No, it's not. If you aren't wet, you aren't in a pool. That's not circular reasoning. That's clear, logical, and doesn't depend on itself.
In this case, it is. The anon is stating that apparently his premise is true just because he says so, without proving that it is the case (which is what I asked for in the first place.)
Well, Kansas gubmint doesn't care about people because *I think that's the case*. Apparently, this is the case (*without me having to explain why is the case*).
Monolithic kernel. You have a somewhat valid argument there. There are modules that I just don''t use, that are routinely compiled into the kernel. Simple solution: Compile it yourself, without the modules. Strip the kernel down to exactly what you need, and compile it native to get rid of all the 32-bit support. You're left with a monolithic kernel, of course, but the monolith is much smaller.
But, but, but, then I have to compile it myself, do it myself? See, that is the root of my complains about monolithic kernels. Where is that damned violin when I need it:P
Is It Worth Learning a Little-Known Programming Language?
How sad that people have to ask such questions. What is worth? Worth with respect to what? For what?
Are such measuring worth in terms of potential monetary ROI? Or do they ever consider the significant value of learning for the sake of learning, stimulation of the mind, exercises which "laterally" help in being mentally agile and adaptable?
I lean to the later value of worth. And it is true that for a busy professional, sometimes time is not available, but to have to ask such a question, that is sad.
Jake Edge writes at LWN.net that there is a myth that programming skill is somehow distributed on a U-shaped curve
Been doing this shit for 20 years, 10 (very) different companies, using different languages and technologies, for app and system level development, working shoulder to shoulder with a very diverse bunch of people. I've never heard of this myth till today.
If I were to be forced to pull guestimations out of my rear, my impression has always been the following:
1. that programming talent distribution with the X axis representing some quantifiable function of both talent and experience (two different things) closely resembles a normal distribution with near zero kurtosis and a slight, but measurable skeweness to the left. The skewness to the left results because, in my experience, lots of people leave the field or stop being active in development before getting to the next level of experience, engineering and craftsmanship. They leave because they suck or don't like what they do, or because they do a perceived beneficial lateral move into management or sales/sales engineering. Less and less people remain in the field honing their skills and making the transition into technical lead/more senior positions responsible for more complex problems.
2. The probability of introduce massive numbers of WTFs per code change sets (or introduce a single massive WTF in a single code change set) as a function of talent and experience resembles an exponential distribution. No matter how experienced you are, you can still fuck it up badly, but the probability of doing so is inversely proportional to your talent (or at least, it should be inversely proportional to your advertised talent.)
So, HP lost 65% of its market value and $100 million dollars, because they made stupid hiring decisions for their CEO. That is the self-correction. Whether Carly gets rich is irrelevant.
That is not self-correction. It is paying the price. Self-correction in a market, with respect to erroneous decisions, is when the rate of occurrence of that type of errors either diminish over time or the rate remains constant with the negative impact diminishing over time. Neither is the case.
When MBA professors mentions *this* as the biggest problem in American corporate culture (can your sense of irony for a second), then this is not idle shit talking.
And when individual companies do this, like, oh, HP, they pay the price. So, it may be a widespread problem, but it is self-correcting.
Self-correcting with respect to what? By replacing one badly performed CEO with another? Or by one company correcting itself while two, three more go down the same bad path despite the obvious, in-your-face, cautionary example?
When the phenomenon keeps occurring to the detriment of the entire national economy, that is not self-correcting.
She was also a U.S. Senator for New York for eight years (i.e. Elected twice). But of course, that was also a job that she only got for being Bill Clinton's wife and not because she holds a law degree from Yale University, not because she was a professor of Law at the University of Arkansas, not because she was she was on the congressional legal advisory staff in the Watergate impeachment process, and not because she played an important role in organizing the Carter presidential campaign. Facts.
Facts are never important when we look for reasons to hate;)
Maybe you should have looked after your employees better, and paid them well enough to ensure they'd stick around. Companies that depend on locking in employees with non-competes are bad actors in my view.
In your view?
I don't defend non-compete agreements, but you are seriously mistaken if you think employees can leave (and worse, go after your clientele) because they do not get treated better. I've seen employees leaving with confidential information, and client information (in industries where that is/was illegal) despite getting a very good treatment, benefits, salaries and a decent work culture. These people not only damaged (or try to damage) the company, but by transitivity, they did so against their fellow (ex) co-workers who did nothing against them.
