RyanZAG

Sure, but sometimes being rude is what it takes to be truthful. You can quote a lot of Firefox users who are saying this - follow this path, and they will no longer use Firefox. This isn't some idle threat, it's just what people will do. It's not a secret, it's not going to be some surprise.

So when you look back in a year's time on why Mozilla has now failed, this decision will be the obvious one.

And at that point, it might sound less rude to you.

Why would betting odds displays escape from Enterprise Java? Seems like the kind of thing that would get it in spades for regulatory and CYA reasons.

If it's specific apps, usually it is just bad coding. 'Enterprise Java' style coding where performance is not even tested for, let alone designed into the algorithms.

Usually culprits are things like downloading multiple data files in a single threaded block, or insanely deep object graphs with thousands of memory fetches per real operation.

That's not really anything to do with the technique (code in browsers) or the runtime (JVM) or even the programming language (Java) -- and everything to do with poor development.

Well going off common sense, it seems likely that Obj C and Swift definitely would not be supported on purpose.

Google's embrace-extend-extinguish destroyed XMPP. They made their chat system XMPP compatible for a short time which caused many people to swap to their solution. When they ended support, most users simply stopped using XMPP.

If you show most of your customers a factory slaughterhouse chicken being killed and packaged, or a grass-fed truly free-ranging chicken being taken inside and killed and packaged, they will actually have a worse reaction to the second one.

Most people cannot really identify with thousands of chickens in a cage being processed by a machine - but they can identify with a single chicken happily running around outside being taken and killed. So paradoxically, the second image would actually be something they see as even more cruel.

Informing people about this has to be done in a very clever way to ensure that people don't connect the packaged breast they buy with the actual chicken running around outside. One slip up, and your label becomes worse than the factory chickens.

While the people who choose to come for a farm tour likely know what to expect, the 'average' consumer would not react in the same way to being told that they're eating this happy, free ranging chicken. As with all marketing, it's important to come from a position of your customer's lifestyle than your own where you 'know' about death.

To put it in a completely different context - think about Target and their new bathroom policy. On the surface it seems great, and everyone supports it. The label is wonderful and everyone wants to be part of that movement. But when it actually comes time to go to a bathroom, many women freak out and refuse to actually enter that bathroom anymore. It's even costing Target customers, and now pulling back the policy would cost them even more. Marketing isn't easy and you need to fully understand what you're doing before you end up creating a marketing campaign that actually harms your business.

That's not how many people see it today. A video of a chicken being killed and de-feathered by any means causes a very harsh reaction in a large percentage of the population.

The use of the organic label is to distance people from this imagery by constantly repeating the propaganda that everything is being done 'nicely'. However, actually showing any kind of killing, no matter how nice, destroys that propaganda. The key trick is to use the correct words to make sure people do not conflate what they are eating with anything negative, and the organic label is part of that.

When you go deeper and attempt to explain how the killing is better, you simply open the audience to the fact that there is still killing being done. This is the wrong approach for the target market. It's better to distance the brand from the actual realities as much as possible.

Judging by the post here, 512kb buffers seems like a good bet?

If you think of it as a 'guilt tax' it makes a lot more sense, and also the direction these stores need to go to improve profits. It's never really been about the food itself: it's been about selling a positive self image. It's a reaction to the abundance of media showing modern chicken coops and mass migrant vegetable labour.

Once you understand that, you understand why the label is the single most important thing, and the less real details supplied the better. Any details you supply serves to break the facade that the organic label means you're doing good deeds - because ultimately, you're still killing that chicken. It's why "efforts to broaden beyond just an organic label" are doomed before they begin and will hurt sales more than they help.

> There are some industries that are natural monopolies, like water and electricity, because it's incredibly expensive to build both last mile connections and core infrastructure.

Is this not beginning to change though? Setting up a local solar farm for a neighborhood and selling on that electricity seems like a valid business model to me. Same with setting up automated water desalinization and treatment plants. But because of regulations, the cost to do either is extreme.

