sharkfish

I see I'm being modded down by programmers who also can't spell.

I hate rants with misspellings. One I found was "breaktaking". I'm sure he meant "breathtaking". Get an editor, you twat.

I was asking a sincere question. Why was THAT modded down?

I recall Affirmative Action being challenged (Univ of Michigan?) successfully.

Not sure how, qualitatively, race-based admissions is different from letting rich people jump ahead of the line.

Modded down because I'm an atheist, or because I imply that religion is dogma? Just curious.

But then most atheists also succumb to comforting lies, and make excuses for death even less defensible than the outright lies of religion. They flinch away, refuse to confront the horror of a hundred and fifty thousand sentient beings annihilated every day.

I would like to think that I, as an atheist, don't have to rationalize the unknown and accept that we just don't have the answers to the "why" of death. I realize he is in pain, but I don't think I'm lying to myself about death just because I don't have some over-arching dogma to believe in.

So IM is better? 3000 messages in my inbox that I can attend to when I'm ready vs. IM - where I'm dealing with everybody simultaneously and live? That's worse than the telephone, IMHO.

Anyway, if you get the same query more than once, it is time to put the answer into a wiki or blog.

I can't stand Card's political views. He hates gays and has expressed violent attitudes toward gays.

Who knows, maybe his writing is a form of repressed homosexual relief for him.

I still enjoyed Ender's Game very much, however. My problem with the review is that it can apply to any fiction that withholds gratification or attempts suspense and has a "super hero" type character. I think of Ender as a kind of super hero, in fact. Just one with geek qualities.

Do we then, call comic books a form of pornography?

The vast amount of data and the prediction task remind me a lot of stock market prediction attempts.

I enjoyed Pi, by the way.

1. I'm saying your timing is suspicious. 2. My own anecdotal experience tells me successful people want to believe they earned their success through brains and hard work 3. Gladwell states that a good portion of success is due to hard work but that you have to be lucky enough to be able to put in the 10,000 hours at the right time and of course, have the luxury of putting in that kind of dedication

So bottom line, he really flatters successful people on the surface, while making the successful folk equal to the rest of us.

I don't think you are "mad" at Gladwell. I just think the motivation is strong and possibly an unconscious aversion to accepting that your success may be in huge part due to luck.

But then. Take with a huge grain of salt some asshole spouting off on a forum.

Believe it or not, you are one of my heroes, and I never seriously expected YOU of all people to be reading this.

Cheers to you and don't stop doing what you do. We are a better field because of it.

It kills me how the Gladwell book brought this out of Joel. Nobody wants to be told their success is a good part luck and timing. They all want to believe it is because they are smarter and worked harder.

So suddenly the software world's number one anecdotal blowhard decides to slam another blowhard. Okay. Whatever.

How does anyone with dev background bear a job for any length of time where all you are doing is editing HTML and ftp'ing it?

I dunno. I re-read the article after I read your comment, and I came to a different conclusion: It is very possible we are in one of those gaps in time where if you have put in your 10,000 hours, you can leverage them. You can be one of those lucky ones.

His point is, then, how do you know you aren't coming of age during a lucky time, when the old goes out the window? It is quite possible this is that "garage electronics" time when nobody has any money and some of us figure out unique ways to save and as a result, make millions.

You can bet, SOMEONE will. We are going to hear, in about 4-5 years, of someone down and out who "did it" during 2009 after they got laid off and were living in their parents' basement. Instead of shooting their employer, they proved everyone wrong and succeeded.

I am one of the jaded and cynical, however. This is just a "glass is half full" perspective.

I really hate over-simplified platitudes. They only comfort the stupid or short-sighted. Kind of like reading a sound-bite on trickle-down economics and applying it to your life.

Or the "prove your mom wrong" trait. That seemed to be his motivation, heh-heh.

My father showed me how much faster hot water freezes in an experiment we did when I was a kid. How many of us owe our fathers for what seems to be innate curiosity now that we are adults :)

If, as in the case of extsmail, one wants to be robust against errors, one has to handle all possible error paths oneself.

That's not really a bad thing, as the author points out.

One thing I've always felt a sense of dread about in C# and Java (last Java I did was back in 2001) is that I never truly knew what errors were lurking with their exception handling. It would be really nice if all error possibilities were listed in the documentation so I could pick precisely what to handle.

