YTechnology

Pi day (3/14) was 10 days ago, and my blog post is late.  Modern scientists tell us, however, that there is no such thing as free will, and that my lateness was pre-determined, unavoidable, and thus arguably, "not my fault." The "no free will" thought experiment goes as follows: imagine we are all physical systems where every interaction can be known and measured.  Given enough data and computational ability, identifying cause and calculating effect delivers predictable outcomes with 100% accuracy.  If we accept determinism, that our lives from birth to death have already been set, where does our moral responsibility go?  Why try at all? The Atlantic wrestles with these questions in There's No Such Thing as Free Will (But we're better off believing in it anyway) . The sub-heading gives it away, indicating that scientists have publicly walked back their argument, "Ha ha, we were just trolling all of you," but privately still think we have

Where did that idea come from? How difficult was it to bring the idea into reality? What does it feel like to develop a major program? Susan Lammers interviewed 19 programmers along these lines to capture and understand what spawned the microcomputer industry.  With such an eclectic group (click on cover image), Lammers touched on the popular platforms, languages, and applications of the day, including CP/M, BASIC, and VisiCalc.  She also explored the boundaries where programming met music , mathematics, and gaming. One of my favorite quotes in the book came from the  conversation with Bill Gates where he talked about "technical inversions": GATES: The old rule used to be that a manager of a programmer was always a better programmer, and there were no what we called "technical inversions," where a programmer works for somebody who doesn't know how to program. We still follow that philosophy: At certain levels we've got business managers, but we don&

Limit Up Limit Down Calculator in Beta Luldcalc is an iOS app I wrote to calculate price bands in accordance to the rules put forth by the LULD Committee:  http://www.luldplan.com/index.html In addition to being a basic calculator, there are buttons to select tier 1 or tier 2 stocks, and also buttons to double the bands for market open and close. For Testers A public beta is now available at: https://testflight.apple.com/join/gWOth57S The link will introduce you to Apple's TestFlight app which is used to gain access to the beta version of LuldCalc.  You'll need an iPhone running iOS 8 or later. Install the TestFlight app and you'll find an icon that looks like this: Open the TestFlight app, and you will be presented with a screen to redeem LuldCalc: Have fun and let me know your thoughts. Privacy Policy It is more than rude to sell information about you without your permission.  We don't do that and we'll find another way to make a