unit91

It's amazing to me how many people think luck is a causal force.

Well, there's nothing I can really do about it. When I hit "delete", my company email doesn't actually get deleted. It just disappears from my view. I believe the stated policy is they delete after 3 years post "delete".

If I worked in or near the office, I'd walk over to HR and request printouts instead of emails, but since I work remotely, I'm stuck.

Do you realize this would tax people for breathing?

>...has turned the US armed forces into a standing mercenary force.

This statement makes no sense.

A mercenary is "a professional soldier hired to serve in a foreign army" [1]. It's impossible to be a mercenary for your own country.

1. https://www.google.com/search?q=define+mercenary

Short-term, that's not the worst thing on earth when you've got a combat mission to execute, and you need working tanks.

Long-term, you're absolutely right. Somebody needs to solve the problem.

Well, there's a huge difference in the mindset of deployed grunts vs stateside red-tape laden behemoths.

When you're deployed and something important breaks, you have a BIG problem. The impact is usually somewhere between you being absolutely miserable for weeks to costing you your life. When you're stateside and something important breaks, you have a reason to expand your empire at next year's budget meeting.

Pilot Varsity. Good enough, no messing with the ink.

Last time Indiana Jones tried that, the whole cave collapsed and guys were waiting with blow guns. Have you learned nothing?! :)

ETA: And he almost lost his hat! Come on man!

Oh wow that's really smart. Thanks!

What?! How'd they get that black-and-white picture of me? :)

Thank you, inetknight, brave Knight of the Internet.

I think your sarcasm detector is malfunctioning this morning.

Exactly

> This system is completely stable—I double-checked with computer simulations.

I would think that's a hilarious joke if the author didn't seem so serious.

For real, good grief. Telescopic lenses and office windows also exist.

That Minecraft CPU video from the article was amazing. It never would have even occurred to me to make such a thing.

>I think the first reason that we should love our enemies, and I think this was at the very center of Jesus’ thinking, is this: that hate for hate only intensifies the existence of hate and evil in the universe.

There's certainly no denying that hate tends to produce hate, or that King did a great good...but I really wonder where he got the idea that it was "at the very center of Jesus' thinking". As I read the gospels, it's very tough to come to the idea that Jesus is any kind of pragmatist. Jesus is squarely in the Divine Command Morality camp. A typical statement:

> For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me. (John 6:38)

This coming from a user named "solipsism".

What do you mean by "you"?

> Children being born today

If they even make it that far. We're not so civilized after all...

I was a Fortran developer for a few years in the Aerospace business. After a while, I got sick of 1977 and just wanted to be a "regular" full stack guy.

At the time Rails 2.X was current and Clojure was pretty new. Both looked pretty neat. I learned Rails and Clojure on my free time, went through Michael Hartl's Twitter knockoff to learn, and applied for jobs.

Nobody really loved how little I knew about modern web dev, but several told me they could see I was bright-ish and sufficiently motivated that they'd take the chance. It was hard and stressful at first, because I didn't know anything (JavaScript, jQuery, what's a "callback" function?, etc.) but I picked it up fairly quickly.

Made $80K my first year (pretty good junior dev salary in Texas) and it's been better every year since.

You've assumed that Harvard is, or should be, the goal of healthy parenting.

If you have kids, stop doing this to them. You're their father/mother. Love, nurture, train, and instruct them to be good people. If they go to Harvard, good for them. If not, Harvard be damned, they're your kids.

If you don't have kids yet, mature before you do.

> stay at home dad

Most (not all) of the time I've observed this, "stay at home dad" is a euphemism for "lazy bum".

TIL: not everybody talks this way. Y'all get it together! :-)

I know the term, I was saying it seems to be used much more frequently around here than in any of my other circles.

Ah, thanks for that insight. It all makes sense now...

Also ironic: "shibboleth" seems to be the new favorite buzzword of the HN shibboleth.

I didn't say, nor do I think, that Microsoft has fewer features, more bugs, and lower profit than everybody else.

Rather, that the goals of pretty much everyone in the software business are features, fewest bugs possible, and most profit possible.

I'm not even sure I agree with the great-grandparent post that MSFT needs to jettison legacy. Frankly, I don't know enough about their numbers to have an informed opinion. My point was that it seems pretty clear what the poster meant by "move faster". So the question "to what?" isn't all that helpful.

New features, fewer bugs, increased profitability... that is, towards the goals of pretty much any (software) company.

If you couldn't, vocabulary would be impossible.

> William Shakespeare

Presumably, later in life he went by "Bill".