baakss

This is interesting to me mostly because my favorite translation is often criticized for being difficult to read because of archaic word choice. Though in this case, a lot of that may be the 'directness' of the translation from the source language (Latin).

I suppose there's a sweet spot between how authentic-sounding the translation is and how complex the diction is.

Why would that have annoyed Tolkien? He was Roman Catholic, and KJV is a protestant translation.

I missed this... but yeah same thing here. We won every year lubricating the wheels and axles.

I just applied industrial strength lubricant to the wheels/axles and crushed everyone in my troop 3 years in a row or whatever it was. The final year we did it, I didn't even bother carving out or painting the car. I sent the lubricated brick down and it was unstoppable.

I would call it a fear issue more so than loyalty. I would be willing to bet not a lot of people knew to begin with, and the few that were told or stumbled upon it didn't want to make it into a big deal for fear of getting caught up in a problem.

In the past, when I've seen a situation like this, one person in middle to middle-upper management made the call, and seriously only 1, maybe 2 devs were involved. If those devs said anything, it was usually a halfhearted attempt to escalate the risk, and was ignored as "well, that manager must have some reason" or "That's too hot of an issue."

I know, it's a crappy mentality, but most people don't want to get caught up in a big ethics issue at work. It's extremely risky for the person escalating.

As far as how only a couple people might know this even happened, corporate codebases are sometimes a total mess. There usually aren't things like code reviews. Project managers sometimes have absolutely no idea what the project actually is or what the requirements are. Devs often work in a bubble with shoddy requirements worked out by managers in the business and/or IT management. Not every company works this way, but I've seen three like this where the SDLC was miserably flawed.

Corporations aren't flawless, but it definitely isn't a given that the people at the top have any clue what is going on with their software either. I can think of two instances that I've personally seen very similar to the referenced story where someone in middle to middle-upper management made the call, and only 1-2 devs/analysts had any idea what was done.

If anything that should go to show the lack of sophistication a lot of these projects have. There often is no project manager, no code reviews, and a messy codebase where snippets of very unethical logic can hide for years.

Solar's fine, but very inconsistent. I work in natural gas myself, but I know quite a few people in Solar. It's great in some areas, not so great in others. They get a lot of calls during the winter wondering why they're getting no production out of their panels when it's snowing or has recently snowed.

Wind more and more is looking like it might be a nightmare. Natural gas is way cheaper in terms of energy provided when you factor in maintenance costs of wind turbines. In addition, there's significant concerns about the environmental impact of wind farms.

http://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2013/02/rethinking-wind-pow...

Natural Gas is actually insanely good right now in terms of carbon footprint versus cost. Most countries don't have the infrastructure for NatGas E&P though like we do in the US, and it's mostly a local resource.

This partially expresses what I wanted to reply.

The other part is that food calories are the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree celsius. By that definition, calories in vs calories out seems pretty darn close to reality, and if it's not perfect, it's likely so close you're not going to notice a significant difference.

LASIK cost me about $3500 in Texas at the best place I could find.

It is easily the best money I have ever spent. I highly recommend it if you're a candidate.

>I exercised my judgement and decided to phone the local Highway Patrol office.

That was rash. You called the police within an hour of reading this article? You didn't think it's possible the writer is embellishing or exaggerating the danger he was in here? As of right now, everything they've done has been done in good faith to try to point out the need for extra security.

Also, if they get arrested, even convicted of a crime, then what? You have two extremely angry researchers who know how to hack your car, and what, you're hoping some jail time might help them see the error of their ways and use more caution in the future? You can't see any potential problems if one of them feels vindictive about being jailed over your phone call when they weren't trying to do anything wrong in the first place?

I'd be curious if it also qualifies the person who found the bug for their million mile lifetime membership programs.

http://www.united.com/web/en-US/content/account/lifetime.asp...

I tend to (maybe unjustly) associate the Reddit community as being the Gamergate community.

I think Ellen Pao may immediately conjure up a perceived connection with the SJW scene, especially after her lawsuit. If I had to guess, that's probably where a lot of the hate is derived from.

Drop me a line at plonn1999 at gmail dot com.

I think the strangeness for me is that the article is written from the casino's perspective. They went so far as to dox the 'culprit' and are portraying him in a negative light in the article.

Strange choice to put a picture from the Ocean's Eleven series at the top of the article, seeing as how the thieves in those films are considered the protagonists/heroes.

