mkn

It's a nitpick, but the only irrationality that gets checked is unsustainable irrationality. It's a bit of a simplification to say that profits are actually "equilibrium irrationality," but not by much. If the market were actually composed of rational agents, all prices would be driven down to material cost + wages, and there'd be no need for advertising, either. Forces can, and in fact always do, push the market to irrationality. The only thing the market seems to do is moderate the degree of irrational excess.

I'm not really going anywhere with this. I just have a fascination with people's manifold faith in markets and their powers. It's interesting that "free market theory" flatters consumers (as rational) and benefits businesses (via consumer irrationality). I think that this is why the notion survives so well in popular culture.

If you're curious about the down-votes, it may be because the above quote is an example of the particular kind of bigotry commonly referred to as "ageism". For future reference, if you are ever in a management position, that kind of thing is actionable in a work environment. You could get your backside sued off, is what I mean, if you are found to have used that in a hiring decision, for example.

The trouble, of course, with IBM's experiments with personal computers is that their fan-base is largely a bunch of nerdy geeks who want this kind of thing to work, and really doesn't tell you anything about the broader world.

So, one thing Cory's success tells you is that, even when you restrict the audience to "copyright geeks who want this kind of thing to work," it can work. Additionally, those copyright geeks have friends and family, and some of them are noticing how those nerdy copyfighters consume literature, and it gets talked about, a fact implicitly betrayed in your qualifier "largely".

It's easy to fire off an "It won't work," but the article itself discusses many of the strengths of the model in question, rendering your complaint moot; Even if the viability of Doctorow's publishing model isn't demonstrated solely on the basis of it working for him, it is supported in the article with other observations, as well.

Don't think that because you've criticized one pillar of the case for direct publishing that you've won the day, nor even raised a serious objection. You have very much more work to do before you've demonstrated "[t]he trouble...with Cory Doctorow's experiments" in a meaningful way.

And furthermore, an instance of the more general case of 'unverifiable claim.' The list doesn't stop there, either.

The first paragraph is a misleading hypothetical. You're left to infer the statistic from the author's anecdote. The new guy can't code? Is that every new guy? One in a hundred? How would you know that his first paragraph says anything at all? In the absence of making a factual claim, the author is trying to inflame passions.

"It's a big problem...[because] there's a boom on." Really? A boom? And then the "50 times more productive" trope? Then "negative productivity?" Ah. This time, the payoff is actually stated: "terrible mistake," "catastrophic company-killer" that "happen[s] so often." LOOK! THE BOOGEYMAN IS RIGHT HERE!

And then, Microsoft's fault. Of course. What isn't? It's here that we find that 'unverifiable claim' is just one of many classes of things that the author is using as a means to pander. Certainly, MS's interview tactics might have worked when initially introduced. Certainly they may have become a fad, and ineffective through overuse and the mere passage of time. But "fault" is a complex thing, and ultimately of little use, here. What if this was a deliberate plan by MS to wreck interviewing forever? So what? It gets you nowhere, except indignant, which is what the author seems to be counting on.

The article just goes on (and on) in this fashion. I won't bore you, but, now that you've got an idea of what the author is doing, go back to the article and find every spurious or unverifiable claim and ask yourself, "What could the author be trying to accomplish since he's clearly not trying to relate factual knowledge?" (Remember that the author included 9 links in as many paragraphs.)

The article is flippant, and is written in a breezy we-all-know-it's-true voice. It's apparently a moot point how tripe like this front-pages, but, with a little work, you can learn to quickly sift through crap like this and move on to meatier fare.

It's truly weird to imagine the Universe exploding from a point into a line, then into a planar region, and then into a three-dimensional domain.

The craft hasn't yet had it's maiden flight. It's an interesting concept. I've always liked the joined-wing concept from a structural standpoint but, if the wing nuts in my graduating class were to be believed, stability and control of that layout isn't trivial.

