sabbatic13

What I think you meant to say is that Latin does not use pronouns in its verbal conjugations. That's a feature of most ancient Indo-European languages. It did, of course, have a full suite of pronouns used in other contexts.

If you ever have studied comparative-historical linguistics, you know the abbreviation is frequent and necessary. So, the question is, what are the chances that someone familiar with it might use it and not even think about it? Your response assumed it was fully conscious. In any event, we're in the land of acronym pandemonium here, between CS, Data Science, Web terms, etc. PIE is a drop in a big bucket.

Unfortunately, y'all gets used as a singular pronoun as well.

Selling a t-shirt with a parody logo of a company isn't the same as a company presenting itself with a parody logo of an another company in the same space.

Well said. For most problems in the world, people are quick to point to a certain country, race ethnicity, religion, etc. as the most glaring example or source, when in fact people are the problems. No part of humanity can boast the largest amount of any vice or virtue. As a species, we're just faulty.

Well, point taken, but when it comes to doing things under the radar on the web, you must admit, Russians are just really good. For a certain slice of the online population, such laws won't change much.

And people who willfully confuse a couple dopey activist legislators from the state's goofiest city with the entire state can...what you said. Also, none of that hate for NYC, or did you not bother to read that this BS is coming from both states, or more precisely, from a few dumb legislators based in the most full-of-themselves cities in the country, backed by politicians in law enforcement uniforms who can't stop crime, so they advocate putting the burden elsewhere?

That's what I was thinking. As I read, I kept thinking "but you're just making up terms and definitions and pretending that there's some objective standard." Even for fairly standard tech terminology, usage drifts all over the place.

This should be getting more upvotes. It's a very interesting topic that provides a framework for understanding our society better and ourselves.

It's not the large tech companies that poach employees from small startups, it's other startups. Small startups pose more of a threat to the large, established companies. Some tech giants successfully obtain people by dumping several money trucks on certain sorts of tech talent, precisely because it is so hard to keep them from starting or joining some small venture, which will provide them with autonomy, large impact, and a chance to become fabulously wealthy. The rather cartoonish notions of startup glory also appeal to many.

There's a reason that every company in tech is trying to b.s. people that they either are _really_ a startup (when they are not), or that they are _like_ a startup (yeah, right).

Well, I think the idea that one can deform natural language at will to conform to usage in code, and that this is somehow analytically superior is what strikes people as pretentious. Natural language is rather more complex than artificial language. The inability to understand what rules it has and deal with its ambiguities is simply a failure.

I don't personally care, unless it's in a context where the expectation is that the language will be, well, "normal." I just thought I'd tease out what I think is being the criticism.

In any event, this is a matter of punctuation, not syntax. As for nesting quotations, you want to alternate between single and double quotation marks. It's pretty rare that we go beyond two levels of nested direct quotations in English, so it's rarely ambiguous.

The main problem with the article, I think, is that it tries to align the oppositions between native-born and new comer, tech and non-tech, rich and poor, educated and not, advantaged ethnic groups and disadvantaged. They don't really align very well, though they do some, and each deserves its own discussion, if one is really going to talk about social problems.

Actually good vs. bad advertising is tricky.

When ads are very targeted and try to show you things the system thinks you are looking for, you get a small number of relevant ads vs. a bunch of spam ads. In that sense, they are actually very good and can be useful for some people. Sometimes, they can even help you discover things you couldn't find through a direct search.

On the other hand, the data collection and analysis you have to do in order to target effectively seems bad to most people.

I'd rather have my privacy and control of my own data than get targeted ads, but most people don't seem to have the same awareness or concern.

In any event, that quote isn't quite accurate. Behaviorally targeted ads are the result of data obtained from people actively searching for something or browsing as well. (Behavioral targeting is really where the money in in FBX). They may be showing you something you don't know you want, but more often, they are showing you what the system thinks you were looking for but couldn't find.

