Find all field names in MongoDb

I am switching from PHP/Mysql to Clojure/MongoDb. In Clojure, hyphens in names are more idiomatic than underscores. So I wanted to find all the field names, so I could see where the underscores were. Having done a straight import of all of my database tables into a single MongoDb collection, I ran this Javascript at the Mongo shell to get all the field names.

var arrayOfFieldNames = [];

var items = db.tma.find();

while(items.hasNext()) { item = items.next(); for(var index in ...

Why leadership often misunderstands software

Interesting:

Back in the mid-1990s, I did a lot of web work for traditional media. That often meant figuring out what the client was already doing on the web, and how it was going, so I’d find the techies in the company, and ask them what they were doing, and how it was going. Then I’d tell management what I’d learned. This always struck me as a waste of my time and their money; I was like an overpaid bike messenger, ...

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Watch users interact with your software everyday

I so very, very badly want this to be me:

Every now and again, I see a business doing something so sensible and so radical at the same time that I realize I’m seeing a little piece of the future. I had that feeling last week, after visiting my friend Scott Heiferman at Meetup.

On my way out after a meeting, Scott pulled me into a room by the elevators, where a couple of product people were watching a live webcam feed ...

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Does intellectual debate matter?

Interesting:

The sad and remarkable thing that we’ve learned over the past year or so is how little intellectual debate matters. On both fiscal austerity and monetary policy, the PREs (Perfectly Reasonable Economists) have completely blown the VSPs (Very Serious People) out of the water — the inflationistas, the expansionary austerians, the 90-percent threshold of doom people have all seen their claims collapse in the face of evidence. Yet policy barely changes, and the VSPs continue to talk as if ...

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How to work with Clojure’s EDN

This is a fantastic little write up about how to work with EDN:

The first place I started with EDN, was with the clojure.edn namespace, which has a very short API documentation and this was my first point of confusion. I could see a read and read-string method… but couldn’t see how I would actually write EDN? Coming from a background that was used to JSON, I expected there to be some sort of equivalent Clojure to-edn function lying ...

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Edsger Dijkstra on the fear of radical novelties

This is truly outstanding. Edsger Dijkstra speech from 1988, “On the cruelty of really teaching computing science” needs to be more widely read.

The usual way in which we plan today for tomorrow is in yesterday’s vocabulary. We do so, because we try to get away with the concepts we are familiar with and that have acquired their meanings in our past experience. Of course, the words and the concepts don’t quite fit because our future differs from our past, ...

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Scala is horrible

I had to work with Scala for a few weeks at Timeout. I hated it. I notice that most programmers who have been exposed to Scala and Clojure will either prefer Scala or Clojure — I have not yet met anyone who liked them both. Scala or Clojure are extreme opposites. But why do programmers divide over this issue? I was leaning toward the idea that it had something to do with types, with some programmers liking algebraic types (and ...

The difference between Scala and Clojure

Check out this matrix that shows which languages have projects that allow them to output code in another language. The difference between Scala and Clojure is extreme. Clojure has more targets than any other language, and Scala has none. Nobody uses Scala to produce some other code, whereas it is clearly a huge source of joy for Clojure programmers.

What is bound-fn good for?

In Clojure, this is a great example of how and why to use bound-fn:

At work we have some tests that spin up various jetty instances that return sample test data. We use these to mock out other services on our platform and switch the app’s config at test time to point at them instead of the real services. It’s actually a pretty great set up that I plan to talk about at a later date but a specific issue ...

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How to handle loops in bash

This is a great collection of bash tips:

1. for i in $(ls *.mp3)

One of the most common mistakes BASH programmers make is to write a loop like this:

for i in $(ls *.mp3); do # Wrong! some command $i # Wrong! done

for i in $(ls) # Wrong! for i in `ls` ...

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Church Numerals make all numbers the results of funtions

Lately I’ve been wondering a lot about where numbers come from. My research lead me to this interesting post about Church Numerals.

Assume we have a programming language that doesn’t support numbers or booleans: a lambda is the only value it provides. It is an interesting question whether we can nonetheless create some system that allows us to count, add, multiply, and do all the other things we do with numbers. Church numerals use lambdas to create a representation of numbers. The idea ...

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The economics of Paul Krugman

This fellow finds a very good quote where Paul Krugman defends himself as an establishment economist. We should all wonder: if the year was 1968, would Paul Krugman be considered left-of-center or right-of-center?

I like to think that I am more open-minded about alternative approaches to economics than most, but I am basically a maximization-and-equilibrium kind of guy. Indeed, I am quite fanatical about defending the relevance of standard economic models in many situations.

…

I won’t say that I am entirely ...

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Corruption creeps into the USA military

Really worrisome:

Even many retired Navy officers say they have been shocked by how chummy some of the officers charged in the case had become with Mr. Francis, calling him Big Bro and Boss in emails and promising to “work your business plan” within the Navy bureaucracy.

