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The other day I was reading an article by Martin Fowler in which he referred to the term technical debt. He credits Ward Cunningham for coining the term, which is defined thusly: Technical Debt is a wonderful metaphor developed by Ward Cunningham to help us think about this problem. In this metaphor, doing things the quick and dirty way sets us up with a technical debt, which is similar to a financial debt. Like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs interest payments, which come in the form of the extra effort that we have to do in future development because of the quick and dirty design choice. We can choose to continue paying the interest, or we can pay down the principal by refactoring the quick and dirty design into the better design. Although it costs to pay down the principal, we gain by reduced interest payments in the future. ...

The Truth About Cars writes about a German program that pays drivers to get their old cars off the road: The attack of the aging automobiles is caused by the Abwrackprämie, cash for clunkers, paid by the German government. Since January 14th, 2009, owners of cars nine years or older can collect €2.5K if they put the pile of rust out of its misery, and buy a new one. In the beginning, the program was ridiculed. It’s not going to work, said many, owners of clunkers won’t buy new. The Green Party said it’s “a joke.” Quickly, the mood changed. ...

This job posting led me to a thought – are people getting jobs based solely on their Github profile? If not, how long will it be before people do find jobs that way? Maybe it’ll take a Github profile and a blog. If you know what someone has written about their work over a long period of time, and you know what kind of code they’re producing, what else is left? Interviewing for team fit, perhaps, but such a record certainly takes a lot of guesswork it seems. ...

ProPublica has published a very readable breakdown of the contents of the final version of the stimulus bill.

So the big news on Twitter among Ruby programmers is that the “hashrocket” operator has been deprecated. For those of you who aren’t Ruby programmers, here’s what that means. If you want to declare a hash literal in Ruby, right now you can do it like this: my_hash = { :foo => "1", :bar => "2" } Also, many methods accept hash literals as an argument, so you can do things like this: ...

Nate Silver says everything I’d like to say about the bank bailout plan. Go read it. He also gets at what’s frustrated me so badly about Paul Krugman over the past few weeks: My anecdotal experience for the past several months has been that the more someone knows about the economy, the more they know (or at least are willing to admit to) what they don’t know. Anyone who is professing with certainty that this or that will work – nationalizing the banks, for instance – is an idiot. ...

The “Dalai Lama” (aka @ohhdl) on Twitter was a fake. The account has been suspended.

Tyler Cowen on politics: One of Obama’s problems is that other peoples’ attempts to copy his memes and strategies make it harder for those same strategies to succeed. There is a common pool of “good publicity for being bipartisan” and now many players are rushing to exhaust it, even if that means pushing policy changes of low quality. I’d describe it as bipartisanship being a currency everyone’s rushing to print. Eventually it’s valueless. When I’m feeling optimistic, I think that Obama is trying to transcend this problem by elevating the dialogue with voters past the cliches. ...

I always wonder what goes on behind the scenes on the World of Warcraft team at Blizzard. Aside from being impressed by the scope and quality of the game, I wonder how difficult it must be to build this (very) fat client that has to be kept in sync on the OS X and Windows platforms, integrate new content, and keep all of the game’s internal systems in balance so that users enjoy themselves. Then there’s the challenge of maintaining the infrastructure needed to support over 10 million active accounts. ...

Viral Acharya and Matthew Richardson on the dangers of new regulations inhibiting financial innovation: Some say that this inhibits financial innovation. We think this gets the issue wrong. The goal is not to have the most advanced financial system, but a financial system that is reasonably advanced but robust. That’s no different from what we seek in other areas of human activity. We don’t use the most advanced aircraft to move millions of people around the world. We use reasonably advanced aircrafts whose designs have proved to be reliable. The same is the case with ethical drugs. Although we are now in a golden age of biomedical research, our goal is to sell only products that have been tested extensively. ...