http://xkcd.com/663/ 
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DNA Lounge update, wherein there are some photos.
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Here are my preliminary thoughts on the Go programming language.
The most interesting feature for me personally is the built-in threading. Aside from its superb support for multi-core, it's just plain a good set of ways of doing networking. The lack of a decent built-in networking library (and generally coordination library) in Python has been a thorn in my side just about forever. In particular the promotion of queues to being one of the few built-in primitives with their own special syntax encourages good threading practice and is clearly warranted. Even such a simple command as 'wait until either the UI thread or the networking thread comes up with something' is a source of ongoing pain in most languages, but is built into Go as a core concept using select.
Go seems to finally get the static typing problem solved. Its := operator is a reasonable middle point between C++'s ludicrous verbosity and ML's excessive magic. Types being structural is also a huge win. There's no end of stupid architectural haggling over what module a base type sits in and who owns it, and the answer 'nowhere' completely gets rid of that problem. It seems to me that there are deep subtle problems with such declarations - for example, how does it statically check that the parameters accepted by methods of a type you're receiving are compatible with what you want to pass them? But maybe I just haven't thought about it enough. It's too bad that Go doesn't currently have generics. I for one won't start any new project in it until it reaches that level of maturity.
Go's lack of exception handling is a real problem, and another thing I'm blocking on to do real development in it. My own preferred method for adding it would be that if you call a function which has multiple return values and you don't handle one of them, it defaults to shorting to the same return of the caller, although some people might complain about that being too much like Java's 'throws'. That said, I've gotten so used to debugging by stack trace that I'd be loathe to not have stack building built into the language in some form, and in fact I've gotten really attached to a tricked out logging tool I wrote which can decorate any object and automatically logs a full stack trace of every assignment which is made to the object and allows you to print them all out at once. But perhaps such trickery is really the domain of highly dynamic languages, and not appropriate for something as low level and performance oriented as Go.
The primitives in Go are quite good. All languages should have special maps and lists built in. I think it actually doesn't go far enough with giving them special status, and should have Python-style special syntax for maps. The curly brackets could be freed up by simply eliminating their current usage and making formatting have syntax. It's more than a little bit absurd that the language designers themselves have a setup where a utility standardizes the formatting of their own code every time they commit, but they still maintain the nominal free-form nature of the language. Really guys, I know you were traumatized by Fortran's original awful enforced formatting, but that was a long time ago and it's time to let go.
That said, the primitives are given too much special status in other ways - they're the only things which have type parameterization, making it impossible to even implement their interfaces yourself, and worse, they're the only things which are call by reference. The call by reference thing worries me a lot. I really, really don't want Go to become the reference/pointer mix hell which C++ has become, but it's already headed in that direction. It really shouldn't matter that much - things which are passed are either an address or a copy, and the reference/pointer distinction really just has to do with what's the default (okay, so typically references don't let you overwrite either, but that's not a fundamental property). I for one strongly prefer the default be an address, and clearly when push comes to shove Go's designers do too, but more important than which way it is is that it should be consistent. Already transitioning to something consistent might require rewriting huge amounts of code, and it's getting worse, so fixing this problem might have to happen soon or never, and I'm afraid that it might already be never.
Go's speed of compilation is very nice, although I'm afraid I view that not so much as a strength of Go but as an awfulness of C++. Why C++ continues to take forever to compile even on machines many orders of magnitude faster than the first ones I ever used it on has long been a mystery to me. I hope the answer is simply that it's a language which wasn't designed with ease of parsing in mind, and has a whole layer of preprocessing on top of it which is horribly abused.
It's interesting that Go is going the garbage-collected route. If such a low-level language as Go can get away with that (and, truth be known, their preferred garbage collector isn't really integrated yet, so it's a little early to call it) then we may never see another non-garbage-collected language ever again.
I despise the use of initial capital letters to specify that something is public. Maybe if I used it for a while I'd learn to not hate it, but for now I hate it. Does chinese even have uppercase?
It's entirely possible that after using Go for a while something else would really start to gnaw at me about it, but it generally has a good smell, so hopefully not.
If you've read this far, you should follow me on Twitter.
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http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/hunter_becomes_the_prey/ http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/379/ Shopping is broken. In the fifties, if you wanted to buy a toaster, you only had a few practical choices. Maybe you went to the nearest department store and selected from the three models available. Or maybe you found your toaster in the Sears catalog. In a way, you were the hunter, and the toaster was the prey. You knew approximately where it was located, and you tracked it down and bagged it. Toasters couldn't hide from you.
Now you shop on the Internet, and you can buy from anywhere on the planet.
The options for any particular purchase approach infinity, or so it seems.
Google is nearly worthless when shopping for items that don't involve technology. It is as if the Internet has become a dense forest where your desired purchases can easily hide.
Advertising is broken too, because there are too many products battling for too little consumer attention. So ads can't hope to close the can't-find-what-I-want gap.
The standard shopping model needs to be reversed. Instead of the shopper acting as hunter, and the product hiding as prey, you should be able to describe in your own words what sort of thing you are looking for, and the vendors should use those footprints to hunt you down and make their pitch.
For example, let's say you're looking for new patio furniture. The words you might use to describe your needs would be useless for Google. You might say, for example, "I want something that goes with a Mediterranean home. It will be sitting on stained concrete that is sort of amber colored. It needs to be easy to clean because the birds will be all over it. And I'm on a budget."
