bmcleod

We've been looking at the payments infrastructure in New Zealand recently and have discovered that, unless you find whoever wrote something 30 years ago, most of the senior payments people have limited and ofter contradictory understanding of the capabilities of the underlying systems.

In general international agreements don't override national law, they just oblige the countries in question to pass laws that bring them in line with the agreement. Which they commonly fail to do in all sorts of interesting ways. Part of the mechanism in the New Zealand case has been closer to redefining what software is rather than what patents are.

For New Zealand to add software patents back in would require back tracking and quite a loss of political capital.

I suspect what's happening with all the people who this works for is that given there are some people who have a psychological component to their pain and some who have a mostly physical component.

Even if there are far fewer suffering from the psychological version, they are the ones who physical treatment will fail for. So they will be the ones that get as far as trying the pseudosciencey approach to dealing with the pain. So the mind body approach will have a high success rate amongst the people trying it even if it would be a terrible initial remedy to try.

This is really the kind of thing where A/B testing is both necessary and straightforward. Decently intuitive arguments can be made for both sides and there isn't really overwhelming strength on either of them.

This is the point where it's worth pointing out that the portion of the population involved in food production has collapsed massively over the last couple of centuries. People generally seem to find new things to value when their time frees up.

Philosophy of Science is an extremely broad field. And like any academic field it's easy enough to find crazy stuff at the edges.

I do think far more scientists would benefit from a bit more of a look at some of the more established philosophers of the last century. It seems that most gained some knowledge of Popper but nowhere near enough people are really familiar with Kuhn's work(http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/). Taking the time to think critically about what you're doing and what it would really take to change your views is critical to actually being open to broad possibilities.

It's a reasonably sensible point being made when I expected the title to mean I was about to be subjected to yet another rant about editors.

Improving the interactivity of wikipedia would be nice. Although I suspect it would make it harder to edit which might be worse than the benefits.

Poor Economics - Changed my views on some areas of how to combat poverty and poor education. As well as relating a huge amount a detail regarding the unexpected ways people with different backgrounds behave.

There is an interesting issue in the philosophy of science regarding the "hard center" of theories. Basically any prediction about a reasonably complicated situation will rely on a large number of premises.

If you happen to be committed to one premise more than the others, you will always blame one of the other premises when an observation doesn't fit your hypothesis.

In the case of sexism there are so many confounding factors that you'll never be able to say with certainty that sexism is the root cause, only that there is a good chance that it is.

If there is a good chance that something bad is happening then it seems like you could reasonably be expected to produce a non-zero amount of effort in avoiding it.

It seems to me that people that don't read self-help books lump a lot more books into the genre and that causes them to miss a number of books they should read.

Earlier this year I recommended Bargaining for Advantage to someone and they responded that they don't really read self-help books. There are a number of books like this that deal with particular topics inside of the broader self-help genre, many of them going to a much more useful level of depth.

In bookstores I regularly find very good books on particular areas of business mixed in with self-help in the more populist style.

Reading a number of these expert titles is very valuable. From the popular group often only one book is enough to cover the common sense side of things, for instance I recommend that all my friends read "how to Win friends and influence people".

Unless the thing I "should" be doing is immediately necessary or massively more important than the secondary thing I end up doing I'm generally pretty happy to follow my motivation around.

I normally seem to get back to the important thing when its deadline or reason for happening actually becomes so important that it really needs to be a focus.

It might be the issue isn't that you're focussing on the wrong thing, it's that you stop after having done the first thing. When the code based work starts closing in on me I start picking targets of what I will do before I'm allowed to sleep. I can do as many other things as I want, but that has to be done. I also seem to focus better on boring tasks when I'm tired. It mostly works.

If you want to seriously consider this kind of cash back deal then you should look at the amount of money you're giving up as an exceptionally high risk investment.

What kind of a return would you want the upside to be for you to walk out right now and gamble 3 months of salary on a 25% chance of winning bet. Unless you've got significant wealth already then most measurements that take into account the diminishing returns of wealth will probably suggest a that you'll want the win to be at least 6 times that mount.

That's quite a lot of cash for a startup and it makes no sense to a startup that's worried about cashflow to make that kind of an offer when they could give out nice free equity.

Liabilities are much worse on a balance sheet than having employees with stock. Employees with stock in the company have an ongoing alignment with the company; employees who are owed cash are going to be slowly getting more irritated.

A terrible deal, you're seeing a bunch of downsides and no upsides.

Unless the work is absolutely fascinating to you then you shouldn't even be considering this. I'm impressed that someone had the balls to put an offer like this on the table. Honestly, even if you loved the work I'd suggest telling them off because it's kind of an insulting trick when some people try to get geeks to work cheaply on "interesting" projects.

If they're somewhere where giving you shares triggers auditing requirements, which is the only reason I can think of them giving for this, there should still be plenty of workarounds. Significantly increased pay back over the following few months at least being the immediately obvious one.

Beef is a case where there are some very obvious things(texture, fattyness, chewyness etc) that make eye fillet a much more pleasant eating experience than other cuts of meat and there's a lot less of it per animal. If you can pull that off you can make the general case of decent meat much more affordable.

Of course, there'll always be Wagyu and Kobe, but that's a much smaller market than just the high end of normal meat.

I've been adding a state machine whenever I find myself adding a state column for a couple of years now.

I have always found this streamlining at least one change in the couple of months after initial implementation.

The level of security knowledge required to do decent penetration testing is a relatively rare skill and therefore often necessitates bringing in a third party which can skew the cost/benefit quite badly.

