dschobel

Doesn't ruby with its "operators are actually methods and fair-game for redefinition" implementation disprove the theory operator overloading is an a priori Bad Idea (tm)?

Those guys seem to manage the flexibility pretty well.

Good luck explaining that to a judge. Would you gamble a company based on that distinction?

Also not sure what your complaint is. Working at the right level of abstraction is fundamental to being a good engineer.

Funny, I remember HN railing on a guy just a few weeks back for bitching about a bug not being fixed in an older version of perl and having the gall to complain to the perl devs about it.

One man's stable environment is another man's technical debt I guess...

I think you misunderstand what a statistical correlation actually means and entails.

Outside of his nigh-endless legal accomplishments, Posner is also allegedly the basis for the character of Mr. Burns on the Simpsons.

His blog (http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/) is well worth a read.

If you're an economic-utilitarian you'll love it, otherwise you'll probably think he's a monster, albeit a very rational one.

I prefer this one, which was a response to a prompt about meaning: "How should I know? I only wrote the thing."

I've heard it attributed to Hemingway.

I realize that there are existential forces at work which would lead a SEO/marketing consultant to emphasize the overwhelming and crushing complexity in running a business but I've seen enough successful and completely beloved hole-in-the-wall operations, run by people you would never mistake for intelligent, that I question the fundamental truth of it.

Sometimes having a great product really is enough.

Thank you for this link. I think a lot of HNers with the "life is an optimization problem, I just need to find the correct parameters" mindset can learn from it. It certainly made me uncomfortable for the amount I identified with the speaker.

I was thinking about this just the other day as I was getting a flu vaccine. As far as accepting closed source technology in your life, that seems like the vastly more salient domain.

vs "If it isn't going in a text-book or you can't sell it, don't bother." --my thesis advisor

That my fried, is called experience.

* (though I don't know if that's an official Microsoft language)*

It is. When you launch Visual Studio >= 2010 it's there alongside C# in the Project Creation wizard.

That's a poor definition which you won't find repeated in any other reference (really, take a look). The entirety of the meaning of the idiom concerns the misperception of ones opponents.

just FYI, the idiom "tilting at windmills" implies an imaginary opponent. TSA is very much real, unfortunately.

I appreciate Patrick's intent and mission to get engineers to value their wares more but I don't think his anecdote makes the most compelling argument.

For a counter-anecdote, I will say that in +10 years of a software career I have never, not even once, seen a "decision maker" say anything near "Doesn't matter. Get a copy for everyone, put it on the company card." ¥

¥ Most likely because that would be a stupid and reckless thing to say.

I love that this is the top story on HN. I only wish that PG got as much flack for his startup economics hype piece[1] and proposition to compress a lifetime's worth of work effort into four years.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

Not sociopaths, psychopaths. Sociopaths tend to be introvert / loner types.

Good for him for getting shit done and empowering his troops but unless their financial incentives are as strong as his, he's just another psychopathic manager for asking them to sacrifice for him ("skip your classes", etc).

Nice work guys. Thank you for doing this.

Maybe it was after Jobs fell ill?

I'm sure there's some psychological term for what long-time Chicagoans feel for the winter there... you'll find it amongst the chapters concerning victims who identify with their abusers. (I did my five years in Chicago and gtfo).

question about text objects:

given the following string and with the cursor over f:

     function(1,2,"3")

why does di" yield:

     function(1,2,"")

but di( has no effect unless you are within the parenthesis already?

Why doesn't di( when issued over the f in function yield the following?

     function()

Interesting anecdote; I wonder if there is any software which people "lust after" or if that's something reserved for physical products.

Why do you say that Cassandra is ill-fated?

Is there any precedent for legal prosecution against STEVE in case the originator is browsing something more nefarious than Yahoo?

I know the "unsecured wireless AP" defense has been used with varying success but I'm wondering if any Tor peers have ever been prosecuted...

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them. - Henry David Thoreau

Same here. Current employer has a "take as much vacation as you see fit" policy and people take less than anywhere I've ever worked.

I'm thinking it some genius/evil HR ploy at this point.

yes, I meant hacking on it when I said "hacking on it".

in which sense? I have yet to see an argument why it would be more of a "test of GH's infrastructure" than RoR.