“Jerry Weinberg, “Secrets of Consulting”: You probably won’t be able to make any changes.

Reading this allowed me to let go of the idea that I was going to make any changes. And this ironically allowed me to see what was going on, and so I may have produced some small effect in the end. It may have simply been a change in perspective from “I’m the high-paid consultant who has been brought in to fix everything” to “I’m probably not going to be able to do anything here, so I’m open to anything where I might be able to make a difference.”

“Visual Basic rocks!

“GWT goes against everything we’ve worked towards in web development. Many of their widgets and layouts create endless tables, rows, and columns littered with inline CSS, “center” and “align” tags. It’s a disgrace to the web industry as a whole and a HUGE step backwards. Google uses the web as a thin layer on top of their technologies. The web layer is a very small, unimportant part of their applications.

“Currying is turning a function of type (A,B) -> C into A -> (B -> C).

Partial application is slightly more fuzzy. The intuitive notion is applying a function to less values than arguments of the function, but then you could say all functions take one argument, so…

“I was recently let go from my job of three years for violating my employee agreement for working on a side business and not properly disclosing this to my employer.

“I am amazed how many people in my generation still hold on to old-school ways of thinking, not because they still make sense, but because they carried them from their parents who presumably carried them from their own parents.

“According to Charles Peirce’s doctrine of fallibilism [1903], the conclusions of science are always tentative. The rationality of the scientific method does not depend on the certainty of its conclusions, but on its self-corrective character..

“..the perceived weakness of the American pupil in conventional studies is where his or her very strength may lie. America’s primary export, it appears, is trial-and-error, and the innovative knowledge attained in such a way. The American system of trial and error produces doers: Black Swan-hunting, dream-chasing entrepreneurs, with a tolerance for a certain class of risk-taking and for making plenty of small errors on the road to success or knowledge.

..we humans are far better at doing than understanding, and better at tinkering than inventing. Neither the followers of Adam Smith nor those of Karl Marx seem to be conscious of the prevalence and effect of wild randomness.

Globalization allowed the U.S. to specialize in the creative aspect of things, the risk-taking production of concepts and ideas—that is, the scalable part of production, in which more income can be generated from the same fixed assets through innovation. By exporting jobs, the U.S. has outsourced the less scalable and more linear components of production, assigning them to the citizens of more mathematical and culturally rigid states, who are happy to be paid by the hour to work on other people’s ideas.

“Version control is a must in any serious web development environment.. With subdomains you can’t do this easily..