notpc

It's not really. Coworkers engaging in banter is friendship. But yes, there's no doubt that friendships between coworkers affect how things get done. That's just the human condition. If you want to change that, you'd have to run your office like a Stalinist dictatorship, and that would be terrible for getting things done. Which is, you know, the whole purpose of a team.

God bless Bill. I've also heard great stories of chairs being thrown (not at people, of course) in high-level Microsoft meetings. Can you imagine him getting away with it today though? Someone would have tried to sue him for creating a "hostile workplace" or something like that.

We're getting too soft these days.

Friendship is not fair. Friendship is freely given and freely withheld. Who you choose for your social circle, and why you choose them, is unassailable.

Also, it's not a purely gender thing. My mother, of hispanic upbringing, finds that she cannot banter the same way around American-raised women as she can with other hispanic women. It turns out that getting easily offended and trying to ruin people's careers over it is not innate to women, but has for some reason arisen out of American culture and also afflicts many men.

When meeting with clients or other teams in a big organization, it's obviously discouraged.

When speaking with colleagues, it's discouraged only when there's people who are trigger-happy about complaining to HR. Fairly or not, women in particular have a reputation of running to HR when someone says something offensive or crude, which leads to them being excluded from office banter, which leads to them feeling left out of the group. Tough problem to solve.

It makes sense really. You let the profanity flow when you feel that you can trust people. You're also most honest when you feel that you can trust people.

>The funnest part of writing a bot is using all the historical data to observe how the bot would have done during that period. I ended up checking thousands of permutations of parameters by brute force to determine the best ones, but in the end transaction fees killed me.

That's a sure way to find a bad strategy. You end up doing the equivalent of overfitting. If you look at enough variables, the chance of there not being spurious correlations is basically zero, so you're guaranteed to land on sets of parameters that look good with historical data but fail going forward.

It's also very difficult to have a "well-planned" vegetarian or vegan diet, especially for children. The chance that you get it right is pretty low.

A vegan diet for children is borderline child abuse in my opinion.

I didn't call anyone an idiot, a fascist, a libtard, or a 'whatever'. Good try at a straw man though.

35 years with the possibility of parole in 10 years seemed pretty reasonable to me.

It's troubling that calling for witch hunts and firings over political opinions is okay, but a direct tone is a problem. Maybe our society would be better if that was flipped around.

You have it backwards. I have this account because HN is not very open to political discourse unless you toe a very specific line. The Overton Window around here is very small.

"circus and farm animals"

It's been reported in the news for the last month that Obama has no intention of retiring from public life. He's going to be a major spokesman and "spiritual leader" of sorts for the Democrats going forward. The reason is that the Democrats don't have a good "bench." Most of the Democrats remaining in positions of power are creatures of big-city machine politics, not exactly likable populists who can counter Trump.

You're conflating two totally separate things. The treatment of circus and farm animals is completely unrelated to supporting biodiversity.

I don't think you get me. I'm not concerned about animal welfare and I don't think other people should be either. It is all the way down on my list of concerns, right below the least important human concern.

Identifying hypocrisy is not just about dismissing opponents, it's about getting them to reconsider their views, which are possibly not well-founded and contradictory.

None of them bother me actually.

I hope you all don't eat meat, eggs, cheese, or milk. The animals that those come from would love to be treated as well as circus animals.

And do you understand that these animals are absolutely vicious and cruel with each other in the wild? A tiger will start picking at your guts while you're still breathing. A male lion will kill all of the existing cubs of its new mate.