Oooooohhhhhhhhh evil companies bluhr durr durr.
Either it never occurred to you that this is possible, or your have never seen it, or you simply decide to ignore it. Either way, it doesn't help the position you are trying to present.
Avarice, malice and treachery runs on both sides of the fence. It is human nature, and to pretend employees do not act on it is simply stupid.
That people on/. mod you up without even considering the real examples in history of employees damaging companies that treated them well, that is not surprising.
This is precisely why I won't leave California. I will never sign a non-compete contract.
I've never signed (nor being asked to sign) a non-compete in the 20+ years I've been working in the East coast (Florida, specifically). And even if you were asked to sign one, they are rarely enforceable. The one case I know well was completely obliterated in a county court because it would have forced the defendant to take unreasonable daily commute drives to work - meaning 20 miles one way.
So, there was a lot of MBA talk and attempts to score big in quarterly reports
And this is the crux of the matter, the focus of scoring big in quarterly reports. This is not hand-waving, purely ideological complaints. When MBA professors mentions *this* as the biggest problem in American corporate culture (can your sense of irony for a second), then this is not idle shit talking.
Business executives are graded per their deliveries at the next immediate quarter, not in their capacity to create long-term value. That is what a shareholder's economy is all about. And Fiorina is a great example of it.
"That federal law protects individuals who are 40 years of age or older from employment discrimination based on age."
HR drones everywhere are rolling on the carpet laughing. Ever tried to get HR to pass your resume along if they spot any clue that you are 50+?
As we get older, That we should accrue several skills that are hard to commoditize (sp?), such as:
veritable expertise in a domain (several domains preferably to act as fall-back plan A, plan B, plan C, etc.),
and an ability to do lateral moves, however painful they might be, to put food on the table without significantly sacrificing our current lifestyles.
All of that crap translates to the following: By the time we hit 40's we shouldn't not be directly competing for the same type of jobs with right-out-of-school kids. Or in more general terms, we should allow ourselves to fall into a situation of having to compete with people 15-20 years our junior.
If we are, then we didn't pay attention to our career development. I saw this in earnest because I spent (wasted) a good chunk of my mid-career years being happy as a "code warrior", disdainfully avoiding any opportunities to take greater responsibilities or broadening my professional and technical horizons. I wasn't being lazy as I would happily clock 60/70 hours "just coding". I was just being ignorant (and ignorance is bliss, right?)
It wasn't until I had people depending on me that I realize how stupid and dangerous that is. We do not get any younger, and we must have something to show from all those years of experience (show something other than coding abilities.)
I oppose age discrimination on principle (and any kind of discrimination unrelated to reasonable work requirements - working more for less is not a reasonable working requirement.)
But I see too many people resting on their laurels expecting to retire doing the same shit they have been doing for the last 20-30 years. That *dream* started to get shattered when the Japanese started beating the crap of American manufacturing 30-40 years ago.
..which, from TFA it is - an act of economic desperation. Their currency loses 25% per year and trying to convert it to dollars takes time and huge fees - losing roughly 30%. If bitcoin provides a better, faster arbitrage, then it is, in this case, a more "reliable store of value."
I think it's more of a damning comment on Argentinian currency rather than a spotlight on the quality and fungibility of bitcoins.
Or it could be seen also as a spotlight of bitcoins as a tool to preserve wealth in a free-falling economy.
The US preaches free markets to the rest of the world, yet the IT programmers there seem to think they are entitled to a monopoly on jobs.
I thought free market capitalism was about open market and prices based on demand-supply.
Why are IT workers so threatened by this? Is it insecurity about their skills or ability to compete?
Why won't India allow Walmart to open stores in India?
Stop trying to make sense to these sock puppets. It is like trying to teach math to a coconut.
By law, H1-Bs can only come for jobs that cannot be filled with the local work force. By law, they cannot replace working locals. But shit, guess what happens? Do you think H1-B visa holders are actually compensated fairly by Infosys and the like?
I have a bridge to sell, and a bottle of snake oil to boot. Let me know if you are interested.
