festivusr

What is the skillset they're looking for that would be proven out by having worked remote before?

They weren't kicked out from the normal White House press briefing. I'm sure you know that from reading the article.

Now's your opportunity to learn, then. China isn't exactly some tiny country at the end of the world.

Agriculture needs to go where, exactly?

They're a for-profit company.

They are not good guys. They might be good guys in their personal life, but hiring someone from outside the country, letting them cut ties, and then laying them off immediately is not something a "good guy" does.

The ops people you work with are also developers? That sounds great but has never been the case at anywhere I've been.

Pardoning only Turing isn't enough, but it would be a start.

Sticking Fact: in front of something doesn't make it true.

Living your best life, and achieving your own goals, doesn't mean ignoring everyone else in the world's well-being (for most values of "your own goals" and "your best life").

No, actually, it's a TIE Advanced x1. An Interceptor has characteristic dagger-shaped solar panels.

There was an interesting talk that mentioned CAPTCHA by one of its creators, Luis von Ahn, at the AAAI-12 conference on AI and robotics this past week.

In ReCAPTCHA, the two-word CAPTCHA version, one of the two words is taken from a scanned book. That (unknown) word was one that failed OCR for that book.

The other word is one that captcha already knows the answer to.

The assumption is if you get the known captcha correct, then you probably got the other one correct as well (if it was possible to read it). The answer to the unknown word supplements the OCR of the book.

The captchas are put in random order, and you only have to get one of them right.

Luis's thought was that people are wasting all this time doing captcha - why not use that time to do something useful, like help digitize books.

As an aside, he's also one of the principal people behind duolingo, which is a quite awesome language learning / human-assisted translation engine.

It may be an imperfect analogy, but to call it "rude" seems like a stretch.

I'd posit that your real point is exactly that which you say you don't want to argue. It's a strong statement and worthy of discussion.

Much more interesting to discuss that than how clear Buffett's argument is. (Which is quite clear, in my opinion.)

Let's say I have a buddy, Bill, and we go out for dinner every so often. He doesn't make as much as me, but he fights me for the bill every time. I end up paying less than he does most of the time.

I tell my wife, "You know what, it's not fair that Bill pays so much all the time. I should pay more."

My wife then says, "Your argument is confusing, and what's more, it's feel-good bullshit. You didn't give me a specific number on how many dollars you'd want to pay. Would you pay with a credit card? Traveler's Cheque? Based on total after tip or before?"

The supposition between reasonable people should be that I pay some reasonable amount more than I have been paying, but I don't go over the top and foot the entire bill. Is it fair to ask how much more I'd be paying? Of course, and the final justification of just how fair the arrangement is would depend on that number, as you've said. However, it's perfectly reasonable to say someone should be paying more, and have a discussion on that topic, without having to go deep into the specifics of how much more.

He posits that people making over a certain amount should be ponying up more in taxes. A reasonable assumption to make is that taxes would be raised in such a way that those people would be taxed more, and people who make less, wouldn't be. The specifics are irrelevant to the general argument.

You said "I understand that people want higher taxes on the rich. I think it's stupid, but I'm not going to argue about it." This is not a question, it's a statement, and a provocative one at that. Saying you're not going to argue about it is not going to stop discussion on exactly that point.

You also said "His real argument is probably too snooty of an argument to make in print, but something tells me that's what he's really getting at. I wished he'd have just come out with it, though. It would have been a lot more honest."

This strongly implies that the author (Buffett) is dishonest in his arguments. I'd say that's calling him out.

"But for those making more than $1 million -- there were 236,883 such households in 2009 -- I would raise rates immediately on taxable income in excess of $1 million, including, of course, dividends and capital gains. And for those who make $10 million or more -- there were 8,274 in 2009 -- I would suggest an additional increase in rate."

That is his recommendation. Is it not specific enough?

Buffett isn't suggesting punitive rates, just rates in line with the income taxes that an average working person pays.

I generally put his articles firmly into the "derp" category. And before we say "hey, we all have to be polite here on HN," his articles consistently take shots at anyone and everyone he disagrees with in a disrespectful manner. Terms like "knuckle-dragger", "pseudo-scientific slime", "Mr. Smarter-than-thou", "flowering of this idiocy", all reek with contempt of his straw-man opponents.

