inflagranti

I so hate this attitude about people acting in good faith doing 'rookie mistakes'. I'm just answering to this post, but it's by far not the only one along those lines.

Why does everything have to be done on explicit contract basis? How can an altruistic act of one party (helping out after leaving the company for free) be turned against them!? Where will this end!? Will I have to get in writing that this was in no way meant as a bribe every if I ever pay a round of beer for a couple coworkers?

There should be protection in place that if people act in good faith they cannot easily be sued like this. And definitely this kind of victim blaming is not helping going in such direction.

Some anecdotal evidence in support of this claim that such craftsman title might give you better prospects than certain university degrees: A friend of mine learned mill-working directly after secondary education in Switzerland an apprentice system very similar to the German one. He had no problem finding a job after this and could even easily move abroad where he now works as an independent contractor.

On the other hand, I know quite a few people with university degrees that had a hard time to find a job in their area and definitely would have an even harder time getting a visa abroad in a saturated market. This might of course be rather coincidental, but I know that in general craftsmanship titles like the German Meister or the Swiss Diploma are highly recognised internationally, and it's well known that Germany and Switzerland do a lot of high quality engineering, which I would attribute in a large part to this education system.

The friends part I admit I have heard many times and can completely understand. Cost of living however is offset by the high salaries. Take home pay is one of the highest in the world, definitely you will have hard time finding comparative salaries in Europe, except maybe Luxemburg, where they also speak French, but it's even smaller and hence less job opportunities than Switzerland.

I might be biased being Swiss, albeit from the German speaking part, but the French part of Switzerland seems like perfect fit for your requirements. You both speak French, your kids will get high quality education for free and eventually access to two of the world leading Universities (no getting in debt to get an education, but that will hold for the most of Europe, too). There's lots of natural beauty, especially Lausanne is a wonderful city and Geneva is consistently ranked amongst the top liveable cities. Compared to France, which was also mentioned here and is definitely also a great place to raise children, it has lower crime rate and way higher salaries.

So you registered to HN just to spew your hatred? And you blame people for being to PC and not doing proper discussion but all you are doing is throw around racist rants without any substance?

If you actually had a bit of sense what's going on in Europe instead of blindly listening to whatever right wing party puts those ideas out in the country you are living, it should be clear to you that how Greece was handled and the German and French banks bailed out using peoples money has much more to do with the state of Europe right now than immigration. It's such an old, tired trope to divert blame like this, but apparently there are still enough people ignorante enough to not see through the simplest of diversion tactics.

An the only conclusion we can draw from this data is that black people and immigrants are intellectually inferior, right (and how are black people and immigrant one entity you can just lump together like this btw)? It can't be that they start out in much worse position than most white, western people? And if we really want to apply your logic, probably the white man is much more greedy and brutal and hence can easily exploit the more peaceful races in Africa. But you know what's much more likely than all this bullshit, that is has 99% to do with nurture and not nature and the status quo is hard to change.

Lets further constrain it then to singing or painting, both areas where I was always horrible (and my guess would be a lot of people in tech are). I just don't see myself getting good enough at those to be anywhere competitive with other people and I definitely wouldn't enjoy it.

So if those were the main areas where there's decent money to be made, best I could hope for is get a mediocre position to earn some money to hopefully pay back my student loans while definitely being unhappy doing something I don't enjoy. The alternative would be to go into some field that pays shit, let's say CS in this scenario, where I might be excellent at but even earn less than being a mediocre painter, and hope to still make it there and at least be happy. Now the choice is much tougher IMHO that what was initially suggested.

That is a valid point and definitely we can acquire a lot of skills. Still there is natural ability and personal preferences and I would think a society where everyone can learn and do what they feel like they are good and and would enjoy - even with that changing over time - would be a way better society.

Now thats of course far from the current discussion, where people are forced to get into certain debts just to study for a profession they hopefully enjoy and will be ok enough in to earn back the money they invested to learn it in the first place.

First of, that's a false dichotomy. The choice is not between expensive liberal art colleges and cheap CS universities. The outcome of a guy going to a cheap liberal arts college would still have been much worse than yours!

Yes, there is some individual reliability, but acting like it's peoples fault if they are good at something that doesn't pay well and don't have a hang for CS & math is dishonest IMHO. Not everyone can just study the subject that currently pays well and be good at it if they don't have a basic talent for it. I would definitely be fucked and miserable if I had to do something artsy if that would be what pays...

You mean like physical ability is ridiculously overcompensated in sports? Yeah we really need to make sure to foster those people with obviously better genetics and weed out the inferior ones...

That sounds about right (right in the sense as that probably how it is and right in the sense that IMHO that's a fair difference). Now would be really interesting to see the same numbers for the US and also have not just the salary but the take home pay after taxes.

Exactly! This sounds to me like way back when Galileo Galilei was criticized for writing in Italian instead of Latin...

This is a very unjustified and overly harsh criticism. The article clearly presents real world confusion that can arise from not understanding that Java is not pass by reference. This can easily lead to wrong code. So it's not just pedantically insisting on some specific terminology, but highlighting the semantically differences between passing a reference (more precisely pointer) by value vs. 'real' pass by reference.

