Nutella4

Besides looking for different topics as many have suggested, look for different authors. If you find that everything you read is written by people from your own country, search out readings from authors of other nationalities. If you find that everything you read is written by people of your own race, search out readings from authors of other races. If you find that everything you read is written by men, search out readings by women.

There's been plenty of affirmative action related to Asian Americans in university admissions. What often happens is that strict reliance on grades and test scores gives an oversupply of people who are of Asian descent or Jewish and when the university's management and alumni see that, they push for affirmative action to get the white Christian men percentages up to a high enough number that the largely white Christian men of the university's management and alumni feel comfortable.

Hey, there's another thing that's very, very predictable: That a person whose argument is making bigoted remarks and claiming they're neutral statistical results very quickly devolved into saying 'liberals are stupid!'

Yes, his name has been carefully kept out of public discussions. This is the patriarchy protecting his reputation while repeating the complainant's name as often and as widely as possible to make sure that anyone who dislikes what she did has a target for criticism and/or abuse while the people who dislike what he did don't.

When I was very new to Rails, I heard a talk Ezra gave at a RailsConf about the work he had done setting up and configuring servers for EY when they were just starting out. He spoke about the technical details with great enthusiasm for a few minutes and then stopped, laughed, and said "Can you tell I love my job?".

Tax avoidance.

Always a red flag.

Nope, the Yotel in New York is a hotel. They rent for overnight stays only.

Apparently feminism is political and anti-feminism is neutral in your world.

If you ask your current company for higher salary/responsibility/etc and don't get it until you quit to take another offer, you have learned that your current company is reactive and only responds to threats. In other words, your current company is not a good place to work.

Yes, Soverain is the quintessential patent troll. It did not acquire the original company that came up with the shopping cart idea. That thing had been sold at least four times before Soverain came along.

No, shopping cart is not and never was a non-obvious technology. It's a clever metaphor for the very common pre-computer business method of maintaining order line records for unconfirmed orders.

And I hope the many companies that caved to this patent troll and paid it millions for claiming it owned the shopping cart now go after it to get all those millions back. With interest.

Depends on what you mean by religious. Most Uruguayans are from Catholic backgrounds but they (at least the ones in Montevideo) behave in a secular way: No church on Sunday, and instead of having Carnival followed by Lent like all the other Latin American countries, they have Carnival that lasts for 40 days.

Not strange at all. Neoliberals are for big government everywhere except government regulation of big business. They want government and big business to work together as one organization of plutocrats to control everything.

There is no difference unless you frequently hire the people you've put at the back of the line because of their lack of GitHub presence.

"I hired the other guy because I screened out the non-GitHubbers" and "I hired the other guy because I gave preference to active GitHubbers" -- I don't see the distinction.

Druckenmiller is lumping Social Security and Medicare together, which is obviously wrong.

Medicare is definitely a problem that needs to be fixed with more health care reform so we're no longer paying double what every other first world country pays for health care per capita. Social Security is fine for current and future generations. Means testing for either of them is idiotic, unless your goal is to kill them slowly by converting benefits for everyone to a welfare program.

He is trying to distract people from worsening income distribution that benefits 1%-ers like himself with sleight of hand to make a class war look like a generational war.

If he really gave a shit about the economic plight of young people he'd be talking about solving the student loan clusterfuck.

I hope when you say you will make comment thread "more civil" you're not just talking about commenters calling each other names but are also considering the comments here in favor of sexual assault as unacceptable.

Amazon claimed it had no physical presence in California so that they would fall under the existing laws. That's not true, though. Lots of Amazon employees work in California. They got very creative with the definition of "Amazon" and "employee" to make the claim.

Good idea to put "guarantee" in scare quotes. If Airbnb had an actual guarantee that landlords or tenants could depend on their terms and conditions would not be as scary as the are: https://www.airbnb.com/terms

Note especially this heartwarming section: "You acknowledge and agree that you and Airbnb are each waiving the right to a trial by jury or to participate as a plaintiff or class member in any purported class action or representative proceeding. Further, unless both you and Airbnb otherwise agree in writing, the arbitrator may not consolidate more than one person's claims, and may not otherwise preside over any form of any class or representative proceeding."

What could possibly go wrong?

Protection for consumers and tenants?

Nope, intent isn't magic. http://genderbitch.wordpress.com/2010/01/23/intent-its-fucki...

And puerile male humor is often intended to drive women away from the boys' club.

I love the buy-to-own policy at PeepCode, too, and have had the annual unlimited subscription there for several years. I just looked up the individual plan at PluralSight and it's horrible. For 3 times what it costs at PeepCode you get much less access:

"Offline viewing allows you to cache up to 30 course modules on your mobile device. Simply choose the modules you want to watch offline and our app will cache them on your device. It's super simple. Each module will automatically be deleted after 30 days (or when you no longer have a Plus subscription) and you can always choose to delete them manually to make room for more."

They reach into your device to pull stuff off! Ugh.

No single purchases either, because they don't actually sell anything.

Here's hoping that the OSS, no-DRM, buy-to-own ideas from PeepCode take hold at PluralSight.

Possibly he got this article from the Economist. http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21572914-...

To me, it reads like the conclusion and summary of a big statistical paper but ... there's no statistical paper. When I saw "Pair programming costs about 2.5 times as much as one programmer working alone" in the abstract I was really looking forward to seeing the data that led to that conclusion since the main problem with pairing discussions is the lack of data and surfeit of anecdote.

But there wasn't any useful data because the source, timing, measurement practices, and sample sizes for the grand summary tables were not mentioned at all. It's like reading an article that states very firmly that the moon is made up of precisely 89.24397% green cheese. It sure sounds very specific but where DID that number come from?

I hope the author publishes more details about how these numbers were calculated because we need more data about pairing but I don't really expect that he will.

More heat than light, really.

Yes, the schools are trying to make college teaching into a hobby rather than a profession.

I should have said that median faculty salaries are much lower. A few stars get big salaries and more than half get starvation wages.

Examples of bloated salaries for non-faculty: The president of Penn State who was fired made $3mill his last year and could only be 'fired' to the extent that he now makes $600k as a professor who does no teaching at all.

And college coaches usually make a lot more than college presidents.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/13/public-college-pres...

Bigger, newer buildings. Lots more administrators paid much higher salaries. Tuitions subsidizing very expensive football teams. Gourmet food and single rooms for students (so they can attract the best and brightest!) rather than hash-slinging cafeterias and dormitories. Fancy gyms for the same reason.

Faculty salaries, however, are much lower since a large percentage now are part time temps with PhDs.

And Wikipedia is missing what is, to me, his best known book from 1991: Rapid Application Development. You can get it on Amazon, though.

Then make plans to do this shitty job in as kind and professional manner as possible.

That means NOT stringing people along. Sit down and figure out whether you're going to be able to keep people employed at 100% of their current pay and benefits. If you know you can't, then the biggest favor you can do for them is to lay them off quickly so they can start looking for a new job immediately.

If you can make some calls to get them leads at other places that's great, but the most helpful thing you can do for them is to let them go as soon as you know that they have no future at your company.

I've done firing and layoffs and I know it's hard. Delaying it makes it all much worse, for you and the departing employees.

Here's an example: Conspiracy to commit a crime is a crime. Sometimes the conspiracy alone, that is just talking about breaking the law without ever doing it, is considered a crime.*

So an email suggesting something illegal with a reply agreeing can get you prosecuted and jailed. We all know how hard it is to understand tone from emails so even if you were joking you would have a hard time proving that in court. And if you weren't joking in the email but just imagining what might happen that can still be a prosecutable crime.

(*) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Shabani