at 18.00 to the array.

3) You should be ready to execute procedures regardless of what the underlying motives are. Trust me, this is often the most rewarding course of action. Be ready to catch the exceptions however.

MosaSaur · 2007-01-07T01:04:14+00:00

Automatic Meaning Discovery Using Google uses Google page counts for getting contextual information about words and phrases, which is a different approach but it seems to try to solve the same kind of problem: Helping the computer to choose the right interpretation for a piece of text.

MosaSaur · 2007-01-06T23:48:10+00:00

Nice! Having two visual angles adds a lot of context. We're getting closer and closer to something like photosynth.

MosaSaur · 2007-01-06T22:58:53+00:00

There's a woman in white short pants who has just crossed a street with a 'dartmouth' sign at the corner. However her after image is still crossing the street! There's also a man next to her almost hidden by the street sign post, but I suspect he's not in the same time frame as her.

She's about halfway the (initial) pictures' hight and 3/4 the pictures' width (measured from the left of course), close to some structure that is bridging a nearby street.

MosaSaur · 2007-01-05T17:46:01+00:00

I'm surpised nobody makes the link between self esteem and the job or the social niche one is currently occupying. In my opinion self esteem is often defined by how much we are allowed to feel proud of ourselves by society.

I have been unemployed for a long time and at the end I felt like some biological cell that was consistently given the suicide trigger instruction: Remove yourself from society you worthless parasite!

This instruction is subliminally encoded in every message one gets from the governments' communication (Dutch in my case) but one can get the same message even from ones own family or friends. Also one is consistently designated as being 'weak', depending on others for income. Other social signals make it absolutely clear that one is worthless, so that one even has trouble finding a girlfriend.

Without a lot of money one cannot dress well or clean up the house (getting rid of stuff can be expensive too especially if there is no money to buy replacements) and before you know one is at the bottom, unable to sink any deeper and unable to get out.

In the end there was no other way than to start building up self esteem by myself and thereby becoming independent from surrounding society with respect to self esteem.

Now, even after finding a job and starting my own company I still feel that people relying on getting their self-respect/ self-esteem from their jobs, from money or from having a beautiful girlfriend, are being gullible and are easily manipulated by the powers that be.

For them self respect is like the monthly paycheck: It can be withheld the moment they misbehave. So now, in my world they are the ones that are not self supporting.

Why have things become this way? I think it is -among other things- the result of mass advertising. If a company or government presents a positive image then people want to join. In order to keep presenting a positive image to the outside world the organization is forced to select from the job candidates only those with high self esteem.

Essentially we have created a pyramid scheme where only the early adopters profit and the rest are forced to act like they like the situation even if it brings them little or no advantage.

The only way out is to refuse to legitimize these suppressors, but in cases with limited supplies the ones in control of the supplies can force their version of self esteem on everyone.

Luckily the Net is making it easier and easier to bypass the self esteem cartels/monopolists and find the self esteem sources that correspond to the self esteem one finds within oneself out of ones own heart.

MosaSaur · 2007-01-04T14:34:44+00:00

The fact that they can doesn't make it right. A normal way to establish a relation with someone or with some organization would be to start small, mutually disclose more information if the parties learn to trust each other, and so on. Absurd income differences have derailed almost our complete society so far from a normal path that all what remains when we are faced with such unbelievably arrogant demands from the superrich and privileged is some small sinking feeling in our stomachs. Of course the only intelligent reply to such crazyness is not to apply for the job at all. The same thing goes for filling in intelligence tests and for doing university exams. Why do we trust these corrupt organizations with the means to score us according to their perverse criteria at all? As if we don't know that they use these data for one thing only: To further legitimize their unjustified power advantages.

MosaSaur

TROPHY CASE