skyraider

The entire economy is centrally planned.

Edit: Social coordination of the means of production, as opposed to coordination by market forces, is in fact the definition of socialism. Whether it's done by a state or various small groups doesn't matter - both are just variations of socialism. Both are about economic planning.

The awkward thing about ideology is that it doesn't have a built-in feedback loop for measuring performance and adjusting accordingly.

"There's no technical reason that a central planner can't do the same."

As another commenter indicated, this is not necessarily both possible and efficient to do with any known model of a computer. Also, to the extent that market economies provide consumer and elite wants and preferences as inputs, they are morally superior to command economies that provide only the elites' wants and preferences as inputs.

Sense of duty, or the realization that you are powerless to resist the iron grip of the state? Maybe both..

Central planning/socialism really is a problem. North Korea would benefit greatly from a superior system of organizing the means of production. Their centrally-planned food system, for example, isn't working very well.

Check the Who's Hiring and Seeking Freelancer posts here. The November ones may still be active. Also, just to re-emphasize, you should post a list of skills in this thread.

One problem with "go do a task" interviews is that you can't gauge a company's interest in you, the candidate, before doing them.

I remember doing a task-based interview once, getting an offer, and having it retracted after I asked to meet with the team before accepting (they just moved on to another developer who would accept without meeting the team first). This was a reputable, respected small company. Clearly, task-based interviews let them determine who was competent and who wasn't, but I was the only one who was invested in the interview process.

Payment helps and it's great to see some companies pay for project interview that aren't even directly related to their technical needs. The company invests money and the candidate invests time.

Sure, but the crime and punishment attitude was around before private prisons. They are more like contributors to the problem than the original cause.

It would be great to shut down the private prison industry but let's be realistic about the extent to which lobbying dollars influence the maximum sentence in legislation nation-wide. I would attribute long sentences mainly to poor thinking.

A few points:

- Many former judges are prosecutors. Prosecutors are trained to get the maximum 'sustainable' sentence. This means looking at what the law says and enforcing it. Fault: legislature.

- If the law says that sentences should or must be X long, sentences are going to be around X long. Outside of the 3 strikes system and the California Supreme Court's ruling, how is this the judiciary's fault? There is a severe lack of empathy among the public, legislators, and in the judiciary for sure, but the legislators passed the laws.

- How much, really, does sentence length have to do with re-election? Maybe a few really informed voters on either side will vote on the sentencing issue only but I really doubt this.

There's a huge difference between 'going to jail' and life in prison.

Is it really hard to make a decision on sentencing in nonviolent crimes that you wouldn't personally lock someone in a box for?

If they're not a danger to society, they do not belong in a box.

I think an effective way to frame this issue is:

Would you consider these people so dangerous that you would personally build a small concrete box and forcibly keep them inside for many hours a day for the rest of their lives? Or, is that how you would treat your children if they committed some minor, nonviolent, kinda-maybe-bad act?

No reasonable person would - the moral decision above is clear. Would you pay for someone else to do this?

We are brothers and sisters in humanity, and we elect people who write these laws and treat fellow people like this (and/or refuse to reform the US Sentencing Commission). We are to blame.

I think carriers today are like the battleships of yesterday.

They look imposing but modern tech (swarms in the former case and, well, enough Fairy Swordfish biplanes in the latter) defeats them.

Submarines are what we need IMO.

It does have ground attack capability and given its stealth capabilities, is probably a good fit for the role and maybe even a better fit than other ground-attack aircraft in the US arsenal.

The Australians picked the F111 for its range. There is a good discussion of the politicking that lead to the selection on the "Replacing the Canberra" section of this wiki page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Dynamics_F-111C

Apparently the criterion for range was the ability to bomb Jakarta. Sounds arbitrary but I have no idea.

Sure, fighters, bombers and drone work excellently when your adversaries have few if any functional modern aircraft, or when their ground defenses are so vulnerable and/or disorganized that (often risky) strikes can take them out. However, there is more than one type of adversary.

It is important to control the air, or the adversary will be able to deny the air and probably the ground and/or sea to you. In that sense, whatever is playing a huge offensive role very likely depends on air superiority.

RAND runs studies on the effectiveness of the (quickly aging) US fighter fleet. There are quite a few of these out there and generally the conclusion is that US aircraft like F16s (cheap multirole fighter) and F15s (fighter/bomber or air superiority fighter) designed (and sometimes even built) in the 70s and 80s, even when equipped with modern electronics, don't have a clear advantage (assuming they don't fall apart on the way to the battle - http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-f156nov...).

SEEKING WORK: Remote (NYC based). Available to meet or kick off projects at client locations.

