GreedyCapitalist - Slashdot User

Some lesser-known truths about programming-> 0

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GreedyCapitalist

on Saturday August 28 2010, @05:17AM

GreedyCapitalist writes "Great programmers spend little of their time writing code — at least code that ends up in the final product. Programmers who spend much of their time writing code are too lazy, too ignorant, or too arrogant to find existing solutions to old problems. Great programmers are masters at recognizing and reusing common patterns. Good programmers are not afraid to refactor (rewrite) their code constantly to reach the ideal design. Bad programmers write code which lacks conceptual integrity, non-redundancy, hierarchy, and patterns, and so is very difficult to refactor. It’s easier to throw away bad code and start over than to change it."
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Did Hayek provide the inspiration for Wikipedia?-> 0

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GreedyCapitalist

on Wednesday September 19 2007, @10:52AM

GreedyCapitalist writes "Jimmy Wales was a finance major at Auburn University when the Mises Institute's Mark Thornton suggested he read "The Use of Knowledge in Society," a now-famous essay written by Austro-libertarian economist and Nobel laureate Friedrich von Hayek.
The essay argues that prices in the market represent a spontaneous order that results from the interaction of individuals with diverse wants, allowing them to cooperate to achieve complex goals. According to a June 2007 Reason magazine interview, this insight of Hayek's is what led Wales to found Wikipedia. The rather lofty vision that inspired Wales? "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.""
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Do politicians know more than rocket scientists?

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GreedyCapitalist

on Monday April 16 2007, @07:35PM

GreedyCapitalist writes "Are politicians more knowledgeable than rocket scientists when it comes to planning the next U.S. moon shot?
Politicians may have a number of reasons for preserving missions that teams of NASA specialists deem unnecessary: the media from moon rovers is a cheap thrill, it preserves funds promised to constituents ($105.8m in '07), and it competes with similar missions from half a dozen other nations, which will "end up with lots of pictures of the same place."
Good publicity, certainly, but not an efficient way to run a space program. Is this an inevitable consequence of government-run science?"

Top Predictions of our Techno-Utopian Future

Submitted by

HeroicLife

on Monday January 29 2007, @06:52PM

HeroicLife writes "Killer (medicine-eating) robots, nuclear apocalypse, nano goo, mass starvation, class warfare or climate hell — is this our future? Or can we look forward to a technological utopia that fulfills our every whim but bores us to death? Here's an unusually positive outlook that answers the most common doomsday scenarios and offers some things to look forward to. "The sum of all these innovations will gradually change the way we define ourselves. Our consciousness becomes the central processing unit of a complex system, with external storage and sensor facilities spread across the world and to other people. As human-computer interfaces improve, our sense of self will evolve to include our digital memories as well as those of others...""