Disqus - Latest Comments for hayeah

Re: Reputation Request - Howard Yeh

Howard Yeh — Wed, 10 Jul 2019 05:51:14 -0000

let me try again... see if this works:

https://docs.google.com/doc...

Re: Reputation Request - Howard Yeh

Howard Yeh — Sat, 06 Jul 2019 03:22:39 -0000

updated my attestation

https://twitter.com/hayeah/...

https://docs.google.com/doc...

Re: 纯 CSS 实现打地鼠游戏 | Zihua Li

Howard Yeh — Sat, 17 Jan 2015 03:52:17 -0000

明明上次聊到 go 你还说它很丑。。。什么时候变成爱好者了

Re: Good practices to structure an Express app | Zihua Li

Howard Yeh — Sat, 24 May 2014 22:30:15 -0000

撸大神~~ 哈哈

我觉得代码块的风格有点奇怪，看起来好像把正文截断了。尤其是代码引用多的地方

Re: 沒有時間的大理

Howard Yeh — Wed, 30 Apr 2014 07:10:36 -0000

感觉好棒啊

Re: 沒有時間的大理

Howard Yeh — Wed, 30 Apr 2014 05:51:33 -0000

真棒~

Re: From The Office To Travelling The World - Howard Yeh | Metacircus

Howard Yeh — Sun, 16 Mar 2014 22:25:03 -0000

thanks ：）

China is less accepting of the idea of remote workers, but I think with the terrible pollution and traffic in major cities, companies that can accept remote workers would enjoy a hiring advantage.

Re: There's A Way - Howard Yeh | Metacircus

Howard Yeh — Sun, 12 Jan 2014 22:47:25 -0000

yup it's hard. Maybe what it takes is a bit mental compartmentalization.

Re: Playing Git Like A Violin - Howard Yeh | Metacircus

Howard Yeh — Mon, 03 Sep 2012 09:57:51 -0000

it keeps the aliases namespaced.

gs is ghostscript.

Re: http://fleurer-lee.com/2010/04/15/dong-tai-zuo-yong-yu.html

Howard Yeh — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 04:50:40 -0000

As far as I know, older Lisps had dynamic scope because it was easier to implement dynamic scope than lexical scope. To implement dynamic scope, you only have to maintain a stack for each variable. Implementing closure is also more difficult for lexical scoping.

Re: Burn Rates: How Much?

Howard Yeh — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 01:44:49 -0000

that's why i feel so lucky to be a developer. Though I pretend to bill myself by keeping myself accountable.

Re: Burn Rates: How Much?

Howard Yeh — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 01:41:27 -0000

I am one of those broke ass fools. When I read 10k/month/body my eyes popped!

Re: Bitcoin

Howard Yeh — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 15:45:46 -0000

I didn't think of the possibilities of infinite divisibility, which is practical with an electronic currency. Bitcoin is continuous, not discrete!

So it could theoretically adjust to any market equilibrium. Super interesting point.

Re: Bitcoin

Howard Yeh — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 16:07:57 -0000

Do you think inflation is ever useful? For example, during WW1 when everybody was on gold standard, there was a deflation in non-government sectors because of contracted money supply.

Could it make sense to use inflation as a tool? Trade-off in moral hazard.

Re: Bitcoin

Howard Yeh — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 16:02:20 -0000

In my mind, Bitcoin is just like gold. Its supply is inflexible, so it is relatively immune to government manipulation. This is the best case scenario for Bitcoin, if/when it becomes a widely accepted currency.

But that inflexibility can sometimes be problematic. In light of the Euro crisis, I wish Greece could just inflate the problem away. It doesn't solve the underlying trade inbalance, but it wouldn't cause the dominoes toppling of the whole EU financial systems.

Sometimes inflation is necessary. During WWI, there was a dramatic increase in government spendings. Money supply couldn't expand because of the gold standard. As a result, there was a deflation in the economy of non-government sectors.

Sometimes inflation is useful. Fiat money is great for that. At the macroeconomic level, it seems to me that the advantages of Bitcoins are precisely its disadvantages.

One way to deal with US debt may well be inflation...

Re: Business Arcanery: Going Concern

Howard Yeh — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 15:42:31 -0000

I agree. @Donna Brewington White raised the point that 2) is applicable only if you don't need an income. Most of us do. In which case, 2) is something along the line of "making enough income that your family is taken care of".Which is still a big risk. It's probably not enough to send the kids to college.

I don't have a family yet. So what came to my head was that as long as I don't starve, I'll be ok. Which I am sure is an altitude I need to change later on in life.

