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Re:US nabs alleged Russian hacker – and Kremlin cries foul on Wednesday July 09, 2014 @01:33PM (#8010969)
> if they are OK with the US taking him into custody, their government is free to let that happen, treaty or not.

If who is OK with what? The Maldives is a republic and has to follow its laws and process to consider arresting someone on a foreign nations behalf and then consider the extradition.

Republics with executive branches that don't consistently enforce their mandates need to be punished by the world community before a mafia of rampantly criminal executive branches emerges and undermines all democratic republics. Oh wait.

I also thought SML worked quite well at that level, but I think the initial negativity on the forums about an unknown language reflected what to expect from a larger portion of 101 students.

> I won't say anything about Python.

I will try to learn from your wisdom.

SML is great, but based on the UW paradigms course, I'd say it gets a lot of backlash from students wanting something common in industry.

Transitioning first classes from C to go would make great sense, but it looks like a lot of schools already replaced C with Java and C++ as first languages.

Personally, I do think there is merit in teaching a primarily imperative language first, if only to appreciate other paradigms later and get an inkling of what is really going on beneath your code.

Re:U.S. Banks Curtail International Money Transfers on Monday July 07, 2014 @07:50AM (#7998301)
Yes, in fact this could hurt them more significantly. The assets 7.6 million expats are mostly in the US since the US is preventing 'US persons' from investing abroad with the same kind of regulatory interference, that amounts to a lot more than the $50 billion in remittances.

Adding further difficulties to international transfers may encourage expats to recalculate their positions. Then there will be further network damages. I would rank the average US Diaspora as less positive about getting involved with a US based business partner than the average European due to familiarity with the US' regulatory style and its chaotic results.

Re:New Study Contradicts Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 Rule on Sunday July 06, 2014 @04:42PM (#7995640)
When I look at a field like sports, I assume the genetic advantages are not so direct to the routine tasks.

For example, significant genetic factors may be: healing or failing to heal without permanent damage or being flexible in a way that causes or prevents a frequent injury.

For many star players the fact that they can keep playing at all may be the freak of genetics or initial behavior that allowed them to get to their level.

For example, football helmet impact data seems to support the direction that many should be dropping out due to traumatic brain injury. Yet some players deteriorate remarkably slower than medical science previously predicted.

Re:The Last Days of the Polymath (2009) on Saturday July 05, 2014 @08:13PM (#7993382)
This is exactly the topic I've been pondering recently. I encountered the same kind of problem just within CS during an interview.

Personally, I went back further in the domain to avoid admitting I never had more than zero interest in what RFC writers chose to call something. Really, I view domains as bastions of useless information aside from the harvestable concepts for problems in other domains.

But I am beginning to suspect the industry has 'matured' into the same crap as the auto industry.

I'm curious if others have comments on remaining a generalist in this environment?

Re:Your high IQ might kill your startup (2010) on Saturday July 05, 2014 @07:09AM (#7991569)
> Being poor completely sucks ... The point of getting rich is so that your life doesn't suck.

This is a false dichotomy. The path to getting rich involves being moderately successful and then being willing to risk entering poverty again. If your goal is to not be poor then your best odds are to try to be moderately successful and then reinforce that position rather than playing double or nothing forever.

Re:Show HN: Free, anonymous coding interview practice on Wednesday July 02, 2014 @06:00PM (#7980053)
The only reason I can do well in one of these interviews is because I recently started writing poor patch code for websites.

In development, who would do design, code and review on only one change in a straight sequence? It is like asking half your brain to shut down and the gods to smite you.

Re:Barclays Not Smart on Monday June 30, 2014 @03:06PM (#7966924)
Yes, I had the same problem with the article. The lawsuit just seems to be cherry picking which part of Barclay's paradoxical claims to trust, not creating its own self referential problems.

If Barclay's could get HFTs out of their products then their situation wouldn't be much different from diet cola and they could raise a fair amount of FUD against the competition irregardless of quality of evidence. But you can't sell the same product yet claim you have removed the "harmful" component. Claiming you know it is not really harmful just means you were up to 2 fraudulent activities to deprive the market and your customers of a better arrangement.

Re:Sexist lightning?: 8 out of 10 killed are men on Friday June 27, 2014 @07:08PM (#7956688)
So, is playing golf in the rain a worse option than walking or driving home and returning later on a city street?

