HN user
Maybe you and many others would be better off by paying attention to actions vs words, and notice which company was the first to push back on the government to provide transparency to national security letters when everyone else bowed down before the government. Being skeptical and not falling for feel good platitudes could help all of us.
Yup, and it's used by everyone, especially execs, and acts as a swiss army knife. Yet the team is mostly leaving in droves because although it's quite useful, it isn't correctly measured and it doesn't bring home the bacon. So the project is sometimes wrapped up and repackaged by a customer-facing team to steal the glory and get bonuses, or teams put it under them and scale back perks/force us to use them vs other teams who want us to cater to them. So silo'ing, everyone wants the goods. I've contributed lots of infrastructure code that customer-facing teams use, gets who gets the large bonuses. Proposals to fix this and measure impact have been brought up and slapped down by managers. I'm leaving the group after wrapping up some stuff. Fortunately I have high perf scores. People make warm comments about how useful the project is, but at the end of the day, it's never going to give me a $200k bonus, so it goes in one ear, out the other.
That is great if your project impact can be measured, but sometimes metrics aren't available for accurate assessment. If sales uses your tool, bringing in millions, that's not so easy to measure, and those projects will languish unless some value can be placed for the project. Good luck with that, or at least coming up with a system that can measure it and having it be accepted. That's a big gap and you don't want to be in that group.
The problem with that is, the unsexy non-customer facing projects that allow for saving/making millions are not recognized, or at least a monetary value cannot be established for them, and become understaffed, which leads to inefficiencies. To get to the big bucks, you really have to look out for #1 and join the sexy groups. Which is partly why you see things like reader die: reader does not a bonus/promotion make. You gotta be churning out new stuff at minimum, hopefully on sexy new products, maintenance of the old stuff is less sexy and doesn't give you the promotion/bonus. Of course you can reimplement a cache server every 6 months, if all else fails.
http://ipcommission.org/report/IP_Commission_Report_052213.p...
> The Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property > With U.S. companies suffering losses and American workers losing jobs
Jobs. Translation: this is a PR piece.
> The Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, and law enforcement agencies should have the legal authority to use threat-based deterrence systems that operate at network speed against unauthorized intrusions into national security and critical infrastructure networks
Huh? This includes national security now? Are they deliberately blurring the lines between pirating and national security? Why I think so.
> Informed deliberations over whether corporations and individuals should be legally able to conduct threat-based deterrence operations against network intrusion, without doing undue harm to an attacker or to innocent third parties, ought to be undertaken.
They want to legalize Sony's rootkit, but they want to do it right. Rootkits in the wild cannot be tamed, don't even go there.
> if counterattacks against hackers were legal, there are many techniques that companies could employ that would cause severe damage to the capability of those conducting IP theft.
You do something that the system thinks is pirating and your computer blows up. What could go wrong.
> ...The Commission is not ready to endorse this recommendation because of the larger questions of collateral damage caused by computer attacks
Ahh I see, they're reasonable after all! IOW, they want to make their rootkit legalization idea sound sane.
> Recommend to Congress and the administration that U.S. funding to the World Health Organization (WHO) program budget in whole or in part be withheld
At this point I want to punch someone in the face.
I can't read anymore.
Do you have an example of a good software patent?
Someone mentioned that having one syscall that sends multiple udp messages is patented. That is ridiculous IMO. It meets the guideline you lay out: you can define the abstract process of calling a method of an API then that itself sends out UDP messages. However, it's blatantly obvious to all programmers. But probably not to lawyers. Pretty much all software is blatantly obvious and trivial to implement. Microsoft's patent on long filenames is another example. Software is trivial to implement. Want long filenames? A high school student can do it.
However, with chemistry, it is nontrivial. It is not a matter of writing code that a CPU runs instantaneously. You have to devise a method on paper, try it(sorry, a cpu won't mix chemicals), go back to the drawing board. Vs software, where it's trivial so millions of people have probably already coded what you thought was novel.
