tsiki

I think you're missing the point. The jimmies are getting rustled up because someone provides false information about the performance to make his own argument seem better. This is something anyone should be against.

Really? I have the exact opposite experience, I feel much more free to study and work on whatever I want now that I graduated. I would always feel bad for working my own stuff instead of just working on the class project or homework.

I've heard this before, is there a source for this? It has all the hallmarks of an urban legend...

For me the problem is that the number of sites I'd like to support to some extent. I'd love to donate to The Guardian, but I also frequent The Atlantic, BBC and many other sites. Actually supporting all these sites would take time and effort. I took a look at some chrome extensions which try to make this easier (namely tipsy) but they seem to have very few publishers signed up.

I currently have a thinkpad with ubuntu in it (not preinstalled should it matter), and unfortunately I'm considering switching the other way around. There are just too many things with this combo that don't work the way they should, like webcam and microphone not working, public wifi with redirection not redirecting etc. I'm completely fine paying some 50% premium to get the support and customer care of a major corporation.

How exactly would that premise be different from the Microsoft/Nokia disaster?

What if wage disparity follows the lines in negotiation ability even more strongly, does that make it an issue of negotiation skills then?

I'm the most surprised how LA blows up, I thought it was quite a bit cheaper there than in SF/NY.

A lot of the people commenting on the article seem to be pretty adamant that something like this matters. Personally, I've never been confused by a period (or lack of thereof) at the end of a commit message. And if such a time comes, I'll give serious thought to whether it's worth anyone's time to teach the team to use/not use periods or whether I'm better off investing that time to teach them something more useful.

Finland has a cultural problem: working for a big company is considered good, working for a small one is considered being unsuccessful and failure at founding a startup is considered a shame.

Maybe 10-15 years ago. Now with the rise of successful startups and the national interest towards them, working at a startup is considered good and trendy and rather, most of the CS students avoid large companies. Even my mom was proud and supportive when I cofounded a startup, and she's always been the one to advocate for a good and stable job.

Same goes for Google, but you could argue that it's for a reason. FB/Google have a reputation to uphold and they strive to make sure their name isn't associated with subpar stuff. Plus, they have a lot of brilliant developers to work on this stuff. In the end of the day, it's largely about knowing which of these cool utilities have a better chance of being usable and well thought-out, as nobody wants to spend time on figuring out a utility which turns out to be unusable.

I think most people from those companies (I can't speak about Wall St) would make more money in other companies. The employers those companies usually hire are exceptionally good at what they do, but simply the reputation of those companies is enough to make a lot of really good people want to apply and accept an offer, ever if they could get a more senior position and more money elsewhere.

I'm a big fan of 10MinuteMail, it's saved from a lot of spam. Thanks!

While Google's this year's submission was good, it didn't seem to contain any particularly inspiring ideas, as it was mostly just a collection of small improvements on previous ideas. Personally, SPP-nets seem to be the most interesting idea to come out of this year's competition.

This article makes it sound like Spatial Pyramid Pooling is something new and amazing

Hardly, the paper specifically states "Spatial pyramid pooling ... is one of the most successful methods in computer vision" and "SPP has long been a key component in the leading and competition-winning systems for classification".

That's a regional Federal Reserve Bank, not "the Fed". Also, you leave out that those share holders get at most 6% annual return for their investment, since it's capped by law.

Famous theory from Harvard: The difference of a person’s fate is decided from what a person spends in his free time between 20:00 to 22:00.

Anyone know the source for this theory? I'd like to know more about it but googling turned up nothing but links to this article.

I think it has something to do with the idealistic view of "pure, well-written" code. There's something appealing about a code base consisting of only code, not comments. But in my very subjective experience, I've noticed that the more programming experience people have under their belts, the more likely they are to appreciate commenting as a tool among other tools to make your code readable.

You don't want to make someone who is editing code stop to think about how it affects the comments.

