j_baker

Well yes, I think designing an ultrabook probably is difficult. I mean, you have to cram a lot of powerful components into a very small computer. You've only go so much space, so something's gotta give.

I think there's more to the open office epidemic than mere cost. Facebook is pouring tons of money into the largest open office in the world. Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg wrote in "How Google Works" that offices should be (and I wish I were making this up) "crowded, messy, and a petri dish for creativity".

I think many companies use open office formats out of principle. Misguided principles, but principles nonetheless.

You know, this makes me wonder. If a car manufacturer or a toy company made a product that was found to be unsafe, there would be a recall. If hardware manufacturers make a product that is insecure, will there be a recall? Unfortunately, I suspect that this is a case where the law hasn't caught up with technology.

If it were connected, you would figure the firing would come sooner than two years later. Though it is possible there was another incident.

Meth is quite possibly the most dangerous drug in existence. It's cheap. It's almost as addictive as heroin. It makes people aggressive, impulsive, and even violent for hours.

Now, don't go trying to convert meth-heads to doing crack. They're both very harmful.

Maybe I'm just obtuse, but this graph makes no sense to me: http://lmart999.github.io/assets/cluster_gis.png

What exactly do the colors mean? And what do those brackets at the top and at the side mean?

What exactly is the author's point? It just reads like a collection of gripes about tech companies. And besides that, I don't see any evidence that Google is building a "Bay View" stateless walled city.

> there’s a disturbing trend developing of people deciding to found a company simply to get rich

I understand what the author is getting at. But the purpose of a business is to make money. What's wrong with starting a company to get rich? My suspicion is that the author means something more along the lines of "There are too many people starting companies simply to make a quick buck."

All things considered though, I agree. There are simply too many people in the Valley chasing huge valuations and quick exits and not enough building sustainable companies.

What Aleynikov did was clearly slap-on-the-wrist-worthy. It's not like he took code and sold it to the highest bidder for zillions of dollars. It didn't merit depleting his entire life's savings and (almost) sending him to jail for many years. This was clearly about more than merely the value of the code he took.

> The Court concluded that he had in fact tried to take 500,000 lines of valuable and mostly proprietary source code

I would dispute the value of the code. The code he took wasn't part of the "secret sauce". It didn't contain any of the logic for actually making High-speed trades.

Krugman's right about one thing: economies that have had large austerity pushes seem to have done worse than countries that have had smaller spending cuts. I don't know that I would agree with Krugman about how much spending needs to happen to recover. Within the next 20 years, spending on Medicare and Social Security are expected to grow rapidly. Thus, I think frugality still makes sense.

> Show me the strictly paper money system which has lived 1000 years (or even 100!)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_money

"The first use of fiat money was recorded in China around 1000 AD. Since then, it has been used continuously by various countries, concurrently with commodity currencies."

> ...or else economics would be just like physics and we'd understand it all already.

So you think physicists understand all about physics? I've got a bridge to sell you...

You're talking about "participatory management". It was a fad in the 50s that comes up again from time to time. It sounds like a good idea, but it actually ends up increasing bureaucracy. There's a good article that discusses exactly what you're talking about here:

http://www.maccoby.com/CHeckscher/Articles/LimitsPartMgmt.sh...

The idea of holacracy is interesting to me, but something tells me it's more about marketing than anything else. Holacracy seems to do the exact opposite of getting rid of managers. It's actually making everyone a manager of something.

And yet, it's billed as simply being a way of getting rid of managers. If that's all there is to Holacracy, then the entire idea is pointless. Reducing the layers of management is a means not an end.

Reductionism FTW.

Ok, so I get that tech hasn't been very good at recruiting older workers. But this? Seriously?

> In Silicon Valley's youth-obsessed culture, 40-year-olds get plastic surgery to fit in.

This is unsubstantiated. Has anyone met a 40 year-old in Silicon Valley that's gotten plastic surgery?

