David Schneider-Joseph

Retrospectives

Today I've begun an experiment in self-improvement inspired by an agile development practice called a "retrospective" which we use at my team at Amazon. In SCRUM for example, a software development team holds retrospectives every two or so weeks, which are 1-2 hour discussions of what went well, what is going badly,...

For how long should we expect to live?

For how long should we expect to live? Though you may expect, due to some technology (cryonics, negligible senescence, etc.), to live an unusually long life by historical standards, you should act as if you will not. An admonition to “act as if X is false, despite a belief that X is true” may seem at first...

PSA: AOL Hometown files still accessible via FTP

I had some AOL Hometown web sites which I made over 10 years ago. I had been intending to retrieve my files and finally cancel my AOL (what a shitty company) account (which I've had since 1995). But AOL (in their shitty style) decided to just shut down AOL Hometown with little notice to their members. I called them up and was told my files were irretrievable and that many other customers had called to complain and were told the same thing. I was also told that there were no backups...

"Barack Hussein Obama": argumentum ad nominem

Projection: 375 - 163

You heard it here first.

Price Discrepancies and Presidential Election Odds

Nate over at FiveThirtyEight has observed a discrepancy between the prices for Obama over at Intrade (52.3 at the time of his writing) and at Betfair (61.7). I was pleased to see that he made none of the amateur errors I usually find when reading analyses of idea futures prices. Importantly, he recognizes that it is non-trvial to translate individual state odds into electoral...

Arafat Peace Prize

Arafat's Nobel Peace Prize was stolen. Oh well, it's the thought that counts.

Religious fundamentalism and kindred spirits

A brief observation about Mike Huckabee's comments at the GOP debates. He says:

We are a culture of life. We celebrate, we elevate life. And let me just say, when hikers on Mt. Hood get lost, we move heaven and Earth to go find them. When coal miners in West Virginia are trapped in a mine, we go after them because we celebrate life. This life issue is not insignificant. It's not small. It separates us from the Islamic fascists who would strap a bomb to the belly of...

Intrade committing fraud?

UPDATE 12/22/2006: Now that the matter was brought to the higher-ups at Intrade, they are handling it very responsibly and I am confident that the matter is going to get resolved. I'm convinced that Intrade is not committing fraud. Their customer service was extremely unresponsive with me so they left me wondering what was going on, but now that I brought the issue to their attention in this way, they are handling it as it should be handled. I'll keep you all posted...

The Beauty of Lisp

Programming languages are about turning your ideas into a form a computer can understand.
- The ideas must be mathematically defined, but beyond that they can be arbitrary (Turing equivalence).
Most good ideas need to be reused.
Programming involves defining ideas and reducing them to "words", and then referencing those words whenever the idea needs to...