klagermkii

On the subject of Linus, I wonder if he feels the same way about kernel discussions or if he is less at risk of this kind of burnout?

Does being more empathetic when dealing with contributors and their suggestions extract a greater price on one's emotional state, compared to the more brash approach Linus has?

The only way these companies can reclaim the money that they've lent to students is through the backing of the government, and the legal mechanisms that have been provided to them to use the state to collect money.

Isn't cancelling debt a form of less government interference, where the government will no longer allow its resources to be used to go after another person's property?

If you have invested 20+ years of your life into a particular project, and you have someone doing something that you consider potentially harmful to it, could that not be enough to react angrily?

I don't see why it would need to be negative emotion sourced from another area of his life that is leaking out here.

You presumably have to be pretty emotionally invested in something to work on it that long as a hobby and only later as a job.

I would think it would be number 2.

People who are anxious/depressed can feel that there are very few options available to them with the trapped sensation increasing the urgency of the choice, so the limited paths that they do see could be presented with more certainty than someone who feels like there's a wealth of alternatives.

> In our case, we want a new hire to be able to act as an independent contributor, i.e. their work doesn’t have to be double-checked. We also focus a lot on craftsmanship since it means that we all are getting better at what we do and at a good pace.

Maybe this varies between cities and job markets but when I read that baseline description he gives in an off-hand manner for the programmers he hires, I think I would probably be calling them "superstars". I don't know if the availability of skilled employees is great in Krakow, but when FizzBuzz type tests are still filtering a large percentage of applicants, it makes it sound like it's from another world.

That's my concern when reading these kinds of hiring articles, it feels very different to how hiring looks when you aren't privileged to have an abundance of skilled candidates available.

> Silicon Valley culture encourages it. Google calls engineers who aren’t managers “individual contributors.” Technical skills are valued above soft skills or business skills. “Anyone who deals with a human being is considered less intelligent,” said Ellen Ullman, a software programmer and author of a new book, “Life in Code.” “You would think it would be the other way around, but the more your work is just talking to the machine, the more valuable it is.”

While I clearly don't think one should go to the extreme of undervaluing soft skills, can we at least keep one industry that primarily values technical competence? There is absolutely no shortage of other fields (most of them) where the main/only way to advance is through management, and I don't think this has to be treated as a flaw that needs to be fixed.

Samsung has designed their own chipsets (Exynos series), but Qualcomm will only grant a patent license for them to use their chipsets as part of their own phones. They won't allow Samsung to sell Exynos chips to be used by other companies.

I absolutely agree with this. What may have seemed like a good idea to avoid short-term arguments, has instead allowed differences to fester to a point where people barely even agree on the terminology used.

Would love to know what that gets priced at per hour, as well as if they plan to have smaller FPGAs available while developing.

I think a lot of it comes from the modern definition of racism involving power + prejudice. As a group Chinese people appear to be relatively successful in society (certainly in tech) and so sit slightly higher up the power scale than black people do. So if a white person makes a negative comment it's going to appear as societally "punching down" much further if it targets a black person vs a Chinese person.

Basically it seems worse if you reinforce stereotypes against a group that is already struggling.

> Whenever people buy something which they are completely unable to differentiate from a fake, are they really being defrauded when someone sells them the fake?

Yes.

This is a pity. One of the things I like with the Mac is being able to use Mac-side editors like BBEdit to be able to make changes to the configuration and files of the Unix-y server tools I need. If I can't reliably use Windows GUI editors that would limit my ability to migrate from macOS.

If one is running NGINX/PHP under WSL would one not even be able to safely edit .php files?

What you describe already exists but it doesn't get called "automatic". The car companies don't call it that, the drivers don't call it that. It'll be called DCT or the older sequential manual gearbox.

I remember not being keen on C&C1 because of the horrible 320x200 resolution, when Warcraft 2 had moved up to SVGA. Red Alert ran in SVGA on Windows and was the game that actually made the C&C engine look how it always should have, and gave enough area to see what was going on the battlefield.

If I can't get 32GB of RAM on the Surface Book either, then I'll blame it on Intel for now and hope it's an option in the next MacBook Pro.

> The international community may not pay much attention to a conflict unless there is media focus on the issue, and the news media are unlikely to pay attention unless there is violence and havoc. [...] The problem of the entertainment-centered media strategies is thus rooted not in ethical flaws of individual editors, but in the fundamental economic structure of the media industry. It is therefore necessary to establish alternative non-profit news organizations to focus on dangerous conflicts and to offset the imbalance caused by the unequal access of the two parts to international news media and to remedy the problem that biased reporting is more profitable than balanced reporting.