From a quick read of the census website linked, it appears that what unemployment data there is comes from the 2000 Census, whereas income data is much more current and numerous. That's rather concerning. It's also the case that unemployment numbers are always underreported, something which gets worse during periods of extended unemployment. The government bases its estimates primarily on unemployment benefits filings. People who are unemployed beyond the period of available benefits don't get counted. So, the unemployed are somewhat factored into the study, but it doesn't seem like a very clear picture of the situation. That's my prima facie judgement at least.

It's a Latin noun, derived from an adjective, that literally means "a something of some size." That's it. The first meaning in English is "some quantity." Uses which denote or connote 'large' or 'small' are secondary extensions which depend on context.

"Quantum leap" connotes an unpredictability in the magnitude of the change in common usage. Over time, the understanding has drifted a bit to include, usually, the idea of significant magnitude.

The CIA is a poor example. The motivation isn't there, it's not really their style, and they are rather incompetent. More importantly, if it were an American plot of some kind, the US news media wouldn't be ignoring it, they'd be going on and on about a Ukrainian Democratic Revolution etc. etc. To orchestrate something like this and not hook it up with massive Western support would be futile.

The specific rationale wouldn't be something one could really explain in less than a few pages for each of those.

The overarching reason is that each of these books had a huge effect on intellectual and cultural history across a long span of time. To demonstrate that, one would need quite a bit of space, and ultimately it would amount to giving someone an entire education in the intellectual history of most of the world over the last 2500 years.

It seems rather futile in any event. Pointing out the highlights of Plotinus' influence would involve referring to a large number of other authors and texts and movements that are even less well known, e.g. Marsilio Ficino, the Corpus Hermeticum, and Renaissance Neo-Platonism.

I am pretty sure that for most of the authors, however, a good Wikipedia entry will throw out a few sentences that give someone an idea.

The problem with these places is what happens, when you need to hire people to build your company. The tech world is full of impressionistic statements like 'they have a startup scene,' but when you start getting numbers on available talent, you'll see you're putting yourself in a bad position.

To take an example where I have better data, people have commented on the vibrant and growing startup scene in Santiago, Chile. Maybe it is vibrant and growing, but the total number of people professionally employed in software development (devs, testers, manager, product managers, etc.) is only about 2000.

Split that 2000 into 50 different companies (and 50 tech companies would often be held up as proof of viability for the location), eliminate the high percentage with the wrong skill set for your company, and how likely is it, really, that you could build an engineering team of 20 and sustain that in the face of attrition over time?

St. Louis isn't going to have more than a few thousand of the same sort of people. Most of them are also not products of local universities with strong engineering programs relevant to most of the kinds of software behind most tech startups these days. The supply therefore is not growing at a steady rate or being replenished.

75 startups in one location? What happens, when the half that make it past the founder stage need to hire 3-4 people? Not only are there only a few available devs of any skill level available for each, but they all have dozens of options on the same block.

For startups, a higher percentage of engineers in an area employed by companies of 50-people or less actually makes hiring harder. In such a situation, they all have options of more or less equal value, and you have little to distinguish yourself from the others. The fact that SV has Google, Yahoo, Mcsft, etc. alongside a ton of mid-sized and smaller companies makes it easier.

If you've ever tried to recruit for a startup, think about how often you bring up ownership, autonomy, "startup culture," etc. as selling points? How well does that work in an environment, when nearly everyone already has that where they are?

This is just a quick set of reflections, but the overall point I hope is made. The truth is that staffing your startup is one of the most brutal forms of competition your business will experience. You're one of many, many players competing for an extremely scarce resource that very few founders even know how to identify, qualify, or retain, once they've got them.

If you ever plan on building your company beyond a small team of friends and local referrals, you should be doing everything you can to stack the deck in your favor. The Bering Sea may be an expensive and crowded area for gold prospecting, but you're still more likely to find gold there than in Lake Michigan.

Bullshit.

4500 undergrads, 1500 graduate students, and hundreds of faculty, and you think that every little paper they give or study they conduct is a product of the whole in a meaningful sense?

The study was practically just a thought experiment by two grad students looking at something outside of their expertise. It _only_ got any attention, because it was about Facebook, and so the media saw a chance to sell more ads. For the same reason, they used the metaphor of pars pro toto as a rhetorical ploy, because Princeton vs. Facebook sells more ads. Like many among the unthinking masses, you got punked by it.

