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bonemachineon Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down

The main point is that the evaluations are the University's property. It would be irresponsible of them to entrust their protection to a third party -- especially when that third party seems to have set up their site without obtaining the University's permission first.

bonemachineon Yale students made a better version of its course catalog. Yale shut it down

Officials also expressed concerns that the site was making course evaluation information available to individuals not authorized to view the information.

Sounds like they have perfectly valid concerns, actually.

When it comes to protecting restricted (and potentially rather damaging information) -- which also happens to be the University's property, anyway -- it's generally prudent to suppress the source, and ask questions later. Taken out of context, even a single vindictive or poorly composed review can be fatal to an instructor's career. Failing to take action to suppress their unauthorized distribution can also invite nasty lawsuits.

So this doesn't seem to be about "the man" stepping in and quashing student creativity and initiative (as much as some may prefer that narrative). If anything it seems that Yale did the right thing, in this case.

bonemachineon The poor don't work because they are economically rational

But you never really substantiate this idea that they're "not looking for work."

I mean, yeah, you made a line graph and such. And you cite mysteriously precise figures like $22731 and $23706. But to conclude that people with net expenditures in these brackets who also aren't presently working just aren't looking (let alone that they just don't want to work) requires a far deeper (multi-factor) analysis than you're making.

It's also very hard to reconcile with the sheer length of the waiting lines at some of the daily employment agencies I've seen at 6AM in my own neighborhood. Or the utterly dour, resigned expressions sewn into the faces of some of the long-term unemployed that I'm sharing seating space with at this coffeeshop, right now.

I know that observation carries no statistical weight; but it's meant to be illustrative -- if you're going to make sweeping generalizations about a class of people that contradict the day-to-day observations that most of the people reading this thread seem to have about this topic -- and which are also, BTW, rather insulting to the intelligence and character of this class of people -- you're going to have to be a lot more rigorous in arguments you're offering.

bonemachineon How startups can compete with big company perks

Yecch.

Everyone knows (or ought to know) that the value of most of those perks has to be offset against something in the company's budget. (Namely: your paycheck[1]).

(New) startups shouldn't try to compete 1-1 with the handful of already stupendously successful startups on these items.

Far better to offer something the big boys can't: like actual responsibility (the kind that by definition, always comes with the act of taking on substantial risk); real challenge; and an opportunity (and expectation) to not only see, but contribute strategically to the whole picture -- including things like business strategy, shaping the company's hiring & general social culture, etc. Not to mention things like decent office space, lack of bureaucracy that's inevitable in any large organization, etc.

Those are what I call real perks -- not free massages, a treacly beer keg, or mediocre sushi (half price after 4p!)

[1] Actual benefits, like health insurance and paid training, are an entirely different matter of course. In these areas, the employer contribution (at scale) has a decisive leveraging benefit (i.e. generally providing more than what the employer could for herself out of pocket, dollar for dollar). But most of these fashionable "perks" out in startupland have dubious benefit at best -- and most of them I'd happily trade for the (implicit) negative offset in walking around money that goes with them.

bonemachineon Ukrainian Protesters Hold Up Mirrors to Police

Ah, how I envy the freedom available to political protestors in the former Soviet Union.

In NYC (during the Occupy days), those mirrors would have been swiftly confiscated as "potential weapons."

bonemachineon The poor don't work because they are economically rational

Monotonic, shmonotonic.

You haven't answered any of the main counterpoints people have been raising to your rant so far. Trying to distract us with academic gobbledygook really isn't helping your case.

bonemachineon The poor don't work because they are economically rational

You mean the time that the unemployed spend looking for work? It's just another "day off", like the original poster says.

bonemachineon The poor don't work because they are economically rational

The point is, if you're going to make not only highly charged, but basically, incredibly insulting assertions about a very large group of people (that also happens to be much weaker than yourself) -- especially assertions that are readily seen to be based on flawed selection biases and other sloppy reasoning -- then you had better make at least the numerical parts of your claims instantly verifiable from the sources you cite.

It's just as in academic research -- yeah, maybe it's buried in the source somewhere, but no one has time to parse paragraphs, and divide numbers for you -- especially when you're already trying their patience by making such structurally weak arguments in the first place.

Pointing fingers (and, implicitly, accusing people of being lazy or unable to read) to distract from the fact that don't seem to have an answer for their main criticisms of your "argument" doesn't help, either. It's just grasping at straws.

bonemachineon The poor don't work because they are economically rational

Ah, I see.

bonemachineon The poor don't work because they are economically rational

You put footnote numbers in the article, but didn't include the actual references.

Weird, huh? Anyway, since I couldn't readily find substantiation for that 24% number, and the added dubiosity coming from the fact that he doesn't even mention whether it's adjusted for students, disabled, etc (as is standard practice in econometrics), I didn't even bother with the other charts or arguments he was trying to make.

bonemachineon The poor don't work because they are economically rational

TL;DR, starting with Line 1:

It’s a fairly pervasive myth within the US that the poor work very hard at unpleasant jobs. But this is nothing but a myth - according to the BLS report A profile of the working poor, 2009, as of 2009, only 24% of people below the poverty line were in the labor force (this means working or looking for work) for at least 27 weeks/year.

Even if one knew where in the BLS report to dig for that 24 percent figure (and independent of the fact that the author doesn't even mention whether it was was adjusted for traditional non-working categories -- e.g.. students, seniors, disabled, in or recently out of detention -- or not, as is standard practice when talking about unemployment numbers) there are so many plainly illogical (and just plain weird) assertions jumping out of this rant that you kind of have to wonder why he bothered.

