steve_g

What does it mean to be a Trump supporter? What if you didn't like him, but you voted for him as the lesser evil? Are you a supporter? What if you didn't vote for him, but you still prefer him over Clinton?

Are you a supporter if you hope that he will be a good president now that he's been elected? Because, you know, he's going to be the president anyway and it would be nice to have a good one.

Also - what are the "racist statements" of Donald Trump? Is it really true that he made "racist statements"? Or are you talking about statements that might be racist if given the most uncharitable interpretation?

I think there are two fundamental questions: Is there such thing as right and wrong? And if so, how does one know what is right and what is wrong?

A commenter below says right and wrong are only human constructs, but that raises the question of "which humans?" Arthur Leff calls this the "grand sez who?" Is right and wrong a preference, as I might prefer meat to cheese? If so, then who's to say my preferences are more or less valid than anyone else's?

Most people act as if there is a right and wrong beyond preference. Public discourse is full of criticism of "wrong" behaviors and attitudes. Is it wrong to be racist (for example)? Is it wrong to dislike cheese? Are those two different? Why?

I think they are different, and I'd bet most people do, too. If right and wrong are merely human preferences, then no one's "right" is better than my "right." If right and wrong is a human construct we're just arguing about which cheese tastes better.

But I do believe that right and wrong exist, and I believe that God determines what is right and wrong. My motivation to do right and avoid wrong (not that I do it well) is to please God. I'd like to be the kind of man that pleases God. And that's enough for me.

To answer your original questions - the fundamental moral tenets of all the great world religions are pretty much the same (not to say all religions are the same or equally true, but the moral teachings are the same). Follow them.

Do it because it's right, and you're a person who does the right thing. You're not a loser if you're pleasing God.

Good luck to you!

You should have ended with "You know?"

Done - thanks.

Kristian Saucier - https://www.google.com/search?safe=strict&q=kristian+saucier

He took photos of a sub he was stationed on, apparently just for his own use, with no intention of "spying" He's going to jail for a few years.

Domain knowledge about the business activities that your software is supporting is powerful. Do you know why your users want what they want? Can you suggest a better approach to solve their problem, based on your deep knowledge of business needs? Do you know the impact of requested changes on other parts of the business. This, of course, is very specific to a company/industry.

Knowledge of accounting principles is often helpful for in-house developers.

You are not broken, or at least no more broken than everybody else. You do have a characteristic trait that makes you underperform in certain types of interviews. It sounds like you’ve got a good way to manage that for day-to-day work.

The good news is that interview performance is not a reflection of how you’ll perform at your job. Think about it – how representative are the interview situations you’ve described? Jobs aren’t like that.

Don’t start flipping burgers just yet. There’s good advice on this thread – two basic ideas.

First, you can get better at the “Google/Facebook/Twitter” whiteboard interview by practice and hard work. No matter how much you think you suck, you can get better.

Second, there are thousands of companies with software jobs all of over the US that don’t use the whiteboard approach to interviewing. You have to look for them. They might not be software companies per se, but have developer groups that provide useful line-of-business software that make their internal users happy.

Don’t give up. You can do it.

It's possible that I was mistaken on the accents. But to me, the lawyer's accent sounded like Texas/Oklahoma (I know his firm was in Kansas) and the expert's accent sounded more Kentucky/Missouri.

I actually thought the lawyer's accent was the stronger one - maybe because it's less like mine. I'm from upstate NY originally, living in Ohio for the last 20 years.

Anyway, my comment was pretty US-centric to begin with, probably not that useful to folks from other countries.

Cheers.

If you link through to the NYT article, you'll see a word-for-word dramatization of the deposition. The actual deposition video can be found on Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYqXlRQrBN4

I found the choice of accents in the reconstruction interesting. The "dummy" expert witness had a southern accent, and the "smart" attorney had a mid-western/northern accent. In the actual deposition, both guys had southern accents.

Maybe it's unfair of me, but I think it shows bias on the part of the NYT.

I’ll tell you how “I” did it.

I was raised as a Christian, but when I was 18 I gave it up. It was a matter of conscience. I didn’t believe. As you said, I thought it was irrational.

But as it turned out, my rationality and extraordinary intelligence just gave me the ability to screw up my life that much more. I was miserable and empty, not because of my circumstances, but because of me. I sucked.

That changed when I turned my life over to Christ at age 29. I still sucked, but it wasn’t about me. I still suck even today at age 53. But it is absolutely OK, because I’m not trusting in myself. I’m trusting in Christ.

