thanks for letting me know, and i appreciate your kind words. When HN pages started to load slow - "slowban" - i guess it was a "big T" for "time to go" :) for me which i didn't recognize.
> for no apparent reason
When i downvoted several PG supporters and upvoted several opponents - zedshaw and the likes - in the yesterday's "Trolls" thread it seems it was the last drop :)
the longer talent stays in (kept in) the less of a talent it becomes. Been there myself and when interviewing people who've been long term with a big company, it is very noticeable how one sided their experience and thinking is. Changing jobs once in at least a couple of years keeps your mind open and up-to-date for the current technological developments.
Following the Adams logic of the opportunity costs, all these "stupid boss, performance review, process" reasons are there to help you to not get comfortable, to help you by providing a motivational nudge to make a move.
>You as an individual is an unknown quantity that they cannot absolutely determine.
well, we can imagine that given more info and better algorithms they would narrow the "unknown quantity" into the range much more narrow and thus less populated than "male, 22 years old, 00000 zip code". From a hundreds thousands peers to just a hundred of peers in the same risk level pool - it would be very different "unknown quantity" then.
The better they differentiate the higher profits they will get by offering lower quotes to no-risk ones while more intensely screwing ones with the risk. This is wet dream of the retail, insurance, etc... business - custom targetted offerings. Lower prices when it is really neccessary to make the sale and screw the customer by jacking up the price when it is possible. To do this they need to _know_ the customer. Thanks Facebook.
>all these gewgaws. There's work to be done, don't get too wrapped up in your tools.
poor Windows people need all these exactly to get work done. (my current job is a windows shop, any simple *nix operation like find/grep/diff and the likes is an epic story scrum style (of course we have that too). Time to make a Xmas gift to myself and move back to a shop where Linux is allowed (that includes no "must-use" Outlook :)
>Don't get me wrong - I love to see how the iPad just shattered the barrier of entry for non-technical users, even though I'm a FOSS guy. But I do think that it was at too great (and an unnecessarily so) a cost to the understanding of that technology.
25+ years ago, s/iPad/AppleII\/Mac)/. Was Mac too great and unnecessary cost?
I'm not an Apple fun. The Apple philosophy (and prices) has always been foreign to me. Yet, it isn't possible to dismiss the fact that back then they paved the way for the ubiqutous cheap commodity "inferior to Mac" PC and these days they did it again for these "inferior to iPhone/iPad" devices
Some analogy comes with icebreaker ships - they have so much unnecessary stuff, so overbuilt, have so low utility ... until it comes to the 2m thick ice.
>It's disturbing to see that this is an all-too-common pattern with the large internet companies. Stories abound of companies like Google, eBay, PayPal, Facebook and Amazon closing down accounts with what I would characterize as "violence". No explanations. No recourse. No way to reason with a human being. The approach seems so "anti-internet" that it is hard to come-up with justification for the behavior.
it is doesn't matter internet or B&M as [quasi]monopoly is a monopoly. Just imagine how it would feel if your electric/gas company decided to "close your account forever". Because of such great power they weild, they are regulated as public utilities. The platforms you mentioned are formally not yet there [mostly i think because the standard metric of what monopoly on the Internet is hasn't been yet determined], so they allow themselves all kind of behavior that is no-no in the other well established areas of business.
instead they'd better mandate the ultrasound radar in front of the vehicle, similar to parking sensor in the rear, yet with additional chip that would take the speed (and direction of the turn if any) into account to calculate the distance for sound&visual warning to the driver. A cheap solution to so many traffic accidents i see regularly on my commute on 101.
"Both of the main detectors, ATLAS and CMS, have uncovered hints of a lightweight Higgs. If it pans out, the only remaining hole in the standard model would be filled.
Even more exciting, a Higgs of this mass, about 125 gigaelectronvolts, would also blast a path to uncharted terrain. Such a lightweight would need at least one new type of particle to stabilise it."
great to hear that there is plan B for LHC if Higgs is finally found :)
>The real issue with freemium is that I've yet to see a single example that's actually a game, as opposed to one armed bandits masquerading as games.
Today heard on NPR something along the lines that Zinga IPO valuation is 7-10B, and they successfully sell virtual goods inside their games like chainsaws in the Mafia wars. That somehow struck me that i'm possibly missing some important change happening in the world as it sounds that people do really buy the chainsaws! (note: i did my share of Doom and i read Godfather - in my view it is completely different chainsaw (or cutting tools in general) applications)
>I think most of us come from a sort of middle class, well behaved background that prevents us from conceptualizing what it means to be corrupted by power.
from the background i come from it isn't always "corrupted by power", worst/bloodiest outcomes were result of "to have enough power to change the world [or a chunk of it] to the best [as the one having the power sees it]". The unchecked/unlimited power is the main core of the issue, not the specific intentions/people it is being used for/by.
>These reports will be sent to the appropriate LEO to summon and indefinitely detain you. You will be sent to a secret prison.
it may be not the worst what could happen to one. Reading about Kennedy/Oswald/Ruby, i've been wondering how much of a precisely targetted influence one is needed to be made behaving in a specific way. How much of our actions are really "ours"?
the same frame-up was attempted in 2003, 2004, 2007, 2008, etc... It is a nice double pay scheme that is completely in the nature of the current Russian regime - to get and stay in power through election fraud and blame the fraud on the opposition at the same time.
well, if you add "registered voters" who isn't a living breathing person registered at the given district (i.e. so called "dead souls") than you can easily get beyond the 100%.
Honestly, even i (whose opinion about the old country can rarely be made worse than it is) am impressed with the scale of the fraud. Well, 10+ years living outside of the country ... When i was leaving, the kickbacks on government contracts were 20-30%. Recently i learned that kickbacks are normally 75%+ these days. Strangely these numbers looks similar to what i thought and what really is the scale of the fraud.
>Hardly any companies that I see are willing to hire a junior dev or admin and contribute anything at all to his/her personal development, skill accumulation, and experience.
well and after all that investment the person leaves for better salary/etc... to somebody who is looking to hire senior people and not "willing to hire a junior dev or admin and contribute anything at all to his/her personal development, skill accumulation, and experience" There is a reason for the things even if we don't like the reason.
And again, the "hot" skills (any NoSQL/Hadoop) can be picked in a week and even junior with such skills would easy find a place. There is just no excuse for somebody unsuccessfully looking for work in this market to not sit down and master some of such skills.
>I'd like more information on the CPUs and CPU/GPU bus of this FASTRA II.
"the graphics cards, which are connected to the motherboard by flexible riser cables." - so this sounds like typical PCIe based design. Usually the bundle of GPU cards on PCIe backplane is placed into separate case which connected back to the CPU host, and in this case they engineered it into one big case thus each card getting it's own x16/x8 pipe.
In general such "supercomputer" is cheaper, hardware-wise, than equivalent CPU-based, yet it is still more expensive human labor (ie. programming) -wise.
1. make yourself belief that "the social network [Facebook] has taken over most aspects of our personal and professional lives, and is fast becoming the dominant communication platform of the future." and "that \"quitting\" Facebook altogether is unrealistic"
2. be miserable
Disclaimer: i've never had a Facebook or any other soc. network account (beyond Linkedin), so use the recipe at your own risk and YMMV.
so we have an Apple supporter argueing that millimeter is enough of a difference to maintain originality, while several comments below another Apple supporter
suggests that the home button was copied even though " They changed white square into a white rectangle and that's about it." So change of shape isn't enough to maintain originality.
In Russian we have a saying for such cases - "one's desire to climb up the pine without getting the one's ass poked/scratched by the needles".