These odds are hardly a compelling reason to continue warning about lighting safety given that the resulting behavior changes might be leading to more of the common causes of death.

No, I just live in Zurich. The past products I worked on were mostly for banks so I still pay a little more attention to what developers from banks and finance groups say when I run into them.

Personally, I am a long time C developer but I simply ignore any postings with "C/C++" and no longer use C very much when I have an option to use a language that is easier to find alone in job listings.

If you are serious about C++ part time then I would suggest something rather write-only in a small group. For example, I did consider learning some OpenMP and working with research scientists. That is a nicer situation since most groups end up using a reasonably small dialect to stay focused on the task and you probably wont waste limited experience time reviewing arbitrarily bad code that misuses esoteric features. But that is exactly why it doesn't adequately prepare you for situations like Banks or make you a "C++ Developer" instead of a good programmer who happens to be using C++.

> I've seen a lot of c++ jobs in the finance sector in NYC

Fast + Legacy = Finance

But based on complaints I hear here in Zurich, the OP would never become qualified learning C++ part time to be the local expert directing offshore junior engineers.

If you want to compete with people who will have more hours of experience then choose a playing field with a reduced instruction set so you will also have had adequate hours with everything and you will only lose out against the minority who continue mastering the subject instead of just getting good enough.

C++ is the wrong direction for someone with a life because it rewards almost every hour of learning equally (or equally poorly depending on your opinions and futures predictions.)

Re:Cool Kids Lose, Though It May Take A Few Years on Friday June 13, 2014 @07:39PM (#7891387)
You are hung up on my example over my point which is not that I believe the explanation of the gratification delay tests..

I like your hypothesis, but I also don't care if the gratification test was flawed due to alien possession. They still point to something earlier in development that probably isn't equally distributed among 'cool' and 'nerd' kids nor fully segregated. If there is a socioeconomic component then the relation to this hidden variable would be similar for eye color too.

So the point of the study verse another study using eye color is questionable to me.

Re:Cool Kids Lose, Though It May Take A Few Years on Friday June 13, 2014 @04:30PM (#7890690)
That could be, though I certainly have met outliers who thrive from a childhood of rebellion. Many of them seemed uninhibited but really had a sadistic ability to wait for their opportunities to maximally affect their surroundings.

But I'm not really saying behavior inhibition has an adequate explanatory power, just that it is confounding. Just one quantitative measure like gratification delay is enough to make a qualitative measure like coolness a worthless subject.

Re:Cool Kids Lose, Though It May Take A Few Years on Friday June 13, 2014 @02:46PM (#7890257)
> So the study is asking "what happened to the kids who their peers considered 'cool' or a 'nerd'?"

Our 'coolness' meters collapse metrics, for example: inhibition may make you cooler in one case (not quoting sci-fi) and total nerd in another (not being rebellious.)

Therefore the question doesn't necessarily work given that the ability to inhibit behavior is strongly correlated to success.

Re:Fake Friends with Real Benefits on Tuesday June 10, 2014 @09:48AM (#7872422)
I didn't mean to sound overly harsh or upset about it, since I do recognize there is a spectrum and you need to fall somewhere in the middle if you want to be able to learn from more than just your own actions and have opportunities if your current project gets cancelled, etc.

But I think it is an ironic part of social nature that we continue to reward those who take it too far on the social side of the spectrum (just complaining about them we seem to make them into a necessary quirk of the place or create a miscommunication that gets them a new position) while we let a lot of brilliant people go just because they look like they are on the other side of the spectrum to people who don't see their quieter exchanges.

Re:Fake Friends with Real Benefits on Monday June 09, 2014 @12:02PM (#7869024)
Even the engineer who freed up his time by outsourcing had the common decency to spend his time looking at pictures of kittens..

If managers could account for the hours of utility he stole from others, I think it would be a separate reason to put him on probation. (I know he was on probation for his own output since that was the topic of many of his visits to one of my neighbors who in turn wasted my time complaining about his tedious visits just as I waste yours now. So ends my postmodern fable.)

Re:Fake Friends with Real Benefits on Sunday June 08, 2014 @05:02PM (#7865897)
> I've seen this too, but it's not a new phenomenon. This has always happened behind closed doors; LinkedIn merely makes it public.

Yep, we had an engineer who spent 40 hours a week going around and building social connections.. Where did he find the time?