That happens often with software: I come up with an imaginative awesome new algorithm, only to learn, it has been done before. that's because I work in a line of work that is trivial. We're glorified code monkeys, and we don't deserve to be awarded patents by any means.
I just tried fish, way too slow. I held down the backspace key, and instead of deleting 10 characters, the entire line was gone. zsh is also too slow. bash may not have the bells and whistles, but it's at least super fast and doesn't get in your way.
Shakespeare is entertaining and metaphors are fun. Do you disagree with a poem and bring up logical fallacies? Of course not, we read them for entertainment value and anything we learn is a bonus. That is separate from metaphors used when trying to discuss the nuances of an argument within the confines of trying to have a logical argument. Poems and Shakespeare aren't supposed to be logical all the time, that would be boring.
OMG, it's like we can't focus on multiple things at once.
How about this revelation: people in cyprus can't use ATMs because they can't manage their money, and Chinese government-sponsored hackers are also targeting American businesses. I know, it's a lot to concentrate on.
But seriously, I like many others on this tech-centered news site where we pretty much run the entire internet collectively, have seen first hand Chinese-sponsored hackers. So you can't really pull the wool over our eyes so easily.
You really shouldn't try to use metaphors when making an argument. Someone says A is like B, another person disagrees that A is like C. But no, says another, A is like D. Finally, an internet troll points out A is like B and D, but definitely not like C. By then, everyone's brain gives up trying to figure it all out.
If you're gonna make a point, make a point, it's that simple.
None of those things you brought up are illegal. Oracle is a scourge and just a step above SCO, but that's a pretty low bar. Making it so you designate something arbitrarily as a "language" and you can be the only princess that implements it is plain evil. Fortunately the appeal is going no where.
In that respect, I would say we are separating into different species.
Not only that, but it takes <1s to type in feedly.com, and lo and behold, a competitor. Not only that, but the site reveals an android app you can download. Any decent monopolist would have never allowed that.
Krugman should really do some research on what monopolists do, starting off with Standard Oil. The internet is a highly competitive environment.
stopthecyborgs? Looks like more microsoft astroturfing. The backlash is growing in microsoft's dreams only.
wow, worse than the irc python channel.
How do you handle distributed joins with group by's? Are there certain SQL syntaxes which aren't handled well by queries? What are the 90th percentile response times?
Here's what a bunch of smart people think:
http://www.c-span.org/Events/Law-and-Economics-Experts-Discu...
synposis: the antitrust case is at this point ridiculous.
As a formerly poor person who could only afford a G1 and not an iphone, allowing me to rise out of poverty, I'm not angry. The only angry people I know are Apple execs. Consumers are pretty happy about this. Which means the antitrust case is going nowhere.
The Microsoft case was different, Microsoft was found guilty for EOM shenanigans, and Bork, who authored modern antitrust law and thought microsoft was guilty, now thinks there is no antitrust case against Google.
When the FTC is done, they'll be a laughing stock.
If you want to really find a problem, you'll have to look at amazon who is not only selling at cost, they make no profit and have a high P/E since investors think they'll eliminate competition then raise prices.
Except the articles selected where in the pro-coffee camp, the articles against coffee were not selected. This is called selection bias. I'd take what this guy has to say with a grain of salt.
You'll notice in that second link:
> However, because the antitrust laws are ultimately intended to benefit consumers, and discounting results in at least short-term net benefit to consumers, the U.S. Supreme Court has set high hurdles to antitrust claims based on a predatory pricing theory.
So yeah, good luck MS et al. You'll have better luck in the socialist paradise known as the EU.
Unfortunately for you, anti-trust doesn't work like that. You have to prove concrete harm to customers.
And that's how it should be, before Google, your only option for a smartphone was to pay one company way too much money. Customers directly benefit, and are more productive, so it's basically impossible in the US to prove antitrust against google.
Hopefully that teaches him to rely on windows.
