5teev

This is management's claim, not objective fact, and probably open to dispute. From the comments on the New York Times article, I'd guess the unions have quite a different perspective.

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/01/11/hostess-files-for-ban...

A professor told me once, "Physics is about what happens. If you want to know why, maybe try going to church."

Or vice-versa, i.e., one's thinking style affects one's choice of programming language. I believe this is why some programming languages just never clicked with me. My brain definitely resisted Perl...at first....

Seriously, "his whole life"?

When Gruber says, "You either see it or you don't,"he means, "If this is important to you, you will notice and value it," not, "If you don't see this, you are an unsophisticated yokel who should stick to pay-phones." JT hears Gruber with a tone of dismissiveness that just isn't there.

Six hours later: yeah, didn't think so.

So it's been more than 6 hours since this was posted. There must be a few clones of the Android version by now. Links, anyone?

Except a lot of the time, it wasn't a lot of cool shit, it was a bunch of crapware and you still had to buy software to actually do cool stuff.

I loved QuickSilver until I traced a system-wide drag-and-drop problem back to it and regretfully uninstalled it in favor of LaunchBar (which is not free). This was around the time the original developer announced he was basically ceasing work on it.

I'm glad development has resumed for QuickSilver, but I'll wait and see before giving up the reliably updated LaunchBar.

> But for people who thought that $60 is a fair price for 1.x (I myself belong to this group, and so seem Marco), it's just a promise of a generous gift that was taken away.

But kind of a bummer for people who considered the $60 as $30 for 1.x, $30 for 2.x.

Not a great analogy: while almost everyone else at the restaurant works for tips, the chef doesn't.

> we can debate how big magnitude of the distortionary effect of taxes. But this should be done with data not based on anecdotal feelings.

This is true enough for the Tax-Me-More rich folks, but much more so for the Tax-Me-Not crowd who oppose just about any taxation--a belief often supported by little more than "anecdotal feelings" itself.

Reported crimes probably correlate more strongly to police presence, so the root question may be, Are police officers more heavily patrolling areas where people also need rides, and how do they know?

Could you have the insurance companies' names in plain text? I could not locate "Aetna" using my browser's Find… function, but instead had to scan the "Company" column. I appreciate that it's sortable, but I might want to sort by price, then jump to each row using "Find Again" to see the variety offered by a particular company.

You can ask these same questions about a lot of things we use every day. Do you have deep knowledge of how your car works, or just a superficial understanding of the basics to keep it running? How about your refrigerator? Household plumbing? Your computer? And how deep is "superficial"?

Another question to ask yourself is, "If it breaks, could you fix it?" And what is fixing it? Swapping parts, fiddling with function params, without knowing exactly what went wrong at a deep level? Paying someone to fix it for you? Is it "understanding" to know whom to pay for what repair?

I believe it is possible to have a thorough understanding of every aspect of every tool we use, but this would tend to limit the extent most of us would build up from it, as time spent learning these fundamentals is no longer available for deriving from them. If we assume humans have limited time and capacity for understanding what already is, it's by necessity that we use certain inventions as black boxes in order to build from them.

Or maybe the question is, "Should you be able to build your own toaster?"

http://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_thwaites_how_i_built_a_toast...

Yeah, I see no problem if you tell the employee, "I can pay you for two months." At least he knows what he's getting into. Besides, even a "safe" job can abruptly end, often with much less than two months' notice.

I flubbed a job interview when asked how I'd implement a factorial. Of course I did the well-known recursive version, but then they asked how I could do it without recursion, and I blanked. I think they wanted me to talk about memoizing and the Y-combinator, but...I don't know, maybe they'd have settled for a naive for-loop.

> I think this is a distinct C-level problem. And if managers aren't being held accountable, that a C-level problem, too.

The C-levels are content with directors who "manage up" instead of looking past them to see what's really happening on the ground.

Unless you include the dog who keeps the other five bones for himself.

I'd extend this concept to meetings: if you block out 30 minutes but finish in 10, don't keep talking for 20 more. The excess discussion is at best simply wasted time, or worse, leads to feature creep.

And just to completely deaden the joke, this was clearly a facetious little bit of hyperbole, not a statement of actual fact.

I'm pleased, too: my app is destined to be immortal!

I've always suspected there ought to be a physics portion on the driving exam.

Who said "primary purpose"? I was just trying to address your concerns about the college-educated waiters of the world.

You seem pretty worried about the waiters, so here's a hypothetical direct benefit of educating them: Maybe the theater degree will offer the waiter more opportunities for self-fulfillment outside of work. Consequently he won't be consumed with bitterness and resentment of the people he waits on, perhaps people educated in some worthier endeavor he couldn't, or wouldn't, pursue. And he won't spit in your food.

Direct link to article: http://blog.getjar.com/developer/getjar-vs-apple/

Are you saying we should all just trust the laptop thieves of the world a little more? Maybe stealing a laptop is the worst thing a thief will ever do; maybe not. It's not unprecedented for a criminal to murder a witness to a relatively minor crime in order to avoid a third strike conviction. Is it worth the risk to find out?

There's a difference between "living in fear" and "minimizing risk" just as there's a difference between "living without fear" and "courting danger."

Actually, this arcane styling might make a lot of sense to non-geeks (even mothers!) who used a word processor in the early 1990s.

So Google's facebook-beater is a product that appeals only to hardcore geeks and not "yo momma"? I doubt it. Maybe for now, but not for long.

Anyway, if it's that important to dodge your mother online, there's always Orkut.

> A lot of OS X users seem to have this idea that Apple hired only the best of the best when it came to programmers while Microsoft hired the cheapest and barely adequately skilled...

Is this really a commonly held belief? I've never encountered anyone expressing this opinion.