I have a friend who worked for TI's automotive. They sold it off as the entire sector is bellow TI's minimum profitability level. So cost is issue #1..

But the subtext in the article makes it pretty clear. They are tracking cost of design as accurately as unit costs.

It is largely an "in for a dime in for a dollar" scenario for each internal engineer when they approve a design direction that appears to cut a cost. The larger oversight is unaware of some of the hidden issues and each engineer is motivated to paper over them to some extent to protect their relative standing. The engineers who are completely transparent are completely unemployed.

Re:Google's diversity post makes no mention of age on Thursday May 29, 2014 @04:58PM (#7818555)
Since the discussion is age, I would say digital equipment corporation which would put everyone at 40+.
But you can also synchronize on a reference system from your competitor's systems and then you can do easy comparisons.

(For example, Solaris x86 clearly favored 1-2 specific windows/mac laptops --which could be ordered on a fast track internally-- and supported the bundled devices on those laptops if the device's type was supported at all. Swapping the external reference every few years was annoying but cheap and limited the arguments to selecting among actual configurations rather than future possibilities.)

I would hope there is another reason is like getting a reliable ABI and clear licensing for the DSP side software? Otherwise, offering a better OS on a few models of android phones will be more useful now, and then again as used Android phones enter the emerging markets.

Re:Why Online Communities Decay Over Time on Friday May 23, 2014 @05:33PM (#7791463)
> Don't forget that a lot of people get on the internet for leisure.

There is a purpose besides leisure, selling to the leisure group or building technologies to improve the internet's effectiveness for selling to the leisure group?

Looking at pictures of cats, pornography and buying trinkets are all clearly leisure activities.. but commenting on vaporous articles about living underwater is something I expect to get academic credit for according to the social norms established by scholastic reports.

Re:How to throttle the FCC to dial up modem speeds on Friday May 09, 2014 @09:27AM (#7720683)
Call me a hawk, but I think it makes more sense for content provider who wont be buying their way into the fast lane to pre-emptively rate limit all customers of the major US ISPs.

Content providers that depend on the US may want to synchronize on specific day of the week to limit each ISP, for example Comcast Thursday, while foreign providers can conservatively cut off all of the US so they don't have to worry about missing any future pay networks..

Re:Become a better programmer with programming challenges on Tuesday April 29, 2014 @07:14AM (#7666179)
Interesting, I've been enjoying https://www.codeeval.com/ which also has the headhunter based model and supports a few more languages, but doesn't have the time limits like a real code interview usually would.
> launchable web application prototype

This sounds like an oxymoron which would imply the two sides of the transaction have separate expectations.

As reasonable developers, do we build out the system, security, data backup plan of a "prototype"? As reasonable buyers do we "launch" an application without them?

You should look in webmaster tools if you want to understand how to use schema in SEO results. I've found things like Events are well supported and relatively easy to mark while things like product offers and reviews are more inclined to be ignored (or intermittently held to higher unpublished standards?) by google probably due to their high utility for abuse.

Personally, I mark everything I think is meaningful to a human and check that google thinks it is validly formed and how they would display it, but I don't rely on whether they do. With good and consistent metadata, Client side code+CSS can be a bit cleaner and better abstracted and it seems to help a little in the long tail of search engines/aggregators, etc.

Re:Why You’re Not Hiring the Best and the Brightest on Thursday April 03, 2014 @03:28PM (#7525539)
Anything raising team cohesion without jet lag is definitely worth trying. Thanks!
Re:Why You’re Not Hiring the Best and the Brightest on Thursday April 03, 2014 @02:20PM (#7524870)
Wow, you go all out! I've mentored remotely and been mentored remotely with nothing beyond email, text chat and (rarely) phone. I'm not sure how that couldn't be sufficient given all of the open collaborations successfully occurring.

Of course it helps if the junior developer also has a project (or any other tasks) matching their current skill set to work on so issues don't have to be solved in real-time to prevent idle+frustrated engineers.

I've actually had more trouble with local mentoring. It is hard to get people thinking deeply about how something works and how to solve problems when they know an answer is a few grunts away.

Re:Mark Zuckerberg, the Warren Buffett of technology? on Thursday March 27, 2014 @03:31PM (#7482802)
Facebook's behavior reminds me more of AOL scooping up Time Warner to survive the inevitable mainstream enlightenment and migration to the open web.