Sven7

This has been Oracle's (i.e. Larry Ellison's) sales and marketing M.O. since forever. Read up on why Raymond Lane left the company. And sad part is it works.

The article is not about whether programmers are doing well for themselves. It's about what happens to the rest of society when only one section (tech\finance) do well for themselves at the expense of everyone else?

I fully agree with this piece.

I am sick of the Larry Ellison type role model of leadership that is encouraged and celebrated.

Mindless ambition is not a bad thing if you want to climb a mountain or walk to the north pole in winter on your own. But if you want to rule the world you will do harm in unimaginable ways.

My favorite kind of cranky old geezer. Inspired.

I'd like to believe there is a secret rag tag bunch of 60-70 year old, retired Engineers out there working on some cool tech.

If we have 60-70 year old's running for president, moving the markets on wall st and robbing diamonds there just have to be a few greybeards dying of cancer working on perpetual motion or something. I mean this is the generation that built the first rockets and computers with fucking slide rules. I am sure a few lurk around here. What are you busybodies upto?

Interesting. Could explain why the different wiring produces the same computation.

I am just curious to see what, this generation of 20-40 year old's who get lucky, end up doing with their cash. They do seem a bit more worldly wise than the last gen (who I blame for funding all the BS tech we see today).

Agree and also Investors have a bias towards the student crowd as they are much easier to impress and deal with, than an experienced Academic or Engineer.

I agree with you. Let's just give thanks that Larry Page doesn't run Wikipedia. At this point Google is way past the point of no return. They are more bothered about empire defense than information.

In so many ways. You can find the pattern everywhere once you start looking.

On a recent trip I saw the after effects of a Nokia factory closing. Now one would think given the boom in phones it wouldn't be an issue for the employees to get new jobs. Two years after loosing their jobs the majority were involved in evangelical churches or multilevel marketing schemes.

Disruption does many useful things, but I feel the benefits are accruing to fewer and fewer people at the expense of many.

Since the crowd around here can't exist without an increase in poverty, the real question is how many poor people do we need to produce one Zuckerberg. If we want more Zuckerbergs we need more poor people, just as if we want more whales in the ocean we need more ocean.

Pretty sure Trump can work out a nice formula to export the poor into the developing world, in return for an expansion of H1B visas or something. Given the clamor I still see in China and India for people coming in, shouldn't be too hard to work out. Also they don't use toilet paper there.

And yes I am that cynical of the crowd around here and the effect the tech industry has had on increasing poverty.

"Computers" were actually clerks in the census office that spent their days manually adding up and multiplying things. They got replaced by IBM's tabulators well before the 30's. But you are right IBM's inventory at the time was mostly tabulators.

Also well worth reading about T.J Watson.

IBM was one of the few American companies that had no layoffs during the depression in the 30's.

Inventories built up. No sales. And he was almost fired.

Once the recovery started every company and govt in the world wanted a computer and the rest is history.

Amen.

It's an unfortunate effect of social media and the information overload. People get flooded with info. They spot hypocrisy. They think they are doing gods works by pointing it out. They get encouraged by the likes and retweets. And we get an endless cycle of people who have no idea what to do about hypocrisy upvoting each other.

The architecture needs to change. We have hit peak hypocrisy detection. You can detect hypocrisy in anything by spending a few days looking into things just like the "activist" editors have. The kind of people who do things about hypocrisy...well...where's the algo for that?

Well...the conservative nature is mostly cause they haven't discovered the internet yet. Zuckerberg is working on it with drones over the Serengeti and such.

DARPA's SyNAPSE and then the self powered brain of an ant. That's computing. Everything else could find place on what's next in consumerist garbage.

True. Which is why I approve the activist shareholder plans at Microsoft and Google to move their CEO's and global HQ's to India.

Well said.

Sounds like the American economy.

If you know the experimental drug\treatment you want to try check overseas. Don't wait for local (I'm assuming) docs to give you the info. Contact centers with a known rep. Good luck!

:) +1 for carrot breaks

This has been like watching one form of misinformation battling another form of misinformation. One set of misguided people battling another set of misguided people.

NetNeutrality is a concept that makes sense in a western context where carriers are basically monopolies. It's unbelievable how good arguments in one context, have been blindly applied to a completely unrelated context.

Activists in the West (who's rep and rent are based on their commitment to netneutrality) without knowing anything about the local context have been cheering on local activists.

Local activists (led by stand up comedians ofcourse similar to Glenn Beck\Jon Stewart) getting carried away by this support (cause Urban India has this strange craving for western validation which I still don't fully understand) have now convinced the regulator to step in and are celebrating victory.

This is similar to how the Egyptians celebrated victory after the army stepped in to depose a democratically elected govt. Just Unbelievable! Free markets are dead. Regulation driven by manufactured outrage or vested interests manufacturing outrage are alive and thriving.

Ofcourse it doesn't help that Facebook and their games are involved which automatically swings every debate into deeply religious territory. As much as I can't stand Facebook and will have nothing to do with them ever, the point of a free market (which produces innovation) has been lost.

If Christian missionaries or Hindu missions go and setup schools and libraries for free in Rural India is someone protesting differential pricing in Urban India. It's ridiculous.

The people who loose out are the farmer\weaver who just need an email address to be linked to the cities. Who is going to provide that now? Rural India is so vast and voiceless that they are the automatic loosers in such a debate.

Congratulations NetNeutrality activists! Well done.

I have a lot of respect for Wael Ghonim for standing up and saying he had no idea what he unleashed via social networks.

I'd like to see Facebook and Twitter do the same. Take responsibility for the costs of an "open and connected" world. A lot of education has to happen. Cause we can't wait for everyone to take 4 years to realize the consequences of what they are doing.

President...well...they don't really do much these days other than provide Reality TV style entertainment. The office should be just phased out imho or used like the Queen for tourism purposes.

Since Google\FB\Twitter\Amazon etc are all being run algorithmically, no reason to indefinably keep paying the execs 300x what the engineers make. Let's just pay Watson. Watson as a VC sounds much more interesting.

Google's problem in search has never been a lack of good engineering, its been a lack of vision for search. The fact that someone from the search team isn't leading the company says everything.

I think the IBM's Watson, Wolfram Alpha, Freebase etc were more much visionary than what Google has done in search in the last 10 years. Even Bing's API's are much more useful. The WolframAlpha and Watson kind of NLP queries have been around for almost 6-7 years now. And Google still can't handle most of them. Whats the use of having all the AI experts on the planet?

Search should be its own company split apart from Chrome and Android. The empire defense game distracts from what Search can be,

I see. Sorry to hear that. I can imagine the day to day complications, but I hope other stuff in Japan more than makes up for it. Like the food :)

How did you end up in Japan, if I may ask?

I would assume daily life could be a little more complicated because of the foreign language. But thinking about it a bit maybe that helps when deaf. The local population I guess automatically make allowances assuming you don't know the language. I have deaf family members, and I constantly see them getting frustrated by people who assume the deaf person understands every thing they are saying, if that makes any sense.

For the deaf developers around, how many of you use ASL?

How often have you been able to use it in at work?

We are currently studying Facebook and Wall Street to answer that.

For someone who doesn't know much about the Indian Startup scene, is there tech coming out of India worth keeping an eye on?