Re: Healthcare

Howard Yeh — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 18:10:51 -0000

Much of medicine's curative effect is based on placebo. For depression, as much as 75% of pharmaceutical's effect is due to a combination of natural recovery and placebo (the hope of getting better). See Irvin Kirsch's book "The Emperor's New Drugs". There are even placebo surgeries!

Indeed, if you have depression, it doesn't matter if you are talking to a Freudian or a Cognitive Behaviourist. Any therapeutic discipline you choose will improve your mood. You can also talk to your pastor.

If much of "psychiatric care" isn't about medicine, but care, how can the web scale the human factor that provides care? I think psychiatry is ripe for a revolution. There could be a grand amatuerization of psychiatric care. Like what blog did for journalism.

Re: Healthcare

Howard Yeh — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 17:52:49 -0000

Singapore is probably rich enough and authoritarian enough to make DNA analysis mandatory. This sounds like a great way to identify health risks on a population scale. Singapore's government can get away with that. It's hard to imagine the US doing that. Too easy to spin it into a eugenic scare.

There's a knee-jerk resistance to even getting finger-printed.

Re: Happy Thanksgiving

Howard Yeh — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 17:20:51 -0000

"normal" by AVC standard is pretty extraordinary

Re: The One Item TODO List - Howard Yeh | Metacircus

Howard Yeh — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 17:17:24 -0000

Actually, I was doing this when I was travelling. It was much, much harder to maintain routine. Now I am back home, and have 100% control over my time and living situation, I am doing something different.

I now schedule everything I do the next day before going to bed. It works for me since I am just a single developer working on my startup, and have zero obligation to anybody (no customers, har har). Later I'll probably need to relax the strictness of the scheduling.

Re: Happy Thanksgiving

Howard Yeh — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 22:58:05 -0000

thanks : )

Re: Happy Thanksgiving

Howard Yeh — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 01:45:17 -0000

I am new here. It's sometimes an intimidating environment to say something, when everybody here is way smarter and experienced. Except you are all supportive and friendly too : )

Looking forward to years of great conversations!

Re: Sustainability

Howard Yeh — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 15:36:03 -0000

My dad was in the family business. In fact, his was the first middle-class generation in Taiwan. My grandpa started the business, and before that we were farmers.

I like family businesses. There is a lot of love in a family business. And fraternal rivalries, ha.

IMO, it's like an extended lifestyle business to cover those you care about. It's not the most efficient company in the world, and risks decline when the spirit of entrepreneurism is gone (say, when the first founders died). The Chinese has a saying, that "wealth does not pass through three generations", which highlights the risks of nepotism.

The standout exception is Nintendo, who struck the creative pot of gold by hiring Miyamoto.

Re: The Architecture Of The Internet

Howard Yeh — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 03:13:17 -0000

I totally agree with you that there are times when the management might think that "machine" or "outsourcing" might replace people thus decrease cost, while the technology fundamentally doesn't work.

"Can you artificially maintain jobs when technology makes them obsolete?"

You've raised the crux of the issue. Should we support social program that supports mass employments of obsolete jobs? If we don't, what do we do with people who are now out of jobs?

Consider the 1920s and 1930s. There was a huge increase in agricultural productivity with the introduction of machines. The human disaster is well-dramatized by John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. In the longterm, efficiency was increased (over the past century, agricultural labour decreased from 38% of the labour force to just 2.6%). This is far from meaningless technological progress. Yet it comes at the cost of painful social-upheavals.

Re: The GAAF Ecosystem

Howard Yeh — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 16:06:46 -0000

Everybody is saying how China's Internet is the Wild East. Go East, young man! However, China also has Gorilla companies that are ready to copy innovative ideas. If anything, they are worse than their US cousins. The three biggest Chinese Internet companies started roughly at the same time, 10 years ago: Tencent (1999), Baidu (2000), Alibaba(1998). It may well be that the condition at the time allowed these companies to establish hegemony.

The US companies you've cited are founded quite a few years apart. Facebook (2003). Google (1998). Apple (1976). Amazon (1994). Looking at history, it's arguable that they've created new markets, in which they dominated by virtue of having created it. While the Chinese hegemons simply captured markets that they know would/will exist (by looking West).

Microsoft leveraged the PC platform to kill off Netscape. No doubt that any individual company that threatens a hegemon and comes in its target would have a hard time succeeding. But even a hegemon like Microsoft could not prevent innovation fro happening. It killed off Netscape, but it didn't kill off the Internet. A hegemon seeks to protect its existing market, than to innovate. Microsoft wanted to protect the PC, not to capture Internet. That's the reason, and the irony, that innovation CAN happen under a hegemon's nose.

In my opinion, it isn't so much that the GAAF are choking the space. It's that transformative innovation leaps are rare.