Your description would be broadcast to all patio furniture makers, and those who believe they have good solutions could contact you, preferably by leaving comments on the web page where you posted your needs. You could easily ignore any robotic spam responses and consider only the personalized responses that include pictures.
You can imagine this service as a web site. The consumer goes to the section that best fits his needs (furniture, cars, computers, etc.) and describes what he wants, in his own words. Vendors could set key word alerts via e-mail or text for any products in their general category. Once they read the customer's needs online, they have the option of posting their solution, publicly, which gives other vendors and consumers an opportunity to offer counterpoints.
I assume this service already exists in some weaker form.
www.answers.yahoo.com is a step in the right direction, but it doesn't broadcast your needs to vendors. My prediction is that Broadcast Shopping (as I just decided to name it) will become the normal way to shop.
(Note: I am not using this blog post to solicit suggestions for patio furniture and toasters. Those were just examples.)
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http://xkcd.com/662/ 
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| User: |  jwz |
| Date: | 2009-11-12 20:02 |
| Subject: | Cyberpunk. |
| Security: | Public |
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| User: | jwz |
| Date: | 2009-11-12 17:08 |
| Subject: | cowgirl |
| Security: | Public |
| Music: | Veruca Salt -- All Dressed Up |
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| User: | jwz |
| Date: | 2009-11-12 14:05 |
| Subject: | Regretsy |
| Security: | Public |
| Music: | Veruca Salt -- Wet Suit |
 "Really? That's interesting. Because to me, this is a $200 necklace of worms fucking."
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http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/the_happiness_genie/ http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/378/ Suppose a genie appears and gives you two choices. The first option is that he will give you $10 million dollars, but everyone else you know will get $20 million apiece.
Choice two: You get $5 million, but no one else gets anything.
As a bonus, the genie offers to erase your memory of having made the choice, so guilt will never be a factor. You will simply wake up the next day in the new situation.
Which option do you choose to maximize your personal happiness?
This might seem like an easy choice. You take the $10 million and your friends will get $20 million each. Everyone wins. Unfortunately, I don't think humans are wired that way. Happiness is based on the direction your life is heading (better or worse), and what you have compared to what you think you should have.
If you take the genie's $10 million option, over time you will start feeling like the poorest person you know, since everyone else has $20 million apiece. You will wonder what you did in a past life to deserve this shabby treatment from the universe. The ugly truth about humans is that your happiness might be maximized by screwing everyone you know while screwing yourself half as much.
If you buy this premise, it has interesting implications for personal relationships. For example, it means that one way to cheer up an unhappy friend is to put yourself in a bad situation, thus resetting the reference point. The splinter in your finger only makes you unhappy when you're not talking to someone who has a railroad spike through his head.
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| User: | jwz |
| Date: | 2009-11-11 13:58 |
| Subject: | Stefano Bonazzi |
| Security: | Public |
| Music: | 50 Foot Wave -- Hot Pink, Distorted |
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http://xkcd.com/661/ 
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DNA Lounge update, wherein the axe falls.
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/sport1/hi/football/scot_cups/8353419.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/scot_cups/8353419.stm The Co-operative Insurance Cup semi-final between Hearts and St Mirren will be played at Fir Park while the other semi heads for Hampden.
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http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/invest_in_whatever_makes_you_angry/ http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/377/ I wonder if you could make money by investing in whatever companies make you angriest. For example, when oil prices were climbing to the sky, it was popular to hate oil companies. It also would have been a good time to buy their stock.
Before any war, a lot of people start hating defense companies more than usual. And that's the best time to own defense stocks.
During Microsoft's long run to dominance, the company was widely hated. It also would have been a good stock to own for most of that time. Now it feels as if the white hot hatred of Microsoft has reached some sort of plateau, and so has the stock.
We generally hate companies when we think they have too much power. And that correlates with profits. So suppose you took a survey of people's opinions of various industries today, then did another survey every six months, and tracked the anger levels. If you invested in any industry where the average public hatred was increasing, and sold stock when the average hatred started to level off, would you prosper?
Can you think of any industry where the public's hatred was increasing while the companies' stock prices were stagnate or dropping?
Remember, it's not the absolute amount of hatred that matters, just the direction of the intensity. There is plenty of hatred toward cigarette companies, but thanks to the success of anti-smoking laws, that hatred has leveled off. So according to my hypothesis, this wouldn't be a good time to own cigarette stocks.
What do you think?
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/sport1/hi/football/scot_cups/8350658.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/scot_cups/8350658.stm Hearts will take on St Mirren while Rangers will play St Johnstone in the semi-finals of the Co-operative Insurance Cup.
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http://xkcd.com/660/ 
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| User: | jwz |
| Date: | 2009-11-08 15:29 |
| Subject: | iPhone worm |
| Security: | Public |
| Music: | Rick Astley vs Nine Inch Nails -- The Hand That Gives You Up |
 First iPhone worm discovered Apple iPhone owners in Australia have reported that their smartphones have been infected by a worm that has changed their wallpaper to an image of 1980s pop crooner Rick Astley. Once in place, the worm appears to attempt to find other iPhones on the mobile phone network that are similarly vulnerable, and installs itself again On each installation, the worm - written by a hacker calling themselves "ikex" - changes the lock background wallpaper to an image of Rick Astley with the message: "ikee is never going to give you up".
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