tmorton

This solution to this "core paradox" is the idea of gains from trade - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gains_from_trade

If everyone has the same capabilities and preferences, then the economy is a zero-sum game like you've described. In some fields, that's close to true, and those fields tend to be low-margin commodities.

Here's an important difference.

The 18F post says:

"we reviewed all Google Drive files shared between Slack and Drive, just to be sure nothing was shared that shouldn't have been. Our review indicated no personal health information (PHI), personally identifiable information (PII), trade secrets, or intellectual property was shared."

While the OIG report says:

"[the integration] permitted full access to over 100 GSA Google Drives, resulting in a data breach."

RDPD is basically a fad diet book. There's some good advice, but it's mixed with bad advice and illegal schemes, slathered with a thick layer of inspirational bullshit.

For a better personal finance book, try "I will teach you to be rich", despite the clickbait title: http://www.amazon.com/Will-Teach-You-To-Rich/dp/0761147489

That's absolutely true. But while physical laws just exist, "economic laws" are a complicated combination of biology, psychology, social norms, the legal system, etc.

You can tweak the rules, but you can't run calculations that predict the results. Some of those legal arrangements might be unjust, but their results might be net-good all the same. We can, and should, keep evolving the social bargain, but upending it completely is very dangerous.

I think restricting this to "the west" begs the question. We conventionally define "the west" to be the relatively stable, relatively democratic countries of the US and Western Europe. We exclude various countries simply because they haven't been stable.

But even in "the west", you don't need to go back very far to find revolutions driven (in part) by economic issues. Hitler couldn't have seized power without Germany's rough experiences in the great depression.

The downvotes here are really inappropriate. I disagree with most of this comment, but it's well up to the standards of political discourse on HN.

Whole life policies are pretty terrible, because they're high-fee and opaque. It's very difficult to compare them like-to-like, and that's on purpose - each insurance company wants to sell a slightly different set of guarantees, risks, benefits and fees. Term life insurance is what you need to protect your family. 401ks, IRAs, then simple index funds are superior investment vehicles.

Here's the really short guide to life insurance: http://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/insurance

"Why not just attach a bell to the cat?" said the mice.

This is a great point, but I don't think it leads to no prosecutions. As you point out, the problems here are systemic - and a vital part of the system is accountability.

In a better world, the mid-level bureaucracy of the military and CIA would be a bulwark against this kind of abuse. Politicians will always be opportunists, and the low-level ranks will always contain psychopaths. But the mid-level people can keep both in check, if they have the motivation.

Twenty years from now, when a president asks "is there anything else we can do to this guy?", the answer from the CIA director should be "no, or I'll be prosecuted". The answer from the DOJ should be "no, or we'll be disbarred". The answer from the military should be "we'll resign before following that order, because it will get us sent to the Hague".

Funny, I got the opposite impression. I would tell her "Throw away everything and focus 100% on mid- to low-brow content." More celebrity blogs, fantasy sports, etc. Yahoo has a lot of unsophisticated eyeballs, but they're not a tech leader.

Pricing a scarce resource doesn't "screw over" anyone.

I agree with this statement, and I'm in the US. My manager wears cargo shorts to the office, but I'd still raise an eyebrow if you wore them to an interview.

The key is to dress up "a little bit".

Wear what would you wear for a "big day" - presenting at a conference, demoing for a customer, or a one-on-one with your boss's boss. Some places, that's a clean t-shirt and your best pair of jeans. If you're fixing healthcare.gov, that might be a suit and tie.

This advice is only for a very specific situation. If you can certainly find a better position quickly, but your boss is a decent person who's interested in your success, then absolutely tell them that you're thinking about leaving.

But that's a rare situation. Basically, it's people who were hired as junior engineers and have leveled up. Years 2-5 of your career are when your position can become mismatched with the broader market.

If you're just testing the market, and you might find that your current job is your best available option, don't tell your boss. Similarly, if you're fleeing a bad situation but you need the paychecks for a little while, don't tell your boss.

Done! https://github.com/scottefein/the-happiness-manifesto/pull/7

I think this comment shows exactly what I was getting at. If no one disagrees, the happiness manifesto will die in a sea of nods and shrugs. :)

> I'd rather have really good code, even if written by a racist or sexist, than bad code (period).

That's a perfectly valid choice. In some cases, it's a completely correct choice. But that's not the tradeoff that I want to make.

Take a look at the original Agile Manifesto: http://agilemanifesto.org/

Sometimes you can have it all: good process, good tools, good individuals and interactions. But when they conflict, the AM says that we should favor the individuals over the processes.

I'm saying that as a development community, we should favor inclusiveness and respect, even at the cost of (some) technical merit. Similarly, we should favor open-source infrastructure, even at the cost of the App Store audience.

