psaintla

So they are hoping people will make medical decisions based on advice from an anonymous doctor whose credentials you cannot verify and who does not have prescribing ability? Is this serious?

I believe it, I've just been skeptical of their reviews. It's good to know their auto reviews have credibility

Do people take anything consumer reports says seriously anymore? I was under the impression they started losing all credibility when they had a series of reviews where they ranked name brand products higher than their generic counterparts then it turned out the generic and name brand products were exactly the same (in some cases having come right from the same assembly lines) but with different badges.

Thank you for your response, that's good reasoning and I definitely see it works well for your use case. It just seems as if multiple companies are coming up with solutions to work around deficiencies in PHP which is causing fragmentation in the language. That's not going to stop me from using this extension in a new project I'm starting though. Are there any areas of this extension you'd like to see improved since I find the best way for me to understand an extension internally is to work on it.

I'd really like to know why they chose to do this instead of trying to make spltypes and type hinting more robust. Annotations seem like an ugly way of doing this.

I agree with most of what you're saying but you can easily deal with your second issue by contacting former employees and former co-workers of people working for the startup via linkedin. Many people feel this is a bit stalkerish but if I'm asked to provide personal references to a future employer I'm going to seek out personal references for the people I will be working with as well.

They should just be International Patenting Machine

You realize The President got his very first intelligence briefing the day before that press conference right?

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/11/05/obama-to-rec...

I agree with your points, I'd personally prefer full transparency over anything else but that is something that needs to be hashed out by the legislative branch, which conveniently gets very little blame. If any of us have an issue with the way government surveillance is performed we shouldn't be looking at the President, we should be looking at Congress since they control the budget and can pass laws to limit actions they find are in legal grey lines.

Does it really have to be that cynical? Don't you think it is entirely possible pre-2008 Obama's opinions were formed with the same information as the rest of us and post-2008 Obama received more information (national security briefings) that completely blew away his belief system? I don't agree with much of what the Obama administration has done regarding domestic and international surveillance but I always feel like we should give ALL Presidents a little slack when it comes to these things because they have two burdens that the rest of us do not. Information and the responsibility to act on that information.

Kevin Spacey is a notoriously private person because he feels that it makes his acting more believable. The chance of him agreeing to meet employees at Netflix is pretty low but it would kind of cool.

Easily, I once worked at a place where everyone wanted to work on the hardest problems. I could have done that also but instead I recognized that there was a lot of grunt work that needed to be done in order to get our product out and meet our deadlines so I volunteered to get that stuff done. The director of our department took note of this and when bonus time came around I received a significantly larger bonus than everyone else and was thanked for my dedication to doing what needed to be done. The lesson being that, you reward people who do what it takes to get the job done not people who are self-serving glory hounds looking to boost their resume with hard problems.

I wish I could say the same about NYC startups. I once worked for a place where an employee left to a competitor which infuriated the CEO. As a result he had a meeting threatening to track down anyone who left and get them fired. In addition he made everyone sign a non-compete agreement or risk being fired. This startup is still around and doing just fine. I've heard similar stories from other nyc startups.

Receiving unemployment happens very quick these days, typically under two weeks.

Because it is easier to bully someone to do what you want.

No it doesn't, two weeks pay at that salary doesn't get you anything unemployment won't cover.

I always hate reading about services like this because I work in the medical industry and something like this would be unbelievably beneficial but will never be implemented because no sane company would ever sign a business associates agreement with the fines that they would get if there was a breach.

How about an obligation to not shift your employee cost of living onto the government?

So you want to make it even easier than it already is for corporations to control govt?

BuddyMedia was losing money also it didn't stop salesforce from buying them for 600M http://www.businessinsider.com/look-inside-buddy-media-money...

There are many reasons so many papers are not reproducible.

1.) The prospective data collection methods used in a lot of studies are deeply flawed and worse aren't documented.

2.) The retrospective data used in many studies is poorly validated and the quality is rarely a concern for most universities.

3.) The people who publish these papers are very intelligent, most far more intelligent than I am, but you'd be surprised how many of them don't have a very good handle on basic statistics. Not because they aren't smart enough to learn but mostly because they have no interest in it.

