languagewars

There are plenty of studies on telling children they are naturally talented, etc and getting them to stop doing the activity for fear of losing evidence of this trait. Many of the "best programmers" I worked with were unproductive and got lost on things that were irrelevant. Engineers I would pick from my old groups tend not to be recognized as great and complemented on how well and timely they put everything together, with an undertone that the greatest programmer could have also done it if only he had time.

As far as submarines stories, I have no idea..

Your examples are competitive sports and buying up the right stocks, areas with specific rules and no net output to society. If the top player never existed in a second reality, the 2nd player would be called the top player and no social scientist could identify the harm to the 2nd reality.

If you look at fields where it matters what people produce and the product requires sophisticated and diverse differences, then attempting to rank them too often is catastrophic. For example Microsoft damaged themselves with stack ranking, not just because of immediate social harm, but because everyone had to rank well by showing off skills that were known to be valuable, top, classy, aka the best fads of today. That puts the company on a walk to a local Maxima and unable to compete with a company with engineers who can invest in random skills that just seem interesting without risking a nervous breakdown from the combined costs of signal investment and actual investment.

Isn't gross income a bit misleading if they need to buy out larger and larger companies and harvest their products/good-will with an increasing portion of that gross income?

So all US exports should be subject to a 20% tax to make the world great again, right?

Interesting, I've been very happy with pouchdb finagling all these browser DBs into one that matches couchdb on the server side.. I would really have to think about the auth logistics for memcache to switch to a kV store. But that would be even more insane minimalism atop the absurd complexity of the web stack.

I played with a free online cbt and got much further than their average participant in this study.. I'm not sure if there is any use to cbt for depression, but I would suspect that it would work better in a preventative fashion.

I.e. I did notice that I can let thinking about some social interactions go where they would bother me in the past, but if I was depressed when I played with it, then maybe I would just notice how bad I was at benefiting from CBT at the moment where I should be letting something go.

Given the population of Zurich, I've always comparing it to Boston to be fair. In that context Zurich is the mix with modern architecture. Boston has done nothing and then a big nothing for my entire life, only in the last 5 years does the seaport look like a part of Zurich, with actual cranes and construction workers.

Looking at the traditional literary world is where everything becomes obvious to me.

To be a good writer you have to hold stubborn opinions until each work is finished or you have too many options and create something confusing, bland, unpalatable and inconsistent. If you hold the same ideas too long and too publicly then the market raises the volume on the jibes against your style since you offer no topics for discussion and it wants to recover your share.

To be anyone else in literary market, you have to fawn over every returning fad as if it were new and great, and be the catalyst for reinforcing the artificial drama in the differences in stubborn views the authors are holding. To do less is to hurt overall market sales and eventually be shunned.

I find it all very interesting to follow, but if you want to be a proper lazy programmer for the long haul then you must learn to stay bellow the radar so no one knows how boring and automatic your solutions are. Those are the authors we all know exist who quietly take ghost writing cuts on a book or more a year, but dont have all the crisises or neurosis to get the role of author on tv.

Hmm, it seems like you are looking at how you should triage an applicant if they let you test them very painfully. I am interested in games I can play where mastery also serves as a potential initial triage and could lead to interesting discussions.

Just as I like project euler gamified as a fake ideal programming project, I would like a systems game where the point is optimizing for the worst case with minimal tools.

Add an IDE, a choice of editors, all kinds of softskills requirements that are more significant to an employer than these base primary skills. Now, I wonder why I am working for free as I am no longer just practicing our core/universal skills in an idealized/timeless environment. The better place to do that form of showing off work realistic skills is in OSS projects.

> Do you work as a sysadmin? If so, how many times did you recover from a broken tty at work? (I mean, is it a number bigger than zero?)

Before then I was an sysadmin for a little while, but I don't really see what difference the role makes. I've never had a job where I didn't at some point need to deal with a legacy serial console of some sort misrouted through incompatible aggregators, etc, in order to deal with a networking problem and/or auth problems.

The idea that I would blind reboot a system in a failure mode I can't diagnose is not something I would normally consider until I've exhausted all means and only if I know a fair bit about it. I'm sure some of my colleagues did things like that as some were developers with relatively little system knowledge, but only a few were stupid enough to mention losing failure data through laziness to senior staff.

> It's fun, but completely unproductive.

? If I had a page for you should have diagnosed and every time you hit a swiss cheese failure with that attitude than I wouldn't use computers at all anymore.

When I used to work in OS support my actions were optimized for the assumptions of a default minimal install and being able to describe actions to a person of questionable knowledge over the phone and interpret what they would most likely try to read back at me. The certifications were along those lines too.. While the exact nature of the certifications was ridiculous and would be even more ridiculous in terms of judging a general user's skills, dropping an administrator on minimal installs with broken ttys, etc makes a lot of sense. If you can't recover a system when vi is not an option then you have a problem, if you spend a lot of time recovering a good term when you could have used tail, then you are also not ideal.

