> We may end up favoring “goody two-shoes” personality types who were on the straight and narrow from their earliest years and disfavor those who rebelled at young ages, even if those people might end up being more creative later on."
We'll keep on doing what we've been doing since the dawn of time: reward Machiavellian behavior.
The guy that creates a controlled fire and puts it out will be praised.
The guy that cleans the dead foliage to prevent future fires will be punished for being unproductive and a dead weight.
Any discussion of interstellar trade deserves a mention of the fantastic Charles Stross book "Neptune's Brood". I went into it expecting more or less a sequel to "Saturn's Children" but what I got was a treatise on monetary policy for economies that span multiple star systems. The concept of slow and fast money and its implications is utterly fascinating and the book is worth reading just for its explorations of the topic (the plot isn't too bad either).
A quick Google search brought me to this post by Krugman[0]:
I’m reading an advance copy of Charlie Stross’s Neptune’s Brood. (Hey, I have connections!)
And it is the best thing by far written on the subject to date, partly because it is, as far
as I know, the only thing written on the subject to date.
If you are looking for a way to generate flowchart diagrams from a DSL description, the classic is Brian Kernighan's PIC: http://doc.cat-v.org/unix/v8/picmemo.pdf
I am surprised at the amount of people that have never heard of it. It is probably already installed on your Unix system. There are several implementations with various improvements, such as https://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~aplevich/dpic/
I'm really interested in learning more about data science. Currently attending moocs to learn R but I don't have much free time and it's a slow progress. Currently I work as analyst for an environmental consulting firm but I always wanted to work in something related to quants. I know I'm probably being naive but I want to change careers. Do you guys recommend that I keep learning R or should I take a closer look to Julia? Or both? I don't have a programming background but I do know statistics and Excel. Edit: fast, concise and useful comments in a matter of minutes, I love HN. Thanks!
The usual plug for sharelatex here. Check out sharelatex.com, it is amazing. Write LaTeX without having to install it, plus collaboration in the cloud. (I'm not affiliated, just a fan).
And in general, LaTeX is a super worthwhile language to learn. It may be a bit more complicated than markdown or its cousins, but it can do pretty much everything.
I've barely scratched the surface of what it can do, but since I live at the intersection of CS and Education research, it is great how BibTeX will swap between APA and ACM styles easily, or how I can use a macro to create likert scale questions, for example. It probably takes the right kind of mindset, but I really liked the fact that my dissertation had a makefile (and was in source control, way back in the CVS days).
It's not the ideal thing for people here on HN, but it's pretty much the ideal thing to send to your non/semi-technical boss or stakeholder at your company who isn't taking ransomware seriously.
Allow me an analogy: "Bronk, the math designed for humans." Instead of dense algebraic expressions like "3x+49", you get to write "thrice the value of x plus 49." You may consider this a straw man, but I think that if you look hard at existing programming languages, you'll see that they are all designed for humans, and that the challenge in programming is in formulating your thoughts in a precise fashion. Should languages create higher-level abstractions to allow humans to reason about programs more efficiently? Yes! But that's not what this environment is about.
I do see one possible rebuttal to this, which would be an entirely different form of programming that is to traditional programming what google search is to the semantic web; that is, rather than specify programs precisely, we give examples to an approximate system and hope for the best. In many ways, that's how our biological systems work, and they've gotten us a long way. I don't see that happening in Eve, though.
We'll keep on doing what we've been doing since the dawn of time: reward Machiavellian behavior.
The guy that creates a controlled fire and puts it out will be praised.
The guy that cleans the dead foliage to prevent future fires will be punished for being unproductive and a dead weight.
Nothing will change.
Edit: punctuation