TimGebhardt

How is this any different than software? Certainly there are many cases where a startup or company tries to make a product and us geeks say "It's stupid to pay for that I can redo it in a weekend and put it on Github" and we fawn over the OSS project and grill the original company.

And certainly there are other cases where OSS blazes the trail. But copycat software gets a hall pass when it you get to download it for free? Or is your post just a different iteration on the iOS/Android fanboy-ism?

It's funny that in the companies where working from home I think is more likely (big companies with policies about it and such), it would probably be less effective because those same companies probably have locked down computers and firewalls and the users wouldn't be as able to use what they might deem most effective (Google Docs? Skype? Dropbox?)

Whereas with smaller companies where you can pretty much do carte blanche ("install whatever software you need on your PC as long as it doesn't drain our Comcast business internet"), working from home would probably be looked down upon.

It's also the reason why it's so important in investing not to lose your principle (Warren Buffet's #1 rule - don't lose money #2 - see #1):

If you start with $100 and you want to make $150 you need to make a 50% return. If your $100 drops to $50 you need to make a 100% return just to get back where you started, let alone where you want to end up at $150.

Fake it 'til you make it. Throw yourself at problems that you think are over your head. If you care and you want to do good work you'll figure out a way to get something done. Especially if you have a good mentor or someone that can guide you to answers to hard questions or take you under their wing.

Learn to effectively communicate and then communicate with your peers. You'll never know what you don't know unless you discover it (and there are only so many hours in a day), or you learn from other people. And you'll have an easier time trying to articulate your visions when you can communicate them effectively.

Don't worry about how good other people are. In fact, it's good to surround yourself with people that are more talented than you are, because it's easier to learn from them. Try to surround yourself with people smarter than you are. This is a lot easier if you contribute heavily to OSS or work in a product-focused group or company. It's pretty easy to let your skill set stagnate if your primary responsibilities are writing internal-use-only software.

But VC investing is a hit-driven business. One big hit, like a Dropbox, funds all the rest. Unless you're really good at picking horses, you'll have the same median as everyone else.

Anecdote: My recruiter told me that the Chicago tech startup scene is the second largest in the country, behind SV. Not sure how true it is, but Groupon was pretty good for the scene.

More specifically, it punishes the savers who have their saved wealth in cash. Those that store their wealth in productive assets, like ownership in a company or real estate, are free to raise prices to keep track with or even exceed the rate of inflation.

Then you can take it one step further: If you indebted in cash or cash equivalents to buy productive assets you get to double-dip: your debt gets reduced by inflation and your productive assets aren't any less productive and their income/growth will adjust. Your overall buying power will greatly increase.

Can I ask why you're rewriting code on your production server on the fly without the aid of the rest of your tool chain?

In any good development shop you make a change, your CI server picks it up, builds it, and creates a release candidate you deploy. Every change should be checked into source control and built by your automated build bot.

At that point the difference between changing an annotation and an XML configuration file should be moot. I'd think the annotation would be easier because you can still mess up the syntax of the XML file pretty easy (e.g. "Can you change the blahblah label to System & such?" That ampersand will hose your system when you get it to production).

What about a small organization or a one-man e-commerce company where database performance affects conversions, and you're the one-and-only tech-guy?

Don't forget that most people in Congress are lawyers. And lawyers will see the patent system providing a lot of value... because you typically need lawyers to file for a patent.

And drug research is largely nationalized. Drugs for "important" diseases are typically discovered by academic researchers and the R&D of a pharma company is either focused on a) how to scale up production of the drug b) how to market the drug c) drugs to cure lifestyle issues and psychological issues. Anything else is too risky or requires too long of an investment timeline.

The reason drugs are so expensive to develop is the FDA testing. So instead of patents the FDA can just enforce a rule to not allow generic drugs unless they've gone through the same rigorous testing process the original guy did.

This is probably something the FDA should do anyway. Generic drug makers can look at a drug's signature, but there are so many other variables that can affect how a drug performs (quality control of the factory, quality of ingredients, recipe, procedure, etc.) that the FDA should require generic makers to go through the same testing process because they're different drugs.