The only suggestion I would make is that a good tool is present and working then I don't expect a penalty. I expect tools to not be present accordance with standard minimalist setups and to pay extreme penalties if I need to call a package manager or move to a less minimalist install to complete the task.

No, the same civil rights allow you to start a process to invalidate a tax completely and they are used that way all the time. Civil rights arguments have everything to do with why your laffer curve isnt optimal and we pay higher set rates so there are things that are completely exempt. Look at state sales tax exemptions as an example of people lowering their effective tax rate, but not the overall tax collected or the average benefit of government.

It seems to me like you are trying to warp the discussion into every tool with a visible political outcome being equivalent and open to "democratic" systems. The republic is a tool for a specific purpose that is usually opposite of delivering optimal solutions to the majority. The democratic systems are supposed to deliver what you seem to want until they violate civil rights. If they dont for a reason other than civil rights, then your recourse is to petitition the republic to change the election process. But you cant make the republic actually care about your general tax rates or any other problems it allows the democratic process to handle, it can only make sweeping rules when parties are in violation of the core rules.

The argument that the state is killing you is only significant if you can make it rationally, and a 10-99% tax isnt killing you unless it doesnt exclude the poverty level in its gradients and then you dont need to be the one being killed to make the argument. A 99% tax rate that can get 50% of the vote may indicate another failure though.

> So if I decide that taxes are too high and I present evidence that the tax rate is at the wrong end of the laffer curve I could get my money back?

How does that flow from these quotes?

To be equivalent, you would need to prove that the tax rate is so insane that it has a substantial chance of killing you. Equivalent arguments for tax relief are in relation to poverty, medical costs, food and basic necessities, etc and generally win.

Microsoft has to address the amount of crapware vendors ship and the permissions they have and deffinitely plays some games of chicken with them to try to keep windows market share.

While it makes sense to hit the vendors directly to the extent possible, it also costs these platforms trust when most of the ways users end up with them have them compromised from day one. I.e. do I give relatives a list of vendors I think might be safe to use without a complete wipe and fresh install? For windows that is impossible.

I think today's equivalent to what I used to do (i.e. playing with an accidental ProDos prompt) is running the browser's developer console (which you most certainly can do on a chromebook) and perhaps running a shell on the RPi.

I don't really understand why a good editor is necessary in the sense of my old nostalgia or how I would try to streamline the learning/tinkering process today. While I see no specific value in anything in the gap between using whatever debugger/interaction the system offers to futz with the most visible levels and jumping to an online Python/processing/whatever notebook, I suppose starting anywhere that stokes one's curiosity is just as good as anywhere else.

I find this a little different than your examples since it is government forcing your actions within the private market, not forcing you to pay for its bundle of services. There is no cost to the system to stop doing this one, it just would make car drivers as frustrated as dog owners when they shop for an apartment in a metro area.

Given how much funding already goes to roads I would say enough is enough. But there is a risk of more long distance commuters, and it is hard to claw back the subsidies that make them.

Not exactly, we have all been dumping on Microsoft for having terrible security and they have what essentially boils down to a public health problem for their entire ecosystem. Then, no one knows what they are adding as AV, much like injecting unreviewed vaccines.

They are making decisions to scan anyway and enable their solutions whenever they can because I won't stop and ask users which crapware they installed to supposedly scan their system before telling them to give up on windows.

I find it very funny that Kaspersky claims Microsoft was a security leader when they were in a total downward spiral but is unhappy now that I have to think twice about whether my recommendation to switch to Linux is out of date advice.

I don't have a good solution for maintaining an add-on AV market and actual security.. But pushing them to just do the bundleware and not be the AV is a pretty good solution for Microsoft and their users that financially Microsoft pays for instead of profiting from. Still, it might be too late for them to retain a position on consumer devices of any sort.

Allowing Sinn Fein to publicly represent the interests of a terrorist group equivalent and necessary. I don't know what is supposed to have changed in Turkey that isn't a direct result of the current government being against the Republic and the rights of the people. I also don't recall the current leader doing any time for his black money, so apparently consequences are discretionary.

I don't disagree that they had some students that would be otherwise difficult to reach as recruits, just that they would have had trouble getting enough money per student given that most of the market has low/no costs in providing anything to future employees. The need to provide personal tutoring for inclusiveness was really the nail in the grave for profitably and had nothing to do with that market of recruits.

Reasonably, they had a max of 5k per matched employee which would only be fraction of students that complete a program and even want a new job in one of a handful of places in the US. Competing recruiters would collectively take more than half those students, especially when the students were already in industry and not completing whole tracks.

I also think the sponsored courses backfire as these things are out of date immediately and/or completely irrelevant in most of the market; they probably had to turn most down to prevent alienating students that trust udacity to recommend learning paths.