4.) There is a lot of pressure put on researchers to publish papers even if they aren't ready and as a result mistakes are made, there really needs to be less of an emphasis on the quantity of papers that are published and more emphasis on quality.

For anyone who might be interested in such things, if you ever find yourself locked in a dungeon with nothing but a computer loaded with every journal article ever published you can find articles involving similar cohorts from the exact same universities that have different results.

If you aren't familiar with the system why make the claim that doctors have control because regulation says so?

Strictly speaking this is not controlled by any regulation You simply aren't going to get the experience necessary to perform certain surgeries with any proficiency without the aide of the gatekeepers. Also the reason for the steep price differences from state to state is partly due to a lack of a supply of doctors with a booming population of people who are seeking more medical care so I would argue decreasing the barrier to entry into the medical field while not decreasing standards should be a part of the plan.

It's really not that simple and I say this as someone who works in health care. Doctors control how many new doctors there will be in any given medical discipline and they do this via accreditation, residencies and fellowships. You can introduce all of the free market forces and relaxed regulations you want but until doctors no longer control the supply of doctors you're wasting your time.

There is a reason for that, real estate is an extremely high turnover occupation with an extremely low barrier to entry. I know this because when I was 18 (a very long time ago :-) ) I wrote and eventually sold the rights to real estate inventory and CRM software to a small real estate company in NY to pay for my college education. Before I wrote the software I wanted to gain domain knowledge in the industry so that I could write an application that actually met the needs of the real estate industry and also so that people would take me seriously as a "kid".

So I went to get my real estate brokers license which required I take a course that was a few hours, a course exam and then a state exam. It took less than two weeks for me to be qualified to help people make the biggest financial decision of their life and I learned much less from the course than I did from a few books I picked up from the bookstore.

Serious question to you or anyone else who uses schemaless databases. Why is the ability to change schemas on the fly a good thing? Having worked at two companies that did, it was nothing but a recipe for disaster in large groups. Code that was dependent on expecting an integer or a string and not a collection would constantly break because a developer in some other group decided to store a collection instead of a the original data type that was expected. Schemaless databases required more documentation to track changes made between groups and led to more bugs because we could never be guaranteed of what kind of data we would be receiving. I've always thought of a database schema as a contract that makes guarantees to all applications. Why would you want to be able to break that contract?

I'm going to completely ignore the ridiculousness of the author's claims and stick with talking about @ suppression for a moment...

Not this again! I've been working with PHP for over 10 years and seen @ suppression used at companies in the most ridiculous ways imaginable. The most common, and I believe incorrect, way @ suppression is used is when using fopen. Why do people do it so often? Probably because it says you can do so right in the php.net manual http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.fopen.php and has so for years. I've really lost track of how many bugs I've come across over the years in production code that could be traced back to someone @ suppressing fopen warnings. I don't care if you read some blog where the author claims using @ suppression will give you a magical 1000% increase in performance. JUST DON'T DO IT.

If there is scalar type hinting I wonder if that will lead to real method overloading by adding methods with different signatures or if devs will have to stick with the __call magic method, which I despise.

I am very aware that it is trivial to handle notices, errors and warnings. The problem is that PHP does not do this by default which allows people to exploit undocumented behavior.

As for handling invalid input, I think you should actually check what some of the functions output some day.

For example, decbin clearly states that the input should be an integer but if I pass it a string.....

Code/ctsr » php -r 'echo decbin("invalid input");' 0%

Zero is clearly not a NULL value. This is one I ran into this morning with php 5.3.8, I've seen this issue crop up in many other functions, they don't return NULL. Some return NULL, some return 0, some return '', some return '0', some return FALSE.

I'm perfectly fine with the robustness principle being applied, but it seems as if it gives people who write poorly thought out projects a convenient excuse for bad design decisions. I've been using PHP since the early 4.x days, so I've seen the project change over the years and I can honestly say I don't think the robustness principle was ever consciously applied across the project, it just ended up that way. If it was a conscious decision then there would be at a very minimum a standard output for invalid input across all functions. Instead, every function returns something different (FALSE, 0, '', '0', NULL). Sometimes the output for invalid data is documented, sometimes it isn't, sometimes it changes without any notice or modification of the documentation. This doesn't seem like a design choice to me.