Michael Nielsen

I wonder how often the idea about software ecosystems has ever been implemented? It's hard to think of many examples: basically a big ecosystem of programs that can talk to each other; then select out a core of jewels that work beautifully. And slowly grow that commons. - Michael Nielsen

Superb essay on leadership by Jeff Atwood. What leadership is: "If you ever want to effect change, in your work, in your life, you must learn to persuade others." So at least three pillars are to _enable_ others, to _persuade_ others, and to _amplify_ the best ideas of others. In this way you become the voice of the team, no longer of yourself. - Michael Nielsen

"The interface fundamentally determines behaviour." - Michael Nielsen

"Any real sketchbook is full of misfires, false starts and stumbles, with a few successes sprinkled here and there. If you were capable of doing a perfect drawing every time, you wouldn't need to carry a sketchbook! But the quickest way to learn how to do perfect drawings is to do a lot of crappy ones first...and learn from them. So don't view your sketchbook as a place for perfect drawings. That's not what it's for. It's for learning. If you pressure yourself to do perfect drawings you'll never carry a sketchbook. That's too much pressure and it takes all the fun out of sketching. Don't focus on how good or bad your sketches are, instead focus on doing your best to capture what you see and learn from it. " - Michael Nielsen

"I conclude that there are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult. It demands the same skill, devotion, insight, and even inspiration as the discovery of the simple physical laws which underlie the complex phenomena of nature." - Michael Nielsen

"And that's why Chess and Go remain as enduringly popular as they are, and why soccer is the most popular game on earth. Robustness and elegance are the key driving forces here, and they are in direct opposition to the brittleness and complexity, the defining traits of story. " - Michael Nielsen

Lots of interesting examples where Watson was considering unusual tracks. The author thinks they're criticising Watson, but most of the examples are more a testament to Watson. - Michael Nielsen

"I expected Watson's bag of cognitive tricks to be fairly shallow, but I felt an uneasy sense of familiarity as its programmers briefed us before the big match: The computer's techniques for unraveling Jeopardy! clues sounded just like mine. That machine zeroes in on key words in a clue, then combs its memory (in Watson's case, a 15-terabyte data bank of human knowledge) for clusters of associations with those words. It rigorously checks the top hits against all the contextual information it can muster: the category name; the kind of answer being sought; the time, place, and gender hinted at in the clue; and so on. And when it feels "sure" enough, it decides to buzz. This is all an instant, intuitive process for a human Jeopardy! player, but I felt convinced that under the hood my brain was doing more or less the same thing." - Michael Nielsen

Many interesting points, including the point that real-time access to data is what matters in a lot of contexts. - Michael Nielsen

"Without being by any means a libertarian, I do think that people of a left-wing orientation sometimes give short shrift to the non-pecuniary aspects of economic freedom. Whether or not you buy that barber licensing rules are a big deal economically, the specter of the government throwing a person in jail for participating in an exchange of haircuts for money between consenting adults should bother liberally inclined people for basically the same reasons that all random state interference in the conduct of private life is bothersome." - Michael Nielsen

A thought-provoking essay. He describes the Lisp Curse as follows: "Lisp is so powerful that problems which are technical issues in other programming languages are social issues in Lisp." There's a lot of problems with this formulation; his examples are pretty compelling, however. - Michael Nielsen

Would you state some examples of the problems you see with his formulation ? - Clark Kent

When my research took a turn for the numerical about 3 years ago I seriously looked into lisp, because it seems ideally suited to what a physicist wants: it's dynamically typed, does all the memory management for you, a small "vocabulary" (so easy to learn and remember), elegant, and runs almost as fast as C or Fortran. I decided against it, more or less for the reasons cited in this article - there's no standard way of doing things and all the libraries, implementations etc. seem to be rather balkanized. In the end I opted for Python (which does most of the above except for performance) and then rewrite the bottlenecked bits in C. - Sean Barrett