tdees40

I got LASIK four years ago. No haloing, and in general I'm really happy about it. I did have vicious dry eyes for about six months, which was much worse than it sounds, but it went away. Overall, I'm thrilled with the procedure, and as I previously had terrible vision, it was legitimately life-changing.

Mike's one of the more fascinating people around. One of the only people ever to receive a discharge from the navy as a conscientious objector after he became a pacifist.

Keep in mind that BigCorp's lawyers have no idea what "linking" means, so they're probably going to veto an LGPL library just the same as they would a GPL library.

I work in industry. Anything GPL is a non-starter. I totally understand and appreciate the concerns, but at BigCorp GPL doesn't play.

edit: I'm well aware that some people don't want industry using their code. Great! But that's really limiting the scope of who's going to get involved, and it's probably going to make it harder to get a sufficient community involved to help your project achieve liftoff.

SJW is just a lazy slur. It's time to retire it.

Well he would, wouldn't he?

Remote controls. Why are they terrible? Why is no one fixing them? Why is it literally impossible to walk into a friend's house and decipher the tangle of remotes for TV, cable box, XBox, sound system, etc, etc. I'm staying with friends for a few days and literally couldn't watch TV.

It's a pattern that recurs in lots of different programming environments. It's an abstract pattern, so it confuses people who've never encountered them, and then they go out and read a bunch of terrible monad tutorials which obscure what's really going on.

Programmers are good at abstract patterns though! Look at iterators: they're obscure and complex if you've never encountered them, but now they seem really easy. The same is true with monads.

In Norway everyone's income is public. I'd be curious to hear from any Norwegians how this works out in practice.

Maybe! But proving an assertion like "Functional programmers are more arrogant than OOP programmers" or whatever is probably impossible. So here's my contribution to this debate: I write Haskell in my free time, and I'm not great at it, but if beginners ever need anything, e-mail me and I'll do everything I can to help. So for my part, I'm going to be non-arrogant and super-helpful and damn the rest.

Yes, if only Sweden was more like Louisiana....

I have friends who "got married" in a legally unsanctioned way. No tax penalty, but they still feel like they expressed their commitment to one another.

And yes, obviously there are massive downsides to this approach.

> Don't look to political hacks like "A housing bubble would be good for the economy" Paul Krugman, or any politicians.... look to actual economists.

This sentence makes less sense when you consider that Paul Krugman, ahem, is a Nobel prize winning economist.

My problem with all of this is that, as renewables get cheaper, people use less fossil fuels. But this drives the price of fossil fuels down. Eventually all you're extracting is the low-hanging fruit that can be pulled out of the ground very cheaply and running tight margins on it. So you have kind of a vicious cycle. Meanwhile most people just assume that fossil fuel prices will increase inexorably. I doubt it.

In other words, absent regulation keeping fossil fuel costs high (carbon tax!), I think the shift to renewables will take longer than the optimists think.

Which is why you're seeing all of the young, educated, upwardly mobile UK residents itching to move to Moscow. </sarcasm>

As long as you're not gay.

Because your pay is high too! If you can find people to work beneath you for cheaper, why can't they replace you for less money?

Edit: also, they do that with intern/entry-level banking jobs. Internships pay well, but it's nothing like what higher-level bankers make. Same with entry-level analysts.

A thought experiment: you have a job that pays exorbitantly well, and you want to offer it to someone. It isn't particularly difficult, and any reasonably well-informed, self-motivated college graduate can handle it. How do you hire for that job? The demand is likely insanely high.

Spoiler alert: you create an insanely complicated funnel to weed through huge quantities of candidates. And if talent isn't the primary determiner of success (remember that the job isn't that hard), how do you distinguish people? Simple, you work them nearly to death and see who comes out alive.

I'm not saying that is exactly the situation here, but I think as a mental model it's not that far off.

Why can't I have both? Isn't that the value proposition of Zenefits?

The descent into lawsuits is pretty sad. When customers hate your product (i.e. the ADP front-end) so much that an entire company forms around making something less terrible, you really have to look at yourself in the mirror.

I continue to be amazed by the horribleness of benefits web front-ends. I recently did a simple task in our Hewitt system, and it required five pop-up windows. It's just so, so terrible.

Yes.

https://wiki.haskell.org/Haskell_in_industry

Apple appears to be terrible at deploying capital. Most of it is just sitting around in cash. It's actually hard to imagine a worse allocator of capital.

"Just as usable by end users as Windows."

Have you seen a non-programmer install a printer on a Linux machine? It's terrifying.

So generally Montana is small enough that you just ignore it, so you price it with separate tables and then Montana gets hosed. If Montana were bigger you might go through something like the process you're talking about.

That leaves you open to anti-selection bias. It would make men's life insurance cheaper than in any other state, and you'd likely get more men buying in Montana.

Well, so that's the problem! It's Montana, nobody cares. If it were New York or California people would have to think about it a little more.

Slightly OT, but I have an amusing story about Montana-based regulation. I work for an insurance company, and when you price life insurance or annuities, you have two separate mortality tables: male and female. Montana decided that that's discriminatory, so they mandate only using one table. So we use whichever table is more onerous (i.e. male for life insurance, female for annuities). So if Montanan women notice they pay more life insurance, or men pay more for annuities, they can thank their local regulator.

If you don't feel like reading it, this is an amusing tale of one arm of the pro-Kremlin propaganda machine. The kicker is at the end when Russian propaganda sources tried to make it seem as if the reporter were recruiting Nazis for a complicated CIA scheme.

I work in finance, and browsing this list reinforces the assumption that people on H-1Bs are just cheap labor for employers. Most people on this list whose positions I can determine with confidence seem to make 10-20% too little.

Nevermind, there's one making $1.5M. I just stopped looking too early.