We (Databracket) are an experienced distributed team who do full-stack web dev, distributed systems, architecture and algorithms work. We most often work in Python (extremely efficient), Node.js, C++ and Go (very efficient).

Our specialities are distributed communications & architecture (we have experience with techs from ZeroMQ to BitTorrent), security (we have worked with SSH protocol internals, crypto, architecting secure data storage schemes), Postgres and PostGIS, image processing, and distributed systems architecture in general.

Some of our work:

http://databracket.com (our own products)

http://cloudless.io (scaling lib for ZeroMQ)

Please get in touch with me at zach@databracket.com.

I think the interesting lesson here is that even marketplaces should be competitively constructed - i.e., there should be significant price-competitive pressure to deliver goods and services; just letting the government to facilitate marketplaces removes price competition from the marketplace itself.

I'm not suggesting that the government create a meta-marketplace for health insurance marketplaces. Just that it isn't as efficient as some people think to introduce a powerful federal competitor with 'unfair advantages' like public funding into the health insurance selection market.

It's also not Fox News - it's Fox Business, which has a partially separate staff.

Don't you know? If a Fox-related outlet does something funny, it's special because we don't agree with their political leanings. cd groupthink && ./mock && ./ridicule.

Agree. They probably cringe at the over-attention paid to being right about things that are beside the point; long-form citations for posts of less than 100 characters; the passive aggressive Snowden comments on articles about, like, Gmail addons.

Fox Business is just trying to explain GitHub to its audience, which is approximately the same as the CNBC audience or the audience of any other business network. I don't see anyone making fun of the GitHub CEO for explaining his product as the 'electricity' of today's tech-based companies.

This is kinda helpful, but it's only for tech-y cities and only for certain skills, and only for startup-y jobs: https://angel.co/salaries

To simplify:

Concurrent tasks complete in the same, overlapping time period.

Parallel tasks run at literally the same time.

Poetic. And a good point. The social vibe of a coffee shop gives me energy, and going to the same environment with the same people every day just drains that away.

This is why I find it incredibly creepy and insulting when founders of small companies try the 'true sense of ownership' or 'we hope you are as excited to work on this as we are' lines. If you want me to be as excited as you are, give me the same stake in the outcome of my work that you have in the outcome of yours.

Wait, why did they offer you options instead of a raise? I just want to hear why that reason tempered your enthusiasm. (I don't get excited about options since I have to buy them, but they can be more incentivizing, at least for me, than salary in the rare case that they are given on fair terms.)

Is there a scale somewhere where I could calculate the expected percentage a very good negotiator with appropriate leverage would be able to extract in the best-case scenario, based on employee # and some metric of value-add?

We did not consider that, but thanks, I will take a look at ShareJS. Minisync is designed only for a non-concurrent single-user use case where a user fetches a document at point A in time, makes changes, and then submits the document to the server at point B.

In this case, we intelligently resolve attribute names to SQLAlchemy mapper class instances or mapped attributes. We let SQLAlchemy do the SQL generation.

Soon, we'll open source an AngularJS plugin that lets you just push/delete from regular old JavaScript objects in order to generate the diffset the server needs. We're hoping we don't have to implement a protocol, and will instead be able to just submit a list of changes to JavaScript objects.

Hi, one of the authors here. We realized that for many CRUD web apps, a library that lets you synchronize "diffsets" (lists of changes the client makes to JavaScript objects) can replace server-side controllers and views, so you don't end up doing MVC on both the server and client.

We reduced web apps to a set of authorization rules and models. You can interact with document-style objects on the client, but keep the power of relational datastores on the server.

It's a relational Firebase for CRUD apps, if you will.

Would love to get some feedback. Thanks!

Hey folks, some context here. I needed a cache that will:

- Keep the site up when the web server is down

- Allow for logged-out users to see "login" and logged-in users to see session info (for example), while still caching most of the page, without using the outdated ESI standard

- Be delivered over a CDN

- Allow for hotfixes

- Cache must be spun up, not passively created by GETs, to avoid the issue of high average load times if you have a fairly even distribution of visitors

There isn't a solution on the market (that I have found) that accomplishes all of these things. I would really appreciate thoughts on how you're currently doing caching and whether this service would be useful.

Not getting a wage equal to your productivity at the margin may be considered exploitation in several schools of microeconomics. If an employee provides value X and receives wages X-10, the amount of exploitation is 10.

However, depending on who you talk to, workers are not 'exploited' in a loose sense because they can move to another organization that pays the prevailing wage. But the fact remains that the prevailing wage may be below the worker's contribution to organizational productivity at the margin. Thus, my econ professor still taught that exploitation, in a formal sense, occurs whenever wage(worker) < marginal_productivity(worker).