msg

If you believe for instance that

1) it takes 3 months of ramp-up time to do an effective job 2) after 3 months off the job, you need to ramp up again 3) the employee will leave in two months 4) the employee will be gone for twelve months

You could conclude that the next 17 months of this employee's tenure at the company will be ineffective.

You could contrast this with an employee that works straight through and will give you 14 effective months.

You might get an exceptional candidate taking the leave, but they have to make a huge impact in a short time to be better for the company on balance than an extra year of labor from a roughly equivalent candidate.

If you're talking about worth in terms of cherished personal values, I would try to figure out if I want to be a scientist or an engineer. If it is a vocation.

Through my master's program, this was on my mind while doing my thesis. I ended up deciding against choosing a narrow specialty and becoming a miner, so I headed to industry to become a maker.

Neither choice is the less noble.

Why not provide two versions of Delicious Library Inf? One costs $20. It only works/installs correctly if you have the original app. The other one costs $40. It is a standalone app. Make a minor bugfix update that says "hey" to the users of Delicious Library 2, and link to the expansion. Sell both.

You probably need to take a survey.

Bad answers: I've heard you make a lot of money here, I want to work on software development, I like Java. Better: I have friends who've told me about it and it sounds like the kind of place I want to work. The best answer: I understand a lot about how your business works and it is a win-win for me to be here for the following reasons... despite the following minuses...

I was playing Resistance this weekend for the first time. Essentially Resistance is Mafia with rules, blue vs. red. One of the first things I did was ask people, "are you a spy?" Like a melodramatic detective. I think there is an instinct to try this first, and win the game on the basis of a twitching lip or "say no, nod yes" sort of reaction.

This may work on easily startled people. Same with slamming your hand on the table in a security clearance interview.

A smarter candidate will figure out you're playing games, which defeats the purpose. I think you also want to consider the reaction of the candidate after the interview. Suppose they answer honestly, then figure out what you did to them.

There's a big difference between trying to learn a prospective employee's motivations the old fashioned way and trying to trick it out of them. Especially when a highly motivated employee can be lowballed in a salary negotiation.

"A lot of people are saying [about Daisey] 'Oh you didn't experience this yourself,'" Wozniak continued, "but in his style of art he's trying to help the audience experience these things. I never expected the show to be real. The 'Pirates of Silicon Valley' [the film about the early rivalry between Apple and Microsoft] was not completely accurate. How could it be? But the movie is very true in the way that matters most."

What I do like about this is that you can't just dismiss an argument, or a representation, because it makes a couple of mistakes. You can usually form a model of it with the errors removed and see what's left. As an argument it can continue to persuade and compel you.

What I don't like about this is that journalists are operating on the front line of history, and introducing deliberate falsehoods is like rewriting history. If they're not exposed, they might sit there, wrong, forever.

Thrown into this, eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable and will rewrite their own reflections mentally as they recall, on the slightest provocation. So it's important to know how far to trust but verify eyewitnesses.

I would put Daisey firmly in camp B, liar, and his argument firmly in camp A, truthy if not completely accurate.

At least for CS 373, and I think for the other ones, they changed the grading scheme.

We have already had three homeworks due and are now on week 4. In the old scheme, you could drop one homework (out of seven). Homework was half the grade and the final the other half. So you could currently get a max of 66% on the homework.

They added a grading scheme that counts the final at 100%.

They will give you the better of your grade under the two schemes, to not disadvantage people who did well on the homework.

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The lectures are deceptively well-designed, with lots of (asynchronous) interaction. Try a course, you'll see what I mean.

The homework is a little more brain-stretching. It usually involves some code reading and intuition that was not served to you on a plate during the lecture. I have found them very valuable.

Often you are filling in some mostly-working code provided by the instructors. My only quibble is liberal use of globals, which violates some of my instincts about how their code works and causes me to spend more time hunting odd bugs than doing the actual content. On the bright side they usually provide some test harnesses so you're not dead in the water.

I've really enjoyed it so far. Signed up for Norvig and another one next time around.

PS - The best taqueria IMO is in the outer mission, most the menu is in spanish, and I'm trying to keep it a secret, but yelpers seem to be catching on :(

If you're trying to keep a taqueria to yourself, do you have incentive to leave a bad review? After all, your interests are not aligned with the rest of Yelp's customers. Or even, necessarily aligned with the taqueria's success. Maybe it's to your codependent advantage that they always stay small and delicious and hidden and yours...

preciouss.

This is the problem Yelp hasn't solved yet: how to align the interests of Yelp, Yelp reviewers, Yelp readers, and restaurants. Yelp succeeds if reviewers leave bad reviews because they are upselling bad review protection (they say they aren't several times in the FAQ, but they protesteth too much for me), or if restaurants buy ads. Yelp readers succeed if reviewers are honest and they can use reviews to optimize their personal quality/dollar equation. Restaurants succeed if Yelp drives Yelp readers to them, if reviewers leave good reviews.