“This kind of malfeasance in basically working for someone else is kind of unheard-of among line officers, except in cases where someone was spying for a foreign power,” said Kevin Eyer, a retired Navy captain ...

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Sex and hazing

I got a laugh out of this comment:

I have no hard numbers/data to back this up, but in my estimation the incidence of homosexuality in fraternities is much higher than in the male population at large.

Probably true.

Life is luck

Interesting:

Luck helps determine how much human capital we acquire in the first place. I’m thinking of several mechanisms here:

– When you were born. Rick was lucky enough to be born near enough to the computer age.Had he been born a few decades earlier, he’d never have unleashed his writing “talent.**” This point extends. In the 50s, only a few people could get to university. Now, many more can – which gives late developers especially more advantage. (It is ...

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The decline of the dollar

Interesting:

Most people know that the general trend in the dollar’s role as an international currency has been slowly downward since 1976. International use of the dollar as a currency in which to hold foreign exchange reserves, to denominate financial transactions, to invoice trade, and to serve as a vehicle for foreign exchange transactions is below where it was during the heyday of the Bretton Woods era (1945-1971). But few are aware of what the most recent numbers show. ...

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Tales for our time

Certainly worth remembering, as part of what this era was like:

Ran out of money. Ran out of credit. Losing house in two months (already foreclosed). Wife pregnant. Three kids all under 6. Pretty sure I am the opposite of everyone here. I am no man. Just a statistic. Everything is gone. Selling spare parts to keep the lights on. It was a nice fantasy, HN. To the rest of you: fight hard and good luck.

How much does luck influence startups?

Interesting:

I tried to follow all the good advice successful entrepreneurs gave when explaining their accomplishments.

For example I started writing a blog. Some say content marketing is a key to success – to create a community that would be useful once the product is released. I also started looking at methodologies like Lean Startup. I released fast and failed fast. I went to startup events to find a co-founder because they said that it’s mandatory if you want to succeed ...

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More about texting changing English

Texting is changing the English language.

And the other day there was news of the new predicate “because”.

Say you find yourself limping to the finish of a wearing workday. You text your girlfriend: “I know we made a reservation for your bday tonight but wouldn’t it be more romantic if we ate in instead?” If she replies,

we could do that

Then you can ring up Papa John’s and order something special. But if she replies,

we could do that.

Then you ...

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100k in student debt and only poorly paid jobs

I am part of many Meetup groups. This was just posted to a tech Meetup. I am removing the name and reposting it here. (This person’s name is one that I would associate with China.) They are now in New York. I think it is sad they have 100k in student debt, but they can only get a below average job.

Hello everyone,

My name [person's name]. I am sorry to bother you. I have start join [name of tech Meetup] ...

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TV is dying

Interesting:

The TV business is having its worst year ever. Audience ratings have collapsed: Aside from a brief respite during the Olympics, there has been only negative ratings growth on broadcast and cable TV since September 2011, according to Citi Research.

Media stock analysts Craig Moffett and Michael Nathanson recently noted, “The pay-TV industry has reported its worst 12-month stretch ever.” All the major TV providers lost a collective 113,000 subscribers in Q3 2013. That doesn’t sound like a huge deal — but ...

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A brilliant attack on object oriented programming

This is very good. I wish I had written it:

Jake’s on the job

Phil: Hey Jake. I’ve been looking at this class of yours. It’s a little bit too big.

Jake: Sorry. And what’s the issue with that?

Phil: Well, thing is. It’s got too many responsibilities. It does too much.

Jake: And?

Phil: Well think about it. If it does too much, it means that it touches many parts of the system. So the probability of having to touch the class when changing code ...

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The uselessness of journalism in the modern era

Interesting:

This is a powerful and important work, but even so, I can’t help but think that it has arrived very late in the day. Ask yourself: how many books have been published describing the destruction of the postwar middle-class economic order and the advent of the shiny, plutocratized new one? Well, since I myself started writing about the subject in the mid-1990s—and thus earned a place on every book publicist’s mailing list—there have been at least a thousand, not counting ...

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The unchanging tone of race relations in the USA

Interesting:

An “outright Marxist!” That’s what Rafael Cruz, Senator Ted Cruz’s father, declared of President Obama on the campaign trail in April 2013. His accusation is common on the right. Google “Obama Marxist” and you will get about 4.95 million results. “Obama communist” yields 40 million. It’s a strange charge against a man who vigorously supported the bail-out of Wall Street banks as a Senator, and expanded it to other major firms as President. Yet ...

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Small innovations in English miss the big ones

Interesting, but more is needed. The thing I hate most about Indo-European languages are the need to emphasize whether something are singular or plural. Why not make everything plural? Why are these something so important that they need to be mandatory in every single sentence? If we defaulted to all plural, all the time, these would fade away, just like gender faded out of the language during the 1300s.

Let’s start with the dull stuff, because pragmatism.

The word “because,” in ...

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