This is what we've all been waiting for: CPM ads based on age and gender. This is the holy grail advertisers have wanted. But it remains to be seen if this information actually translates into better online advertising. We will soon see. I'm skeptical. I am almost positive that this won't lead to better CPMs, higher click throughs. This might make brand advertisers, who don't care about that stuff, happier.. but still won't want to put ads on a penis growing forum. TV is what they like. So yeah, we'll see, but I'm not expecting much.
There are other ways to limit the onslaught of spam: user-defined filters. Facebook could have gone that way, but then, giving users control isn't lucrative.
Some people use browser fingerprinting for anti-spam techniques, would they need to get the spammer's acceptance before enabling this?
As you can see, these European laws border on absurd.
Maybe they expect air force vets to fly them?
If I write a site that logs users in, I keep track of them merely by storing their username in a database as well as a cookie value representing that they are logged in, so do they need to accept terms before logging in?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think everyone who licensed with moto initially was given a 2.25% rate, but they cross-licensed patents to bring that down. Apple doesn't want to cross-license hence they're whining about how they think FRAND(non-discriminatory) terms aren't being followed, when in reality Apple's getting the same negotiation everyone else gets, but Apple doesn't want to play ball and cross-license patents like everyone else.
It's a pretty tenuous claim on Apple's part.
That's a bit of a generalization. Some anecdotal evidence... years ago when I was but a youngin', I didn't get along at my company, got burned out and eventually curled up in a corner and slept/played games. Needless to say I got on the PIP (performance improvement plan). Then I got laid off eventually. I was immature. My manager sucked, but so did I for not realizing this and taking action.
These days, I am simply more mature, and I regret my past somewhat, but at least I am good at learning in general. If you don't regret your past, you aren't growing, everyone does. Now, after life has kicked me around, I know people well, I know how not to be a condescending jackass, and be pleasant, and get things done, and communicate to my manager honestly vs being passive aggressive etc. And I have that same inner drive to figure things out. I'm still the same person, I just don't bullshit around, I keep my mouth shut, impress people with my actions, then lo and behold, when they come to find out more info about me, I tell them, but before that, I remain an enigma. When I came to my group, some underestimated me, I didn't lash out like when I was younger, I just shut up and fixed their bugs.
I do think, as you allude to, certain people just have that knowing, they have it in them, but for whatever reason, maturity, bad manager, etc., they don't rise to the top. I think though, if you are mature, you will realize your manager is crappy right away and address that. Part of being a star performer, to me, is not just tech. ability, but non-technical ability.
There are two barriers to entry: the network effect, s.t. the utility I derive corresponds to the friends I have on the social network, and their utility derives partly from me being on the social network, so at a critical mass it's hard to justify going onto another social network.
The network effect kicks in at a certain critical point. If you created a really compelling social network and added the feature s.t. people could say, "import from facebook", choosing your facebook login/pw, then if enough people did this, critical mass would be reached. The network effect just states that this critical mass might take awhile to reach, but it's not impossible. Facebook disallowing you from exporting your data makes it so competing networks cannot reach that critical point quickly enough.
As someone who is on the 'high performer' list, I can tell you I have seen this first hand and this is fine, we will work harder, provided we're given an even more outrageous salary. Otherwise, I'm going to get burned out doing the job of my coworkers / thinking for my coworkers every day, monitoring them so they're more efficient and don't go off chasing down bugs incorrectly. I don't need to be managed, leave me alone and I'll make customers and your boss'es boss happy. But this all can get tiresome and it sucks. But give me that bonus/salary and I'll continue on like a trooper.
At my last job, I was given more and more work, and I made everything work without intervention, but I left due to low pay, now the old boss wants to hire me back as the old system seems to go down a lot, while his cheap labor source turns out to be more expensive than he first thought. There seems to be a belief that we can just whip up the high performers when we need them, but this just leads to burn out and turnover. just pay the high performers an ungodly amount and all will be well.