underpantsgnome

Reminds me of Dr. Bronner's soap, the way the rambling, hyphenated copy freely invents words and associates the product with feelings of peace and goodwill.

Given the context, I kinda hope the error/correction was intentional, committed by someone who doesn't like David Sacks.

slacker hat: perspective is one of those words they use when they want something from you, like "duty" or "contribute". Doctors get so much more job security, prestige, and straight-up money than software developers. By the time we're in our 60s, many of our classmates who went into medicine will be living in neighborhoods and moving in social circles that are completely inaccessible to us.

The Atlantic just wants you to feel insecure about your level of maturity so they can sell you shit.

Maybe spacemanmatt didn't want to disparage institutions he had no experience with.

It's the type of place where they can't tell that means "has some problems, in a way similar to what the OP describes."

Are you suggesting that finance isn't?

I'll bite.

Cut power to the heat source/declaw the perforator/plug up the ink jet. I have physical access, after all.

Keurig is in the position that they can attach a number to each one of their coffee cups, and the machine will refuse to brew if the number doesn't prove the cup is authentic. If they give all the cups the same number, as they apparently have chosen here, than all anyone has to do is present that number again, and voila, the coffeemaker will execute whatever cup they feed it.

Maybe they get smart and give each and every cup a different password. Of course the machines have to recognize these passwords, so they have to start with a known list of length N, where N is the total number coffee cups they ever expect to sell for this line of machines. They put all these passwords through their favorite one-way function, stuff the hashes in a newline-delimited text file, and hope it fits in a few gigabytes. Now once the machine encounters a matching password, it brews one cup, but "crosses off" that password and won't brew for it again.

Good point. Would you agree that: even if a phenomenon (for example performance of some sort of worker) is hard to model, we should still try, especially if that phenomenon provides enormous value to society?

See, the thing is, people are already trying really hard to do that. Practicing programmers, even.

This is a lovely dream, but what if you're working on the caching software instead of the web app?

former 1st world non-socialized medicine country

This is a painfully accurate description of the USA

no one will ever know.