I think a bit more information included with the article to verify this was actually a 'hack' would be helpful. I mean, was this akin to counting cards or what? It's hard to tell from the article.

From an article attached to the book:

"From an initial list of 20,400 companies, we sifted through 11 layers of cuts to identify cases that met all our tests (our study era ran through 2002). Only seven did. We labeled our high-performing study cases with the moniker "10X" because they didn't merely get by or just become successful. They truly thrived. Every 10X case beat its industry index by at least 10 times. Consider one 10X case, Southwest Airlines (LUV). Just think of everything that slammed the airline industry from 1972 to 2002: Fuel shocks. Deregulation. Labor strife. Air-traffic controller strikes. Crippling recessions. Interest rate spikes. Hijackings. Bankruptcy after bankruptcy after bankruptcy. And in 2001, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. And yet if you'd invested $10,000 in Southwest Airlines on Dec. 31, 1972 (when it was just a tiny little outfit with three airplanes, barely reaching breakeven and besieged by larger airlines out to kill the fledgling), your $10,000 would have grown to nearly $12 million by the end of 2002, a return 63 times better than the general stock market. These are impressive results by any measure, but they're astonishing when you take into account the roiling storms, destabilizing shocks, and chronic uncertainty of Southwest's environment. Meanwhile, Southwest's direct comparison, Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA), flailed and was rendered irrelevant, despite having the same business model in the same industry with the same opportunity to become great."

Src: http://www.jimcollins.com/books/great-by-choice.html

Integrated settlement / closing software for Title companies.

The market leaders right now are God awful. Market leaders include Adeptive (Resware software), ISGN (Gators software), and Ramquest (Closing Market software).

Their platforms usually include a desktop app (not really necessary), in most corporations accessed via Citrix, or installed locally (host of issues with versioning), and an accompanying database and web application. The web app usually offers a very limited view into orders, and some limited ability to place orders and is customer facing. The desktop app is usually internal to the title company.

The amount of money spent supporting these applications is staggering. In one company I know, it's ~$3mil a year in application support alone. That cost alone would make a strong case for switching to something more intuitive. The worst part, however, is that they're also extremely glitchy. When someone misses a closing because of this software, it's a huge deal. That's somebody in a hotel somewhere, and a very unhappy bank.

Some of them suffer from insanely limited UI's, application design that is prone to database blocks, and various bugs such as accounting data updates not being wrapped in transactions and failing to update 2 tables when needed (so you get 'half' of a payment and your ledgers are out of sync).

In practice, here's all these boil down to: It's a task list (provides user with a list of tasks to complete) that has some attached functionality to help you do the task, and is customizable. The reason most are desktop apps is because the most used functionality is document preparation, which seems to be universally done in Microsoft word using templates by all these companies. They're also horribly dated.

If this could be a web app, work well, and port data over from the current market leaders into your schema, you would not have to work hard to convince title companies to switch.

My apologies, the book name was Great by Choice, as someone else pointed out. Both books are excellent and worth the read though.

Seconded on the book choice.

Although, I thought the business parts of the book were excellent, but the mountain climbing anecdotes were absolutely gut wrenching. I actually at times found some of those passages about people freezing to death difficult to read. Others may have found it a bit more entertaining than I did though, and the life lessons about preparation and calculations are applicable to business.

Having worked in a couple large enterprises that tried to make the Data Lake concept work, I would love to see this concept in practice where it actually does something useful. Thus far, both attempts I've seen ended up falling back to traditional reporting structures, like data warehouses. This was in financial services and energy.

Serious question, does anyone know any companies that are employing this successfully? And if so, in what fashion? I'd definitely love to hear about a success story and what value was provided.

Edit: The example in the article seems to be more related to the failure of the data warehouse than the success of the data lake.

There were other efforts involved. Actually, if you're curious, there's some good analysis of Southwest Airlines' success in a book I read recently: "From Good To Great" by Jim Collins

If we're basing revulsion based on cost of diseases spread, vaginal sex would also have to be considered disgusting. Actually, you'd have to view quite a lot of non-sexual activities with revulsion as well based on that premise. Sorry, but I don't believe it's any more gross or decent than any other consensual sex act.

I did think about that a bit. That's part of why I added the disclaimer. I included it more because I was watching it this weekend, saw that bit, and thought, "That would be a really unacceptable thing to say today, but back then it was considered funny." Edit: And you're right, comedians are on a different standard. Sorry, forgot to include that.

In my lifetime, I think this is the social issue that has seen the most positive change.

As a kid, gay people were practically lepers.

