cema

I would be happy to wear a tie if I don't have to. I need to practice tying a tie to remember how to do it. Also, some time ago I learned how to tie a bow tie and it's a cool skill that I want to maintain.

Semantics is important. People are making decisions based on semantics.

Good luck! There is plenty of demand for mature people with a solid educational background.

Another reason for small (not tiny) interfaces is to help with unit testing, when different smaller interfaces could be mocked in different ways.

Rearchitecting sure, but when designing a code base from scratch, designing for DI is not a bad approach.

Document your decisions, explain assumptions, limitations, and reasoning. It helps immensely.

Yes. Another consideration is that sometimes a submission may be upvoted not so much for the quality of the article as that of the discussion.

But he did end up there somehow in there first place. What was his interview them like, I wonder?

They talk about research but don't show it. All the explanation they offer seems common sense, is there anything more than that? Software engineering research is notoriously less stringent than the hard science of the rest of computer science, and to the extent that it serves to justify a corporate strategy, invites substantial scepticism.

Yes, customers seem to have been overlooked. A telling omission, I think.

I think your penultimate paragraph, the one where you ask managers to ponder, basically, if they are helping the team to roll it just push it, is very important and clarifies things. Of course, the whole comment, albeit larger than average for HN, is helping to make things clear.

We don't live in an ideal world though, and I do not know if the managers who prioritize the long term goals are more successful than the ones who focus on the short term goals (and who, frankly, usually are basically self-serving). Maybe it depends on the definition of success.

How I would like this point to be true! It sounds plausible but I do not have a proof.

A self-documenting code means we can (relatively) easily see what is being done by the program just by reading the program.

What is one question; why is another. When we work with the existing code (debugging, maintenance) we need to know answers to both questions. So, in addition to a well written (self-documenting) code base we need a document explaining the rationale for the choices that were made and, more generally, the context in which the code was created.

Hmm, the numbers in the publications are not stratified. Besides, I am not sure if the father-to-son monetary delta is the only factor to estimate the mobility. The first publication seems to study a broader set of parameters but all of them except the father-to-son thing look secondary.

I wonder what the data would look like for the various strata in the American society.

In order to change my beliefs I would need to see the evidence.

I tend to agree: it is largely true in the US. Not so in the rest of the world (outside of the Western world), and not necessarily so in certain parts (more precisely, social strata) in the US either, such as the ghetto.

I think you are right. When people from the then Soviet Union were emigrating to the Western world it was the supermarket that impressed them most.

Unlikely, but an interesting argument.

An aside note: I have noticed that recently (starting about one year ago) there has been a meme of Breitbart not being a reliable source, while its opposite counterpart Huffington Post does not seem to have this reputation. I wonder if there is a better reason for that than just political disagreement, perhaps there are studies on the relative reliability of different sources (online and offline)? Thanks!

Sounds like you refuse to even consider other possibilities. Okay, but there is still the question of his genesis as a terrorist and a murderer. Do you refuse to discuss that too?

  It sounds like justification for a decision made for less quantitative reasons.

Yes. And the perception of objectivity from the first two points (of the parental article) helps in hiding this.

"This being said" sounds like otherwise the metric works. I wonder how. The first two points do not seem right (measuring code commits! Punishing bugs, tracking the burn rate as the person's measure of progress!) The last two points are subjective, but the objectivity of the first two points is likely misleading. At the same time, because they are perceived as objective, they are likely to lead the overall measurement of progress. So the example you gave in the last paragraph (of people avoiding blame) does not sounds as an exception, more as a consequence of the choice of progress measurement tools and criteria.

I guess technically in C everything is passed by value but you can pass a pointer to something and call it, naturally, a pass-by-pointer. Since in C you can typically get the pointer value by providing the reference (I don't remember if it is called the reference in pure C, but we are clearly talking about the same thing here) it can also be called a pass-by-reference, consistent with some other programming languages.

I doubt you can really just cut-n-paste jQuery in any nontrivial web app...

  it puts a lot more pressure on the interviewer to spot my bugs

Perhaps you have a point. In addition, maybe it helps with focusing on the substance of the solution rather than the peculiarities of the chosen language.

A good explanation. I think one detail may be corrected: a traffic jam typically goes backwards, with respect to the direction of the cars forming the jam, at a speed much slower than the speed of the traffic. Perhaps a similar behavior is observed with the galactic arms?

Seems like it may be crucial. I am really eager to see how it resolves!

Yes, I have just imported my LJ to Dreamwidth, and I am not alone: there has been a spike in the number of Dreamwidth accounts.

  That people with some expertise thinks it's a duh article 
  makes me happy that I didn't just read a bunch of bullshit!

A good point, by the way.

But did you take his pills?