anonymous245

Very poor piece. I didn't get anything more from the article than the headline already has.

For a politician "shielding from public view" is the same as "shielding from consequences". Do you agree?

If you still disagree with the quote, then you're saying that people will misbehave regard of consequences.

Link to article: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/10/21/60minutes/main6978...

How well do these startups pay (as a point of reference, RethinkDB offered an absurdly low salary for what amounted to a top-5% developer)?

I think the original article might have been talking about the real world.

OTOH, the media is very good about discovering poster cases to earn our sympathy. One common theme I've noticed in all these cases is that the person in question took their job for granted in the face of the changing technical landscape, didn't upgrade their skills and finds themselves in a tough situation.

Another problem in the tech industry is ageism: the media doesn't talk about unemployed 30-something and 20-somethings. Haven't seen this piece, maybe it did.

Well said.

I've read that memory is an integral strength of high performers in fields such as chess and music.

And btw, you can extend this casual dismissal of expertise to knowledge of algorithms and data structures too. Would this author be equally dismissive if somebody pointed out that, what he was solving was an application of so-and-so algorithm.

If you're getting downvoted on HN for criticizing Microsoft, you might want to take a serious second look at those comments. Oh btw, I took a look at them and if anything you're getting off easy.

Thank you for your follow up. Clearly your experience is far outside my world. I've never heard of an outside consultant being brought in to second guess the company's "architect".

It seems like you mostly move among bad developers. I don't think your experience is relevant to most of the developers reading HN.

Obviously, a full rewrite not a good idea in most cases as Spolsky eloquently argued.

PS: I didn't detect any "defensiveness" (you know, the catchall passive-aggressive term that is used to use to imply that the other side has a weak hand without backing it up) in the post you were responding to. It rang true to me.

False dichotomy ($1B vs zero).

Actually, in my experience, developers understand the business quite well. It's the other business functions which doesn't understand development.

You WILL drive out (and keep out) good developers if you fail to treat developers as professionals whose inputs of how to develop software should be respected.

Which Unix kernel is the analog of this truck? i.e., keeps chugging under extreme CPU/memory/IO/interrupts/multithreading load?

I used to participate using a recognizable name for networking reasons. But I was self-censoring myself too much, since I don't agree with lots of HN's groupthink. So I switched to an anon handle.

No, the experience on the MBP is not so much better as to warrant getting it for development.

IMHO, it's worse. My biggest gripes: (1) built-in terminal doesn't do fullscreen, (2) built-in terminal doesn't have easy way to emulate different keyboards (tmux requires function keys behave like xterm).

BUT the iApps are SWEET. iPhoto/iMovie are rocking my world.

I say this as a recent dabbler in Mac.

Interesting. Can you elaborate with some examples?

I would start thinking this way: how much effort are you putting into serving this small market? If the effort is small, ROI might be worth it.

Interesting. Are you sure taxation ends after 10 years?

Have the "real" economics gurus like Greenspan (snicker) delivered?

I'm not sure I agree with you. But upvoted for not censoring yourself.

Thank you for giving some sane advice, instead of peddling the magical "single source/multiplatform" promise.

It's in Microsoft's interests for there to be a strong alternative C# implementation. This is just so they can reassure their customers against the risk of vendor lock-in (and M$ does need to reassure customers about that risk).

For example, I've taken a semi-detailed look at both Java and C#. I find C# and .Net to be very pleasant to work in. I would totally choose C#/.Net for my own startup over Java.

Why do you think Google picked Java in the first place (and not a "really" open language like C++, Javascript, or Python)? To appeal to as many developers as possible on Day 1.

Further, Google as a company seems to have drunk the Java Kool-Aid (e.g., Closure compiler is written in Java, GWT uses Java as source language, and I hear Java is one of the three "blessed" languages (others being C++ and Python)). Personally, I think C++ would have been a better choice for the first project, and Python for the second one.

It's highly unlikely they're going to stop using Java on Android.

Somebody please write a blocker for this. Do we need something special, or can we just add some rules to AdBlock Plus to work around these antisocials?

Good job funding this garbage, PG.

I don't understand the hype.

I downloaded and installed the Mac binaries, but it couldn't compile the STL headers that Xcode installed.

It's FAR from production quality, IMHO.

Thanks, that's a good point.

Interesting. But I don't necessarily agree that all merchants are pissed off.

One merchant I bought from had a direct store and an Amazon store. The Amazon store price was higher (by about $1.50 on a $20-ish item), but I still ordered from Amazon because I expected the merchant to take care of Amazon customers better wrt shipping time etc. :)

As a buyer, given a choice I would rather order from the Amazon store than directly from a no-name merchant.

I think your e-commerce customers just need to raise their Amazon store prices.

Unlikely to work. Companies will just invoke the "false negative better than false positive" heuristic.

Organized crime AND/or labor groups? Really?