fabricode

Then what about the author's other points where you can increase your productivity if you avoid all alcohol and get good rest. If productivity is what is most important, then maybe your employer should be allowed to limit your alcohol consumption during your off-hours.

If you're employing someone putting together sprockets on an assembly line, then yes, productivity may be the most important thing to you. If you are employing managers, designers, programmers, advertising folks... then maybe productivity is not your primary goal. Maybe getting the smartest work from them is more important than getting the greatest amount of output.

Personally, I'd rather have one brilliant, game-changing program/algorithm/policy/advertisement than one hundred mediocre pieces of output.

Not sure about the rest of you, but I'm not clicking on a dickey.xxx link to read about anything.

Ironically, his blog is title "Mystic Rhythms: We Suspend Our Disbelief and We Are Entertained"

This is a song title and lyric taken without credit from Rush, specifically their Power Windows album. http://www.songmeanings.net/songs/view/108820/

He decries the lack of respect given to developers of creative works, yet here he steals ideas from another creative group and uses it without any attribution whatsoever.

I'd say it detracts from the strength of his argument just a bit.

(Note: hopefully he fixes this in the future, but no attribution as of Oct 14, 2012 10:51am)

Maybe because scary things crawl out of dark holes? Because you can drop things into holes & not get them out? Because you can hurt your little finger putting it into holes where it doesn't belong? How about Flash Gordon's Trial by Treebeast?

There is no viral effect to our products.

You certainly know your market better than I do, but it seems to me that you are taking advantage of a viral effect. As people use Jira (for instance) and they move around from one company to another, they're likely to recommend using Jira at their new places when they get sick of Rational, Remedy, Bugzilla, etc.

People using Jira and realizing that there is a bug tracker that doesn't stink are very likely to bring that message to their next company. The word about a great product spreads... like a virus, albeit a slower moving one than pet rocks.

"You have illegally been subjected to make..."

"Try the new app right now, its beautiful:"

As clever as it is, it would have been far more effective if you had checked your grammar before printing two hundred flyers.

There doesn't seem to be anything specific to a "Perl Shop" on the list.

Perl specific maturity items would be:

1) Do all packages have documentation (pod) stored in the package file(s), and is it up to date?

2) Are there tests built using TAP (e.g. Test::More), and is this built into some kind of continuous build/test server?

3) Have a set of perlcritic rules been set up for the shop? Are these checked as part of code-review or scm check-in?

4) Is there a consistent set of rules for how external packages are brought into the current build? How are local changes to CPAN-originated packages handled?

These are the kinds of policies I'd expect to see implemented in a mature Perl Shop. The policies listed in the original post are those which I'd expect to see implemented in a mature software firm.

These ideas are named to honor the person who did much of the grunt work to get them proven/accepted, but we continue to use the name as a convenience.

If you're working with educated people, it's a lot easier to say, "apply DeMorgan," than to say, "why don't you negate the clause, remembering to negate each of the internal clauses, and switching the and's to or's and vice versa."

There exist people who use the names to sound intellectual, and these people are annoying, but just because some people enjoy spouting (in the general public) "obscure" rules and names, that doesn't mean that using such names is without value.

You said: Actually it does [mean he's wrong] because it is upon that logical fallacy that the counter argument is entirely built upon

Wrong is the wrong word :)

What you're looking for is "invalid". An argument is valid if and only if the conclusion follows from the premises. In other words, if the premises are true then it cannot be the case that the conclusion is false. Since a logical fallacy adds nothing to an argument, the conclusion does not follow from the premise. Since the conclusion can therefore be false, even if the logical fallacy is true, the argument is labeled invalid.

Just for completeness... A more strict standard is soundness. An argument is sound if and only if the argument is valid and the premises are true. If an argument is sound, then the conclusion is necessarily true. Obviously, the argument invoking a logical fallacy as its premise is unsound because it is invalid.

It is also perfectly possible for the conclusion to be true even though the argument itself is invalid and unsound.

If you still would like to apply the label "wrong" to it, then I'd say, "The argument is wrong, even though your conclusion happens to be true."

(Note: I can't see the post that started all of this off as it has been deleted, so I'm not making any comment on the truthiness of his/her conclusion)

If you are able to make this happen, it would be very interesting if you could get the visitors to write a short note before entering about what they expect, how well they think they'll handle the disorientation, etc. After they're done have them write a similar note about their experience and how reality matched up with their expectations.