I think this is a great idea. The ruby community is a wonderful thing, and part of that is reflected in the technology.

However, the original Agile Manifesto was powerful because it made tradeoffs. "We value X over Y", even when Y is a valuable thing. For this HDD thing to take off, it has to make the similar tradeoffs explicit.

For example:

  We value readable code over runtime performance.
  We value open-source frameworks and libraries over developing for popular ecosystems.
  We value inclusiveness, diversity, and respect over pure meritocracy.
  We value teaching, learning, and improving our craft over short-term productivity.
  We value creating wealth over capturing wealth.

This article has a great response to that argument: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2014/07/28/Privacy-E...

> Best we can probably hope for is better intelligence augmentation/amplification than we've got now.

Sounds like we can get the "Captain America" singularity - everyone gets a genius-level IQ, but nothing further.

I think you're looking at this the wrong way. Decide the level of risk first. That dictates your stock/bond mix. After that, you get whatever the market gives you.

If you're looking for a guaranteed 5%, it doesn't exist right now, and it won't be back unless inflation spikes close to 5%.

If you're lucky, you'll learn this lesson early in your career: when you think "oh, that's easy, those people must be idiots" it's a sign that you don't understand the problem.

People are not idiots. Large problems are never easy. Politics, management, and salesmanship are genuine parts of the problem, not useless distractions from technical stuff.

I'm not saying that improvement is impossible, I'm saying that improvement is hard. The healthcare.gov system could have gone live, and been functional, on October 1 - if you could hire better technical people. Can you hire a top-notch team of techies in this environment? Ever tried it? It could be working if the political appointees had nailed down the requirements earlier. Have you ever tried getting hundreds of legally-mandated decisions pushed through the federal bureaucracy? Many of those decisions were pushed back for political reasons, which sucks - but could you made the unpopular decisions early, then won enough elections to keep Republicans from dismantling the entire thing? The system could be working if the law made more sense in a dozen different ways, but all of those compromises were necessary to get the law passed in the first place. Have you ever tried to write legislation, and get it through congress?

Don't get me wrong - the healthcare.gov system is a clusterfuck, and there are easily identifiable reasons for that - in retrospect. And hopefully we can learn from the failures and move forward. But laying it all at the feet of some nebulous government employee is completely unhelpful.

If this system becomes routine, mortgage rates will go up, though I'm not sure about "huge premiums."

Is that a bad thing? The investment becomes risker and more expensive, so less money is available, so fewer mortgages are made. More people rent instead of buy their own homes. I would submit that fewer owner-occupied homes would be a positive thing for the national economy.

The most important document your site probably isn't keeping - a custom error page.

Snark aside, here's a cache link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:E1oDq8P...

Cache link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:pONjMF-...

This article mentions, but undersells, the lead factor. Lead exposure causes cognitive problems in children, especially related to impulse control. The drop in crime correlates very well with lead cleanup.

Kevin Drum (a left-leaning US journalist) has been making this argument: http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/01/lead-and-crime...

Should this be handled by Github? Package systems like RubyGems seem like the natural point to designate an "owner" of a library.

When parking is free, drivers are also getting an "insane discount." If drivers can park for free, food trucks should also park for free - but the best solution is that nobody parks for free.

This post and the original post set up a massive false dichotomy. Yes, keep your commitments. Yes, pull your weight at work. For many people, that means getting your ass into the office at a normal time.

But in order to get there, you should understand yourself and work with who you are. If a label like "delayed sleep phase syndrome" helps you manage your life, use it. Either set good expectations with your team, or set up systems to help you out.

The ass-kicking rhetoric of this post is true, as far as it goes. For some people, this sort of wake-up call is exactly what they need. But for many people, "just do it" is not a useful message. Feeling guilty is useful if it kicks you into action - but too much and it just holds you down, preventing you from making progress.

This is a good point, but the obvious solution is to rent parking spaces at something like a market-clearing price.

If a food truck can outbid people who want to park, then the city's economy needs food trucks more than parking spots.

It's not about price, it's about control. At any price, I won't buy it until these are met:

- No ads, from anyone, ever.

- Any data, including video and location information, is under my control, and there is an easy way to review/edit/delete it.

If you view eating as a nutrient-delivery process, then yes, you are wrong to despise mashed potatoes. On the other hand, if we view eating as a recreational activity, then you should eat whatever you want. On the gripping hand, tastes can be changed fairly easily - if you eat mashed potatoes a couple of dozen times, you'll learn to tolerate them.

So is programming about pleasure? About delivering business value? Are we artists, engineers, factory workers, craftsmen? How much weight do we give to the programmer's preferences, versus practices that seem to produce better results on average?

But those are not the important questions. The problem is that we can't even begin to answer those questions, because we don't know what is effective "on average", or how to measure those results.