aggieben

Lawyers, accountants, and mechanics all have to provide estimates to a client precisely for this reason. I see no reason why medical practitioners should be any different.

As an anecdote, I have found that price comparisons are perfectly feasible in a non-emergency situation. My son broke his arm, and instead of just driving to the nearest emergency room, I called around to a handful of urgent-care clinics and found one that was able to quote me some prices that were reasonable, so we went there to get him treated. Easy.

In any case, I think the ACA is a train wreck, piling on more of the crap that makes our system suck: the disconnect between consumer and producer. If we ever want to make our healthcare market sane, we will have to largely cut out the middleman ("insurance"), and the only way to do that is have patients pay for their own care (particularly routine care).

Because I don't agree? What I don't "get" is why people like you assume that your opinion is completely undebateable, or that it's any more than what it is: an opinion.

> they get stigmatized for that way more than average. If a Rubyist never sticks nose outside their beloved technology stack, noone makes such a big deal out of it.

Yes, exactly right.

> to vitriolic anti-M$ hater mentality

Right on - this isn't what OP was demonstrating, I think, but general reactions to Microsoft technologies are pretty bizarre. Use it or don't, but I don't get all the hate.

> OCaml, Haskell and Lisp are spectacular. Erlang is spectacular. Tcl and Python are spectacular. C# is an OK-language at best.

I don't agree. In my view, Lisp is spectacular for its unified meta-programming capabilities, and C# is spectacular for its expressiveness (and rapid improvements, which really has more to do with the C# team than the language per se, I suppose). The rest are what they are, better than others at some things, but not spectacular.

I think this post is interesting, but mostly at this point useful as a frame of reference for all the changes that have happened in the .NET ecosystem in 2 years. For example, the server produced by the ASP.NET team (Kestrel) has now been benchmarked at over 300K req/s, and it's using libuv under the hood as an event-based IO engine. That's also not to mention that Mono has benefited tremendously from the new open-source nature of the entire .NET framework, and is a far more viable portability story for .NET than it ever has been (although it still has its pain points). Soon enough, Microsoft will have its own port of CoreCLR for Linux.

Also, relatedly, I think this post is also mostly about the characteristics of the .NET community and its culture, and less about technology. The aforementioned recent changes are indicative of substantial growth and diversification of that community, and I think likely heralds a lot more good changes to come.

Meh, not a great disservice.

It would help if the writers who want to complain about inequality knew what bourgeoisie means.

This reads persuasively, but the problem is that the same arguments have been made consistently since as long as I can remember. When I was an undergraduate, people were saying much the same thing, and almost nothing has really changed.

I myself have always had both Windows and Linux (and occasionally OSX) boxen around to help me do what I need to do - so what's right in front of me doesn't seem so one-dimensional as what PG writes about. I've also been in and out of some radically different industries (for example, appdev consulting vs aerospace & defense), and it seems pretty obvious to me that "best tool for the job" is the future and it always has been. That means there will always be a place for Windows and BSD/Linux+derivatives (I throw OSX in this bucket), and there will always be engineers of many stripes using each one (or multiples).

I mean, seriously: even Git - which really does seem to have utterly won the VCS wars from a certain perspective, is still just one of many in reality. Lots of people use Perforce. Legion upon legion still use TFS. BitKeeper is still kicking around. Subversion still has substantial usership. Even CVS is still around. Pretty much the only VCS technology that has truly been defeated is RCS/SCCS, and probably only because they never figured out how to handle directories or else they'd still be around too.

That's why I find these kinds of prognostications to be very silly (although fertile ground for gathering up fake internet points and/or blog readership).

That's an interesting data point, for sure. I've never had a Redfin agent turn down a showing because of price, but there are too many variables involved to read too much into it.

This is the same myopic view expressed by PG: you're only seeing what's right in front of you. There are plenty of web developers who aren't in gaming and use Windows on a day-to-day basis. This business of "future" and "past" is exceedingly silly. The right choice is the tool that you can do your job best with.

For lots of people, that's Linux. For lots of other people, that's Windows.

You can sell your own home without a license. He was referring to the "cost of entering the MLS market" (my paraphrase) being a mere $300 (for having an agent list the sale). My point is that's not true because any actual sale costs an additional 6% of the transaction.

"almost always"?

Really? Even in the server space, Windows still occupies a third of the market, and desktop statistics are somewhere more along the lines of 70%. For every "cool" startup developer, I can promise you there is an entire army of "not cool" developers doing things in Windows (or whatever).

$300 fee? No, my friend. If you buy something on MLS, you pay at least half of a 6% commission on that $300k, for a cool $18,000 (if you have an easygoing seller, that is) How's that for a barrier to entry?

And yah - the market would revolutionize overnight* because without professional licensing suddenly MLS becomes just one of many sources of data - and judging by the technology of MLS, a quickly irrelevant one.

