pp

I have credit cards at a bunch of banks here in Russia and what they do is they send you a one-time password in a text message every time you make a purchase online. It's the same VbV/SecureCode window and everything but you don't get to create your own password.

Which is terrible. If you really need business cards in two languages, just order two different sets.

What would be the top 3 items on that list?

Shouldn't they be able to get B1 visas with the company they founded? It's most probably registered in the US. But then again, the US immigration system is seriously broken.

I wonder about this, too. I mean, it's funny how people have all these rights including freedom of movement and residence, but only within the country.

The economists usually praise mobility of the population. I wonder if the current state of affairs is simply due to historical reasons.

Just in case someone from the Dropbox team is reading this, I wanted to compliment on the web UI. Really, it kicks some serious ass. I'm usually very picky when it comes to websites and their design, but this one is just a piece of art.

When I worked at a large company, their reason for storing passwords (to an online ordering system; for some 1.5 million clients) as plain text was the ability to impersonate users when debugging their problems. Then, after a while, even that became too hard for them so they added a special backdoor: on the live system, you could go to a special page (it was not linked from anywhere, but it was conveniently named Login.aspx) and enter the user ID and a shared password that worked for all users. I'm still amazed why this had never been taken advantage of while I was there.

It has to do with maximizing the return per employee, so to say. Otherwise you might as well fire the employee and save 100% of the salary.

I would go as far as to say there really are only two things a lower- to mid-level manager should focus on. First--and this is by far the most important thing--she should make sure her subordinates have the best possible environment to do their jobs. The second responsibility is hiring the right people. With these two ingredients in place, whatever she does on top of this would actually harm the performance of her team.

What usually surprises me about large organizations is how little power the managers have over these two points. A manager in charge of internal applications development may negotiate the functional specs with the business, but have no influence whatsoever over the hardware that's supplied to the developers.

Luck is disguised as genius all the time! Not only do we tend to see just the winners (survivorship bias), those winners honestly mistake their lucky guesses for great decisions (hindsight bias).

I would love to study more examples of failed startups. But people are not that fond of sharing with others how they screwed up (again, it's easy to see your own mistakes in the past). We need Anti-TechCrunch.

Most studies that I'm aware of in behavioral psychology (granted, it's a young branch of science) confirm my point, though. When they tell people about the anchoring heuristic, people still continue to make similar mistakes.

One way to explain would be to think about the number of variables we should account for in virtually any everyday decision. Finding even a fairly optimal solution would consume too many resources and evolution has taught us to deal with this using emotional shortcuts. On the evolutionary time scale, the 50 years when the question of choosing a programming language was relevant would be a tiny dot.

On the other hand, rational knowledge can by absorbed subconsciousness eventually. But when it does, we become unaware of it, by definition.

It would make more sense if it was a wiki, so people could link to detailed descriptions/implementations of the algorithms listed. The invitation to email those to the author (at the bottom of the page) is not exactly encouraging.

To my knowledge, the famous experiments of Kahnenman and Tversky have proven otherwise. When studying the effect of "anchoring", for example, they would actually explain to their subjects how their rational decisions are influenced by this irrational heuristic. Yet the subjects could not rid their decisions of that influence.

> If you want a cup of approximately coffee-shaped liquid in the morning, Starbucks is great because it's the same coffee anywhere.

Which really is the point of branding in the first place.

On a serious note, have people been more educated in probability, the economic crisis might not have turned out as bad. Look at Nassim Taleb to see how far some probability consciousness can get you.

While I certainly agree with you, I must admit that it never occurred to me that the whole monkey typist experiment depends on the assumption of the monkey's being able to actually hit each key. :)

Isn't that simply because work is harder? This is one end of spectrum, and the other one is laying on the beach doing nothing, which becomes tiresome even sooner. Games are somewhere in between--something for the brain to chew on the edge of boredom.

Привет :)

Not exactly not specialties, but thanks for the info. Funny that you've mentioned Parallels--they are about as much of a start-up as Google.

http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/taskwatch (note the release date).

Russia, anyone?

Shouldn't there NOT be 200-line methods in the first place?

Some say that the Drake Equation has too many variables that are impossible to even guess, let alone estimate. For example, here's a great article: http://www.crichton-official.com/speech-alienscauseglobalwar...