The US preaches free markets to the rest of the world
Let me stop you right there from continuing with this stupid-as-shit line of thinking. Certain interest groups in the US preach free markets to the world. That doesn't imply "The US preaches free markets" or whatever shit else these interest groups try to peddle.
, yet the IT programmers there seem to think they are entitled to a monopoly on jobs.
Like almost anywhere else. You don't see engineering in general (and IT in particular) being offshored en-mass in, say, Japan and Germany, do you? I've never been in Germany, but I have been in Japan. So I can claim with some certainty that what I'm saying here holds.
There is also the rule of the law. The law says that H1-B visas are for jobs where companies have a hard time filling in with local talent (be them US workers, or foreign workers with a permanent residence status.)
It is not a replacement of US citizens and legal residents with temporary visa workers to lower costs. That is a violation of the law. In any other country, that would warrant an immediate investigation by a department of labor. Not here, and that is stupid.
And people thinking that we should not investigate (when every other country would), those people are either stupid, obtuse or disingenuous.
I thought free market capitalism was about open market and prices based on demand-supply.
And it is... within the definintion/demarcation of an economy. Any nation that does not treat its economy as a national asset of strategic value is an stupid nation that deserves whatever gets coming.
Look at China, India, Japan, Germany, and so on. They all have specific protections in place according to whatever they consider strategic or vital.
It is only in the US that private enterprises (and politicians in their pockets) who do not think that way. As long as profit is made, the nation as a whole can go screw itself.
Why are IT workers so threatened by this? Is it insecurity about their skills or ability to compete?
Do you understand the meaning of "begging the question"?
There is no competition when locals are being replaced without even giving a chance to compete, being replaced completely and unilaterally with cheaper labor in contradiction of what the law says.
And this just doesn't affect US citizens. It also affects legal residences. I've seen with my own eyes India workers with permanent resident status getting replaced with H1-B visas. So it is not just a question of talent and competition. It is a disingenuous violation of the law.
Not only that, the H1-B abuse is heavily slanted towards India workers and consulting firms? Why?
If we are going to get inundated and replaced by H1-B workers, let them be more diverse, from Russia, China, Africa, and LATAM, not just India. This is the biggest problem I have with abuses of the H1-B program. It artificially skews one of most profitable segments of our economy towards a specific foreign nationality.
The country as it is has a history of racial segmentation. There is no need to make that problem even worse.
What does punishment achieve? Makes people feel a bit better? The crime has been done: The focus of the justice system should be on minimizing future crimes, and punishment should be regarded only as a tool towards that end. Not a means to satisfy some perverse public desire to see others suffer so they can feel like some scales have been balanced.
I wonder how this applies to a victim of rape, or say, child molestation.
Incorrect. Abstract mathematical objects are not "encoded within the observable universe"
Sure they are. The set of concepts that humans can conceive are those which human brains, either directly or through tools like computers, can handle. Human brains evolved in the context usually called "the observable universe", so all concepts - including but not limited to abstract mathematical objects - we can think about are encoded within it, just in a real roundabout way. In other words, you can not know anything that isn't encoded in your causal past; even the very notion of abstraction only exists because it's inherent in the physical universe to such a degree that evolution encoded the principle into your brain.
And besides, the notion that math is supernatural - something that exists above physical reality, independent of it - is an unproven and probably unprovable assertion.
You are confusing mathematics with the metalanguage we use to describe them.
What's fucked up is that when i was in grade school (25 years ago) they were still using Ditto machines (70 years after its invention) despite Xerography machines being widely available (and having been around for 60 years).
There is nothing fucked up about that. That technology worked on the cheap (compared to Xerography or God forbit, modern laser/inkjet printers.)
Just because it is old, that doesn't mean it is shit. Enter the #2 pencil.
Slashdot Mirror
This is circular reasoning.
No, it's not. If you aren't wet, you aren't in a pool. That's not circular reasoning. That's clear, logical, and doesn't depend on itself.
In this case, it is. The anon is stating that apparently his premise is true just because he says so, without proving that it is the case (which is what I asked for in the first place.)
Well, Kansas gubmint doesn't care about people because *I think that's the case*. Apparently, this is the case (*without me having to explain why is the case*).
Doesn't get anymore circular than that .