The essential reason that front-end development "should" be easier than back-end development is that back-end development is fundamentally algorithmic in nature and requires languages powerful enough to solve any solvable problem in computer science, while front-end development--and we really mean layout here--solves the limited problem of placement, layering, and coloring, and only requires a commensurate level of syntactic power for its implementation. I guess my point is that the front-end, or at least the layout portion of the front-end that CSS purports to solve, is so obviously so much less complicated than the back-end that you shouldn't have to point that out in order to deflect the accusation that it's just a naive expectation.

I realize it was probably tongue-in-cheek, but if anyone defends the complexity of CSS by equating it to a jobs program for web dorks, they've just ceded the point that CSS is improperly designed and needlessly complex.

I don't get this at all. Central to the design of HTML and the Web is the notion of democratic access to information and the ability for non-specialists to create it. Furthermore, the motivation behind CSS was to make it easier to do this work by separating the design from the information. CSS should therefore be, if not intuitive, at least easy to learn, use, and troubleshoot.

It's true, we need brain surgeons to do brain surgery, but we shouldn't need specialists to do basic things like vertical centering, convincing layout without tables, and overriding styles in nested elements.

We've come a long way from the intent of CSS if we're arguing that only specialists should use it.

I don't think the intent of the article was to answer the question of what to do, but rather to point out its currently intractable nature. Furthermore, he points out that he's even "done something about it," wrote a catch-all library, but that it hasn't had the anticipated or desired effect.

Clearly, something else is afoot here. Where next?

The point is that you won't ever gain the 40 lbs if you only eat the 20 cal/day extra.

Imagine you start eating the 20 cal/day extra. Initially, your weight climbs at 1 lb/year. However, by the time you gain that one pound, you have to spend an additional 11 cal/day to maintain that weight, so now you're gaining at a bit less than 1/2 lb/year. By the time you (asymptotically) approach having gained 20/11 ~ 1.9 pounds (which really only happens at infinity, but let's imagine you splurged to put yourself over), then you're at maintenance for your new weight. In order to gain more, you have to increase your uptake again.

As you gain weight, you accumulate metabolic load, so it takes a serious surplus of calories to continue to gain in the long term.

The steady-state condition of obesity requires a large ongoing surplus of calories to maintain.

Plausible fixes are incorporating more fiber in the diet to increase the feeling of satiety, reduce portions generally, cut out high-calorie drinks, and start exercising, even if only moderately but consistently.

Succinctly, the amount you "should" eat is not the amount to maintain your current weight, but the amount you need to maintain a healthy weight.

He neglects the metabolism one needs to maintain that fat tissue each and every day. One rough rule of thumb is 11/cal/day/pound to maintain your weight. Being 40 lbs overweight thus takes not just his (apparently trivial) 20 calories per day to gain that weight, but 440 additional calories per day to maintain it. If the weight was truly gained in a linear fashion, that's an average of 220 calories per day to maintain it, above the 20 per day to gain it. This is the real math. This is why weight gain and weight loss correspond to gross caloric intake and expenditure. The dynamic equilibrium of an organism's weight is a feedback mechanism in which the mass of the organism appears as the magnitude of the gain on the negative feedback term.

Someone who is truly obese, say someone who is 300 lbs who should 180 lbs, for example, is running an ongoing daily calorie surplus of 1320 calories through diet and lifestyle, not the 60 per day that Taubes would suggest. This is not an insignificant disparity, and this guy's work will be truly harmful wherever it is--help us all--taken seriously.

I could maybe take the rest of his ideas more seriously if he were not so obviously wrong right out of the gate.

That sumptuary laws are gone is not a weakening of the class distinction implied by suits, but a demonstration of their effectiveness.

>>No one aspires to that. Jeans, sweats and t-shirts are the new class separator, indicating which of us have earned the freedom from having to wear suits.

The key thing here is that there is a difference between aspiration and ability. Clothes unsuitable for labor merely indicate a commitment to an information occupation. Suits, expensive clothes that look good and are unsuitable for labor, also indicate a social commitment to the organization, a social commitment necessary to advance within the ranks.

In many, if not most, software firms, the way to success is upward through management. For a while, it was through stock options or stock grants. In the latter two scenarios, no social commitment was necessary, so come-as-you-are became the norm.

