= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
"Glad To Change My Mind" goes to a 404 page.
I don't get it.
"Just because many believe in something doesn't make it true - the opposite, actually." (This from Googling the too-short excerpt and reading a bit of the surrounding text.) He spoils it by excepting two domains, religion and politics.
In response to
Bragging thread September 2015
For six months straight I've kept up a routine of coding a little bit - 10 lines, two lines, just a refactoring - every single day. In the process I've picked up some fluency in the new(ish) language Elm, functional programming in general and functional reactive programming in particular.
Awesome, thanks! (ETA) I have the figures already from a secondary source, so that's OK.
In response to
LessWrong Help Desk - free paper downloads and more (2014)
Software Engineering, A Historical Perspective J. Marciniak DOI 10.1002/0471028959.sof321
I came here looking for some information on implementing a prediction market at work. I happen to already have Nate's book, so I'll have to check that out. Thanks!
Cool! Where do you work?
For a while now I've also taken part in the Good Judgment Project prediction contests, since Season 2 as a "super-forecaster". I've scaled back my involvement this year for various reasons. But I do know that they're working on a commercial offering; depending on what you're looking to do, this may or may not be relevant to your efforts...
In response to
Rationality is about pattern recognition, not reasoning
I'd welcome any suggestions for how to find collaborators.
Keep posting the material here. Post to Main. Don't worry about it not being polished enough: you'll get plenty of feedback. Ignore feedback that isn't useful to you.
Got hired by the French government to promote a more agile style of programming and project management.
Seriously - that's a thing? Je ne parle vouz francais, but I just had to up my regard for the french government.
To put this in some perspective, they're mostly doing it because the Brits did it first.
Still, having any recognition and awareness that there is a problem there is heartening. We're just getting started here; last I heard, the good old habits were still in force, i.e. of starting software efforts with price tags expressed in hundred million euro multiples, letting them run for a while, then scrapping them as not even worth deploying.
Procurement is one of the big culprits here; a classic case of lost purposes. Ostensibly to save money, departments give a lot of power to policy-making bodies who then dictate a risk-averse process that departments must follow before they can spend their own money. This means that contracts now mainly go to contracting firms who positively relish dealing with red tape, but are less competent at actually shipping code.
Typically this leads to disasters, see above, which result in tightening financial controls, giving even more power to purchasing organizations, the almighty tail wagging all the dogs. The departments' own IT people, in this setup, end up doing nothing much beyond filling out paperwork, while all actual competencies such as writing the software are "externalized" to contractors.
So the job description is basically to cure government of this addiction. I've been given control over a budget of a couple million euros to start with, and instructions to split it over about 10 worthwhile projects this year. Each project should have a 6-month roadmap, with a first go/no-go milestone at two weeks in (and an obligation to report in with something they've learned by getting out of the building and talking to end users). At least half of the development crew (4 to 6 people) should be in-house to the departments, not contractors. That should leave much less room to hide incompetence, but we'll also provide a bit of mentoring to make sure these teams know a minimum of good engineering practice.
In response to
Bragging Thread May 2015
A couple months ago I started learning the Elm programming language, and to make things interesting I resolved to push one non-empty code commit to GitHub every single day (ideally also non-trivial, but not everyone's definition of "trivial" will match mine). I'm now on day 67 of that streak, having written six proto-games (playable here if you're so inclined, though they're not hugely entertaining). So far the habit has resisted a new job and a ten-day vacation. I've also been keeping a daily journal since Feb 21.
Used my 3D printer (Prusa i3) to print the entire set of plastic printed parts for a different printer (FoldaRap), very much a non-trivial project (~ 50h of printing for 30+ distinct parts) that requires a well-tuned printer. I'm particularly proud as this comes on the tails of completing a major conversion of the Prusa from its original direct-extrusion design to a Bowden setup.
Got hired by the French government to promote a more agile style of programming and project management.
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Strange, I clicked on it, and it went to the actual page for me. Regardless, I edited it and re-added the link. Here's another link to the same place, please try it and see if it goes to the right place for you.
Yep, works now.