theoj

Baffling on the face of it, but I think he answered that question when he said he wanted to be paid a compliment. I took that to mean he just wanted reassurance that he and his company did not come across in a negative light. Maybe they weren't the best, but at least it would be reassuring to know they didn't "suck".

You can sometimes get away with admitting ignorance if you promise to follow up with action. As in "I don't know the exact particulars of Y, but I'll look into it later today and get back to you tonight." This is one of the things that students getting their first job who have spent all their lives in school don't get. They are so used to the academic environment and its expectations of always knowing on the spot, that they don't realize it's sometimes permissible not to know -- you just have to state it appropriately.

Then again, refactoring without permission could be a really bad idea. You need to ask yourself a few questions before you proceed.

Do you have thorough unit tests for the code that you are trying to refactor? If not, be aware that there is no way to know for sure that your refactoring won't break the functionality of the code.

Suppose it breaks the code. Have you thought about the operational impact to clients and the financial costs?

Let's say the costs are low. How big and political is your organization? What kind of trouble will you find yourself in? As the hysteria rises, will you be fed to the dogs over this?

How bureaucratic is your company and how many people do you need to interact with to fix a functionality breakage? The more people you will need to interact with, the more damage you will do to yourself and your reputation. Others will resent working in panic mode to clean up after you (now widely known as the "rogue" programmer).

"We also used the dating site HowAboutWe.com to go on dates so we had the undivided attention of a female for market research. No judgment; we paid for dinner."

Interesting way to go about collecting market research. Though I have to wonder if some of the ladies didn't resent having a date with your future app rather than you.

Sure enough, it happened just like the author says. Tuned in to CNN this morning and the announcer cheerfully smiled (?!) and said that ATT will acquire TMobile and this is great because we will now get access to iPhones! Nevermind that ATT's service is horrible and their costs are high. Made me want to hit my forehead.

For me, it's about quality. Guess who had the worst network in America?

http://blogs.consumerreports.org/electronics/2010/12/consume...

As many as 40% of CEOs are actually introverts.

http://www.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/2006-06-0...

I have heard something slightly different with regard to classes of players: "A players hire A players, B players hire C players, and C players hire losers."

Here is a discussion from long ago about the phrase's origins: http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.50837.1...

With radiation you shouldn't bet, you should know with certainty.

I used Virtual Stock Exchange for a test portfolio last year. http://virtualstockexchange.com/Game/Homepage.aspx

Does green convert better than red? Performable seems to like red over green. http://blog.performable.com/631526233/

I say the site is a good thing because just like HN it strives to aggregate high quality tech posts that you might otherwise miss -- it just does this for Spanish language posts, which is currently outside the scope of HN.

As a bonus for those of us who learned or are learning Spanish, it's also a great way to practice the language. :)

They can safely keep on hacking as long as they don't screw up in a major way. If the lives of regular folks are affected by their hacking, public opinion will turn around pretty quickly.

The idea is that developers should have a quiet, distraction-free space to do their coding. With open spaces and cubicles you hear other people's conversations and you cannot reach the deep focused attention that you need to produce good, bug-free code.

Another great way to learn Linux is to setup a VPS. Last year I setup a VPS from scratch with no previous experience (Ubuntu, PHP, Ruby on Rails, DNS, email server, iptables and more) using just web tutorials. It was a slow process (it took me about a week full time) but it taught me a lot.

Then perhaps these kinds of decisions should not be taken by machines.

Disabling his account is either a display of creepy dictatorial power or an indication of incompetence and lack of common sense.

Wage parity is a pipe dream. Each country has different social, political and educational systems that lead to uneven economic progress. You will wait a long time to get back to improving humanity.

The truth of the matter is that everything that can be outsourced will be outsourced. The idea that "brain work" would remain in the US was just a rationalization to enable the first wave of outsourcing to get underway.

In the 1980's the driving force was quality and the ones to emulate were the Japanese. Now the driving force is cost, quality is not that important, and the ones to emulate are the Chinese/Indians.

The article is clearly marked as an op-ed piece. Obviously the person who wrote it has an opinion and a call to action, else he/she would not have written the article.

Edit: Downvotes? Really?

Link without registration: <removed>

Edit: Apparently you need to go through Google for this to work. See comment below.

Yes, you can "try" an idea in a weekend, but it's only going to be a rough sketch, not a polished experience. You still need a team and months/years of effort to bring it up to the next level so it can get the billion dollar valuation. How many weekend projects have billion dollar valuations?

Edit: In reply to mkr-hn whose comments I cannot reply to for some reason... I believe that this thread was about a bubble and billion dollar valuations not weekend companies worth much less.

All the analysts were saying similar things in 2000... the field is misunderstood, there are great transformative forces at play, you needed to subscribe to our new theories about how things work to understand everything, etc., etc. These valuations are naive projections of future growth -- most likely these firms will reach constraints on future growth.

That seems like a lot of options to explore at once, and could be quite expensive from an R&D and product development standpoint, while at the same time failing to capitalize on large returns to scale. Rather than a 4-pronged strategy I'd rather see 2 pronged strategy. Keep Android, dump WP7 (it's a laggard and Ballmer's MS seems incapable of generating any big wins) and select one of either MeeGo or Symbian.

I'd say justice is more than legal punishment, it is punishment appropriate to the crime. If you steal from me and then I shoot and kill you, that's revenge but it's probably not justice.

The original Salon article is much better in its analysis: http://www.salon.com/news/us_economy/index.html?story=/news/...

Can you provide some examples of more lucrative segments?

Number of lines is used as a proxy for complexity, especially among those who are less familiar with how the programming sausage is made (management, non-IT folks, etc.). To non-technical folks, it sounds pretty impressive that you can do a simple change (low # of lines) and get a huge improvement. Nevermind the fact that behind those couple of lines could be days of code analysis and several rewrites. It's the allure of the easy, "why didn't I think of that" kind of thing.

From Linus' post:

"And you're just full of bullshit."

You can be "abrupt and to the point" without personal attacks. Linus personally attacked him, without knowing all the facts.

Not my impression. I think they didn't want to publish his name, so they opted for "The Russian" instead because the guy's "Russian-ness" is what stood out most in their mind after the interaction.