I think the very regulations that add so much cost may be the one's that have us thinking all about 'natural monopolies' today. The more people you can service, the easier it is is to spread the cost of regulation. But why do you need that cost in the first place?

Those ships were ordered a long time ago.

Successful people manage many other people, and successful CEOs have many successful people under them. Successful companies also spend large amounts of money on lavish office space, employee morale boosting functions, and other perks.

So the more money you can spend, the more successful your company must be.

Cargo cult?

No single guy with no family to support has to fear failure though. It only becomes a fear once you have a wife and children to support - but that's why it's generally accepted that you first get financial stability before starting a family. Some people choose differently as people are always free to make terrible life choices - but they need to face the consequences then.

Even someone with a $1mil trust fund can make terrible enough choices to end up homeless.

Nobody mentioned quicksort. You're assuming quicksort, which is what the issue is. Many languages don't actually use quicksort, fyi. The practical performance considerations of just quicksort itself also change depending on how you've implemented the small details - are you moving memory around, or just changing pointers? Huge difference in the real world, no difference in the algorithm.

Right, that was my point in the following two lines.

I think this is a great manifesto that would produce amazing software. I'd also never hire anyone who used this manifesto unless I've personally known them for years, and even then, the number of developers I'd trust with this manifesto is in the single digits.

In Cairo, most of the roads during rush hour are so packed with cars that you can't drive faster than 5km/hour. Those packed roads with slowly moving cars have the lowest accident rate in the country.

So yes, you can definitely reduce accidents by forcing everyone into high traffic situations where they have no choice but to drive extremely slowly.

In IT security, you can also reduce hacked computers by making so many security regulations that nobody can actually use the computers. It does work, but nobody really gets their job done.

Or at least, in the case of the state department, it works until your secretary of state moves all of her email onto her own server to avoid your regulations and you end up with a political firestorm.

At some point you probably want to try find solutions that optimize safety and actually getting something done at the same time. Creating traffic isn't a very good solution in the long run, I think.

Well you can blame them, but it won't solve anything. MBAs are filling a business 'need'. Professional management and all that it entails was going very strong before MBAs even came onto the field. If you removed all MBA programmes, I don't think anything would change - you'd still have professional management and revolving doors, you'd still have people chasing these same KPIs to the exclusion of customers.

My point was more that MBA is a symptom, or a result, of the real problem. And someone with an MBA is probably going to be a better manager than someone without. An originally good CEO who built a company is going to become better at his job if he gets an MBA. So the MBA itself does have value, as does all knowledge. It's just misused by many companies. Removing professional management and keeping MBAs would be far more positive than removing MBAs and keeping professional management, provided we had a real and workable alternative to professional management.

Practicality of management (as opposed to actual good management). This isn't really the fault of MBA, but rather the fault of office politics.

In a large modern corporation with a constantly revolving door, everyone moving their careers through that organization is looking out mainly for themselves. How does someone who has just moved into an executive level at a business he doesn't understand cope with all of the office politics around him? High performance big name people constantly looking out for promotions, bonuses, threatening to leave if their demands aren't met?

In the age when the owner of a business built that business up himself, knew how it worked, and knew the people he worked with, it came down to real experience. But in this new age of modern professional short term management, most of the people up and down the organizational chart don't really know anything about the depths of the business. So the only real solution is to simplify the business into "units shipped". If you can put simple numbers and KPIs on everything, you can tell right away who is valuable. Everyone now knows who is valuable.

It cuts down politics dramatically as everyone is now pulling in the same direction. Instead of one employee doing all the work being outshone by another employee who does nothing but brag about himself to new hires, you have real hard numbers. Everyone knows how to succeed - make some number go up.

Obviously this only works if the numbers actually align with the business. Most of the time, they actually do correlate, which is why this system continues to be used and why it makes profits go up. Does it correlate particularly well? Usually not. But it doesn't have to - the loss from the lack of correlation between reality and the simplified numbers merely has to be less than the lack of production from uncertainty and misalignment.