For all of us that don't have access to such facilities, this kind of before/after diary might be very interesting.

A great article, and you must be commended on your dedication.

That said, it reads almost exactly like the opening to "American Psycho". Sure, Bateman's routine is slightly different than yours, but both narratives have the same affect.

Best of luck, and I can't wait for your article on business cards!

I cannot believe you missed the most important reason: you shared some of your life with your daughter.

My dad was a programmer, and I was always hacking away on the computers that we had around the house (sure... it was an Atari 800.... but you'd be amazed at what you can do on that little thing). Unfortunately, he never worked with me on any of my code ever. He never taught me anything about design, about computer languages, --nothing--. Perhaps I could have been more aggressive about getting him to help me, but I was an introvert's introvert. I was the kid in school who blushed when his name was called during attendance.

Looking back, I can't believe the wasted opportunity. You should enjoy this activity with your daughter for what it is. Forget the other 1,000 paragraphs you wrote about why.

I'm glad that you did this, and your daughter will be too.

( I read your article twice to make sure I didn't miss it, but I sometimes skip a sentence, so please pardon me if I got this wrong. )

The true nightmare begins when it says...

    Please log in with your Facebook id and password

These question marks are almost as annoying as the "self-interview" question marks made popular by former Sec. of Defense Rumsfeld.

What is a self-interview? Well, it's when you ask yourself a question then immediately answer it. Are they occurring more now than before? Listening to people on TV news shows and NPR seems to show that more are doing it now.

Why would people do this? Because it makes it sound as if they're answering a question that has been asked -- even if the answer they're giving wasn't actually in response to the actual interviewer.

Can we stop this now? I sure hope so.

Fantastic.

I clicked on your CV just because the link was available on the side, and I was shocked to find out that you're still in high school. There are professionals that would have taken 10x as long to explain it only half as clearly. For context, I've been in the business for ~25 years. Keep up the great work.

Very nice article, but I did not like the example data he was using.

The problem is that both population and tournament city could be dependent on year.

Population (obviously) changes from year-to-year, so either his original data is incorrect or he's recording a city's latest population along with all historic tennis championship winners -- neither interpretation makes a lot of sense. Why not use something unlikely to change such as either elevation or country?

Likewise, tournament city is not a fixed value for a tournament. For example, the Australian Open, which he uses as one of his examples, has also been set in Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane, Perth, Christchurch (NZ), and Hastings (NZ).

To resolve this, he would either have to introduce a two column primary key (tournament, year), or pick some simpler data. I suggest the latter.

Even with all of this criticism, I think it's one of the cleanest introductions of the normal forms for beginners.

Welcome to ABC, Inc. In these two cubicles we have our vetting department. One screener always tells the truth, while the other always tells a lie. If you could only ask one question... oh never mind.

What would be annoying? The comments with the highest votes would still be at the top. He/she said nothing about randomizing the comments. The only effect of the idea would be to eliminate "celebrity" votes.

Management is orthogonal to code design/dev/maint.

No one (ok... almost no one) has no management nor coding skill, rather each of us has a mix of the two. The great organizations I've worked in had extremely smart people in management and in development, but the type of brilliance was different.

So yes, hire someone smarter than yourself.

No one is being punished for being wrong.

From the article, the problem with the leaders was in how they handled the management of the team and the publicity of the announcement. You know there are problems when many of the collaborators asked to be left off of the paper; insufficient experimental checks were done (according to some team members); some of the team members heard about the results from the press release rather than from their colleagues; and so on.

The team also did not ask them to step down. The internal vote of 16-13 was insufficient to have them removed (2/3 majority required). So they really did step down on their own.

And in the end, "science" worked.

Cute & fun, but not engineered very well. In order to have the sunken bed:

  - he's raised the floor (effectively lowering the ceiling)
  - cut his floor space dramatically
  - made the center of the room unusable (stairs)
  - introduced a dependency between electricity & sleep
    (though there's probably a manual override)
  - made it harder to change his sheets
  - annoyed the neighbors (power drill to open the bed)
  - made moving day a royal PITA

I've used the HUD available on the C5 Corvette, and it's no more distracting at first than any new car's radio, wiper controls, etc.

Once you've driven with it for a bit, it really does increase the attention paid to the road. Your quick checks for speed, gas, tach are instead diverted to mirror checks or just keeping your eyes on what's happening ahead.

