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

Reading this I realized how much confidence it takes for a company to focus on simplicity. Most companies compete on features, and takes a huge amount of confidence to deliberately leave features out, allowing other companies to exceed your feature set. - Michael Nielsen

Bike-shedding as a natural part of open source (and all) development; building consciousness of it, and how to avoid it. - Michael Nielsen

The top-rated answer is very helpful. - Michael Nielsen

Obvious - "Identify bottlenecks in your open source project's workflow" - but very cleverly done. They did an analysis (good first step!) and found that simply reviewing tickets was the biggest bottleneck. So they found a solution! - Michael Nielsen

A thoughtful detailed comparison for a practical problem. - Michael Nielsen

DARPA's Director: "I would say, don’t be afraid of failure. Really go for it." I wonder what the Director would say when asked to name DARPA's most recent failures. Or what percentage of their projects fail? If they don't know that number, or it's low (say, less than 50%) then they're not eating their own dogfood. - Michael Nielsen

V. interesting (but incomplete) ideas on how to change the way we think about mathematics. - Michael Nielsen

Excellent talk pointing out the ubiquitous and institutional nature of failures of the imagination. - Michael Nielsen

One of the best talks I've ever seen. - Michael Nielsen

Wow. Thanks very much. For me right now I think the guiding principle is: open or closed? - Jan Jensen

Loads of places where machine translation is useful; - Michael Nielsen