The generic drug makers will have less overall expenses to bring a new drug to market (because someone already figured out a particular protein sequence that works in XYZ manner), but the original inventor will have time to milk the market as the first-to-market, encouraging innovation, and we can still get rid of our awful mess of a patent system.

Generally if you've built up a whole system (like the patent system), and it's really only beneficial for a select few (pharma), then maybe it'd be better to design a different system just for them (like the one proposed above) and don't make everyone else suffer the consequences.

If you're a small fry then your broker will probably assume the risk. If you're a big guy, like it sounds like this guy is, then he should know he assumes the risk. Buying and selling in a market carries some credit/counterparty risk. NASDAQ probably handled this poorly (Seriously, did they ask traders to be honest and self-report their trade executions as part of the official books of record?!?!), but this guy's fund will be on the hook until it all gets settled out if it does at all.

EBay's an open market with buyers and sellers and people just take it for granted they'll get screwed by EBay/PayPal at some point in their lives. I understand that there is probably more at stake in the NASDAQ than on EBay, but their Risk/Compliance department should have advised the principles of his fund to hold some capital off to the side for a situation like this.

I can't stand when I see people making this argument. What if people said that we had "enough" computing power back in 1999? Would you be happy with your Nokia candy-bar phone today? You'd never know because that's all you'd know!

We never have enough. The march of technology should be relentless. I for one can't wait to see how the guys at Intel/AMD/ARM or someone out of left field comes up with a way to get around this.

Getting a pre-nup is pretty much going through the work of a divorce, but before you get married. He wouldn't leave her with nothing, unless she found her lawyer from the bus station bench.

How is this any different than any other job, and why are we limiting a teacher's earning potential? If they're not well paid then they'll find ways to supplement their income.

If I'm well paid and satisfied with my current job then I'll make sure to get a good night sleep and be ready the next day to do a good job. If I'm unhappy or think I could be making more then I'll either do work on the side or spend more time working on my resume and interviewing for a better job. If I think my career doesn't have much potential then I'll really spend a lot of time outside of work trying to switch careers.

If you want teachers to do a good job, hire talented people and pay them accordingly. If you want a McDonald's like education system where a handful of chefs come up with bland but easily executable recipes then we can go down that path too. Just don't be surprised when your kids are switching careers from fry-vat guy to third grade teacher. And don't be surprised when the talented teachers see it as a stepping stone and get the heck out of there.

Instead of a "one click install" how about a "clickonce install". ClickOnce, the installer/updater built into .NET since .NET 2.0. It can also work for installing via CD or over a fileshare if you don't want it over the internet.

I think there is a big difference between banning it outright (like Apple) and hampering it. From the end-users point of view both suck, but at least if I use Firefox to sync my bookmarks and passwords I'm able to on a Windows tablet. Nothing I can do on an iPad.

They're not banning it. They're just not allowing access to critical API functions for a JIT engine to Windows Marketplace apps. Only IE has access to it. Without these APIs then Firefox will run like a dog because it'll undue all the years that people have been working on optimizing Javascript engines.

Who says inserting into a linked list is faster than inserting things into an array? If the array is pre-allocated, or even crazier a c++ vector or c# list<> with an amortizing growth function that only needs to be invoked once or twice, it'll be much faster than inserting a new node in a linked list.

The array/list can be pre-allocated to the size you need and have good cache locality and minimal container overhead -- the linked list will have the overhead of the pointer to the next node (2x for a doubly-linked list) + the type descriptor (if you're using a language like c#, java, python, etc.) per node and data located all over the heap with cache misses everywhere.

<sameCondescendingToneAsParent> If I was asked during an interview why inserting things in a linked list is faster that [sic] inserting things into an array, and I provided an answer that made him blankly stare back at me, would I want to take the job? </sameCondescendingToneAsParent>

Perhaps you're getting a guy switching careers or fields of expertise (web -> system or accounting -> embedded), or someone that just has that gap in their knowledge, or someone that's just having a plain ol' brainfart at that point in time. No need to be as rude as I responded in my third paragraph.

At work I set up one of our project's automated build to fail if the cyclomatic complexity of a method exceeds 20. It's a C#/.NET project so we use NCover as part of the automated build. NCover has a reporting tool that you can set to return a non-zero return value (which will fail most build systems) if it's metrics exceed some value -- in this case class-level cyclomatic complexity exceeding 20.

