samd

You think typing skills are as essential to being a productive, and by productive I mean creating wealth and value, not lines of code, a productive developer as dribbling is to being a good basketball player?

I don't understand programmer's obsession with typing efficiency. We're not typists. Typing is a tiny fraction of the time I spend programming. Most of the time I'm thinking, or talking to another developer about a problem. I could have the fastest typing skills and most efficient editor and not even be marginally more productive.

And I'd upvote it to Mars. FactoryGirl is completely an anti-pattern, unless maybe you're doing acceptance testing, but you know even then I wouldn't want FactoryGirl in my codebase, people would be too damn tempted to use it everywhere.

Yeah, should've known the article would grossly misrepresent the claims of the scientists.

This article is as absurd as if it had said: "It's official, scientists have discovered the meaning of life!"

The gall of these scientists to claim that not only can they definitively say what consciousness is, but that they can prove that something has it is astonishing.

Good riddance. There is nothing essential to the role managers fill that couldn't be done by someone without authority over you. That doesn't necessarily mean removing all managers, it just means not making them your boss.

Valve is proof that a flat structure can not just work, but lead to massive financial, critical, and popular success. It's also probably one of the only companies that I would be fulfilled working at that wasn't my own. There's no one to hold you back. I think the startup-minded hackers on this site can relate to that.

Testing isn't just about preventing bugs, it also encourages better design, and good design makes extending and enhancing your application much easier and faster.

...in general, of course, there's always exceptions, don't be dogmatic.

You weren't the only one who found it awkward and uncomfortable. The bit about sex set the tone for the rest of the piece. The operator calling her 'honey' certainly didn't help.

Even so the piece was powerful. I empathized with Kara and it got me thinking about AI and our future. The male-sex fantasy stuff just distracted from the important parts about consciousness, emotion, and rights. It would've been an even more powerful piece had it been more tasteful.

Rails never used PUT correctly to begin with. Everybody uses update_attributes which does partial updates.

Ideally you wouldn't need to do partial updates and just send the entire resource; your resources shouldn't be so big that that's an issue. It's much simpler than making the front-end decide when to do full versus partial updates and which method to use.

Rails can't really do that though, too much legacy code out there, too many people set in their ways. Resorting to PATCH is their only option if they want to use HTTP correctly.

The Agile mantra these days is write code instead of talking, but there's no faster way to iterate than to have a conversation. Sure you've got to write code at some point, but save yourself wasted hours and days doing the wrong thing and talk about it for 30 minutes.

People seem to forget that code is a means, not an end.

P.S. Down-voting the OP for having a different opinion, for shame Hacker News.

So touch screen only controls aren't the way to go. But it may not be necessary to reinvent the basic controls of the car. Making a better climate control system isn't going to win hearts and minds. But what would be very interesting is a web-connected car with an API and a touch-screen device with an open app ecosystem.

I know it's not the important thing in the entire automotive industry. But I think it just might be to the average driver. Assuming, of course, you've got the mechanics right. Like a hierarchy of needs, having a reliable car to go from point A to B is the foundation. If you had already had a car with the same performance, reliability, safety, efficiency, etc. of a Honda Civic how could you beat Honda?

Does anyone else get the feeling that the entire automotive industry could be disrupted by a company that focused on design, usability, and modern technology in their car interiors? It seems to me you could replace just about every car's dashboard with an iPad and already be light-years ahead of the industry standard.

In fact the problem seems to get worse as you add more technology and money; if Top Gear is any indication the supercars of the world are all a usability joke. They have a dizzying array of meaningless, misplaced, and practically useless buttons. I believe on the latest Ferrari you can either see your speed or your position on a map, but not both.

It seems very similar to the phone industry before the iPhone.

Just about all of these problems can be solved with good agile practices like pairing and scrum.

People are way more productive, focused, and determined when pairing. It's simply much harder to waste time and produce low quality work when you're directly accountable to the person next to you.

Scrum solves the urgency, commitment, follow-through, and slow problems. Each iteration the team has to commit to a set of tasks to get done. If they don't make it they have to figure out why they didn't, and how to improve. This continuous reflection and optimization is how team's get good and fast.

Of course there will be people who can't be brought into the team, but they are few and far between. And you can't tell until you've created a team for them to be brought in to. So instead of focusing so much on the fantasy of hiring a great team, learn how to build a great team.

How does an empire conquer that first city? Do they too start as movements until they've dominated one area?

