maddalab

I think the title should be changed to "Are you capable of being a kiss ass to get ahead?" Or some variation of the same - douche bag/manipulative etc.

It is rather naive to think that you get ahead by just making friends with those on top. Almost certain you are giving them something in return for the favor, in most cases it is the hide (skin) of those you publicly claim as friends right now.

All said and done, why is this Hacker News worthy?

I was joking, but we are speaking about taste, not interest. Since you usually make friends in the social circles you inhabit, it would be likely that your friends share similar if not the same interests.

On the flip side, not every one who is kind and decent will be a good friend to you.

Speaking about taste.... they are your friends :)

No it isn't. The book has been available since much prior to the notice about royalties being put up.

I have a single correspondence with the author about compensating him for his effort (I used the online edition) to learn lisp and he refused -- as the publisher has first rights to collect monies on the book -- , I am inclined not to even fleetingly question his judgment in posting the book online.

I have found that uber-productivity is domain specific. I might be uber-productive in a particular domain (Java programming), however put me in an environment that does Groovy programming and I will stink as much as the next newbie. However good programmers develop techniques for meta-uber-productivity. They know what it takes to get uber-productive in another domain in a short time and what works for them. My way to try and me more productive in any environment is to get my hands dirty, start soon and make changes often. Practice makes perfect. As an individual you can be uber productive, just practice more of what you want to be productive at. Want to be productive at running a business, start your own and practice it. Want to be uber productive at programming, write code lots of it, and so on and so forth.

Quoting from the post, gratuitously, with minor modifications.

Like the AI-Box,the show is improvised drama (so is most of reality tv), the show operates on an emotional level as well as a logical level. It has characters, not just plot. The contestants cannot force others to keep them in the home. The could try to engender sympathy or compassion or fear or hatred or try to find and exploit some weakness, some fatal flaw in the other contestants.

Since the post is ultimately about 'transhuman artificial intelligence', focussing on the 'relativity' of the intelligence of the contestants, the show ultimately rewards the contestant with the most intelligence required to survive in the artificial environment.

The contestant only needs to convince others of their right to stay in he house while requiring others to leave.

The AI requires just the opposite of the gate keeper. This is specific to the environment set up in the experiment, and the experiment could probably be set up to let have the gate keepers primary function be to prevent the AI from entering the box'.

The escape from the box has been set up to exercise human fear of a being of greater intelligence exploiting us.

Have we not all seen a version of this at some point on reality tv, namely Big Brother?

It is true that cheerleaders when treated wrong will disappear and critics will weather the storm with you, it is with the caveat, in most context.

In the context of corporate culture and internal critics, I have seen numerous occasions when critics have left after weathering the storm when corporate bosses do not share the same passion towards users (employees and customers). In such scenarios critics have little to no control to implement fixes and are labelled negative under the definition of not meeting business goal (read: does not make the boss look good).

This may very well be because 'in American culture, that criticism and negativity go hand-in-hand', tho, I think this is unlikely.

Altruism aside, it is a very smart move. I grew up in India and am sparse in my living standards and am at times amazed at the kind of affluence that exists in America even amongst those who consider themselves less privileged.

As long as the trust grows at greater than 5% of its values you receive the mandated annual disbursement which is this case is a fair chunk of change and add monies to be disbursed at the end. However factoring in the rate of inflation and "money's real value over time", the trust probably needs to be invested wisely to grow at 5% + rate of inflation to retain its original value over the years.

Occurs to me that setting up the trust is only half the battle, having it deliver on its original promise is the greater half.

Yes, age is an issue but only at some organizations and you are probably better off staying away.

A couple of observations on interviews focussed on api's -

I do not have a problem with being asked a question on specific api if I have listed it in my skill sets. I would not expect to answer an api question on struts FrontRequestProcessor just because I have MVC listed on my resume.

Usually when I have been asked such questions, it has been when interviewing with junior to mid level programmers, all of them significantly 'younger' than me.

The older folks have all transitioned into managerial function, some of them know the engineering terms obtained from reading technical publications but have not written code in a while.

Organizations with an emphasis on such questions tend to more often than not lack an "engineering culture". Emphasis is placed on delivering requirements from a backlog rather then innovating on behalf of customers and I would stay away from them.

Age is an issue, but not at the ones that matter (to me at least)

I wonder if you are asking the correct question. Your frustration from the process seems to stem from not having received an offer yet. Would you not rather ask the question, what can applicants do to obtain an offer from prospective employers every time? You might want to keep the discussion focussed by providing a link to your stack overflow profile.

As someone who grew up in India, studied and worked and the US and who spent 6 months attempting to help my previous employer set up an off site development centre at a third party vendor, before returning to the US, here is my perspective.

Management culture is not controlling or assertive in a manner any different than that practised at my US employer. The differences are mostly in response to such assertiveness, Indians tend to typically approach such assertiveness by authority with mere acceptance without necessarily understanding the reason underlying the decision. Such management assertiveness I have found to be misguided with the same rate at both locations.

Management response to highlighting inefficiencies in work culture or ineffectiveness with regards to output is specific to the organization, and in my experience I found the response to be similar, hide inefficiencies rather than work towards improvements.

I do not think I would find it difficult to go "home" (I consider US to be my home now), I would only need to find an organization that has the same first principles of continuous (personal and profession) improvement as I do.

Finding such an organization in either nation would be similarly difficult or easy.

yes, but that syntax is unnecessary as the proposal allows for final variables (primitives and reference types) to be available in the function literal syntax

final int a = 0;

is all you need in the example you provide.

In the absence of the ability to capture non-final variables, the proposal does not add closures to Java, only 'function-literal syntax' for specific use cases, or for the java community 'anonymous-function' is lieu of more verbose 'anonymous-classes'

>>> a lot of anonymous classes are using just that by boxing those vars in final arrays

final variables (primitive and references) will be accessible in the function literal, the proposal only states that 'capture of non-final variables' will not be supported.

<i>Dynamically typed languages are fine for smaller programs and simple web applications, but if you’re building something big, something that will be several millions of lines of code, you really need all the tools you can only get from a statically typed language</i>

From my experience I am only speak to the benefits provided by a statically typed languages as you try modularize the components. That isn't to say that a dynamically typed languages do not provide an alternative or similar benefit, I just do not have large project experience with them.

Not certain how he draws the causation from using agile to the resulting software being modularized and cohesive. It just is a case of correlation on the projects he has worked on.

Both the arguments for dynamic and static languages as presented here are vacuous.