Come-as-you-are seems to survive for two other reasons. Firstly, the class distinction between partners & the board vs the line-level programmers has to do with ownership, and no amount of coding, whether performed in jeans or in a suit, can help you over that barrier within the organization. Secondly and consequently, the route across that social divide, for the line-level programmer, is via a start-up effort undertaken as a side project, outside the social structure of the worker's organization.

These trends are not heading in a direction that portends an infinite ocean of denim and sweats, but rather for a re-emergence of business casual or even smart casual in the workplace for programmers, and again for suits in the managing establishment. Suits are a signifier that someone is adept at controlling other humans and getting them to perform work for them. The ability to get computers to do useful (capital-capturing) work has upended this temporarily. As this algorithmic market commoditizes, or at least as the exploitable niches fill, the ability to control people instead of machines will become more important again. Even without commoditization and niche-capture, the fitness advantage of being able to control and manage an organization still portends a crystallization of an owning class, complete with ownership regalia, the suit.

The short of it is this: If you program for another organization and don't have an amazing side-project, you might consider the slacks-and-jacket smart casual look if you want to move ahead.

Actually, thorium reactors have a natural load-following capability due to their negative thermal coefficient of reactivity. You suck power out of them too fast, they cool, get denser, and the reaction rate increases, increasing power output.

In addition, shutting down a liquid salt reactor is literally a matter of pulling, actually melting, a plug. Simply overheat the core, melting the freeze plug, and the fuel falls into a subcritically shaped catchment tray. Reheat and reload and the reactor is up again. They're very easy to start and stop.

There's a wealth of information on the Net about these guys. I hope they get built!

First, what is suggested in this article is not a receipt, but a breakdown. A sales receipt for a car, for example, doesn't start out, "5 tires (4 on vehicle, 1 spare), 2 axles..." It just doesn't work that way. You buy "government" with your taxes.

Even if you did get an itemized receipt for a car, that would be far easier than what's proposed here. You can always just point to the car and account for the parts. The part is either there or not, and meets specifications or not. The reason that government and spending are these intractable issues is that the parts can be arguably there or not, and arguably working or not.

As long as you can't opt out of all or a portion of your taxes, in other words, as long as tax policy is sane, the only "receipt" you should get should specify that you paid the amount you calculated. Any other discussion or education about costs and allotment should happen in a forum that at least has a chance of shedding some real light.

Finally, if the receipt ever became the focus of public attention, politicians will just monkey with the categories until you're happy again. It will cease to be an information tool and become an influence tool. It will merely add another layer of intractability to an already byzantine bureaucratic system.

Assume the weights are resting on a surface, the pulleys and rope are massless, the pulleys are frictionless, and the system is maintained in quasi-equilibrium as the rope is pulled (steady state & small accelerations). In this case, the tension T in the rope is constant everywhere. Now, take a horizontal section through the ropes. ("Cut" them and replace the missing portions of the rope with the tension.) Each weight is experiencing an upward force of 2T.

When 2T >= 20, or T = 10, weight A begins to rise. Once a hits a stop, T must be increased to just above 20 to get Weight B to rise. Similarly, T just above 30 causes C to rise after B stops.

The "trick" with these pulley problems is to section the problem through the cables and show the tension, T. Then you've just got free body problems, in this case subject to the floor constraint.

Oh, also, while the first weight is being lifted, the floor beneath weight B experiences 40 - 20 = 20 units of force, and the floor under C experiences 60 - 20 = 40 units of force. Once B is lifted, the floor under C experiences 60 - 40 = 20 units of force. (Presuming that the labels are weights, and not masses.)

This is not anywhere near a correct description of a sonic boom. A sonic boom is not "a large burst when [an object] “breaks the sound barrier”." It is a phenomenon that is associated with any object traveling at or above the speed of sound. A related phenomenon governs the crack of a whip, but is associated with unsteady flow around a subsonic object. (Yes, you read that right. The business end of a bullwhip does not need to travel faster than the speed of sound to produce an audible crack.)