Reviewers have many incentives to game reviews. One of the Yelp FAQs is about payola. If they review enough they gain community prominence through badges/titles. If they review too much, their reviews look suspicious (because they could be making them up instead of actually attending). If they become untrustworthy due to a secret Yelp algorithm, their reviews are obscured from prominent view. If they have a bad experience at a place everyone thinks is great, they run a risk writing a contrarian review and being labeled untrustworthy. And on and on.

I don't know how many google searches you want me to provide you with. Here is the top result for [Microsoft brand]. Admittedly it is from 2010. However, it is not an isolated example.

"Microsoft is a dying consumer brand"

http://money.cnn.com/2010/10/27/technology/microsoft_pdc/ind...

Consumers have turned their backs on Microsoft. A company that once symbolized the future is now living in the past.

Microsoft has been late to the game in crucial modern technologies like mobile, search, media, gaming and tablets. It has even fallen behind in Web browsing, a market it once ruled with an iron fist.

Here's something from a few days ago reinforcing my position.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/microsofts-branding-crisi...

If you google [microsoft flop] you will get many overlapping examples. Kin shows up, of course. As does Vista, as does Zune. And that latter day tablet product that never was. And the other products of MSR that never quite make it to stores. Consumers are not dumb. They are aware of these high profile collapses.

And there is a general trend of lagging the market, then failing to catch up. This more than anything explains the performance of Windows Phone in the market.

My workflow is the following:

1. Wait for Amazon MP3 special for album I want

2. Buy album

3. Download to Mac with MP3 downloader

4. Sync Google Music with iTunes library.

5. Stream Google Music to phone and browser at work.

This way I have a physical master to use how I see fit. Prices are usually better on Amazon than iTunes store, $4 per album unless I'm buying from a personal favorite on release day. Selection is basically universal.

I've been liking this scrobbler/lyrics looker-upper for the web client:

http://www.danielslaughter.com/projects/google-music-with-la...

"The bottom line: If you are a non-Canadian who wants to open a business in Canada, you will have to immigrate to Canada or find one or more Canadians to team up with."

http://sbinfocanada.about.com/od/startup/f/Non-Canadians-How...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com_controversies#Canadi...

If it doesn't seem to work for me, I haven't practiced it enough. How long should I try? 10000 trials. Of course the game is already up before I begin.

Kind of ironic considering the subject matter.

When I'm working with code that doesn't have it, runtime errors significantly lengthen the time between insights, as I hunt for the root cause of some bug.

The general point is that you do better work in small increments and revisions than you do, like Coleridge, getting high and watching masterpieces spill out of you, like Kubla Khan. You will be less sensitive to small things destroying your work, like Coleridge's visitor. Truish story.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Light

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_State

http://scripting.com/stories/2011/10/27/theJobsBook.html

http://scripting.com/stories/2011/11/21/whyJobsChoseIsaacson...

No.

This reductionism has no explanatory power. You might as well say "all egoism boils down to the benefit of the other because personal benefit benefits humanity/the universe at large. Therefore all reduces to altruism." You can pick any explanation and say "in the heart this boils down to X". If you have no special reason for choosing X (which is evident if you can explain just as much with Not-X), all such explanations are equally worthless.

There are many options other than believing that a human life divided by infinite space approaches zero.

If anything, internet corporations are showing up late to the game.

I actually don't know what it's going to be like to work on Wednesday without Wikipedia. But I think it's in all our interests to find out and put a face on these bills.

But this might be a good thing. We will have to struggle through a day's worth of a world without HN and be motivated to do something about it.

+1 for blackout for me.

I had to deal with a crisis this week that boiled down to a poorly optimized SQL query or two. Of course, the manner in which they failed meant our DB started disk swapping and hurting our availability.

Contract to hire is something we do but it is rare. An initial try out period doesn't do us much good since the learning curve is long.

I don't trust take home assignments unless their solutions can't be googled. And it's a lot of work to create and evaluate problems of that nature. You want them just long enough, not a huge time sink for you or the candidate. You want them to demand a range of solutions so there are many ways to fail and succeed.

I agree we should not be doing riddles/puzzles. For me the most straightforward way to gauge a candidate's ability in an hour is to ask them to program on the spot and see how they act. Yes, it's a game and the candidate can learn to beat the system and oversell themselves. But the vast majority of people I don't want to hire do not go to these lengths.

-- SnarkTron TM 2012 Edition --

I take Hitchens as trying to find a common ground for argument by appealing directly to the text. So it is on point if his interpretation of the text does not do it justice, especially if the Christians interpret it differently in a way that is more internally consistent.

I find myself writing the ridiculous sentence that Hitchens perhaps took a religious prose poem/vision/prophecy/allegory/history too literally.

I understand that he had an axe to grind. But he hasn't done justice to the thing he argued against.