I've thought about ratcheting it down to 15 based on stuff I've read, but unfortunately that particular failure metric can only be set as low as the class-level in the latest version. The next version (4.0) will have the ability to set the threshold at the method level.

In any case, I'd rather have a handful of places in the code where someone has to do something goofy to work around that metric rather than accidentally allow the whole project's complexity to creep up as time goes on.

> I'm not a formally schooled developer. I don't know a <strong>heap</strong> about traditional computer science.

Well you sure do talk the talk. ;)

Ba-dum---Crash!

And I think he's asking you: what should he do then since you're judging that the work he's doing isn't valuable? Impact and importance are judgement calls.

You're already making the judgement that the work he's doing isn't valuable, finish it up and judge what he should do.

Yup, different types of financial products trade differently.

Stocks and bonds are "fungible" meaning that they can be traded on any exchange that will let them, or even via private agreement which is called Over The Counter (OTC).

Futures are not fungible, so contracts that are traded have to be traded on the same exchange where you got them. The main reason for this is that each futures has a contract specification that would need to be the same across exchanges to be fungible: e.g. one contract of light-sweet crude oil is X U.S. gallons of oil at Y quality... The other reason for this is that once the contract has been traded the exchange (or your broker) assumes the counterparty risk if you or your counterpart default on the contract -- so keeping it all on a single exchange helps everyone keep track who sold what to who.

Currencies are the worst: there is no central market. It's all inter-bank agreements and probably the lightest regulated of the bunch. Retail customers get hosed because it's absolutely legal for your broker to front-run your order and skim a couple pennies off your trade.

"Love doesn't start out as a hurricane that sweeps through your life and changes everything in an instant. It starts out as a seed. Barely alive, easily overlooked, fragile and small. But given attention love grows. Given proper care it sprouts and springs up through the dirt. Given years to blossom it buds flowers and grows branches, snaking its way through your life until it consumes it entirely. Given enough care the thing that you love becomes the lens through which you see the world. "

I might borrow this next time I have to give a toast at a wedding or a rehearsal dinner. I don't have to mention to anyone it's career advice... :)

Probably depends on the request. I got a pretty quick turnaround (or at least it exceeded my expectations) on my request to the FBI for whatever they knew about my grandfather: About 3 weeks.

Sidenote: if you're interested in doing the same just go to http://www.getgrandpasfbifile.com/

I'm not so sure about that. Have you ever played fantasy baseball? Or fantasy hockey? Most other fantasy sports are a pain in the butt. They're too involved.

Fantasy football has a nice rhythm: Peak at your team on Thursdays half-way through the season because of the handful of Thursday night games, adjust your team at lunch on Friday, check your scores on Monday.

At least for casual people. Maybe those hard-core will move to fantasy golf...

I think people without kids, when their friends with kids say they're so busy, don't realize is that all the work with kids is sporadic. You never get to get "in the zone" when child raising. I can't just change diapers for half a Saturday afternoon so I don't have to change diapers all week.

When kids are first born they need to eat every 2-3 hours including night-time. And a feeding can take anywhere from 15-45 minutes, with a diaper change per-feeding. If you're in the boat that Jeff or I were in you were very fortunate if your twins were both on the same schedule -- offset schedule twins are exhausting and relentless.

Oh, and 50% of twin births are C-sections and my wife was no exception. So her only jobs for the first six weeks were to recover, breastfeed, pump breast milk, eat, and sleep. Daddy took 6 weeks off work (3 unpaid) and pretty much had to do everything else until my wife recovered from her major abdominal surgery.

Not asking for pity or sympathy. I'm just saying that I don't know how people handle newborn twins without help from friends and family. It would be impossible.

When my wife and I were about to have our twins we had read that it takes about 170 hours a week to take care of baby twins. Remember, there's only 168 hours a week.

Now that they've just turned a year old I can safely look back and vaguely recall that: Yes it probably took about that much time to take care of the little guys.

Good luck, Jeff!

For those not aware why this guy's rant might be important, he's the author of "Working with Legacy Code". That book is pretty much a how-to (and a great one at that) on how to get your legacy code base in a testable state so you can write automated tests.