Is that really something to brag about?
Yes. If you don't understand why, you have no place in engineering.
Monolithic kernel. You have a somewhat valid argument there. There are modules that I just don''t use, that are routinely compiled into the kernel. Simple solution: Compile it yourself, without the modules. Strip the kernel down to exactly what you need, and compile it native to get rid of all the 32-bit support. You're left with a monolithic kernel, of course, but the monolith is much smaller.
But, but, but, then I have to compile it myself, do it myself? See, that is the root of my complains about monolithic kernels. Where is that damned violin when I need it :P
Because they care about their people more than they care about the taxi lobby.
That's not an answer. That's a slogan.
Apparently they don't though.
This is circular reasoning.
Wonder if they will get away with it?
The question is irrelevant since the premise, the original premise, still remains to be proven/explained as valid.
Seems to me there is a reason Kansas is dying.
Unproven statement. Can't make sound conclusions from it.
This may be a symptom.
Bad hypothesis based on a false premise.
Well, that and it's a negotiating position where they figure Kansas will cave.
Why should Kansas cave?
Is It Worth Learning a Little-Known Programming Language?
How sad that people have to ask such questions. What is worth? Worth with respect to what? For what?
Are such measuring worth in terms of potential monetary ROI? Or do they ever consider the significant value of learning for the sake of learning, stimulation of the mind, exercises which "laterally" help in being mentally agile and adaptable?
I lean to the later value of worth. And it is true that for a busy professional, sometimes time is not available, but to have to ask such a question, that is sad.
Jake Edge writes at LWN.net that there is a myth that programming skill is somehow distributed on a U-shaped curve
Been doing this shit for 20 years, 10 (very) different companies, using different languages and technologies, for app and system level development, working shoulder to shoulder with a very diverse bunch of people. I've never heard of this myth till today.
If I were to be forced to pull guestimations out of my rear, my impression has always been the following:
1. that programming talent distribution with the X axis representing some quantifiable function of both talent and experience (two different things) closely resembles a normal distribution with near zero kurtosis and a slight, but measurable skeweness to the left. The skewness to the left results because, in my experience, lots of people leave the field or stop being active in development before getting to the next level of experience, engineering and craftsmanship. They leave because they suck or don't like what they do, or because they do a perceived beneficial lateral move into management or sales/sales engineering. Less and less people remain in the field honing their skills and making the transition into technical lead/more senior positions responsible for more complex problems.
2. The probability of introduce massive numbers of WTFs per code change sets (or introduce a single massive WTF in a single code change set) as a function of talent and experience resembles an exponential distribution. No matter how experienced you are, you can still fuck it up badly, but the probability of doing so is inversely proportional to your talent (or at least, it should be inversely proportional to your advertised talent.)
So, HP lost 65% of its market value and $100 million dollars, because they made stupid hiring decisions for their CEO. That is the self-correction. Whether Carly gets rich is irrelevant.
That is not self-correction. It is paying the price. Self-correction in a market, with respect to erroneous decisions, is when the rate of occurrence of that type of errors either diminish over time or the rate remains constant with the negative impact diminishing over time. Neither is the case.
The decline in the average rate of profit since mid century is explained easily through more efficient markets.
Efficient with respect to what?
And when individual companies do this, like, oh, HP, they pay the price. So, it may be a widespread problem, but it is self-correcting.
Self-correcting with respect to what? By replacing one badly performed CEO with another? Or by one company correcting itself while two, three more go down the same bad path despite the obvious, in-your-face, cautionary example?
When the phenomenon keeps occurring to the detriment of the entire national economy, that is not self-correcting.
She was also a U.S. Senator for New York for eight years (i.e. Elected twice). But of course, that was also a job that she only got for being Bill Clinton's wife and not because she holds a law degree from Yale University, not because she was a professor of Law at the University of Arkansas, not because she was she was on the congressional legal advisory staff in the Watergate impeachment process, and not because she played an important role in organizing the Carter presidential campaign. Facts.
Facts are never important when we look for reasons to hate ;)
Maybe you should have looked after your employees better, and paid them well enough to ensure they'd stick around. Companies that depend on locking in employees with non-competes are bad actors in my view.
In your view?