You're often much better off saying that your site has a certain level of security because it's built in default thing X until it grows a bit.

Generally you'll know already if you're in a market or field where penetration testing is absolutely necessary(finance, health, well known brands etc) and it won't be a question.

One of the things people talking about reputation seem to miss is how easy it is to establish that base level of reputation. A couple of decent talks at local user groups will be enough in most tech areas that have job openings for employers and people with other opportunities to start querying you before they move onto more blanket searches.

On top of this I really dislike the argument that the skills are transferable from a big company to a small one easily. It seems like a much better argument for going towards something like a small-medium company. In the web space I'd suggest that the plethora of 10-40 person bespoke web dev shops that float around are a very good option for gaining broad skills and being less risky than startups.

People who are interested in startups should join something that looks pretty similar to a startup. People who are interested in making 10 million dollars should join a big company and live cheaply.

Unfortunately it's likely the spammers are simply going with whichever bank is easiest to work through.

Any changes will just cause them to move to the next easiest option.

The problem with "teh womenz" is that up until that point I was thinking of adding that list to a set of programming resources I'm sending to a friend of mine who's been learning programming recently. And sure, she'll have to deal with that kind of attitude eventually, but I'm not going to throw it in with the basic training resources.

Talking about "teh womenz" is a good way to end up with a dearth of women in your general vacinity.

This works very well for anything where people can objectively judge how good you are.

For anything more arbitrary you're going to need to toot your own horn a little. Of course, you still have to avoid doing it too much.

If you do your research you should know that range already. In which case open with 80-100 or more depending on the company and the arguments you can make to back up your value. If you do this then you've fixed the entire discussion at the high end. If the other party opens with say 50k then it's going to be very hard to argue it up to 80k.

As I said, you do have to research things first and if you really don't know then you just have to wait for the other guy to name something first. Since you don't know they can name whatever they like.

Learning particular techniques is a fun part of negotiating, but it's actually not a particularly important part of it. In the long run you'll be better off if you use these a little bit (any more and your start pissing people off), but the focus needs to still be on simple things like leverage, BATNA etc.

A lot of these ploys are becoming far too well known as well. For instance, nibbling seems to be in every negotiation book ever and it's really obvious when someone pulls it.

As a side note I continue to not understand people who don't like making the first offer, the evidence against it is very flimsy and it lets you frame the conversation. It only fails miserably if you accidentally come in under what the other party was expecting. Research should allow you to avoid that and in all other cases you'll get a slightly better deal.

Possibly the most important part of looking at lists like this is working out how to counter them rather than how to utilize them yourself.

That depends on how you're going about taking your papers. For instance, I took a little over double the maximum course load my second year at uni. As part of that I ended up failing a paper that turned out to have some more time intensive portions than I was expecting, but I also graduated a year early as I got B's or better for everything else. I was much better off enrolling in more stuff and then ignoring one when I found myself swamped towards the end of semester, too late to drop the course, than I would have been if I'd just taken a normal course load. I saved a years worth of living costs in student debt as well.

People fail things for all sorts of reasons in Uni, they're also often going through Relationships 101 which is great for knocking people for a loop.

tl;dr getTime in windows only updates every 15 ms, so if your performance benchmark cares about that kind of period then it isn't going to give very good results.

Every time I hear about performance testing in JS it seems to be that it doesn't really handle IE very well for whatever reason it is today. It looks like this bug would have made IE look like it performs better than it actually does though.

The majority of people I've come across started by doing web stuff or Basic way back in the day. I think in general that's the largest population. The best self-taught people I know have by now read everything that would be in a university reading list anyway.

I think it reinforces the point that self-taught people become very knowledgeable about the things they're interested in. The average self-taught programmer is likely to be more motivated than the average new CS grad. Although this may be becoming less true as more of the less purely interested people move to the more "practical" software related degrees that exist.

The list they've put together it long enough that I would expect nearly everyone to be missing a few.

Compilers and Machine learning are probably the two that you don't see in self-taught people much. The ones you do see it in generally go to university shortly after having been self-taught anyway.

Most of the other things on the list you learn if you deal with particular programming languages. And a university degree doesn't really supply breadth much more than being self-taught does. But someone who was self-taught and then did a degree will be much broader in skill, which is why those people seem to have such diverse skills.

The actual answer is that the self-taught programmer needs to keep learning and broadening into other languages etc. Which is exactly the same thing any other programmer needs to do.

People would probably be shocked by how cheap airfares are now though. Aviation technology has favoured seat cost over speed and that does show.

Slightly related: In pretty much any store which has sales people that come and talk to you those people have the ability to knock 5-10% off if you ask for it. Cheap things aren't worth negotiating a lot for, but they certainly can be negotiated and the other side will quite happily make a small concession normally since it pays off in happy customers.

This is why always asking for a discount is worth it.

Hello world is valid for checking that you have everything installed properly and it's the fastest way to make sure you get the most basic syntax of the program.

It's not like the first thing you're going to do is write out all of quicksort to see if it's easy. You're going to fiddle with numbers an arrays a bit first, particularly if your language has some kind of interactive console. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the first thing you do in the language is actually 1+2.

There's quite a bit of syntax you need to learn before quicksort becomes a relevant test.

If you're looking for a good language to build a quick website backend in you probably don't even care about that, you'll care more about having nice ways of passing information around and checking that it has a decent inbuilt sort method.

I was shocked when I took CS papers at the number of people who just could not grasp recursion.

My first job out of Uni I pretty much got the interview because the sample code I sent in had recursion in it.

I occasionally think I should recommend lisp to people who don't get it, but I'm not sure it wouldn't just break them.