metaphorm

I think Satya comes from a dramatically different cultural and professional background than Ballmer and has a correspondingly different set of priorities and ideas.

The difference is like night and day. Ballmer was all about monopolization, vendor lock-in, ruling the developer community with an iron fist, and funneling all business into the proven profit centers. Nadella understands the value of interoperability, evangelizing your own tech while trying to advance community efforts, embracing open source, and developing new lines of business independent of legacy products.

I can't claim to have any insight into group psychology here so I'll only speak for myself. I'm much more interested in the aspect of the story that has Marisa Mayer failing to save a sinking ship than I am interested in the ludicrous golden parachute. There is something interesting to discuss about the former but nothing interesting to discuss about the latter.

I don't think there's anything gray about a car service booking app. The gray area is Uber's deliberate pushing of legal boundaries and using skechy business practices. Lyft is in the same business and has not become infamous for this kind of thing. They are fairly successful too, even if they are (for now) 2nd place behind Uber. In New York City anyway almost all the drivers are using multiple services anyway so it makes very little difference (in this market).

So why is it that other businesses doing exactly the same thing Uber is doing are able to do it successfully without the legal and cultural issues?

> similar to how in capitalism products become obsoleted in favor of newer, better ones.

this is idealistic and I think ignores a very important effect that is present in both consumer capitalism and in scientific research: the institutional interests of those on the supply-side tend to dominate those on the demand-side. In scientific research the supply-side would be research funding institutions such as universities, and the academic-industrial complex of publications.

in consumer capitalism we see many examples of products getting worse over time (from the consumer point of view) because it serves the interest of the producer. the best example I can think of is home appliances. In the 1950s and 1960s they were engineered for durability and maintainability. In 2017 they are engineered to be cheap to produce and to be disposable. Washing machine repair service is basically a thing of the past, for example. Now you are expected to just buy a new one. Similar effects can be observed in a lot of products.

what might this effect look like in scientific research? a lot of the "replication crisis" is related to this effect. there is pressure to write up a positive and interesting result, rather than a negative result. there is also pressure to write up theoretical research that attracts attention even if it doesn't yield experimental procedures to test the theory. is this going on with string theory? I don't know, but maybe.

my point is just to call into question the notion that there is some kind of positive selection pressure that improves research over time. maybe there is, but I wouldn't count on it being strong enough to overcome institutional pressures.

I thought this was a fascinating read but it left a serious question lingering in my mind, which is a little out-of-scope for the article, but I hope someone here can address.

Why did the GNU developers go to such lengths to optimize the yes program? It's a tiny, simple shell utility that is mostly used for allowing developers to lazily "y" there way through confirm prompts thrown out by other shell scripts.

is this a case of optimization "horniness" (for lack of a better word) taken to its most absurd extreme, or is there some use case where making the yes program very fast is actually important?

> The "generation gap" is dead and buried.

maybe for pop culture tastes (though I'm not so sure about that, access doesn't necessarily mean interest). there are huge social, political, and moral values differences between generations though.

how successful has Amazon been, historically, in enforcing these clauses?

I've had Amazon recruiters trying to bring me in for an interview for several years now but keep avoiding it because of their reputation for sledgehammer management style. Am I on target here or is this unfounded?

the ones who own the technology

IANAL but my impression is the provision in legal due process for expediency is relevant only to the criminal justice system. This example makes for a very good argument that it ought to also apply to the civil justice system. The main mechanism that is used for this kind of legal action is the cost of retaining a law firm for extended periods of time. If the time was reduced the costs would be reduced also. That would partially equalize access to legal representation in civil disputes.

but you're talking about a hypothetical. the relevant question is has TraderJoes made that contract with their customers or not? The store does not have a membership program (like some retailers do), it is open to the general public for shopping.

more context for the headline quote. FTA:

"While he calls AI “profound” and increasingly capable of doing unbelievable things, on matters that require judgment he’s not comfortable with automating the human entirely out of the equation. “When technological advancement can go up so exponentially I do think there’s a risk of losing sight of the fact that tech should serve humanity, not the other way around.”

he's talking about AI here.

the four suits are explicitly tied to the classical elements (swords = air, wands = fire, pentacles = earth, cups = water) and the source material for the cards is drawn directly from Western esoteric traditions, especially Hermeticism and Alchemy.

