jjs

Foolish Scotty! The corporate world is no place for human beings!

I suspect he's too sleepy to worry about logic right now. :)

Go to sleep.

> I stopped reading here.

Ignore that part; the middle of the article is interesting. Also ignore the very weak conclusion, which appears to be there because he felt there should be a conclusion. I attribute this to the way he was raised. ;)

I think they're emphasizing "become more efficient or lower their costs" as opposed to growing the company, or increasing revenue.

I know only what the high priests have spake after consulting the Stone Tablets of Ancient Prophecy, but by all accounts, pg is twenty feet tall, with fiery glowing eyes and fiercely flaring nostrils. His golden halo is shaped like a matched pair of parentheses, and his arrival is heralded by heavenly trumpets and a choir of angels.

You know you've made it when you're banned in China.

The horrible thing is that people are going to hear the sound-bite headline, rather than the actual conclusions of the study, or even the article.

None whatsoever! :)

No, I live in California.

I pay no taxes in Sweden.

> I like Python on many levels - particularly the indentation - but the religious-ness of the philosophy and language design is off-putting in so many other ways.

I think you're overgeneralizing from a single misquotation. I've rarely encountered dogmatism from pythonistas, as most of them are too busy getting stuff done.

> Hygiene is a red-herring. It's easy enough to achieve with a defmacro-style macro system - just use gensyms.

Hygiene can also be baked-in to a nice lispy defmacro-style system; there's no reason that hygienic macros have to be scheme-style. Variable capture can be permitted with a (capture x) special form. (I like to use ^x as a shorthand for that).

At that point, macros start behaving scope-wise similarly to lexical functions, and captured variables behave kind of like dynamic variables in a function.

It suddenly occurs to me that this form of hygiene could be implemented in the expansion of let, lambda and defun forms, at which point (someone yell at me please if I'm wrong), plain-ol' defmacros would be hygienic, unless there's a type of variable capture that I'm forgetting about right now...

> What does "counting" against "notional salary" mean?

Offering benefits allows both companies and employees to agree on a lower cash salary; it's in the company's interest to provide benefits that have a large perceived value for minimum cost, whereas it's in the employee's best interest to only offset his desired salary by no more than the amount that the benefit would cost him were he to purchase it individually.

Any time you take a percentage of the net, you've set up a perverse incentive for the company to spend more money up to the exact point where they're not paying you anything. After all, for them, it's "free" money!

> If you have more data than a single server can hold the best thing to do is hashing. For instance the Redis-rb client supports consistent hashing.

Hopefully with a secret salt! It would be interesting if someone nasty managed to take down a node by e.g. predictively registering certain usernames.

Whatever you do, try and get a (small, depending on volume) percentage of the gross, not net, on each transaction. Maintaining their margins is their job, not yours.

Sometimes a big truck has more bandwidth than a series of tubes...

By "real" salary, I mean the notional salary that the company would have to pay were it not providing benefits.

There is indeed often a mismatch between how the company feels a given benefit should be valued by the employee and how the employee actually values it.

Complicating matters is the fact that the company wants to provide benefits that provide greater utility to the employee than the cost to the company, but smart employees will take that into account.

What's to prevent the company form writing off the perk and counting it against the employee's "real" salary?

Getting rid of the colons (e.g. "if foo:" vs "if foo") does not appear to enhance readability.

It's important to make time for both! >:)

> When saying this on HN your karma will be heavily dropped ...

Doubt it. The bootstrapping ethic is very strong here.

> Whether it fits HN or not, thanks for this.

Of course it does: he hacked the Gibson.

This wouldn't happen if you'd paid your gravity bill, Steve.

The horrible thing is, I immediately started thinking of a half-baked scheme involving very heavy shoes...

Xcode is much more manageable when you're using Spaces, and set up one desktop exclusively for Xcode, and an adjacent one for Interface Builder.

Exactly.

> We're a small bootstrapped team

Are you bootstrapped, or merely self-funded-so-far?