But he's sure to get his own History channel special now, airing right after the alien guy.

In my experience, some narcissism is a requirement to be a startup CEO. And I don't mean that in a smart-ass way. The incessant representation of the company seems to require a strong identification of one's self with the company. It's sort of an enabling trait which has some potential negatives consequences. Among the latter would the perspective that sees everyone around them in the company as an extension of their will. Getting to the point of being a "real" CEO also usually requires some more-than-usual self-involvement and identification of one's endeavor with one's self. Good CEOs (by my standards) just have a touch of this. Many have too much. As you indicate, there's a certain logic to it.

I wouldn't even qualify this by saying "normal." VCs are hyper-capitalists. Other people give them money with the mandate to turn a profit...period. That's the whole job. Most of us "normal" tech folk get migraines looking at the silly crap that gets funded, but a VC's job really isn't about anything else, and couldn't be ethically, unless the people who pay into the fund wanted it that way.

The investors who do the stuff that I suppose one would call meaningful tend to be investing their own money or their friends' money, or it's a slice of a regular fund used in a way similar to corporate donations. Plenty of VCs do care about tech and meaningful endeavors, but that has to be secondary, unless they are playing with their own money.

There seems to be a lot of misconceptions about what the business of investment is, when it comes to venture capital, for some reason. I've spent enough time around the activity and the people that I can see what it is and the logic of it. I don't really like it, but then I don't like a lot of things in our culture.

This fluff piece doesn't quite make sense. The tech sector is and has been for some time spread across most areas of the greater Bay Area. While nothing North of Menlo Park or in Alameda county is part of the "Silicon Valley," the latter is just a PR term. Tech companies are densest from SF down to San Jose. "Silicon Valley" is neither a distinct geographical nor an economic unit.

There are some "sociological" differences across areas in that range with respect to the types of the companies and types of employees. Ignoring those trends to cause staffing problems, e.g. building a new consumer web company in South is rather hard, while trying to start a new semiconductor company in SF would be challenging to say the least. Many people immigrate here without understanding that, and problems ensue.

The "San Francisco Bay Area" is a large and diverse region with a population of roughly 6 million. About 10% of those people are directly involved at tech companies, and about 5% are the hard-to-find developers, product managers, testers, etc. Sadly this one minority sector of the economic absolutely dominates most sub-regions here, and it's economic power is so much greater than all the other people together, that a host of problems arise.

The presence of the bay and the surrounding hills also kinds of screws things up. Space is limited, and travel between certain areas can be time-consuming. If you consider that roughly 1/3 of the people currently residing in the Bay Area currently are not from here originally, then throw in the vast economic changes tech caused over the last 30 years, you can start to appreciate that maybe long-term planning for the present state wasn't quite manageable.

In any event, the rhetoric about "sovereignty" and its similes is always self-serving and posturing. Decentralization of tech, or the decentralization of L.A.'s entertainment industry for that matter, would be a boon to everyone. Only self-important people who want to believe that their region or state or country or village is the center of the freaking universe fail to accept that. It would be better for everyone if the Bay Area were simply one of a set of 20 or so equally large and vibrant centers of tech.

For those who think Linear B irrelevant to Hacker News except as trivia, as a non-technical person at a software company, I was casually consulted by a member of the W3C CSS3 group on arcane writing systems. One of the questions was "Do Aegean numerals and Linear B symbols need to rotate?" My response was "I'm uncertain off hand, but let me check my linear B book at home." Never thought I'd say something like that at a SW company. In any event, I did check my books, and neither Aegean numerals nor the somewhat related Linear B needed to rotate.

Oh, and if you are frustrated by the fact that you can't rotate cuneiform in CSS3, that's my fault.

The last time I checked (ca. early 2012), there were tens of thousands of untriaged bugs in the Moz Bugzilla instance. Add to that unresolved bugs in the 3M+ lines code base and multiple platforms supported, and the job is obviously huge. There simply aren't enough people working on such things to keep up.

It is an open source project, so there is something that one can do about such things beyond complaining.