The Hero's Journey is Campbell's analysis of archetypal themes present in most mythologies, and especially in Ancient Near Eastern and medieval Eureopean hero stories. It maps well to the Major Arcana because they are both archetype maps of the same underlying cultural milieu.

I think that's the wrong perspective. They don't tell or make the future. They have very little to do with the future. They take advantage of psychological archetypes to encourage examination of the present in a new context, which might lead to thinking about the future differently.

ok, so skip those parts then. there's lots of other stuff in there that is objectionable. encouraging of drunken recklessness is what struck me as the most inappropriate part. the remarks about consent for sex seem like they're put their specifically because there was encouragement for heavy drinking and impaired judgment. it's kind of striking that they even felt a need to remind people that non-consensual sex is rape. they didn't use the word rape though, but perhaps they should have.

Take the like/+1/retweet/etc. buttons off your website.

no it doesn't, but I'm picking Bloomberg every time.

I'm happy to see that people are using the LTS release as intended. Not surprised at all that the newest releases are the least used ones. More than a little surprised that version 1.6 still has any users at all, let alone how many it actually does have.

For those not familiar with django's release history the 1.6 -> 1.7 major release was a very large change in terms of how database migrations are handled. In 1.6 (and earlier) there was no built in too for it, but a very popular django extension library called South was the standard. In version 1.7 the creator of South (Andrew Godwin) wrote a migration tool for django core that was based on his previous work with South. There is a migration path from South to django core migrations and it's not that scary to do but it's a little work. That was several years ago at this point though. I wonder if some projects just abandoned upgrading at 1.6 because of this.

the way it addresses your objection is that the congressional voting power is proportional to popular vote received.

unstated in the OP, but my supposition (reasonable, I hope), is that there will still be a limited number of congressional seats so that candidates below a certain popular vote threshold will have 0 representational power. in that case it is still in the best interests of voters to vote for someone who is likely to clear the threshold and not throw their vote away by voting for a perfect ideological match (i.e. themselves).

this seems fairly elegant to me except that it might lead to a neglect of the provincial concerns of low population density areas (which was a major concern of the founders), but on the plus side, those rural voters can at least find an ideological match even if they don't find someone to represent their geographic interests.

this breaks down quickly because most employment offers at startups don't use option compensation, er, optionally. it is a mandatory substitution for base salary.

I don't think it's problematic. The duopoly system forces a large number of voters into "lesser evil" stances, or at least forces them to narrowly focus on their one pet issue and vote for candidates based only on that issue.

a system with more choices has more opportunities to find candidates that you agree with on multiple dimensions of policy, as well as hopefully finding more candidates that you can respect as human beings.

the post you're responding to is proposing a kind of non-geographically constrained proportionally allocated representational democracy. so, instead of voting for just one of the 2 candidates in your congressional district (which is likely gerrymandered anyway) you can vote for anyone in the country and that person's voting power in congress is proportional to their popular vote count. that's not dissimilar to a lot of corporate governance systems (voting shares of common stock widely distributed).

what is an alternative to facebook (besides abstention, which I agree is viable in this product category)? the network effect is overwhelmingly strong.

I think one of the real problems that doesn't get discussed very much is Google-envy. A lot of companies that don't really have problems like Google, and don't really have organizations like Google, and don't really have applicant pools like Google, will yet interview the same way Google does.

It really might be the correct way to interview for Google. Certainly they've put a lot of thought into how to manage their hiring process and they still lean heavily on the whiteboard. I'm almost positive, however, that most companies are really nothing like Google and really should not be using the same interviewing techniques.