I think too much is pinned on the door of the media when reporting on stories when:

(a) they are very far away and of little interest to people

(b) have very difficult solutions and enough nuances to make peoples eyes glaze over

(c) there is alternative coverage of other news that is more interesting

I take something like climate change which has had plenty of media attention, but until the first city sinks underwater there isn't going to be enough impetus for people to take the truly difficult actions. That moves it into the national spotlight and makes it a priority, similar to how terrorism on US soil changes "standard problems in the Middle East" into an important US issue.

> Another reason why the use of terrorism turns out to be counterproductive is that it weakens the ideological standing of the weak part. The ideological condemnation of terrorism for harming innocents is hard to argue against. The use of terrorism thus ruins the only truly efficient weapon that the weak part has: ideological warfare.

The resistance/terrorist/freedom fighter organisation's reputation is pretty worthless to begin with. Even if they're saints, no one is going to know about them or care. On the other hand, the powerful country/organization/political has an incredibly important reputation. It is absolutely worth it for the terrorist organisation to let their own reputation sink into the mud, if in doing so they can draw a response from the target that will tarnish its own reputation. It's like the relationship between politican and heckler; the heckler can say all kinds of things and people barely care, but if the politican really lets loose and responds in kind that can damage their image.

As a more reliable way to confirm if you have some thermal problem on an older Mac, download and run Intel Power Gadget. That shows the current frequency of the CPU, and when combined with running some program that puts all cores under load, you can see if the frequency drops below what is designed for.

Be aware it isn't always thermal paste that is the culprit. I had a 2012 Retina 15" MBP that was normally 2.6GHz but would drop down to 1.4GHz. That was purely due to the fans and (tiny) vents getting choked up. Solved by opening and using compressed air to clean, no fiddling with CPU paste.

So where are the American-born Nobel laureates? Surely all six being immigrants it at least a little statistically strange. Is this a result of poor US primary education, an issue with culture, or something else at play?

I feel like this article muddies so much of what is cause and what is effect. It pushes the idea that there is an "age-old male quest for a paying job", whereas I don't think men or women or animals or anything has ever had that as their primary objective. The pressure has been to meet basic needs, meet societal obligations and expectations, meet peer pressure and similar outside forces that lead someone to take up a 9-to-5 job.

I think it's natural as those forces have weakened for this to be the consequence. It's become easier to meet basic needs, gender roles have become less rigid and there's not the same expectation of a male breadwinner, and society no longer demands everyone has children.

"One manifestation of regression, Donald Trump, is perhaps perverse evidence that some of his army of angry men are at least healthily unhappy about the loss of meaning, self-esteem and masculinity that is a consequence of chosen and protracted idleness."

Maybe they are, but just taking up a "pointless" job isn't going to change that. Without the sense that there's something bigger that they're working towards, being a Gap Factory Store employee in itself (as per the header image) isn't going to give any kind of meaning. People don't work bad jobs for themselves, they work it for something bigger. Family, society, some kind of grand purpose. Can just look at that Congo cobalt mining piece by the WaPo to see what motivates people to endure horrific work.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/batteries/c...

Is there a licensing reason that one can't get a Thunderbolt switch to connect a few close computers, laptops, and a NAS and be able to have a network? Even if one's not going for the full 40Gbit, just at least let me move files around on an emulated 10Gbit network card as Thunderbolt supports.

Does this just start to get too close to InfiniBand for Intel's liking?

Thunderbolt cables and adapters are (relatively) cheap and I find it a pity not seeing it used for these kinds of cases.

I don't agree with the idea that giving companies better and better tools to achieve price discrimination is the win-win that the final quote seems to make it out to be. Yes, I can see how it could allow a company to offer goods to people who otherwise would not be able to access their services, but this comes at the cost of potentially complicated usage restrictions, making it easier for incumbents to squash new competitors, and pushing for more and more of a legal framework to support this kind of business model at the expense of the end user. I can think of examples where the products are barely (if at all) worse and see how heavily it swings things in favour of the powerful incumbent:

Trademark restrictions to prevent importing what could be effectively the same textbook or wrist watch.

DVD region locking where you can sell practically an identical product but charge vastly different rates in different areas, and it's illegal to work around.

License agreements on software not to restrict specific functionality, but rather the usage scenarios.

The example in the article of the slower LaserPrinter example morphs from being a physical restriction to modern printer cartridges that block ink refills via DRM.

Comcast's battle with Google Fibre where the price will heavily drop in just the areas where Google Fibre operates. Makes it much harder for Google Fibre to make any gains, but the vast majority of Comcast customers see no decrease in their bills.

Even the recent EpiPen drama, where they want to be able to milk as much as possible out of the pockets of insurance companies, but end users don't want to play the real price, so they introduce the co-pay discount to try and offset that cost. It makes the "rich" organisation pay, but reduces the amount paid by an individual.