I think they ran into the problem that running the programming competition sites costs a lot less and has little maintenance compared to building and updating the classes. It was doubly difficult since they needed mostly applied classes to have students that were interesting to employers and finished in under 4 years.

Well, I like the "see also" in that entry.. Do you think they will buy a school or a prison with their graft? Will the 99 other senators who want $32m each be so good as your own?

If you want to reduce federal spending and federal tax so that the local system can tax then that's great. If you question the federal government spending $1 out of $34000 on a reasonable global service, then please tell me why my wife would be reasonable in questioning my $1 a year new year's burger, but my converting from a standard $40 a month ATDT service to a $3400 a year program to turn our kids into psychopathic murderers who are sometimes willing to protect us is an unquestionable rational expense.

I left out that I meant 2 orders of magnitude in government. Comparing federal spending to what would be waste in a town or county is an example of giving into propaganda steered stupidity as an acceptable norm.

I don't disagree that this is a terrific value. I disagree with it coming up for discussion like this in absolute terms when nothing the federal government does that is blatantly absurd could ever discussed in absolute terms without seemingly like an unworldly statistic at any local level besides, maybe, in NYC.

There are 34,000 $32 million dollar units in federal discretionary spending. I'm willing to bet that if someone randomly samples another one it will be worse than this one.

That 32 million may be enough for a town to redo it its main library if it received it through complex graft using a rider (and then some kind of magic to get it to the town level) is a bizarre distraction from anything meaningful at the federal level.

> Saying "it's nothing" is a losing argument in every town hall meeting that ever takes place. $32 million is a lot of parks, operations, libraries, and whatever else you like.

You have changed the scale by 2 orders of magnitude to make it something.

$100 is a 5th of someone people's yearly salary, so how dare you waste it on entertainment every month?

He raped his ex wife then did whatever else and ran a bunch of scams. She gave out what she believed to be classified data in a system she clearly understands. Yet even if neither understands their crimes are crimes they are responsible for them under US law. If you want to fix US law and/or the election system then arrest them both. Then something has to be fixed or the system has to run with no inaugurated president. The system functioning with no president is an even better reform in my book.

I think a bipartisan effort to arrest both of them before the election is the logical way forward. I want a system where criminals are afraid to run for office.

My impression is that they have the NIH and refuse to use standard LSPP in favor of FLASK. They take this so far that they accept no feedback from the SELinux community. While they may have analyzed all the great reasons not to use every competitor, they probably lack oversight and critical evaluation of the EOU problems that causes, leading to less practical security than those using off the shelf software with proper oversight.

While I agree with your overall summary, I find it odd that you skip the issue of whether he had special access/ability or is just just one contractor among a group of essentially all NSA employees and contractors given access to a library of all of this information (as stated in a previous article.)

Given the NSAs general behavior and the nature of the Snowden leak in comparison to Manning's, I believe it is more credible that they have virtually everything at a single (and lowest) clearance and compartment, so this:

> If I had to guess, the most likely outcome here is going to be that we are talking about someone with very serious mental health issues who NSA had no business putting within 1000 miles of the information he managed to hoard in his house.

Is simultaneously true and a deflection from how incredibly inevitable this was and how incredibly incompetent they are as an institution. I am all for splitting their capabilities across existing agencies where it makes sense and cancelling programs all together where it doesn't.

It seems like it is promoting things that might be expanding JS' reach to other device running the Linux kernel rather than cherry picking projects in the existing common use cases. For example, sponsoring the only node server I've heard of that targets running on mobile devices, and an IoT appropriate interpreter are not like the net zero action of picking a winner among react/angular/ember/etc.

Absolutely agree that Python has a weak showing, but Java always had an odd disconnect with the real world too. These languages survive in every field despite relatively odd and impractical infrastructure in most due to the availablity of fresh grads that have been taught in them.

I think JS will do quite well as JS becomes the back end scripting language over time (in place of lua for example.)

I don't see a bright future for ruby, I think it had some lead advantage, but RoR/opinionated-design really cut down the options for innovation with a Ruby based web dev group. It is interesting to see how diametrically opposed philosophy of Ruby the language is from the RoR community, it is like Ruby created a liberal blank space and RoR immediately filled it with conservative inflexibility.

Php is in an interesting position, but I think ecommerce systems catching up and offering more integrations will erode its position. It is very expensive to hire and retain loyalty on a php project, especially when it is of any complexity since anyone who will tolerate it and understands CS has plenty of other options.

If I had to say what will trouble JS, it is C++ as the VM. Too many groups will lack members that are able to look bellow the scripting layer when the inevitable low level problems occur.

Personally, I see the future as a war (and up/down stack integration) between JS/v8 and LLVM based languages. While other options will keep their markets for years, they have no solid positions for growth. Python will hold on as long as it has the academic position, but it needs a better relation with LLVM or clever curriculum builders will choose another language to teach using only one easy enough language up through compilers, with llvm-ir replacing assembly in a way that makes sense given the Arm/Intel war could go either way now.