God’s grace did it. I didn’t do it. It was “easy” because I didn’t have anywhere else to go.

I hope you can get back to that place, littletimmy. I’m rooting for you. Let me know if you want to talk more.

Programming Language Pragmatics by Michael Scott

http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-Pragmatics-Third-...

I haven't read a lot of language books, but this one has good information on the various design choices one might make when building a language. Like the others listed in the comments, it's more implementation-focused than semantic design-focused.

"a pogrom against Muslims in some southern states"

That's just untrue. A pogrom is an organized massacre of an ethnic group - it's not happening, in southern states or anywhere else in the US.

And he could squat 600 lbs, when he was younger of course.

https://media2.wnyc.org/i/620/599/l/80/1/Sacks_Lifting_dr_sq...

That's not a trivial weight.

This is about human error, not malfeasance. A more detailed explanation is in this news report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/repo...

One of the pull quotes in the article states that Amazon reminds the customer if they've purchased the same book twice. Oddly enough, about an hour prior to reading the article, I repurchased a book deliberately. I'd given one as a gift, and I wanted to read it myself. There was about a 4 day interval between the two purchases.

I wondered if Amazon would alert me about it, because that's how I'd design the system. They didn't.

Does that have any implications for the article's accuracy?

I remember using something similar in US paper mills during the mid-late '80s. We called it a manlift. It was basically a vertical rubber conveyor belt with a small platform and a handhold located every 10' or so. It ran through holes in the floor. You just approached it, stepped onto the platform, and grabbed the handhold. There was a limit switch to stop the belt if you didn't get off at the highest floor, because it did just return down the other side.

Discrete Optimization with Pascal Van Hentenryck on Coursera - https://www.coursera.org/course/optimization

It doesn't look like there's any open sessions now.

Very cool. This was prefigured in Snow Crash, the novel by Neal Stephenson

My family did a test at a Christmas party just a few days ago. We did a blindfolded tasting of four cheap wines, two red and two white. The goal was solely to distinguish between red and white wines. On average, each person made one incorrect determination (n=8, avg=1.1, mode=1).

It wasn't very scientific - it wasn't double-blind, each person knew the number of reds and whites, and it's pretty clear the order in which the wines were presented made a difference. In any case, I think our findings were reasonably consistent with the article.

It was also a fun time.

If python is your thing, you might want to check out http://pythonmentors.com/

"The mission of the Python Core Mentor Program is to provide an open and welcoming place to connect students, programmers – and anyone interested in contributing to the Python Core development."

Teasing, shaming and other forms of negative humor are very hard to do with a positive result. People are astonishingly different in what they can tolerate and how they respond. I suppose, with the right people, and the right team dynamics it can be OK.

But as a manager, I would strongly advise you to steer clear of that tactic. Even if you've got awesome emotional intelligence (and I don't) it's easy to screw up. It's not worth it.

Really, don't do it. Because when you screw up, it hurts real people.

There are better ways to encourage people - for example, the positve feedback to the tester you described.

One 72 character column. Why make it complicated!

I think the puddle would take a long time to evaporate because the air is basically saturated with water vapor (100% relative humidity). Saturation at the higher pressures in Aquarius occurs at a much lower water vapor concentration than up here.

In other words, the water has nowhere to go.

Do you have any links to references on the "membership model?" I've always felt that rating/ranking scales are unworkable, and I'm interested in other approaches.

Silverlock by John Myers Myers - a fantasy novel written in 1949 with hundreds (maybe thousands) of allusions to mythology, history, and classic literature. It's a lot of fun.

How about, "That's not a very good question for a variety of reasons, so I'm not going to answer it. This is both an answer and a meta-answer."

It's a good question, and one that just recently came up for me at work in a slightly different way. My feeling is that it would be morally OK to register at a competitor's site. It would not be OK to use a false name or somehow attempt to hide your identity/affiliation with your company.

The paper at this link has some good information about issues and attitudes around competitive intelligence - http://osint.pbworks.com/f/Trevino.pdf

Also, there is a Society of Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals (like, who knew that was a thing). Their code of ethics is here - http://www.scip.org/About/content.cfm?ItemNumber=578

Preactor is a comercial scheduling software suite. I haven't used any of the tools, but they sound like what you need.

They have a free product that you can play around with. Good luck!

http://www.preactor.com/Express/Default.aspx

Would two gardenias work as well?

Wow, I just saw that this was the original posted joke. I guess great minds think alike. Inferior minds don't read what they're responding to.