rgoddard

First there is the recognition that there is no pyramid. Since math is so highly interrelated, learning about one area almost always helps understanding in a different area. Granted some areas require a certain prerequisites, hence you will encounter peaks, but I agree aiming for only one peak does not make all that much sense since calculus is only useful in certain situations.

From the sounds of it, one of the biggest improvements for the son was the elimination of his habit of eating nonfood items, which seemed to occur on a near daily basis. So I am sure avoiding all of that pain was a big plus for him.

The point at which you create real value is when a person is offered and accepts a job. Trying to charge people just to use the service while they are looking probably won't work since if they are out of a job paying for a service might not seem like a good idea. Although somebody looking for a new job while currently employed, might be willing to pay for some extra features.

This gives me four ideas where to collect money. For the person without a job looking you can collect money from them after they found a job with a donate feature, with ads - seeing as though they are looking for jobs this can lead to highly relevant ads, or with offering them continued access to special features after they have found a job which could come in handy later on.

For a person currently employed they might be willing to pay for some premium features TBD.

Or as others have said with a job board that companies pay to post to, or some affiliate program with other job boards - could be related to you advertising scheme.

So a number of good possibilities there.

Details matter, and ultimately the code needs to run on a machine. Hence the implementation matters.

Plus the update was already planned on being installed later in the week, so it was not like they were ignoring it.

But all of the examples you gave solve problems. With Amazon's kindle and associated service, they helped solved problems related to distribution of books, storage of large collections and portability. After having just packed up and moved my book collection, I can see real value in having something like the Kindle.

The iPod solved the problem of poor user interfaces and managing your music collection, and it did this better then any other current mp3 player on the market.

The main point of the article is to make something because it is of actual use and not just because it seems like a good idea. He never says only confine yourself to well defined problems, and he explicitly says to consider making something which is better then any of the existing solutions.

Your own idiosyncratic views of the status quo can allow you to see the situation in a different light and how things can be better. You may be the only one who thinks this way, and others will only understand that there was a problem only after seeing your solution. But that does not mean that the problem did not exist or that a better solution did not exist.

The problem steams from the fact that when Microsoft first starting bundling IE with the Windows, they had a monopoly on the OS market. The used their monopoly to dominate the Browser market and this is what got them into trouble. Apple does not have this problem because they only have a small fraction of the overall market.

Although in this point in time, I think the browser market has become competitive enough that people know of other choices and will make the effort to install them. A most people have come to expect that IE will be on the computer, and would be more annoyed if it did not, unless it came preinstalled with their browser of choice.

The part that matters is not if the job is a blue collar job, or white collar job, but if the type of work is a good fit for you. Neither type of work is inherently more valuable, they just have a different set of trade offs that need to be considered.

Although I do appreciate the author's attempt to raise the perceived worthiness of blue collar jobs to an equal level as white collar jobs.

The biggest thing for me, is that it did not feel like Microsoft made it, plus it felt faster. Google 3.7s, Bing 1.57s, and actually was. Although this could change depending on how well Bing is able to scale.

Interestingly enough you are arguing that breasts evolved to make women more honest - makes it harder for them to lie about their age. The author argued that breasts allowed the women to be less honest - removed indication of infertility.

But in either case, the rest of the argument of how men evolved to like breasts could still be true.

All this really tells us is that the range of possibilities are large. I think the question of how one could prove, or at least narrow down the possibilities is an interesting one.

For example, if one could demonstrate that our ancestors had an aversion to breasts, and that the change to liking them was in a reasonable probability of occurring in the way the author describes, then his explanation is reasonable.

But, given the random nature of evolution, finding the precise answer may not be possible and the best we can hope for is a set of weighted possible explanations.

Fortunately I did not need to do this, it looks like google just did.

For me, I have found that a more concise language is easier to think in and write in. I recently worked on an application that was implemented both on the web using mostly javascript and as a desktop application in VB.Net.

One of the more complicated features I waited to implement in the web version, just because I found it rather difficult to think of the problem in VB. The javascript code was just easier to write and think in, and once implemented I could translate it to VB.

Although I do not know if there is a limit to the benefits of moving to a smaller language. Also, this is just my personal experience and I do not know how much it generalizes to other people.

In regards to the Update PUT vs Update POST, with the PUT you can only address a single resource. So while the Update POST maybe idempotent, to accomplish the same thing with a PUT, you would have to issue multiple PUTs to address all of the resources that were updated in the POST.

At this point, if MS does not implement these features then it will fall further behind and lose relevance. There are enough people using non IE browsers, that one could create a new site leveraging these features and ignore the IE users, or provide a significantly downgraded experience. The thing is, it would not take much to do so. A couple of fun games here and there with some useful apps at a significantly reduced cost and there goes more of IE's market share.

A better way to think of it, is that procrastination is a symptom of another problem. You are referring to one potential problem i.e. not actually liking what you are doing. Some of the others responded with the problem being perfectionism, and wanting to do something that they cared about correctly. Right now I am procrastinating from fixing a bug because I cannot think of how to test it adequately and I do not want to just give it to the customer and hope that it works. Procrastination may not be the optimal solution, but it may be much better then just ignoring the problem and pushing ahead with what you think you should be doing.

This and Google are serving two different purposes. Google is an interface to search the web. Wolfram Alpha is an interface to search their own database of facts and relationships. When you use Wolfram Alpha you are doing a fact search, not a web search.