Smaller companies with more quotidian problems would be better served with a more conversational and less time-pressured interview style.

need context to determine what would be better. giving the same interview for every position you're hiring for is not usually the right thing to do. Google is very unusual in their practice of hiring into a general pool. Most companies hire for more specific openings.

In general though, when I interview it has three main sections, tailored for the role.

First, is conversational. Talk about the resume, talk about work experience, talk about technology, etc.

Second, is a practical example. Sometimes (but not always) this involves solving an algorithmic problem on a whiteboard. Sometimes it involves a guided tour of the codebase and functionality of a relevant project the candidate has worked on. Rarely it might be a take-home coding task.

Third, is a more general example usually of some kind of system design problem. A lot of candidates like to write/draw on the whiteboard for this section but it's not strictly necessary nor do I ask them to do so. There's a board in the room if they want to but I don't ask them to use it.

let me now reply in more temperate and deliberate language, since this deserves discussion. I would appreciate it if when you disagree with me you attempt to discuss the disagreement with me instead of making assumptions about what I think or believe.

The OP of this thread asks women specifically how to find an employer that she might feel comfortable working at. That is a fair question, though personally I believe that toxic workplaces for women are also toxic workplaces for almost all men as well. But fine, that's not the issue. Some men have responded even though they were asked not to and some of those responses have been thoughtful and potentially useful.

In this subthread a HN moderator told a poster that they had made an unfair comment. That was refuted by another HN poster who asked the moderator to reverse his judgment because it his his responsibility as a moderator to support a particular political agenda that the other poster wants him to support.

I asked that person to reconsider their attitude because, like the moderator, I believe that there was a significant element of unfairness in this subthread and the moderator was correct to call it out because it leads to uncivil and unproductive discussions, as well as encouraging a kind of prejudicial attitude about men.

I agree with the moderator. That is the extent of my statement in this thread. In what way am I co-opting something? What am I co-opting? How does my language accomplish that, if that is what I am doing?

Maybe you will speak to your own positions here as well, since that might advance the conversation. You seem to enjoy sniping me so I don't hold out much hopes, but maybe you'll be nice. What do you think is going on here?

> I'm baffled by the suggestion that reasonable responses somehow negate the hateful bile others post. If somebody gets sexually harassed by 3 people in the office, does it help to point out the other 17 people have done no sexual harassment at all?

not a comparable situation. the comparable situation is when one man is accused of sexism, then all other men by proxy are judged as if they are sexists.

what am I trying to do, exactly? Why don't you tell me again what I do think and believe, since you seem to be an expert on my mind and beliefs.

I would ask you to reconsider your attitude here. There is a strong element of unfair and unfounded accusation in this thread that has basically created bad-faith dialogue here. While there may be insensitive or even overtly sexist people that comment here, your own minimization of unfair attitudes w.r.t the presence of good men with your snide hashtag reference is a serious part of the problem too.

humor with the intention of ridiculing something by using its own tropes to the point of absurdity to show the wrongness/badness of the thing is a well-established form of satire and commentary.

a satirist is emphatically NOT in concordance or agreement with that which they are satirizing. I find it unreasonable that you are arguing against this basic premise. Maybe I'm misunderstanding you. I hope I am because If I am really understanding you correctly it seems to me like you are making something far worse than a fallacious argument, but really something that rises to the level of destructive of the meaning of words.

lets have a more realistic conversation about the consequences of shunning and ostracizing people, even if those people are noxious (in some way).

does it really work? it seems to work in-so-far-as it purges specific communities of specific people. it doesn't remove those people from larger society and it most certainly doesn't change their mind. it makes them feel aggrieved to the point where they lash out with redoubled violence. it radicalizes people into extremists where before they may have merely been insensitive now they will be resentful and hateful.

backlash is a real thing and we ignore it at our own peril.

who is "they" and what did "they" say, specifically? can you quote someone? the discussion of speech issues is often about culture and norms rather than about legal statutes.