I don't defend non-compete agreements, but you are seriously mistaken if you think employees can leave (and worse, go after your clientele) because they do not get treated better. I've seen employees leaving with confidential information, and client information (in industries where that is/was illegal) despite getting a very good treatment, benefits, salaries and a decent work culture. These people not only damaged (or try to damage) the company, but by transitivity, they did so against their fellow (ex) co-workers who did nothing against them.
Oooooohhhhhhhhh evil companies bluhr durr durr.
Either it never occurred to you that this is possible, or your have never seen it, or you simply decide to ignore it. Either way, it doesn't help the position you are trying to present.
Avarice, malice and treachery runs on both sides of the fence. It is human nature, and to pretend employees do not act on it is simply stupid.
That people on /. mod you up without even considering the real examples in history of employees damaging companies that treated them well, that is not surprising.
This is precisely why I won't leave California. I will never sign a non-compete contract.
I've never signed (nor being asked to sign) a non-compete in the 20+ years I've been working in the East coast (Florida, specifically). And even if you were asked to sign one, they are rarely enforceable. The one case I know well was completely obliterated in a county court because it would have forced the defendant to take unreasonable daily commute drives to work - meaning 20 miles one way.
So, there was a lot of MBA talk and attempts to score big in quarterly reports
And this is the crux of the matter, the focus of scoring big in quarterly reports. This is not hand-waving, purely ideological complaints. When MBA professors mentions *this* as the biggest problem in American corporate culture (can your sense of irony for a second), then this is not idle shit talking.
Business executives are graded per their deliveries at the next immediate quarter, not in their capacity to create long-term value. That is what a shareholder's economy is all about. And Fiorina is a great example of it.
"That federal law protects individuals who are 40 years of age or older from employment discrimination based on age." HR drones everywhere are rolling on the carpet laughing. Ever tried to get HR to pass your resume along if they spot any clue that you are 50+?
As we get older, That we should accrue several skills that are hard to commoditize (sp?), such as:
All of that crap translates to the following: By the time we hit 40's we shouldn't not be directly competing for the same type of jobs with right-out-of-school kids. Or in more general terms, we should allow ourselves to fall into a situation of having to compete with people 15-20 years our junior.
If we are, then we didn't pay attention to our career development. I saw this in earnest because I spent (wasted) a good chunk of my mid-career years being happy as a "code warrior", disdainfully avoiding any opportunities to take greater responsibilities or broadening my professional and technical horizons. I wasn't being lazy as I would happily clock 60/70 hours "just coding". I was just being ignorant (and ignorance is bliss, right?)
It wasn't until I had people depending on me that I realize how stupid and dangerous that is. We do not get any younger, and we must have something to show from all those years of experience (show something other than coding abilities.)
I oppose age discrimination on principle (and any kind of discrimination unrelated to reasonable work requirements - working more for less is not a reasonable working requirement.)
But I see too many people resting on their laurels expecting to retire doing the same shit they have been doing for the last 20-30 years. That *dream* started to get shattered when the Japanese started beating the crap of American manufacturing 30-40 years ago.
Some people really hadn't gotten the memo yet.
Oooooooo, a philosopher.
..which, from TFA it is - an act of economic desperation. Their currency loses 25% per year and trying to convert it to dollars takes time and huge fees - losing roughly 30%. If bitcoin provides a better, faster arbitrage, then it is, in this case, a more "reliable store of value."
I think it's more of a damning comment on Argentinian currency rather than a spotlight on the quality and fungibility of bitcoins.
Or it could be seen also as a spotlight of bitcoins as a tool to preserve wealth in a free-falling economy.
The US preaches free markets to the rest of the world, yet the IT programmers there seem to think they are entitled to a monopoly on jobs. I thought free market capitalism was about open market and prices based on demand-supply. Why are IT workers so threatened by this? Is it insecurity about their skills or ability to compete?
Why won't India allow Walmart to open stores in India?
Stop trying to make sense to these sock puppets. It is like trying to teach math to a coconut.
By law, H1-B's earn at least $60K.
By law, H1-Bs can only come for jobs that cannot be filled with the local work force. By law, they cannot replace working locals. But shit, guess what happens? Do you think H1-B visa holders are actually compensated fairly by Infosys and the like?