There is plenty of evidence that would put the US as the "bad guy" from a Muslim perspective, it doesn't need one to play logic games in a vacuum to create a conspiracy. The support of "friendly" dictators, oppressive monarchies, and military coups that align with US interests, and the absolute backing the US gives Israel over any other Middle Eastern country. The last thing you want is people getting educated about that. There's no crazy conspiracy needed to show that the US does not have the best interests of the Arab world citizenry at heart.

And that figure of 10 000 people can't keep a conspiracy secret is predicated on the idea that it's some kind of active plot, when just having conflicting ideals and values can produce all the hallmarks of a conspiracy without any of the members necessarily being consciously aware. Cf studies on name blind hiring and diversity, where none of the recruiters would feel that they were racist/sexist/etc, but the end result would look very similar to there being a recruiter wide conspiracy against certain groups.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/is-blind-hiring-t...

I feel like most people are acknowledging the legal perspective in this thread. The comments are using words like "draconian" or "going too far" or "The law is clear: complicity in copyright violation". There's very little doubt that the four top pirates on that site are breaking some kind of law, it's more about how hard they should be punished or if the law is fair as it currently stands.

There's this interplay between the law and ethics as to how much your ethics are shaped by what the law currently says, vs the law being shaped by the communal ethics of people. I think when you reference a detail of the law (say first-sale doctrine) as a black-and-white first principle for your view of ethical IP handling it feels like there's not much room to move the ethical line. If there is some kind of absolute author moral right to first-sale, why even put a time limit on copyright or patents etc?

Personally I feel that people should be able to make a living (and more) from producing creative or useful work. Everyone benefits from that. I think the legal details beyond that including copyright terms, exclusivity, first-sale, reselling used software, importing of trademarked goods, mechanical royalties, license agreements, patent pools. All of that to me is ugly hacks on ugly hacks to try and make a workable system out of it. And I don't care if people throw all of it out so long as they can still come up with a viable way for people to make movies, make video games, make music, make medicine and make useful software applications while still being able to support themselves and their family that doesn't just depend on charity.

I feel that by reducing it to a binary legal question you've already dropped so many layers of nuance which help shape peoples own moral or ethical view of it. We all know that distributing copyrighted goods is against the law, reducing a complex question to an irrelevant simple one does nothing to help settle what people may feel is legal overreach.

Also even the "right to reproduce and distribute a copyrighted work to the public is solely that of the copyright holder" is not an absolute when you look at things like mechanical royalties.

If you're spending $159 on wireless headphones for your iPhone, you're probably already the poster child for the first world and are thus entitled to complain about first world problems.

I will have a stronger opinion about chairs and keyboards not because I think they're more important, but because I have more experience with them. And that experience is far easier to gain.

Most of the consequences of choosing a particular programming language or technique will only come out months or years later, and often those results will have a very muddy connection between cause and effect. I'm way less likely to go on a forum and talk confidently when I would have needed to do multiple projects taking years to have a definitive answer.

On the other hand give me a keyboard for a day and I'll happily wade into an argument about it after typing a few thousand letters on it.

> Researchers will track how various factors — including diet, sleep patterns, gender, race, economic circumstance, air quality, and exercise habits, as well as substance use — correlate with changes in the subjects’ brain scans over the years.

> "How cool will it be if we can collect data on 9- and 10-year-olds that will help predict how all young people will function in later life?" asks Garavan. "This is the sort of information that will truly help people parent, and legislate, and educate, and live healthy lives."

I'm not as enthusiastic about that future as Garavan is, and especially not the idea that it could shape legislation in any kind of significant way. Doubly so if it's going to be done via statistical models and correlation, rather than a deeper understanding of the mechanisms involved.

I don't think I've ever felt that users are intentionally trying to annoy me, it's more that it feels like they're not trying hard enough. The sense that the application is not impossible to use, lots of their peers have apparently been able to use it with no problem, and that they need to meet me halfway. A kind of unspoken contract where I try and make it as easy as possible for the user, and the user puts in the effort to read the directions rather than just immediately clicking through.

This is not to say that it's their fault or that I am not always working on improving my own work to better take into account human nature as part of interface design. Merely that the post focuses on "intentionally piss off" as the prime motivator, and I'd be a surprised if most developers attributed it to that.

I feel that the self-confidence that is important is not in regards to specific coding skill or the quality of the code itself, but rather the confidence that no matter how the project goes I will be able to find a way through the problems. It may not involve the greatest method of solving it, and I'll probably be able to look back with hindsight and learn a lot, but one way or another I'll be able to see it through.

To me that mindset is very different from thinking that every piece of code I write is particularly amazing, it just helps free me from some of the paralysis of worrying about going down dead-ends.

It's more than just Google, it's the whole tech press that pushes the glorious cloud future without covering these kinds of caveats. A big selling point of the cloud for average people is that supposedly they don't have to worry about having to protect their data as professionals will do it for them, but then these incidents come out and there's these "I told you so" where apparently they always need a self-hosted version as well.