That said, the Corvette's was a monochromatic subtle display. I'm not sure what the impact of full-color high-resolution information would be. One always has to be wary of the "ooo... let's watch the odometer rollover to the next 10,000" kind of distraction.

Everyone seems to be confused by the "I am sending you the only copy" aspect of this letter. I'm sure he kept excellent records, and keeping a copy (or the original) for himself would be a standard business practice for someone in the communication business.

It is no different than you sending an email to someone saying, "I'm sending this note to you alone rather than posting this publicly, ..."

As for why he would keep a copy: no different than why you keep copies of your emails. Should the recipient respond, he'll have his original to reference if the person responding takes items out of context, attributes statements not actually made to Vonnegut, amongst other benign or nefarious mistakes.

I thought the overlord joke was from the Simpson's, but it turns out that they got the idea from 70's high camp: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-for-one-welcome-our-new-x-ov...

More on topic: I believe that one of the main reasons why they don't take it seriously is because they are literally above the law here. They don't have to go through the same process that ordinary travelers do. I can't find an authoritative source, so either all of Congress or only those senior members traveling with a security detail are exempt, but either way, those in charge don't understand the full impact it has on ordinary people's lives.

Probably when you've found that you don't have to read the documentation for the base language in a while. Everyone constantly reads docs on infrequently used libraries and for gotcha parts of a language, but that's far different from having to look up how to create/destroy objects, perform all conditionals, use the data types, etc.

Equivalently: when you wouldn't be embarrassed in an interview to write something on the board in that language.

I did catch your conclusions in the penultimate paragraph. However, I don't believe that "assigning [a] quality control role to the next person downstream" is a workable solution. This is a form of passing the buck, saddling someone else with your problems, etc.

In your reply here, you say that you've learned that by working as a debugger/finisher you've learned how to start stuff better. That is worthy of further exposition as so many people suffer from the exact same problem.

And as much as false categorization & naming hurts your best point, it sure seems to have caught HN's attention, so marketing may be where your true genius lies. That's cool -- there's lots of money in marketing :)

> The Starter, the Architect, the Debugger, the Finisher

and the Stereotype.

These articles aren't very informative if they don't have some new insight into how to maximize the output of the team by exploiting the traits of the stereotype. The roles outlined in this entry really only fall into two categories: get things going (starter & architect) and get things working (debugger & finisher).

If I had to take a wild guess, I'd say that what the article is really trying to say is that it's easy for people to start projects (I've yet to meet a "debugger" that can't start their own), but it's hard to complete them. It's often even harder to keep something working than when it was put together given the nature of changing requirements.

So my take on the article would be to add the advice: if you consider yourself a "starter" or an "architect", go live in the world of maintenance for a while. Learn to complete your projects. And if people tend to curse a project when your name was on the design doc, perhaps you should spend a bit more time learning about practical programming, design, and algorithms... or mentor with someone who is well regarded.

Next week's article: What happens when the boss is a Sagittarius and the team lead is a Gemini?

This may not fail the metaphor test. Take a real folder in your hands and try to stuff in it a drawer which is too small. Your corner tab will stay in the corner while the rest gets "smushed".

If anything, this makes it a bit more intuitive for the user as it avoids the confusion of losing controls because of an errant mouse drag.

Removing the "ums" (a distraction) is a far cry from going to the dark side of public speaking ("vacuousness").

One insight I had into public speaking was that good speakers pause. There is white space in their delivery. These are typically the locations where a less experienced speaker puts his verbal tics.

Just as we prefer well-spaced, paragraph style coding over wall-of-text maintenance nightmares, we should work towards removing our fear of "dead air" and let our presentations breathe a bit.

There are many uses of "friggen" or the word that it is being substituted for, and in this case, it has nothing to do with denigrating the object.

By putting "friggen" into the middle of a word, you're verbally underlining / emphasizing it. Really emphasizing it, as is underlining it multiple times.

For instance, in the movie Pretty Woman, when one of the two friends is trying to figure out someone for whom a relationship worked out, she responds with "Cinder-friggen-rella". ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100405/quotes?qt0466870 )

I know this is an overly-long response to a minor issue, but I just didn't want you thinking that someone was making fun of your country. Instead, I believe the person who originally said it was essentially trying to say "a really, really, really communist country" had a more appealing entry system than today's America.