Eleven Years ago, Dave Chappelle just outright said "gay sex is just gross, sorry it just is", and it was considered funny and acceptable. (Not harping on him specifically, just pointing out what it was like in 2004)

Seven years ago prop 8 passed, if barely with some caveats about lack of understanding.

And now? SCOTUS upholds gay marriage and it's socially reprehensible to mock homosexuality. It's a strange and very positive feeling watching a country's world view shift like this.

>If you choose to move away from London, fine, go forth and be happy in New Whatevershire in the county of Who Cares..

Your comment's attitude reminds me of those AirBnB / DropBox soccer players kicking the kids out of Mission field. When prices inflate, it sometimes removes the 'choice' to move away. So no, not "Choosing to live in New Whatevershire in the county of Who Cares". Choosing had nothing to do with it.

I guess it would depend on who you ask.

Ask someone from that wedding party that gone attacked by a drone predator missile last year what the U.S. flag represents.

The scientific community does seem to be rethinking the environmental impact of wind energy at this point. Supposedly the drag created by windmills is enormous for the amount of energy they provide, so in order to take up a greater portion of our current energy needs, it would drastically harm the environment from essentially slowing down the wind. Local temperatures rise substantially, but there's meteorological effects beyond that that are not fully understood at this time. Here's a primer article on what's been found.

http://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2013/02/rethinking-wind-pow...

Right now the efficiency over oil is enormous. At current market price youre getting over 3x the energy per dollar for natural gas, IIRC. Methane is also by definition the cleanest burning hydrocarbon, with the fewest CO2 molecules per energy provided. In the US alone, it's estimated that nat gas has the average household pocketing $800 yearly since the fracking boom. In addition, a geoscientist recently told me it's estimated that we're only extracting about 10% of the natural gas available per well, meaning there's tons more down there. It has serious potential, and at least the US's electric infrastructure is rapidly changing to accommodate it. Anyway, what I'm getting at is maybe we shouldn't count out natural gas.

We don't have all the details. You might not hire the best computer programmer in the world if he was also a psychopath. Heck, you might skip on him even if he wasn't a good culture fit. I'm not saying this person is / was any of those things, but there's more to hiring than just talent.

From the Zenefits CEO in Emails to customers (calling ADP unethical for protecting their customers data):

When you originally set up Zenefits, you created an Zenefits admin user in your ADP RUN payroll account to let Zenefits manage your payroll—set up new employees, manage deductions, remove departing employees—on your behalf.

Yesterday, without your permission, ADP systematically deactivated these accounts—accounts that you set up, in your payroll system, to allow Zenefits to work on your behalf. The reason for this is that ADP believes it can one day build software to compete with Zenefits, and in the meantime they would like to do anything they can to impede Zenefits.

ADP is claiming that they are taking this action for “security” reasons—but this is clearly not true. For years, ADP has let customers add third parties—a bookkeeper or an accounting firm, for example—to their payroll system to manage payroll on a company’s behalf. What Zenefits does is no different. In fact, even today, ADP will let you add a third-party administrator to your payroll system unless they have a Zenefits.com email address.

What’s high-handed about their approach is that Zenefits is still completely compatible with ADP payroll. All they’ve done is make it more inconvenient for you, their customer.

By default, we will start emailing you whenever there are changes that need to be made to your payroll system. We will detail exactly the changes that need to be made, and you can make them yourself in payroll. It’s less convenient this way — and frustrating that ADP has decided to create more work for their own clients in order to attack Zenefits. But beyond this, nothing will interrupt your use of Zenefits.

We are also working on other options for restoring automated payroll. Zenefits’ mission is to make running your business as effortless as possible, and our support team will follow up shortly with additional information on how to resolve this issue.

We think it’s outrageous—and unethical—that ADP is making these changes to your payroll system without your permission, and is creating this complication for you in their attempt to block Zenefits’ service—essentially treating you like a pawn in their corporate chess game.

If you’re as upset with ADP as we are, you can sign this Change.org petition. In addition, if you’re interested in switching from ADP payroll to Intuit Payroll, we’re paying customers $1,000 and helping them to make the switch. We’ll include instructions for this in our follow up communication.

We remain committed to working with ADP to find a solution to make this problem go away for all our mutual clients. In the past, we’ve directed many payroll customers to ADP, because payroll is not a service we provide. We’ve tried contacting them, but so far they have refused to return our calls. If they have any genuine concerns, we are happy to resolve them, but they have yet to express them to us.