What really happens in a sonic boom is, for a slender body traveling above the speed of sound, the local flow is turned "suddenly," and the freestream is not able to accommodate it in a continuous fashion. There then arises an oblique shock wave, a very small region where fluid properties change nearly instantaneously; Direction, temperature, pressure, and entropy all change. Because the change is not isentropic, there is a hard lower limit to parasitic drag associated with supersonic motion through a fluid.

Interestingly, there is an expansion fan at the widest part of, for example, an aircraft body that is isentropic. It's a broad region where temperature, pressure, and direction change gradually. Thus, there are three 'sonic booms' when an aircraft passes overhead at a speed greater than the speed of sound. There is one sharp one as the nose passes you, due to a compression shock, and another softer one as the widest part passes you, due to an expansion fan, and a third one as the tail passes you, due to another compression shock. This is analogous to Mach diamonds in a rocket exhaust stream.

This is all for sufficiently lax definitions of "passing you," as the shock and expansion fans propagate at the local Mach angle. You'll be looking downstream at the local Mach angle when you hear the boom, if you're following the craft with your eyes.

"However, a year ago the team shrunk by half and our agility was severely limited. I’m omitting the internal reasons for this, as they are the typical big-company middle-management issues every software developer has."

This is one of the things that can happen to you when you work at Microsoft. You can start thinking that the terrible work problems you face are both "typical big-company...issues" and problems that "every developer" has to face.

First, many of these issues, and especially their particular flavor, are not general to the business. Second, not every developer works for a big company. You have to get out and work elsewhere for a while to see this.

There's a minimsft.blogspot.com, but is there an equivalent for Apple? For Google? If so, are they as well known? Do they draw knowledgeable commenters from within the ranks of the host/target company?

There are many better places to work than Microsoft. The place seemed truly pathological to me.

As to mission-critical parts, there is some leeway in the definition of the term that may explain the confusion. "Mission-critical" means, necessary for the survival of the crew and passengers. The "mission" is, get to the desired location if you can, but abort safely if you can't. For passenger planes, this means that if one engine goes out, the plan can land on the other one (or two or three). If the ailerons go out, the pilot can achieve roll control with rudder and throttle. If the INS goes out, the GPS can get you to a visual on a landing strip. In each of these cases, there is a single failure and nobody dies. Hence, these systems are not "mission-critical" where the "mission" is transporting crew and passengers without loss of life. That the plane goes somewhere specific is a fringe benefit, so to speak.

IIRC, the O-ring disaster had to do with the poor design and decision-making regarding temperature limits of the inadequate O-rings. Once hot combustion products get past an O-ring, there will be a failure. On a system where those hot gases can impinge on a fuel tank, there will be a catastrophic failure. On the STS, that makes those O-rings mission-critical.

Interestingly, some have said that the choice of Thiokol is the ultimate cause of that disaster, for precisely the reasons I talked about in my original comment. The SRBs reportedly had to be able to be shipped over the road from Thiokol's plant. In order to do so (instead of building a plant near the launch site), the boosters had to be segmented. Segments -> O-rings. That's pure rumor, afaik.

That said, it seems to me that the safety culture is a symptom, not an underlying cause, of the troubles that NASA is facing. Fundamentally, the political nature of NASA planning and acquisition drive NASA-designed systems toward complexity and high-performance. It is the complexity and performance of (especially) launch vehicles, combined with their stringent requirements and catastrophic failure modes that drives the safety culture. If they didn't obsess over safety, these monstrosities would fail every time.

Take a typical aerospace quality part that has $700 worth of material and labor in it. Because it is engineered with a factor of safety of, 1.05-1.2, for example, there is a $25-30,000 paper trail that documents the mine where the ore was extracted, who did the refining, what the heat treatment process was, where it was performed, and so on and so on ad infinitum ad nauseam.

Take the (awful) STS, for example. Congress was promised "airline-style" operations for this "space pickup truck." Well, an airliner has 0 mission-critical parts. A wing spar can fail and the skin should hold the wing together. The STS has over 700 mission-critical parts. For example, if an O-ring fails on a booster, everybody dies. If some foam hits the leading edge of the wing, everybody dies. High-perf mission-critical parts seem to be a result of the political need for the appearance of technology leadership.