"exposing your weaknesses"

Yeah. They bring out the ASS in some parents.

Spoken like someone who is genetically thinner (or one of the few fat people who can just skip a meal and lose weight) than most and never really has to deal with weight issues.

A few years ago, for 4 months, I ate a small breakfast of oatmeal and black coffee, a lunch of one Lean Cuisine, an afternoon snack of a Balance Bar, and for dinner, a small salad and lean meat option. I lost weight the first 2.5 months. After that, I stopped losing and actually gained some back.

You do not know what you are talking about. Please don't ever comment on weight issues. Normal people have to maintain or add muscle mass or their metabolism will adjust and you are back to square one.

I...believe you’re either pro life or pro death.

Bleh. Black and white thinking. Bleh.

It seems to me that people with children in the war are more likely to want a leader that supports getting out of the war sooner rather than "staying the course".

Anecdotal, of course, but the people I know who have been over there or who have children in the war claim they don't see that we are going to accomplish much and want to the US to leave Iraq as soon as is feasible. Whereas McCain is more about winning the war, my impression of Obama and from his statements, is that Obama is not so much about winning as much as wanting the war to come to a reasonable end.

So yes, if you had an investment in the war personally, you would probably have more direct information rather than propaganda about the war. Regardless of your emotions.

He removed much of the verbiage but he still supports net neutrality (as evidenced in your link).

If you have children in the Iraq war, you might feel differently.

Also, I'm glad we have so many people in this country who understand that the economy is driven by the working people, not the wealthy.

I don't agree with all of Obama's ideas, but I think under his presidency I will have the most freedom to be who I am without fear that my country will turn into the setting of the novel 1984.

But most of all, like Linus, I'm worried about black/white thinkers. I am happy knowing that Obama as a future president, at least shows _evidence_ that he understands multiple perspectives on a problem and can think through contradicting positions to come to a rational conclusion. Too often, difficult decisions seem to have been made, these past 8 years, based on religious views.

This slacker thing could backfire and people in line jobs could get paid less. That'll make'em work harder!

But seriously:

In software engineering, my colleagues don't want to be managers. When I worked in IT, they did want management. I think this difference is a function of the work satisfaction, pay differential. If you make six figures already (most of my software engineer friends do or are close to that figure), there just isn't enough motivation in a few more grand to become a manager.

When will corporations understand that they have made work all about money and therefore have to pay. There is no loyalty, no sense of sticking it out during rough times. So all we can afford to value is the cash.

That's not our fault. And I'm not a slacker because of the changing value system I had nothing to do with.

"HTC had strong engineers developing notebooks, said Mr. Chen. But it was a volatile business with lots of competitors. She saw that clearly and pushed for the other instead."

I'm curious as to how she decided cell phones over notebooks. Cell phones seem to be uber-competitive, too.

Interesting I should read this today. I saw an ad for a job I wanted back in early September. I wasn't qualified for it that I could tell from the ad. I applied anyway and went through the interview process. I didn't know exactly why I wanted the job until I was close to actually getting an offer. I figured out I was just bored doing web development. I was already 3 months on a job I had just taken, doing .NET, PHP and web dev using a variety of CMS's. I did it for three months and I realized I just didn't enjoy it anymore. I started doing web dev back in 1999-ish and that's all I know in real world experience.

But this new company took a chance on me. If I can keep up, I'll have that low-level C++ programming experience I have always wanted, including multithreaded stuff.

My intense interest registered and my new employer decided to take a chance on me. Of course, there is more to the story. Such as, I had spent significant time learning C++ on my own and had code to show for it. I'm also older and maybe people take me seriously :)

I have a feeling the top developers are going to all start getting bored with web dev soon. It stands to reason all these 20-somethings start branching out and discovering the underlying software that makes the web work and will want some of that action.

I'm just glad I'm ahead of the curve so I had little competition for this job. The wave will be behind me! Yay!

More comments by me and possibly others here: http://www.crazyontap.com/topic.php?TopicId=41745&Posts=...

How will it modify an African person? Asian?

Are there different algorithms for those?

I know someone will chime in that beauty is universal but I have my doubts.