I have a bridge to sell, and a bottle of snake oil to boot. Let me know if you are interested.
The US preaches free markets to the rest of the world
Let me stop you right there from continuing with this stupid-as-shit line of thinking. Certain interest groups in the US preach free markets to the world. That doesn't imply "The US preaches free markets" or whatever shit else these interest groups try to peddle.
, yet the IT programmers there seem to think they are entitled to a monopoly on jobs.
Like almost anywhere else. You don't see engineering in general (and IT in particular) being offshored en-mass in, say, Japan and Germany, do you? I've never been in Germany, but I have been in Japan. So I can claim with some certainty that what I'm saying here holds.
There is also the rule of the law. The law says that H1-B visas are for jobs where companies have a hard time filling in with local talent (be them US workers, or foreign workers with a permanent residence status.)
It is not a replacement of US citizens and legal residents with temporary visa workers to lower costs. That is a violation of the law. In any other country, that would warrant an immediate investigation by a department of labor. Not here, and that is stupid.
And people thinking that we should not investigate (when every other country would), those people are either stupid, obtuse or disingenuous.
I thought free market capitalism was about open market and prices based on demand-supply.
And it is... within the definintion/demarcation of an economy. Any nation that does not treat its economy as a national asset of strategic value is an stupid nation that deserves whatever gets coming.
Look at China, India, Japan, Germany, and so on. They all have specific protections in place according to whatever they consider strategic or vital.
It is only in the US that private enterprises (and politicians in their pockets) who do not think that way. As long as profit is made, the nation as a whole can go screw itself.
Why are IT workers so threatened by this? Is it insecurity about their skills or ability to compete?
Do you understand the meaning of "begging the question"?
There is no competition when locals are being replaced without even giving a chance to compete, being replaced completely and unilaterally with cheaper labor in contradiction of what the law says.
And this just doesn't affect US citizens. It also affects legal residences. I've seen with my own eyes India workers with permanent resident status getting replaced with H1-B visas. So it is not just a question of talent and competition. It is a disingenuous violation of the law.
Not only that, the H1-B abuse is heavily slanted towards India workers and consulting firms? Why?
If we are going to get inundated and replaced by H1-B workers, let them be more diverse, from Russia, China, Africa, and LATAM, not just India. This is the biggest problem I have with abuses of the H1-B program. It artificially skews one of most profitable segments of our economy towards a specific foreign nationality.
The country as it is has a history of racial segmentation. There is no need to make that problem even worse.
Ah, because wrong + wrong = right. Got it.
What does punishment achieve? Makes people feel a bit better? The crime has been done: The focus of the justice system should be on minimizing future crimes, and punishment should be regarded only as a tool towards that end. Not a means to satisfy some perverse public desire to see others suffer so they can feel like some scales have been balanced.
I wonder how this applies to a victim of rape, or say, child molestation.
I mean, really now. What's the point of this article?
. If the sun were ten times hotter, there wouldn't be life on Earth.
If humans needed to breathe in methane instead of oxygen, there wouldn't be humans on Earth.
See, I can play the game as well....
This is a prime example of an individual who doesn't get the meaning and purpose of science and the pursuit of knowledge.
Sure they are. The set of concepts that humans can conceive are those which human brains, either directly or through tools like computers, can handle. Human brains evolved in the context usually called "the observable universe", so all concepts - including but not limited to abstract mathematical objects - we can think about are encoded within it, just in a real roundabout way. In other words, you can not know anything that isn't encoded in your causal past; even the very notion of abstraction only exists because it's inherent in the physical universe to such a degree that evolution encoded the principle into your brain.
And besides, the notion that math is supernatural - something that exists above physical reality, independent of it - is an unproven and probably unprovable assertion.
You are confusing mathematics with the metalanguage we use to describe them.
1886 Mimeograph
1923 Spirit duplicator
2015 3D printer
What's fucked up is that when i was in grade school (25 years ago) they were still using Ditto machines (70 years after its invention) despite Xerography machines being widely available (and having been around for 60 years).
There is nothing fucked up about that. That technology worked on the cheap (compared to Xerography or God forbit, modern laser/inkjet printers.)
Just because it is old, that doesn't mean it is shit. Enter the #2 pencil.