So "units shipped" wins out. What you really need to be blaming is the concepts of professional management and job hopping. I'm hopeful both of those concepts will be uprooted within a century or two by smaller, more focused, and more efficient companies. I believe the future of companies will be single person businesses with zero employees all linked to other single person businesses through an efficient market. With each business being owned, run and controlled by a single expert individual taking the optimal choices.

I think you're confusing TDD with unit testing. You can unit test without TDD.

Remember the mind map craze? For a few years, educators everywhere wanted you to do almost all learning by drawing circles with words and connecting them. For many people, this type of visual link between concepts allows them to learn far faster than regular textbook style.

For some people, mind maps make zero sense and they learn far slower. Some concepts just don't fit into mind maps at all and even for very visual people it just slows them down. There's often a more specific visual learning method for many problems than a simple mind map too.

TDD is mind maps. Give it a try, but don't feel bad just because mind maps don't gel with your brain.

Could be a big part behind companies re-purposing common words? If you give it a unique word, it becomes it's own thing. But if it's something like "Yoga", then you will always have to refer to it as "Facebook Yoga" which is very good for the Facebook brand.

Except Google does police the auto complete, which makes the one's they don't police stand out.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/0...

Article is from 2013, and they do routinely update which words they police. They also now police searching for "Name+Crime", I'd guess to avoid lawsuits.

http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2016/jun/23/...

I think Google has opened themselves up to critique about allowing this antisemitism by policing other offensive terms. They need to either set up a forum for policing all offensive terms, or avoid policing. Otherwise articles like the OP will continue to plague them.

Definitely! But the majority of the deaths are concentrated in a tiny geographic area. It's important to note that fixing that tiny area would have a larger benefit than fixing the rest combined.

Also the dust from those mine dumps can travel a very long way on the wind. 100s of km.

For some extra context here, a lot of this fine particulate matter is not from burning the coal - it's from decaying exposed mine dumps. The wind in Johannesburg blows the fine sand on top of the mine damps into the communities living next to the mine dumps. The article tries to make it out as being just regular air pollution from fossil fuels, but it's many more factors than just that, and fixing the unique problem of mine dumps is probably a lot easier than general air pollution if there was political will to fix it. Which there is not.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jul/06/radioactive-c...

Except we've redefined what "the level at which a human can subsist on". Go 50, 100 or 200 years back and look at the kind of life most citizens lived. It was far below what even a person without a job today has - and a person without a job has an incredible amount of free leisure time compared to the 18 hour days that were common even 100 years ago.

The simple fact is that welfare and minimum wages have removed many jobs from the economy, and those jobs that were removed kept the economy at full employment. There's no real change aside from us effectively banning some jobs. Remove the ban, remove welfare, and we'd have full employment again. Is that a good thing to do? Probably not, but it's an important point to understand that the author completely left out of his essay. You're not going to find a good solution if you don't even stop to consider how we got here.

I like that vouch goal, sounds great!

Makes sense about releasing more stats - how about internally then? Could you take a look at the number of pro- and anti-YC stories that you've turned the system off for and see if it seems unbiased? Often it's easy to judge each story one by one and think you're being unbiased. But we're all biased. Going back and checking those stats may reveal something you didn't think was happening. Or not. Not as any kind of placation, but more as an internal quality check so you know you're on the right track.

As duncanawoods says, that seems far too convenient. Is there some list available of which discussions have had the 'overheated discussion detector' turned off on them? Then we could see the number of PRO-YC vs ANTI-YC articles and see if a bias does in fact exist.

Ah right, that makes a lot of sense. I was probably just being naive there. Probably best to discuss YC related topics on different forums.

There doesn't seem to be any flamewar though, looks like decent discussion. Should the flamewar detector not be turned off when no flamewar is present?