Germany versus Italy: what is the difference in their economy?

This is brilliant:

The line is that Germany has made it easy for firms to hire and fire (while gradfathering the job security protection for the middle class middle aged). That this explains why their economy is performing so differently from those of Spain and Italy, but it is a high price in solidarity to pay for low unemployment.

Nonsense

I live in Italy and I am totally unconvinced by the premise of the essay. Italy is full of contract workers (though not ...

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Facing death alone

What a sad story:

I was responding to a call from a small brick fourplex in a quiet part of town. I assumed I was being sent to pick up some partyers, or someone who had just had a fight with a lover, or a worker heading to an early shift at some factory for the industrial part of town. When I arrived at 2:30 a.m., the building was dark except for a single light in a ground floor window. Under these circumstances, ...

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Creating standards is hard work

This sounds exhausting and tedious. It’s also incredible Kent M. Pitman was working on the Lisp standard for at least 10 years. He was new to formal standards processes in 1986, his book was published 10 years later, in 1996. That is a long time for a story to unfold.

5.2 Early Politics and Posturing Never having been part of a formal standards process, I didn’t quite know what to expect. The very fact that there are a lot ...

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Why do online communities such as Quora decline in quality?

This seems like a reliable pattern, which makes the whole question of how to solve it that much more interesting.

Great things never last I saw Quora’s potential early on — it could have been a giant repository of information, a kind of interactive encyclopedia with views coming from everywhere. And certainly, there are still very interesting questions being asked (this one and this one came in my Quora weekly digest, and were pretty interesting). But it’s all being overrun with ...

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Most attempts at motivation are fake and futile

I like this:

When the team got down emotionally, I would try to persuade them that reality wasn’t as bleak as it seemed. I laugh thinking about it now. The guys would tell me, “You can’t persuade me of the pitch because we helped come up with it!”

The problem is that I was operating under the mentality that a team needs to be motivated to get more done. It turns out that my attempts to frame reality ...

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Loops of learning as the core of complex development in games

I like this model of games:

The ‘game’ aspect of this beast we call a computer game always involves ‘loops’.

The player starts with a mental model that prompts them to…

Apply an action to…

The game system and in return…

Receives feedback that…

Updates their mental model and starts the loop all over again. Or kicks off a new loop. These loops are fractal and occur at multiple levels and frequencies throughout a game. They are almost always exercised multiple times, either within a game ...

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Run Java as a daemon

Interesting:

How to run a Java Program as a daemon (service) on Linux (openSUSE) using a shell script

The following alternatives may be used to run a Java program as a daemon on Linux:

Use the Java Service Wrapper. Use the Apache Jakarta Commons Daemon package (Jsvc). Use a shell script. This article describes how to use a shell script. The disadvantage of the Java Wrapper and the Commons Daemon package is that they both make use of C programs. These C programs have to be ...

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The importance of agents in Clojure

Using agents reduced the runtime of this script from 12 minutes to 6 seconds.

With that out of the way, we’ll create a function to see if a given host / port combination is connectable. To avoid indefinite blocking, we’ll make it so the connection can timeout (thanks to nikkomega from reddit for helping me improve this function).

(defn host-up? [hostname timeout port] (let [sock-addr (InetSocketAddress. hostname port)] (try (with-open [sock (Socket.)] ...

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The desperate and futile hope of recreating past moments of inspiration

Inspiration is inspiration and it can not be turned into a process or a procedure or an algorithm. Inspiration does not repeat: each moment of inspiration is wholly unique, a one time event in the story of the human species. This fact plays out in every aspect of life, from art, religion, science, and also in business.

The reason IBM can’t deliver is also explained well by Steve Jobs. It’s IBM’s maniacal fixation on process, once a strength but now ...

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The continued retreat of women from programming

At a time when women have made big progress in most other professions, the retreat since the 1980s is difficult to explain:

As it is, women remain acutely underrepresented in the coding and engineering professions. According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics study, in 2011 just 20 percent of all programmers were women. A smaller percentage of women are earning undergraduate computer science degrees today than they did in 1985, according to the National Center for Women in Technology, and between ...

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Still working at age 103

I am curious, if you took NGF to keep your nerves young and HGH to keep your muscles and bones young, then what would get old? Would it be possible to stay young forever by taking every form of growth factor hormones?

Has Dr. Rita Levi Montalcini unlocked the secret of eternal life? The oldest living and the longest-lived Nobel laureate in history, Montalcini celebrates today her 103th birthday.

“I can say my mental capacity is greater today than when I was ...

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An extremely mis-run startup

I’m torn between admiring the attempt to invest in the future, and the crazy waste of money when no business model had been validated through actual sales. Interesting:

Fruugo was one of the most talked about companies in the Finnish startup scene, perhaps due to the fact that the company was able to attract the top executives of the Finnish business world. In the early days, the most well known people on board were Jorma Ollila (the former CEO and ...

