kenster07

The reason the san fran interview tends to focus on theoretical cs more so than other regions is because the plethora of berkeley and stanford grads in the area, who subconsciously prop the entirety of their ego on their college educations, and thus use it as a measuring stick for others, sometimes at the cost of a good, practical hire. I've seen job descriptions for FRONT END positions which list a cs degree as a 'must,' which is just absurd in today's day and age.

As far as I know, there are no documentaries made about how it sucks to be a gas attendant.

Though I am disgusted by the descriptions in the article, I find your comment equally offensive.

Forgeting about the india comparison for a sec, there are degrees of 'voluntary.' There are no girls out there who think that they want to be in porn when they grow up.

Microsoft clearly did not make IE a business priority to the extent that Google has with Chrome, and obviously Mozilla with their flagship.

Why do we continue to work 40+ hour weeks when 15 would suffice? The answer is quite simple -- over the past tens of thousands of years, the primary survival pressure on our gene pool has been scarcity, and thus we are genetically -- not socially -- programmed to want to work.

Your assertion is only correct in the near-term.

The ultimate market is the world's poor.

I like this concept.

"Introduce to the west" claims aside (see http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/466721916/the-worlds-fir...), I'm generally a supporter of being able to feed the world's population in worst case scenarios.

That's the fundamental problem. The function of the finance system in a healthy economy is to ensure efficient allocation of capital. Playing poker has a neutral to negative effect on the system.

Re Wall Street: It's unfortunate that some of our brightest are tempted into playing multi-million dollar poker, rather than focusing their energy on producing any significant long-term value.

I believe software engineering wages will continue to rise over time, and will eventually reflect the true value the industry produces.

With due respect, God probably had little to do with make.

There will alway be a need for performance beyond what js can be provide, in time and memory.

So don't worry, js will not take over...completely.

This is easily explained by a broader psychological phenomenon. The brain and ego will invest itself in a task in direct proportion to the expected payoff.

"Remember the days in college when you learned all about the big Oh!'s and re-implemented all these sort-algorithms for the hundredth time? If you are a web developer like me, chances are you never had to touch a single one of these algorithms ever again." +1

It's a good start, but when the window is shrunk, the result isn't as impressive.

Many of the comments presuppose that Palo Alto's city council is in a position to do something about a truly macroeconomic problem, i.e. "instead of kicking them out, why not provide them with jobs etc."

That being said, I don't agree with the council's decision. But the cultural momentum that has carried them there is so far beyond them, and many of these comments miss that point.

After doing some more reading on the matter, integer factorization is not known to be NP-complete. So I retract my original statement.

This isn't very different from saying P = NP will be proven within 5 years. Sounds like linkbait.

Was this point downvoted for a good reason?

I will reiterate my point. There is no point in comparing suboptimal C++ to optimized asm.

Rather than downvoting me, the author if the study ought to rerun the benchmark with optimized C++.

It is quite misleading to write native code in the same way you write the javascript.

A wothwhile benchmark would test optimized code in all contestant languages.

This is incredible and may have far reaching implications for computing.

Hopefully, the cost ratios haven't disproportionately increased as well.

The example given for the "components" argument in this article is very contrived and unpersuasive.

No one should expect Bezos to speak for all companies in -Amazon's- letter to the shareholder.

The problem with the stock market is that it is optimizing for a different thing than most companies, and even society at large. If the minimum holding period for an asset was, say, 20 years, the subprime mortgage crash would have been much less likely. (One could make a similar argument for democratic office. But I digress.)

Shareholder value theory induces a sort of hysterical myopia, where ideas and results are evaluated in these Q2Q or Y2Y window. Growth is only evaluated within the context of the company, which creates perverse incentives wrt externalizing costs. Furthermore, if growth initiatives require no additional external funding, then the public stock market -really- makes no sense, and that is likely the case for Blizzard and Dell.

Getting away from shareholder value theory's myopia is the surest way to begin a sustainable recovery of our capital markets.

Then one would have to do another round to account for the trustworthiness of the 3rd party.

I don't condone lying in any sense, but I don't really care about the phone's benchmarks, and neither do most phone buyers.

In an era where patent trolling is rampant, an exaggerated benchmark of this nature is sadly, child's play. And it certainly would not have stopped me from buying the product if I was in market.

There are not many skilled and experienced workers would work for a ceo who has but a few internships under his or her belt.

A fresh college grad may be able to design a web product, but let us not confuse this with running a real company.

Why is it desirable for fresh college grads to be deluded into thinking they can found a company without any real work experience?

I would hope that an article from "Scientific" American would cite "scientific" studies which back such claims. As it stands, this article is more bro-science than real science, and it's a damn shame.

Articles like this miss the main issue.

Privacy rights should not have to be enforced at the public key encryption level.

Before all the sensationalists start going wild, remember that the NSA almost got defunded very recently. That is where the real frontier of this debate should be.

At best, this episode exposes how vulnerable public key encryption is. But let's not go off the reservation.

I have mixed emotions, not about the author, but the implications of this thread. It is great that she shows such dedication to the craft. But has dedication to a craft really become so rare that it is worthy of 900 plus points on hacker news? I know countless software engineers who work their tails off every waking hour, myself included. Do we all deserve hacker news posts? Or should we elevate our expectations?

It's a curious thing, good vs evil. It seems to me that there are few true Luke Skywalker vs Darth Vader scenarios in history. Rather, every political leader has a bit of Darth Vader in them. There's something about that power that brings out the scum in all of us.