I can almost guarantee you that the O-rings and leading edge pieces were manufactured in different states. High part-count is an artifact of the procurement process.

Elon Musk has talked about what makes SpaceX's pricing possible. (Note that they're offering launch services at 1/5 the cost of the shuttle.) He has a vertically integrated rocket factory. In one state. NASA could not build the Falcon 9 if it wanted to simply because they could not vertically integrate in one state. Every state would get a piece of the pie.

Algorithmically, because that's the crowd, here, you pay an exponential administrative cost for each of the factors: performance, lateral integration, and complexity. We've done all three.

NASA treats the fact that the Space Shuttle is the most complex machine ever built as a point of pride, for political reasons. It's actually our national shame and folly, and has set space access back 30 years.

Particularly your second point about developers ignoring jobs salaried at less than their current pay. Working in a toxic environment, or doing meaningless work, or staying where one's range of expression is limited, all have a cost. You won't know until you get there, but when you do, you will.

The idea that the OP put forward was that simply offering more will solve the problem of finding competent programmers. My comment was related to recent and compelling research into motivation in creative work. It seemed related. I'm not sure I mentioned my pay grade.

Having one's eye on the bottom line is different from being subject to an incentive program, and different still from being competent. The latter is the more to the point. Anyone can be greedy. Even the incompetent. In fact, due to the Dunning-Kruger effect, it might even be suspected that the incompetent are likely to feel more entitled to a higher wage than the competent.

I am not your buddy. However, I will offer the following friendly advice: You might enjoy the level of discourse on Reddit or Digg more than that on YC.

This seems to have something to do with the relationship between creative effort and intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation. The prospect of an incentive seems to gum up the creative works.

When you compound that with how difficult it is to recognize, let alone find good talent, especially with an interview process, you have a real conundrum.

Real conundrums are rarely solved by naive one-dimensional solutions like "offer more money." An actual solution would have to solve the dual problems of finding good help and not spoiling it with overt incentives.

Clearly there is a real problem here. Perversely, if you could solve it, you could make a lot of money!

If the "victim" didn't want to get raped, she should have dressed less provocatively, not gone out after dark, and not had those drinks.

It's the same argument, and it's just as wrongheaded and lame.

The argument fails in both cases for the same reason: It ignores the larger social context of behavior. It's ironic that the "you shouldn't have trusted social media" argument is sociopathic and antisocial. It fails to see the social nature of social media!

The complex matrix of interdependencies that make civilization (writ large) and social media (writ small) possible depend upon a notion of trust that depends upon both parties seeing beyond "I'll do whatever I can to you if I can get away with it." The relationship between a user of a social media site and its user has to be one of trust because the media site holds the power.

If FB really cannot hold up its end of the deal, then it really isn't the social media site that will fill that need. It's positively stupid of Zuckerberg to think he's going to get good data in the long run by betraying his users now. FB will either be replaced via market forces or destroy the social niche through its monopoly. Bluntly, people will choose another option if they can or sabotage their data if they can't.

I think one way to get traction would be to expand a profile or messaging feature of an existing site that has a reputation for trustworthiness with user data, and then fork the feature after it reaches critical mass.

Unless, of course, the chemical process that converts coal to oil is exothermic, which is not impossible in principle. In this case, the energy conversion efficiency would be less than one, but it still might cost less than changing the oil-based infrastructure so that it consumes coal directly.

That's a little harsh, so let me elaborate. It's a matter of explicit policy at MS, and at least implicit policy everywhere, that interviewers are looking for candidates that will be successful at the company. This unpacks to "candidates who will do excellent work with minimal supervision and stay and grow in their careers with the company." If we grant this (I think uncontroversial) goal of the interview process, then we can measure each of his rules by how well they serve that goal, and ask generally if there are any rules at all that will ultimately serve it.