Twitter and Facebook give businesses the opportunity to interact with their customers. Using those channels as yet another way to talk at customers is wasting that opportunity. The best way for local businesses to use Twitter is to actually use Twitter. Log in, respond to messages, join the conversation, act like a real person and connect with your customers.

Polly.IM may be a useful tool if you're already engaged on Twitter, but if you rely on automated responses to drive your "interactive" marketing you're doing it wrong.

Have a source for that information? Facebook's own API documentation page says: "There is a strong inverse correlation between the number of permissions your site requests and the number of users that will allow those permissions. The greater the number of permissions you ask for, the lower the number of users that will grant them; so we recommend that you only request the permissions you absolutely need for your site."

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/web/#login

I recently did a Startup Weekend and coded basically non-stop for a couple days. Afterwards I felt great, like my skills were being used to their fullest; and I had created something significant. It wasn't until days later that burn-out set it; but I wasn't burned-out from working all weekend, I was burned-out from my day job. How little real, valuable work I did at my day job compared to what I did during the weekend made me feel worthless and insignificant.

Paul Graham has talked about how heavy a work-load starting a startup is, and how much founders enjoy it compared to life at a big company in spite of it. I was skeptical at first, and thought that you had to be some super-human workaholic to handle it, but it turns out creating value is really enjoyable and fulfilling. It's a different kind of work, a kind that invigorates you rather than drains you.

I don't suppose you'll tell us how you know whether a site's content is original or not.

What if you have a blog with lots of quotes from other sites; will that hurt your rankings because Google sees "unoriginal" content?

Is there some ratio of original to unoriginal content that must be met to keep from being flagged as a scraper?

Let's go with: nobody's a Cartesian dualist.

I'm sure there are still some out there, but I haven't run into any. Most philosophers I know are compatibalists. Though to be fair predictable is not the same thing as determined, and we mostly think that determinism is false.

However, I think the true philosophical problem of free will is deciding what exactly a "will" is and what it means to be "free". You've got to answer that question before you can decide whether free will is compatible or incompatible with determinism.

Have any examples? I'm curious which philosophical problems have been solved by science.

Edit: To be fair, I'll provide an example of what I mean. David Chalmer's "hard problem of consciousness" is about why we have qualitative experiences. You can explain all of our brain states in functional ways, like pain's function is to prevent damage, but that would still not answer the question of why pain hurts. I don't think science can answer that question, at least not in a way that is observable and testable.

My mileage did vary. Nobody in modern academic philosophy is a dualist.

Facts are nice, but philosophical debates tend to be about things that are fundamentally unprovable, unobservable, etc. I think a lot of people that come from the sciences and other "hard" disciplines are frustrated by how useless their facts are in solving these debates.

As someone with degrees in both a hard science and philosophy I'd say that philosophy is more useful to other disciplines than other disciplines are to philosophy.

Sorry about that. The reason there's a limit is to keep the emails relatively short so people will actually read them.

It's quick and dirty and manual right now. But if you've heard of us at this stage you'd probably make a pretty good alpha user.

How trustworthy is the feedback from these dissatisfied businesses?

People have a strong tendency to blame others for their problems and this case is no different. Groupon and its "disloyal" customers are an easy scapegoat for the business' own problems.

Groupon just brings customers in, they don't magically make the business better.

When analyzing the effectiveness of Groupon we should be most concerned with how well businesses with a good product or service did using Groupon.

Except that as the metrics and tracking gets better so does the advertising.

Don't worry, like any academic field philosophy is filled with jargon, but knowing the jargon doesn't make you any smarter and not knowing doesn't make you any dumber.

Both you and Eliezer made good arguments and points, they just happened to already have a name in the philosophical jargon.

If you're interested, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at plato.stanford.edu is the greatest repository of philosophical knowledge on the Internet.

They have an article about rule-consequentialism: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consequentialism-rule/

I'm not sure.

Here is the rule: "Do no harm."

Why should we follow it?

A rule-consequentialist would say, "Because if everyone followed that rule all the time it would lead to better consequences, on average, than if people tried to calculate the consequences of each individual action and act to maximize them."

Why would that lead to better consequences?

A rule-consequentialist could say, "Because people are quite bad at calculating consequences, especially in the tumultuous time before making a critical ethical decision. While we have had the time to think and properly calculate the hypothetical consequences of everyone following the rule."

I think that's exactly the argument Eliezer is making.

Not a very informative article. There's nothing in it other than baseless speculation and weak inferences.