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Everyone hates Mass Effect 3

But for so many different reasons. Apparently some people criticized for having homosexual themes, however quiet those themes might have been. Matthew Murray responds to those who criticized him for defending the game:

I must admit a bit of confusion about one thing. The relevant part of my post concerned my standing up for individual rights, and advocating making your own decisions, rather than thinking that I (or anyone else) knows what’s right for you and the people who are ...

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The decline of higher education

An interesting bit of history:

I did not realize that very hard times for higher education were about to begin. As the student population swelled during the 1960′s, the youth culture developed as a result of demographic changes, the Vietnam War and skepticism about consumptionism clashed with a different kind of pressure: a sagging rate of profit, following decades of unparalleled prosperity. Under these conditions, the goal became to reverse the gains from the G.I. Bill. Rather than including people in ...

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Popular girls won’t learn math

Interesting:

I went to math camp in spite of it being an extremely uncool summer endeavor, according to my classmates at school. Yet I didn’t care, and went anyway, mostly because I was already a complete outsider, a fat girl on the math team (but a mathbabe when I got there!).

Two things about this. First, most smart girls around me in Lexington High School, and there were a lot of them, would not have been willing to go to math ...

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People are moving back to the cities

The suburbs are not as much fun as they used to be:

Generation Y has grown up in the safest environment in human history. The suburban cul-de-sac offered a safe place to play, with lower crime rates than cities. But despite this safe environment, the need to fill a 24 hour news cycle in the emerging world of cable and online communications brought every localized “stranger danger” news story to a national audience, giving rise to the overprotective Helicopter Mom ...

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A company where the workers are self-managed

Very interesting :

If most of the value is now in the initial creative act, there’s little benefit to traditional hierarchical organization that’s designed to deliver the same thing over and over, making only incremental changes over time. What matters is being first and bootstrapping your product into a positive feedback spiral with a constant stream of creative innovation. Hierarchical management doesn’t help with that, because it bottlenecks innovation through the people at the top of the hierarchy, and there’s no ...

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Amanda Peyton on the nature of online identity

Anonymous is necessary

The problem with most social networks is the assumption that your life is linear and that people are interested in accumulating their own personal histories in one single repository.

I just don’t buy it. I think that is facebook’s core error – this belief that the digital world is becoming increasingly identity-based rather than persona-based.

Identity isn’t singular.

In my mind this is one of the most pressing issues for maturing social networks – this idea that the network will need ...

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Using Jetty inside of one’s app

This is exactly what I want to do with the chat app I’m writing: embed Jetty so I won’t have all the complications of dealing with an external service:

Jetty for HTTP

Because you can’t be a web service without HTTP, Dropwizard uses the Jetty HTTP library to embed an incredibly tuned HTTP server directly into your project. Instead of handing your service off to a complicated application server, Dropwizard projects have a main method which spins up an HTTP server. Running ...

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How much should you work?

Taryn East says no one should work more than 40 hours:

Anything over a 40 hour week is really stupid. Not just for you, but also for the business you’re working for. Many good books have pointed out that, not only do you not do your best work after five… but sometimes you can be actively sliding backwards (making more bugs that have to be cleaned up).

Of course the business won’t say no. They think they’re getting extra work from ...

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Git rebase is confusing

This is a fantastic explanation of one of the most confusing things about git: the use of rebase, and in particular the use of rebase to resolve conflicts.

I am not writing this because I am a git master (I am not) but to point out a thing that I took an unreasonable amount of time to understand. Basically, I am going to show that “git rebase” serves many completely different roles instead of one:

a) rebasing, that is, making a ...

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Monger is an experimental idiomatic Clojure wrapper around MongoDB Java driver

I’m planning on writing chat software (on the server side) using Clojure and MongoDb. On the mailist for Clojure, when asked about Mongo libraries, everyone seemed to prefer Monger.

Setting up Clojure on a Mac

This is a fantastic post for setting up Clojure on a Mac. Everything pretty much worked for me and I was able to create my first project with lein and I got a Clojure REPL going.

Sockets for chat?

I’m going to try to write my own chat software soon. This is part of my research. I’m thinking a lot about how much I should try to handle in my own code and how much I should rely on the functionality that is already there in Unix systems.

BSD sockets

For most modern platforms you have some sort of basic socket layer available based on BSD sockets.

BSD sockets are manipulated using simple functions like “socket”, “bind”, “sendto” and “recvfrom”. You ...

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Running Java as a service (daemon) on a Linux machine

You can either start the command at the command line, like always, or use a script to launch it:

Overview

Sometimes application have the need to run java application as Linux Service. Aplicatioin needs to start, stop, restart easily. In traditional method, I usually run java application using command line java -jar applicationame when I need to restart the application, I will do: - Find process ID of the application started before - Kill process kill -9 PID - start java apps, java -jar applicationname

Besides complicated, this ...

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