While "Know Your Stuff" is trivial and uncontroversial (and therefore not worth mentioning), the remainder of his points 2-7 amount to telling you how to say your shibboleths. I mean, if you just knew the answer to the problem (for example, if you had seen it before), could you just present the solution and be done? Or do you have to "Describe the Algorithm?"

The smoking gun, however, is point 7:

This is just good psychology. Make the interviewer feel important by spending a few minutes at the end asking about the interviewer's team and work.

He's telling you to suck up. To him. Personally. Sometimes you just get a freebie, as in this case. So many of the author's implicit fantasies leak through his prose that we can easily dismiss him. To name two:

First, he believes that there can be "7 tips" for passing an effective interview process, not one that is mere kabuki. An effective interview process screens out the stylistic theater. This is an ultimately unsolvable problem, unfortunately. Candidates always simply rehearse their shibboleths.

Second, the author thinks that he's arrived and that he's reduced to practice the means of telling who else has arrived. Implicitly, this means that he views how he's judged himself ready is the approved way to judge others. The circularity of that belief is the playground of Dunning & Kreuger.

If he wants either to find truly valuable candidates or to be able to assess himself critically in a manner that will prod him to grow, he needs to relinquish his rule-based and ultimately smug beliefs about how to evaluate himself and others.

What an incredibly simplistic analysis! 'Analysis' is too strong of a word; this is mere polemic. It is clearly not the case that government completely corrupts education. It is further untrue that any of the consequences described can be attributed entirely to the fact that government runs public education.

The parent merely asserts that government 'corrupts' education and then lists a bunch of alleged educational maladies. Many of these maladies are clearly due to the fact that schools are institutions and that they serve pluralistic communities. The point about bureaucracy is especially vacuous. Can we even imagine a school or school district, public or private, without imagining an attendant bureaucracy? Another poster mentioned Marx; is it lost on the parent that Marx talks about, iirc, alienation due to private bureaucracies as well as government ones?

The real causes of problems in education will not turn out to be so simple as 'government.' The real problems will turn out to hinge partly on the peculiar aspects of government bureaucracies vs. private bureaucracies for sure, but will also stem from economic issues like poverty and hunger, social and socio-economic issues like the amount of time parents spend away from home working, and cultural issues like the value placed on education and civic responsibility by contemporary culture, and many other possibly irremediable causes.

Finally, the form of the original 'argument' offered is this: There is an overly simple problem, it has an overly simple cause, and the solution is simply to remove that cause. The truth is that both the causes and effects of real-world situations are both more complex and more intractable than that. That any adult should fall for such a blatant oversimplification is perhaps a clearer indicator of the trouble with current corporatist culture than the addled mind of Michael Moore could ever conceive.

William Kamkwambe did not put you to shame. With any luck, he will have inspired you! You and I live in an environment saturated with information and technology. Maybe you'll be inspired to accept a slightly less extravagant lifestyle in exchange for some charitable donations? Maybe you'll be inspired to use your skills to do some work overseas where it could alleviate real suffering?

The beauty of this story is that it makes both the plight of many people and the prospect of manifold solutions seem more real. What you do or do not do with William's contribution will be your source of pride or shame.

From the article, it sounds like we're coming to, indeed are in, a first-world industrial and information economy where we've learned that children's natural levels of executive function may not develop sufficiently, in the presence of the gadgetry available, to allow them to compete in the workplace and cope with the demands of a technological society. We're also, apparently, in a place where we think we have some idea how to intervene in what appears to be a caring and benign way to direct children's play in a direction that fosters this key cognitive function.

Far from being unexpected, this seems very natural to me. We wear clothes because we live in inclement places. We cook our food because our brains need more nutrition than raw food allows. And now we direct the play of our offspring to better equip them for their expected environment. This is no more indicative of some untenable circumstance than the fact that we don't live in huts and dig for grubs on the plains of Africa.

Is this here because it was prescient and we're seeing exactly what was described in the article? Or is it here to show how wrong this guy was?

These aren't smart-mouthed internet questions. I really don't know where we stand now compared to this guy's prognostications of doom.

Any ideas?