* - I exaggerate: it would take at least a fortnight.

> Their victory is so complete that I'm now surprised when I come across a computer running Windows.

Sigh. It's clear that PG, as good a writer as he is, is the one in another world.

Fair enough. I guess my point was to be opposed to unethical negotiating strategies.

I can agree to this: this allows a user to not have to trust that the company running the application set up password authentication properly.

But still: I just can't get worked up about this at all. I'd rather see pgp get implemented in browsers before this.

Right. So there's an I suppose in there somewhere, and my response is still pretty much: "meh". The people who might could possibly get access to that password already have access to all the data being protected by that password, and if they were so hell-bent on using your password to break into other sites, they could do that anyway by brute forcing what CBCrypt produces.

There will never be a deal. NAR's prosperity absolutely depends on their exclusive control of market access. Professional licensing is the single reason why this market sucks donkey balls.

This is also why I would heartily support a total deregulation of real-estate-related professional licensing. It simply isn't that complex a task, and it doesn't really require much training to be competent at most transactions - and particularly the one kind of transaction you want to do. Anyone and everyone should be legally allowed to represent someone in selling or buying real estate.

In that world, the NAR continues to exist as a sort of "credibility certification", which I would fully support. But they shouldn't get to use the government to keep competitors out.

The problem is not one of physically opening doors. The issue is one of trust. Having drones opening doors instead of an agent doesn't really solve that problem - not to mention that lots of people wouldn't go for that.

> but so does a Redfin agent

I don't see how - and anyway, a buyer's agent can be a big waste of money in a lot of markets. Traditional single-family housing transactions aren't that complicated, and a great many buyers could handle one on their own just fine. I applaud _any_ effort to undermine the NAR.

My reaction is one of those "I'm not sure if I should feel stupid or not" moments, but: rightly-built applications already don't expose passwords to employees in that they aren't (or at least, shouldn't be) generally persisted. Usually the plaintext passwords live in volatile memory briefly while the server computes a hash of some kind for comparing with what is stored. I suppose an admin could run a web application under some sort of memory profiler, or take a dump at exactly the right moment, and capture a plaintext password, but that seems pretty far-fetched.

CBCrypt seems to me to introduce a lot more complexity into the entire application space with very little real gain. I'm certainly open to being convinced (especially because I'm waffling on whether or not this is a dumb reaction).

Lying isn't a negotiation tactic or a loophole. It's lying.

A negotiation tactic: getting an actual job offer in hand for your salary + X, and then indicating to your manager that you have an offer for $S+X and that you would like to stay where you are if they could match.

Lying: not getting a job offer, but tell your manager you did.

Also lying: getting a job offer for $S, or $S+0.1X, but telling your manager you got an offer for $S+X.

If I'm reading you correctly, your argument basically boils down to "but managers/companies lie too".

Well, both sides are wrong then. Deals negotiated in bad faith are bad deals, regardless of whose bad faith it is.

I completely agree: the pictures in the article make the manual look brilliant: simple enough for anyone to understand, but detailed enough to get the most out of the tool. Every social media platform should have this manual.

I used to love OneNote's writing experience - but it sucked hard at syncing data between devices. That was what Evernote absolutely nailed from the get go. They synced data seamlessly before anyone else, and ultimately that ended up being more important to me than the UX. Now, in 2015, I feel like Evernote has scratched the UX itch enough for me that I have no reason to go back to OneNote for the forseeable future. Penultimate provides a decent UX for writing even if not as sophisticated as OneNote, Scannable is brilliant for pulling things in via the camera, and the core note-taking app is perfectly adequate, IMO.

I use Scannable _extensively_. Being able to search the text in handwritten documents and whiteboards - without losing the original document to some ridiculous OCR conversion - is absolutely gold. Plain text notes are somewhat less important for me, although I use them a lot too.

I don't care one whit about chat.

I, for one, would be upset as a manager to find out that I had been lied to (and taken advantage of, really). I would have zero qualms about firing someone for negotiating like this. It's fine to say "Hey, someone else over here thinks I'm worth more, and I'm inclined to agree with them - are you?" It's not fine to say it if it's not true. I'm also not super-impressed with the leveraging of a tough moment in the company to extract more $$. It's not dishonest, although if I were your manager in that situation, I'd be looking for a replacement.

My take on this whole idea is this: instead of focusing on how big your balls are, focus on how much value you can bring to the company. Your monetary compensation will reflect that (and actual honest negotiating techniques are recommended).

No, you don't. If you want to stick with the $75k number, then you say "I make just under $75k". If you want to round, you say "I make $73k".

I don't think this is controversial at all. I wouldn't even give a second thought to a FB deal (unless it was for my own mother, I suppose) - the incentives are all completely misaligned. It starts off adversarial and is extremely likely to end in a failed project and/or hostile client (as you explained very ably).

Apparently whatever number of readers hit your blog made it fall over :-(