To address this particular article: the writing is all over the place. First paragraph: he doesn't like science when it's a "club to beat up people you simply disagree with." Well, good, reproducible scientific results can indeed be used as a "club" to beat up ideas that are wrong. It's one of the best uses of science. Now my assumption (from reading further) is he hates bad science. Which I actually agree with, but that is not stated up front.

From the fourth paragraph. "...science is the beautiful application of reason and logic that slowly and inexorably moves from ignorance to truth." The next paragraph says "Bullshit." What's bullshit about it? That is indeed how good science should work.

Then he goes on to talk about scientists who speculate outside either their area of expertise, or outside scientifically produced results.

Later he says "It needs to be clear when reporting medical studies what types of methods were used...". Here's the deal: it is clear. It's clear in reputable scientific journals. Read by scientists that can actually make sense of that kind of information. And even then, as a reader, you have to use critical thought to mentally junk studies that don't follow appropriate methods. Reading the most reputable peer-reviewed journals is a start, but you can't shut your brain off while reading even those.

If he's talking about newspaper reporting about science, yes, it's frequently wrong, because it's written by non-scientists. As an exercise, read a regular newspaper article about anything you have deep knowledge in. I'll bet you find many problems with it based on the lack of understanding of the reporter.

In his last paragraph, his conclusion seems to be that scientists should do good science, and not bad science. Again, this is what peer-reviewed journals contribute greatly to. It's not a "totally new way of doing things". Not even close.

Has any study been done about the likelihood of people to check-in with one of these social apps? If someone checks-in at the gym on Monday, are they going to be less likely to check in again on Tuesday? People I know seem to check-in when they are subtly bragging about what they're doing, so is it likely they'll check-in at a non-trendy restaurant on a Tuesday evening?

Somewhat bizarre that they say pro cheerleader-turned-NASA engineer. It's really the opposite. She started as an engineer and became a pro cheerleader on the side, according to her profile on the Texans website. http://www.houstontexans.com/news/Story.asp?story_id=3750

For the inattentive meeting-attenders: Do they want to be there? Is it a mandatory meeting? You might be seeing passive resistance to the meeting itself.

I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir, but wow - not using one way hashes is an absolutely terrible security hole.

Giving developers sub-par machines for "incentive" purposes is... well, crazy. Intentionally slowing down your write-compile-test cycle makes no sense.

For web software, you indeed want your test environment to be no faster than production, so it can be slower (within reason), especially if you have a hard time simulating in test loads you expect to see in production.

Aside from the inflammatory headline, what the article seems to be saying is "teach more about concurrent programming during early software programming courses," which seems reasonable enough. Like pointers, concurrent programming concepts seem to be a tough pill for some CS students.

Granted, this guy's cover letter is not going to win him the job. But "Send us your resume! We'll post it on our web site and make fun of it! And your grammar, even though ours is not completely correct either!" is not going to win this company applicants, either.

I enjoyed thinking about the scenario, but I must be missing something. By not revealing the conversations between the gatekeeper and Yudkowsky, the test seems less like a simulation and discussion of a possible future and more like a magic trick.

I guess we've lost each other, then. In my opinion the ideas in the manifesto are the best part of anything that has had the agile label slapped on it. I guess you don't get anything out of them, but I'm not sure why not. If you want to try to apply them to things that they obviously don't apply to, like writing RFPs, then yeah, they don't make any sense.

In many cases you DO have a direct choice on which of the items (column A or B) to focus your efforts on. You can tell your developers to focus on writing code, or write control gate documentation. You can spend your time as a manager working on procuring the next new silver bullet tool, or on hiring, retaining, and working with top talent. Now there's nothing that says you can't do both, but you certainly have a choice on how much time and effort to spend on each.

As far as a sales slogan goes, yes, the manifesto is the headliner for the books and coaches and everything else that costs money in the writing and consulting world that is selling methodology silver bullets. But you can use the ideas in the manifesto without spending one thin dime on any of that stuff.

I'd take the manifesto over any stack of "Agile Programming with Blub" books any day, or the advice of any Agile Coach, for that matter.

Each statement is giving you information. "When faced with one of these two things to concentrate on, we suggest you concentrate on the first one." That information might be obvious to you as an expert, but is non-obvious to some people, including many decision makers that don't develop software on a day-to-day basis.

Is it an exact recipe to follow? Nope, but neither is development an exact science, or something you can do by rote following of a checklist. Which is exactly the point of the first item in the manifesto, incidentally.