I know I'll go of a on a tangent here, too, and won't directly address the PG posting, but it really saddens me that every time there is discussion about immigration on HN, it always degenerates into an us vs them argumentation between employer and employee and how each side can maximise their profit. Rarely anyone seems to care about the social or humanitarian angle of it, not to mention the historical significance to the US as a country. Is it really that controversial to allow other people that didn't win the birth-lottery a chance to work here if they proven themselves to be qualified enough? Isn't that what the US was founded on and what at least the H1B was exactly meant for? And can anyone really honestly argue that the 65k H1Bs that are awarded each year could put considerable pressure on the average wage in a country of 300M (especially considering the strict wage requirements which people seem to happily ignore in most arguments here). Why are people so upset about a few immigrants - fearing for their wages - when clearly the wage-fixing amongst Google, Apple & Co. had a much more severe influence? Isn't this obviously the typical spiel of blaming and fearing the immigrants for situations much better explained by internal actors that should be feared (and possibly punished)?

> What makes you so special versus someone from Asia with better skills? I'm supposed to hire you because ... what? We share the same passport and so I owe you some special heightened loyalty beyond what I owe any human being born on our common planet?

Well said!

This is what always makes me quite sad and angry every time there's a discussion about immigration. Shouldn't we as a society be past this entitled way of thinking? Why does anyone deserve a job more just because he already was lucky enough to be born in a rich country like the US? Sure, allowing in people from other, often poorer countries might reduce the local wage slightly, maybe even take a job opportunity from some local developer, but so what? That developer is still very well of and the possible wage reduction that US workers might have to live with is minimal, but the gain for the immigrant from the poor country is huge! How about a bit of social conscience and empathy for your fellow humans?

The H1B is already heavily restricted to 65k per year, which is a ridiculously low number for the US so I don't see this being able to do much harm in the first place (Switzerland, a way smaller country has roughly that immigration per year), but it will allow at least some people the chance at a great opportunity. Admitably, the way the H1B currently gives to much power to the employer, but many people here seem to strongly argue against immigration in general which I just cannot understand.

Worst comment ever.

Why is it so hard to grasp that most people don't want to be homeless or out of s work and hang around all day? Why do we bail out banks and governments in order to bootstrap them but not people!?

To me this is the same question whether we need directories or not in a file system. Ideally, your file system is a flat database and files are indexes by a vast array of automatic and manually added metadata that allows to easily retrieve them. Microsoft tried to go this direction with WinFS that was eventually cut for Vista, maybe because it wasn't practical (yet). Looking how people use the Internet though, where 90% of browsing will start at Google, this does seem a very reasonable approach for many things in the future. At the end, why should humans do manual indexing and retrieval if the computer can facilitate this part?

But isn't one huge issue here also that the way the airbus flight controls are designed it made it very hard for the experienced pilots to realize the wrong inputs the 'unskilled' pilot made and essentially allowed him to silently control the plane? This seems to heavily undermine the whole purpose of having senior people on board. And to rely solely on verbal communication to coordinate the input controls seems a very fragile concept to me.

But fly-by-wire does not preclude the sticks being mechanically or electronically (force-feedback anyone?) linked together. This would seem to me a much better design choice which gives immediate tangible and visual feedback to the other pilot. Instead the whole system relies on the pilots to coordinate using communication and by reading the instruments, which happen on a much higher cognitive level than the tangible input IMO and are hence very hard to maintain under stress - as unfortunately illustrated by this tragedy.

Hence I'd say this is much more a design issue than it is pilot error, as both senior pilots were advising the right course but the interface design allowed the inexperienced pilot to silently override control. Yes, this junior pilot probably had too little training and reacted terribly; but what's the point of having multiple pilots if they apparently don't add any additional safety because coordination amongst them has to rely on non-technical means instead of being facilitated by intuitive interface design? Where's the iPhone revolution in planes?

AFAIK you can embed images in CSS using data URIs, so there goes that argument and only the show-off one remains ;)

I see this explicitly argument being made more and more recently. A language is better because it’s more explicit and hence easier for people to understand. I think it’s completely wrong. If you want to be really explicit, use assembler. But everyone would argue that this is too explicit and harder to understand. So definitely explicitly in itself in a language is not intrinsically better.

What I think this whole argument is about is levels of abstraction. By saying language A is more explicit then B and hence easier to understand, what he really means is that language A is on exactly that level of abstraction that makes most sense to him. It might even mean that it makes most sense to most developers and he does mention the bell curve, but I think that discussion is still out.

Personally I would argue that Scala, Rust, D and at the very extreme Scala are not too high level, it’s just that most developers nowadays learned programming in something like C, Java (pre 8) or C++ (pre 11) and hence are used to that level of abstraction that feels natural to them. I’m confident though that a next generation, learning early on more functional constructs that are more and more pervasive in newer languages and also newer version of “old” languages (Java, C++) will feel natural to them and the “right” level of abstraction.

So in order to not drag HN into this your second sentence is some provocative claim about your view on the truth? Very dishonest, IMHO.

The nice thing with materialized views in DB2 for instance (don't know about oracle) is that they are automatically picked by the optimizer to replace a join. So your logical query is - as it should be - completely exasperated from the physical storage underneath. The DBA just puts in a materialized view and the application will speed up magically :)

The Muslim integration might be real issue, but it's also to a large part fear-based; that was definitely the impression I had back then from the advertisements and the media. In any case, I don't think laws should be enacted just to voice opinions and this one might at the end actually further hinder integration. This is all a bit OT now though :)

"This is my biggest concern with the idea, which I don't see being addressed (checked the entire conversation on this post to date). I don't think having the vote and having the basic income is compatible with each other."

If you have well-enough educated, hopefully reasonable people I don't think this will become an issue. Swiss recently voted down to get more holidays ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/switzerland...) and it wasn't even close of getting through. Now this of course doesn't prove anything (we also voted to ban minarets for instance, which definitely wasn't very rationally based), but it shows that people will not just take the short sighted approach only thinking of immediate rewards and instead try take the whole economic outcome into account.