For starters: that

    "below the poverty line" === "poor in the U.S."

or, my favorite:

    "in the work force at the moment" === "willing to work in general."

Really now?

bonemachineon Why Are There So Many Pythons?

As it happens, hashes in Perl 5 autovivify by default (rather like defaultdicts in Python). In retrospect, this can seem rather surprising (if not off-putting) to newcomers, so an argument can be made that a more conservative default behavior should have been chosen (like the more "hard-nosed" behavior of standard dicts in Python).

OTOH Perl people tend to like the way we can, for example, create histograms (and nested structures like graphs) a bit more fluently with autovivifying hashes, e.g.:

    my %a;
    for my $x (@x)  { $a{$x}++ }

than if we always had to be saying

    if (exists $a{$x})  {
        $a{$x}++
    }
    else  {
        $a{$x} = 0
    }

Or as Perlistas would be more prone to write (if forced to use a non-vivifying hash):

    exists $a{$x} ? $a{$x}++ : { $a{$x} = 0 }

Or gosh, who knows:

    $a{$x} = exists $a{$x} ? $a{$x}+1 : 0

Or to have sat around and waited for 10 years or so until Hash::Util was invented (after Perl 4's initial release), provided then you knew to look for it, and how), at which point you'd finally be able to say:

    use Hash::Util 'unlock_keys';

But as it happens, when Perl 4 first came out, autovivification (and its cohort, promiscuous ducktyping) were chosen as the default behavior for many of the language's core constructs (not just hashes and arrays). It's just the way Perl rolls. Whether it's the "right" tradeoff to make or not, from a socio-engineering perspective, is an interesting question (and partially a matter of taste). But in general Perl has been pretty consistent in its approach to tradeoffs like these.

bonemachineon Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (January 2014)

In general, with marketing, you need to keep your Message simple. As in drop-dead simple. Especially when you're veyr small.

That's why you see food trucks offering tacos, sushi, or organic chocolate-and-truffle-oil-suffused hempseed brownies, respectively... but food trucks offering all 3 of these, not so often.

With recruiting it's kind of the same. Also, out-of-towners have different filtering / recommendation / communication needs, and take different payscales, also

So they're probably just applying the 80-20 rule, and catering to what their known client base seems to ask for most.

bonemachineon Please Don't Learn Category Theory (2013)

Finally someone has the courage to tell the Truth about CT.

Next up: the idea that the notions of Monad, Functor, and Category (in whatever guise) are even needed or helpful to do strong FP.

bonemachineon With YesGraph, Finding Tech Talent Is As Easy As Using Tinder

Agreed - major cognitive disconnect there. Preferred identity providers, if any, should be ('GitHub', 'Stack', 'Twitter') followed by None (i.e. independent / paranoid). FB tends to have vibe ranging from "Meh" to worse among most developers I know (who don't actually work for FB).

Definitely not a place I'd think to go looking for available talent, in any case.

bonemachineon Lawsuit: Oracle called $50K 'good money for an Indian'

Perhaps they terminated the guy because he showed he was too emotional and incapable of dealing with the way the company worked globally ...

If so, then evidently they're the kind of company that seems way, way more concerned with employees who get "emotional" about discriminatory practices... then about the discriminatory practices themselves.

bonemachineon Lawsuit: Oracle called $50K 'good money for an Indian'

They shot the messenger. That's the main point.

bonemachineon Taking PHP Seriously

This is not about taking PHP seriously.

The point as I understood was that for all of PHP's faults, (almost by accident) it managed to get certain things right, or at least right for the Web in the time in the time of it's heyday.

These being, chiefly, that the much-maligned document-based scripting model turns out to be really easy to package, deploy, and most of all, to learn. And that it also (again by accident) happens to be in some ways easier to program safely in, compared to handler-response based frameworks.

Don't get me wrong -- I don't see these as anywhere close to redeeming strengths for PHP. It's still a crappy language, all the cheerleading and apologetics from the likes of FB and Etsy notwithstanding. But the presentation does make some interesting points.

bonemachineon Why smiling in your passport photo is forbidden

Because they don't everyone to know how happy you were the day you knew that, soon enough, you'd be leaving.

bonemachineon Lawsuit: Oracle called $50K 'good money for an Indian'

No, what we have here is a SV megacorp practicing blatant racism in its hiring (or internal allocation) practices, and then firing the guy who blew the whistle on it.

It's not about the Irish guy, or the Indian guy.

EDIT: for "internal allocation", above.

bonemachineon Lawsuit: Oracle called $50K 'good money for an Indian'

Even what is written doesn't sound lawsuit worthy.

May or may not have been, but sounds like you didn't even read the article, judging from your response.

Hint: It definitely was not about a $10k salary difference.

bonemachineon My Amazon interview experience

And? How's the inquiry going, so far?

bonemachineon My Amazon interview experience

In any case, my primary point is that I wouldn't write off an entire company due to what are likely the mistakes of a single individual,

Well, actually, I would. Because (being as it seems to keep happening, over and over again, in big companies and in small companies) clearly it's not the mistake of a single individual. The fault lies with the mindset of those who create the hiring culture in the company at large.

And the shabby treatment frequently dealt out to candidates may not be entirely consciously intended, but still, it is no "mistake." It is a perfectly predictable outcome of the hiring culture in these companies.