What's the point of comments then if your general rule is that it should be fine to edit code without changing the comments?

The programmer who doesn't change the documentation when changing the code is usually the same one who doesn't change the function name when changing its functionality. If a bad programmer is tweaking your code, it doesn't really matter if the documentation is in the variable names or in the comments.

I honestly think public libraries should be allowed to use some of their money to advertise and create a brand for themselves. For a lot of people the thing deterring the usage of library is simply the idea that it's unexciting or doesn't offer enough, while usually a coffee shop is pretty much equal or worse. Of course it'll lead to people complaining how their tax money is being used for ads, but it makes libraries reach a larger audience and, in economic terms, improves well-being of more people.

This makes me think if there might be demand for a consultancy-like startup, which has the business idea of taking over a SaaS service if the company is discontinued, and running it for x number of months/years. The business model would presumably be charging the SaaS company an insurance-like fee, and the value proposition would be that they can advertise their SaaS as a "safe" service.

Probably all of us agree that being forced to comment everything will lead to some bad/useless comments. But the examples you showed were simply bad comments. Just because there are bad coders out there who don't care about the quality of their comments for whatever reason, isn't a reason to avoid comments. I'd treat anyone who wrote that first sample comment in a similar way I'd treat a programmer who writes unreadable code; that is, probably take the time to teach them some good commenting practices.

Many of the reasons that speak against commenting apply to good variable names, too. Maybe someone will come later and change the way the variable is used but won't change the name. It doesn't mean we should avoid descriptive variable names, though.

Also, with comments, as with any form of communication, the audience is the key. Let's say I'm a senior programmer somewhere and I'm writing comments. Often the train of thought seems to be "well, using this variable name/adding this comment clears it up for me". But that's usually not nearly enough for junior coders who are new to the codebase, and who are often the target audience. They'll probably still go "wtf" after reading a comment aimed at a senior programmer with an understanding of the codebase and a programming experience to match.

In addition, the obvious point to make is also that code is good at answering how, not why.

This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, I guess since I've met relatively many coders who claim that good code should comment itself and ditched commenting altogether. Their code has usually ranged from above average to downright awful, and has, on average, been rather unreadable.

Lately I've developed a distaste for thinking of math as simply a representation of "something real", I'd rather think of it as a language in its own right. I'll just link this here because it explains the point way better than I could: http://onfoodandcoding.blogspot.fi/2013/04/completely-reliab... (the first 5'ish paragraphs especially)

Not strictly economic, but personally I quite like the idea of gross national happiness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_national_happiness

On the more economic side, you have something like the Misery Index and its extensions (http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/misery-mena). Obviously composite indexes like these have their flaws too, but overall they are more comprehensive than GDP alone.

Absolutely, personally I dislike how it's the single most powerful figure for decisionmakers. There have been many alternative measurements developed for measuring overall progress of an economy, but unfortunately they haven't taken much foothold.

It's always hard to tell what's really happening behind the GDP growth figures when comparing countries. The population of US and UK are currently increasing around 0.7% a year, while Germany is around 0%. That's a lot of additional GDP growth for both UK and US, even when excluding the fact that immigrants are at their prime working age and usually more beneficial for the GDP than an average citizen. This has a fairly big impact on what's seen on the news. Since depression is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth, it's much easier for countries like US and UK to avoid "official" depression, and much easier for news outlets to talk about the "stagnating old Europe" or such; and of course, at the same time the living standard of an average German might be increasing and that of a UK/US citizen decreasing.

If you don't mind, I'd like to hear of your experiences too. I'm part of a start-up team building a somewhat similar product. My email is jani@viima.com

It'd be interesting to also hear some average hours worked. I have the image that the average hours worked in the IT sector in Bay area is quite high, so it's not directly comparable to the previous poll.

I know of quite a few data analytics companies that hire mainly PhD's for their research positions. Many traditional companies do so too, to get on the big data trend.