This is on github. Does this mean that MS is abandoning CodePlex?

You actually wouldn't have to do either of those. There's actual frozen ice on Mercury's poles, which means you have a relatively temperate environment, plenty of sunlight for energy, and water.

The atmosphere and gravity situation on the other hand are about the same as Mars.

No, Mercury actually has a magnetosphere. I don't know about what kinds of protection you would need to get there though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Mercury

There's one gaping hole in the idea though: where are we going to get water?

One other interesting possibility is colonizing Mercury. It turns out to not be as crazy an idea as it seems at first. Mercury does have water, there's plenty of solar energy, and it's not too hot at the poles. The trickiest part would really be getting there. As deep as it is in the sun's gravity well, it would take 6 years to get there!

Agree with 10/12.

> Schedule any meetings that really require 1 hour over lunch.

For the love of God no. This almost always ends up turning into an excuse for managers to make your lunchtime into work time.

> If our meeting is scheduled for 10:00 and you're not there by 10:01, I lock the door.

I get that it's important to be punctual, but isn't this a bit extreme?

There's one thing I would add to the equation:

((1-p) * s * e) + r < (m-c)*t

r is the additonal compensation package that companies offer to employees of an acquired company.

In an acquihire, the bulk of the proceeds go to the employees, and it's not in the form of equity payments (which are usually not worth the paper they're written on). Instead, companies offer employees other incentives to come on board.

Not to mention that SO's content is released under a Creative Commons license, and for exactly this reason. Google doesn't really even need their permission to do something like this.

I've noticed that a lot of message queuing systems have an "delivery at least once" property. What exactly does the possibility that a message could be delivered more than once buy you?

How good is the ES6 transpiler used for this? My experience with ES6 transpilers thus far hasn't been great. The feature support seems to be very spotty.

Our government has always been plutocratic.

> The man who is possessed of wealth, who lolls on his sofa or rolls in his carriage, cannot judge the wants or feelings of the day-laborer. The government we mean to erect is intended to last for ages. The landed interest, at present, is prevalent; but in process of time, when we approximate to the states and kingdoms of Europe, — when the number of landholders shall be comparatively small, through the various means of trade and manufactures, will not the landed interest be overbalanced in future elections, and unless wisely provided against, what will become of your government? In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.

-- James Madison, the architect of our Constitution

Perhaps that was the point. Someone may not want this job to be filled for whatever reason?

Who'd have thought that the business-types (Rubin and Spector) are supportive of crunch, while the developer (Paxton) doesn't like crunch? Apparently, the business types like turning their organizations into meat grinders while the developers like not being overworked and exploited.

To be fair, here's a choice Snowden quote:

""" I'm no different from anybody else. I don't have special skills. I'm just another guy who sits there day to day in the office, watches what's happening and goes, 'This is something that's not our place to decide, the public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong.' And I'm willing to go on the record to defend the authenticity of them and say, 'I didn't change these, I didn't modify the story. This is the truth; this is what's happening. You should decide whether we need to be doing this.' """

That's basically what the wayback machine does: https://archive.org/web/

We don't really know the full relationship between substance abuse and mental illness. There's a very well-known correlation between the two, but it's questionable whether the substance abuse causes mental illness or the mental illness causes the substance abuse. It's likely some combination of the two: the substance abuse aids the mental illness and the mental illness aids the substance abuse.

I have to say, I can't help thinking the author doesn't know anything about Hemingway or Picasso. Both are very famous examples of how depression can be creative. You can name many others like Virginia Woolf or Emily Dickenson.

I think both depression and exuberance can be creative, albeit creative in different ways. Exuberance is very good for, as the author notes, divergent thinking. You simply have the ability to come up with so many positive possibilities. Depression on the other hand is very converging. You just know for sure that something bad is going to happen.

EDIT: I should add that Hemingway at least was likely bipolar. So it may very well be that he's a good example of how both depression and exuberance can be creative.