I think this is mostly due to perception. I have experienced a similar change in perspective, but I still come here just as often and spend about the same amount of time reading the articles. But I now use this site as a baseline for quality comparisons. Rather then being wowed by all the cool articles here, I have come to expect this level of quality.Other sites have become less interesting to me as a result.

Offering video on the web opens up so many more options then the current methods, and many more revenue models. As you mentioned, the ads can be updated to be the most current since the video is being streamed right then and there.

On top of that, the networks can easily have more targeted and relevant ads. They can track all of the shows people are watching, and know exactly how many people are watching them. There are additional hooks for people to discover new shows.

You can have different subscription models, with the free version allowing people to watch only the most current episodes, then being able to pay additional to see all of the previous episodes and seasons. People can pay to not have advertising if they want. Plus any other combination or other pricing models that you can think of can be used.

In exchange for giving up control, they would gain an incredible amount of flexibility on how the content is priced and used. They are crazy for not moving ahead with this with the amount of money they could make off of this.

*Edit:Grammar fixes

Plus, the number of milestones and changes that occur when you are younger are much greater then when you are older, and those changes are more novel. You have your first word, your first step, your first day of school, the first time you learn to ride a bike, the whole puberty thing. There is a huge number of changes occurring that you have never experienced before. Plus you have the anticipation of all that is to come, and when you are focused wanting something to be here, it feels like it takes much longer to arrive.

As an adult, I often have days when I become so involved in what I am doing that I lose track of time, poof all of a sudden the day is over. The only time I can remember that happening when I was younger was when I was either reading or playing video games.

The other question to consider is if the revolution is local, does that really matter for the society at large? The startups are creating value for the rest of society, regardless of where the startups are located. Using the internet as the means of distribution, decouples the location of the business from the consumers of the product, thus allowing the startups to have a central location. The business revolution will only matter for a subset of companies, mostly software companies.

If they think they should be rated higher, then they should give the reasons why. If those reasons are valid, then the employer can change the rating. If the employer is unwilling to change it for irrational reasons, that means that the rating system is not objective and the system is undermined and has lost its meaning. This becomes a separate problem entirely.

If the reasons for valuing themselves more are not valid or applicable to the company, then the employee is over valuing themselves in this context. If the employee is not willing to accept this, then they have the option of declining the offer and moving on.

You have to consider what being more productive translates to. In this case, since we are talking about software, lets assume that being more productive means that you can implement more features of a similar complexity at the same level of quality compared to the guy sitting next to you. Assuming everything else equal between you two, you would expect that you would be paid more. In Joel's model, the only way for this to be accounted for is scope. Since you can produce more features you are now responsible for more features. Assuming that this increase of scope is enough to move you up to the next grade, you would have a higher salary. Otherwise, it could be accounted for with your bonus.

But what if you could implement twice as much features, but you required additional over site to manage those features. You have just created additional work for someone else. Before your additional productivity can be utilized, someone else has to help you convert it to something more usable. Depending how needed that other person is, your increase in productivity could result in a net lose of productivity for the team as a whole.

When talking about productivity, you need to be specific in what you mean, because productivity is hard to measure and quantify.

My guess is that this was the cheaper option. It only cost Joel a couple of days and several hundred on the hard drive. What it did not do is interrupt his programmers. As Joel has already described, he is now a grunt worker. His job is to make it as easy for others to do their jobs. Their time is probably worth 10 to 100 times his, because they are the one actually making something that directly results in more sales and money for the company. So all Joel had to do was save a couple of hours of work for the programmers and he would come out ahead.

Plus these additional side benefits: The programmer who was complaining does not feel like he is being ignored. Joel is now going to upgrade most of their computers, making it better for the entire company. So lots of warm fuzzies to go around, leading to happier programmers, leading to a better product.

{} means object [] means array So you would not be able to just drop them, since they mean two different things.

A good example of an idempotent function is the absolute value function.

abs(-1) = abs(abs(-1) since both equal 1

He mentioned in the comments that the reason why he has not made a multiplayer game is because he is only a so-so programmer and lacks the skills to do so.

Themselves?

I am not sure what the ideal ownership is now. But CNBC is mostly owned by G.E. whose main interest in this property is making money. The desire to maximizing profits is in partial conflict with strong news reporting.

The burden does also reside on the consumers who demand more entertainment then real information.

And that is part of the problem. This news agencies are owned by large corporations, whose motivation is profit and not the telling of news. The news media are no longer a strong force in helping to shape this country. It is not in their interest to ask the hard questions and do strong investigative reporting.

I was listening to an interesting pod cast on just this subject (http://www.dancarlin.com/disp.php/csarchive) if anyone is interested for a unique perspective on this.

*edit: grammar fixes

I did enjoy seeing the articles on Erlang. If I want to see more stories like that, then I just need to take the time to either find similar articles or upvote the ones which I am interested in. The top list of stories is a reflection of the members of the community who are actively posting/upvoting articles. If there are certain types of articles you want, then it is up to you to support them.

From what I can tell, correct me if I am wrong, part of the purpose of this site is to operate as a testing grounds for Arc. The focus is on making the language better. So rather then improving performance by providing better hardware, it becomes a matter of improving the site through code. Either by changing the code running the site, or by improving the language itself. But given that this is more of a side project, the resources needed to improve the site are limited. Given the unusual spike in traffic, rather then using limited resources to fix it, or sacrifice the motivation to improve the code/language, the boring article approach is being used.