klein_waffle

I have seen Damian's amazing presentations and I still feel sad for what's happened to Perl since he became a strong influence.

I believe he is the one who has most encouraged the tendencies which led to the Perl 6 debacle. His strong charisma has made it acceptable to have the following attitudes in the Perl 6 effort:

- Actual use by mortal programmers is boring; satisfying your desire to be brilliant and clever is what matters

- Complexity and obscurity are fun. Perl is good or popular because the language is complex, therefore the next version of Perl should be even more complex.

Perl 6 really has nothing to do with Perl 5. It's more like those movies that say "a movie by the producers of $THING_THAT_WAS_AWESOME" which neglect to mention the script and the director are different.

Wait, you mean financial software positions. The linked article is about interviews for analysing firms or how to execute deals.

True story: I was at an OpenID developer meeting some time ago and BradFitz was asking people to explain all this crazy nomenclature, because even he can't quite follow it any more.

OpenID is a simple idea that was seized upon and overwhelmed by a large number of asshats who wanted to embrace and extend the concept with dopey shit like XRIs.

Unfortunately, those people have way too much influence on the written spec. This is not to denigrate anything daveman692 is doing and BradFitz did, it's the other people that I wish would fall off a cliff.

I think the banks also know that accounts are such high-value targets that criminals have better ways to steal, anyway. Straight up identity fraud is way more of a problem than account hacking.

Unlikely. The person on the phone doesn't have the right to make judgments like that. Furthermore, if they were to allow it, that means that everyone who writes gibberish can have their account compromised by someone who guessed that it's gibberish.

Whenever i need to open an important account (say, with the power utility) I make up answers and record them on paper. Simple. Effective.

As far as I know, the only benefits of being Canadian are the TN visas and a slightly faster route towards H1-B status. But both of those are for professionals working for some sponsoring company.

Because I am from Montreal. Living in Vancouver is one thing, but going to Toronto means I'm a vendu. ;)

Can we discuss health care without the science fiction and doomsday scenarios?

I realize that the USA is used to looking inward for solutions, but other governments are solving these problems, better, today.

Every discussion I have with Americans about healthcare leads directly to these imagined totalitarian futures, as if "everybody" knew that this was what happens. I don't understand it. Where did you all learn this narrative? Was there some nursery rhyme about the evils of socialized medicine?

Well, I don't know what you mean by "doing business" in SF. If you mean the LLC is technically founded in Canada and just happens to have an SF branch, maybe that would be fine. But, that seems legally dubious to me.

The reasons to stay in the Bay Area are mostly personal. I have more friends here than back "home" now. I can demo to people every day of the week if I want. I like the city and the culture. And this is an amazing area for the concentration of talent that I'll eventually want to bring on board.

I have lived in Vancouver and I'm not going to knock it, all kinds of cool things have come out of there, and the lifestyle is great too. But where is my Maker Faire? My functional language discussion groups?

To me, this is an attempt at lifestyle design. If I just wanted to grind away at something without my friends and preferred hangouts in close reach... well, that's not enough right now.

Perhaps the idea of 'lifestyle design' is incompatible with starting a new venture. I suppose I have to just sacrifice everything for the good of the idea?