3d3mon

Null references do make reading code more complex for the user since every function call must be prefaced with a null check. If I make a function call in every line of my code adding all the null checks would easily double my line count, burying my code in Java-like verbosity (ok not that much but you get the idea). I suppose a good IDE could help with this if option types remain unavailable.

Another common complaint with null references is that there is no compile-time type safety that you get with option types. The go team could mitigate this by having the compiler check for possible null references that may not have been caught and emit warnings or refuse to compile.

Both of your examples are new to me as well, however I can make sense of topics discussed. Just to use your example, the first equation for B-splines defines it as a function from a tuple of ordered reals to real vector of dimension d. The real difficulty with math is not so much the symbols as they give a precise but very legalistic way of defining things but the underlying concept or intuition that it represents, the deep semantics if you will. The best analogy is law. The way a lawyer or judge defines things will be different from the way a lay person would due to the difference in precision. The descriptions will be technically correct but will make you second guess on what it really means. I wouldn't go so far as to say it sucks but math is definitely scientific legalese.

Rather than saying what is descriptively and historically accurate, I believe Thiel and Kasparov are merely issuing a challenge, if stated in a somewhat hyperbolic way, to today's innovators/entrepreneurs. If read in this light, they are cheerleaders not historians.

I imagine voting out Biden/Hatch means the next set of pols will just take the campaign contributions instead. What can be done structurally to prevent this cycle from repeating?

I think strict regulation is the way to go. Banking in a modern economy is really a utility like gas, electric, and water.

Another solution that is more long term oriented and market based: create rival capital-formation pools outside of Wall and Broad, say in the Midwest, South, and West Coast. That way if one pool blows up, we can let them fail and it won't take out the whole economy. It also removes single points of failure from the system. I think the crowdsourcing bill floating in Congress is a great start as it decentralizes capital-raising.

Some seem rather obvious:

"The technology behind one patent allows a site to offer suggestions to consumers for items related to what they're currently viewing, or related to online activities of others in the case of social networking sites.

A second, among other things, allow readers of a news story to quickly locate stories related to a particular subject. Two others enable ads, stock quotes, news updates or video images to flash on a computer screen, peripherally to a user's main activity."