languagewars

There are plenty of studies on telling children they are naturally talented, etc and getting them to stop doing the activity for fear of losing evidence of this trait. Many of the "best programmers" I worked with were unproductive and got lost on things that were irrelevant. Engineers I would pick from my old groups tend not to be recognized as great and complemented on how well and timely they put everything together, with an undertone that the greatest programmer could have also done it if only he had time.

As far as submarines stories, I have no idea..

Your examples are competitive sports and buying up the right stocks, areas with specific rules and no net output to society. If the top player never existed in a second reality, the 2nd player would be called the top player and no social scientist could identify the harm to the 2nd reality.

If you look at fields where it matters what people produce and the product requires sophisticated and diverse differences, then attempting to rank them too often is catastrophic. For example Microsoft damaged themselves with stack ranking, not just because of immediate social harm, but because everyone had to rank well by showing off skills that were known to be valuable, top, classy, aka the best fads of today. That puts the company on a walk to a local Maxima and unable to compete with a company with engineers who can invest in random skills that just seem interesting without risking a nervous breakdown from the combined costs of signal investment and actual investment.

Isn't gross income a bit misleading if they need to buy out larger and larger companies and harvest their products/good-will with an increasing portion of that gross income?

So all US exports should be subject to a 20% tax to make the world great again, right?

Interesting, I've been very happy with pouchdb finagling all these browser DBs into one that matches couchdb on the server side.. I would really have to think about the auth logistics for memcache to switch to a kV store. But that would be even more insane minimalism atop the absurd complexity of the web stack.

I played with a free online cbt and got much further than their average participant in this study.. I'm not sure if there is any use to cbt for depression, but I would suspect that it would work better in a preventative fashion.

I.e. I did notice that I can let thinking about some social interactions go where they would bother me in the past, but if I was depressed when I played with it, then maybe I would just notice how bad I was at benefiting from CBT at the moment where I should be letting something go.

Given the population of Zurich, I've always comparing it to Boston to be fair. In that context Zurich is the mix with modern architecture. Boston has done nothing and then a big nothing for my entire life, only in the last 5 years does the seaport look like a part of Zurich, with actual cranes and construction workers.

Looking at the traditional literary world is where everything becomes obvious to me.

To be a good writer you have to hold stubborn opinions until each work is finished or you have too many options and create something confusing, bland, unpalatable and inconsistent. If you hold the same ideas too long and too publicly then the market raises the volume on the jibes against your style since you offer no topics for discussion and it wants to recover your share.

To be anyone else in literary market, you have to fawn over every returning fad as if it were new and great, and be the catalyst for reinforcing the artificial drama in the differences in stubborn views the authors are holding. To do less is to hurt overall market sales and eventually be shunned.

I find it all very interesting to follow, but if you want to be a proper lazy programmer for the long haul then you must learn to stay bellow the radar so no one knows how boring and automatic your solutions are. Those are the authors we all know exist who quietly take ghost writing cuts on a book or more a year, but dont have all the crisises or neurosis to get the role of author on tv.

Hmm, it seems like you are looking at how you should triage an applicant if they let you test them very painfully. I am interested in games I can play where mastery also serves as a potential initial triage and could lead to interesting discussions.

Just as I like project euler gamified as a fake ideal programming project, I would like a systems game where the point is optimizing for the worst case with minimal tools.

Add an IDE, a choice of editors, all kinds of softskills requirements that are more significant to an employer than these base primary skills. Now, I wonder why I am working for free as I am no longer just practicing our core/universal skills in an idealized/timeless environment. The better place to do that form of showing off work realistic skills is in OSS projects.

> Do you work as a sysadmin? If so, how many times did you recover from a broken tty at work? (I mean, is it a number bigger than zero?)

Before then I was an sysadmin for a little while, but I don't really see what difference the role makes. I've never had a job where I didn't at some point need to deal with a legacy serial console of some sort misrouted through incompatible aggregators, etc, in order to deal with a networking problem and/or auth problems.

The idea that I would blind reboot a system in a failure mode I can't diagnose is not something I would normally consider until I've exhausted all means and only if I know a fair bit about it. I'm sure some of my colleagues did things like that as some were developers with relatively little system knowledge, but only a few were stupid enough to mention losing failure data through laziness to senior staff.

> It's fun, but completely unproductive.

? If I had a page for you should have diagnosed and every time you hit a swiss cheese failure with that attitude than I wouldn't use computers at all anymore.

When I used to work in OS support my actions were optimized for the assumptions of a default minimal install and being able to describe actions to a person of questionable knowledge over the phone and interpret what they would most likely try to read back at me. The certifications were along those lines too.. While the exact nature of the certifications was ridiculous and would be even more ridiculous in terms of judging a general user's skills, dropping an administrator on minimal installs with broken ttys, etc makes a lot of sense. If you can't recover a system when vi is not an option then you have a problem, if you spend a lot of time recovering a good term when you could have used tail, then you are also not ideal.

The only suggestion I would make is that a good tool is present and working then I don't expect a penalty. I expect tools to not be present accordance with standard minimalist setups and to pay extreme penalties if I need to call a package manager or move to a less minimalist install to complete the task.

No, the same civil rights allow you to start a process to invalidate a tax completely and they are used that way all the time. Civil rights arguments have everything to do with why your laffer curve isnt optimal and we pay higher set rates so there are things that are completely exempt. Look at state sales tax exemptions as an example of people lowering their effective tax rate, but not the overall tax collected or the average benefit of government.

It seems to me like you are trying to warp the discussion into every tool with a visible political outcome being equivalent and open to "democratic" systems. The republic is a tool for a specific purpose that is usually opposite of delivering optimal solutions to the majority. The democratic systems are supposed to deliver what you seem to want until they violate civil rights. If they dont for a reason other than civil rights, then your recourse is to petitition the republic to change the election process. But you cant make the republic actually care about your general tax rates or any other problems it allows the democratic process to handle, it can only make sweeping rules when parties are in violation of the core rules.

The argument that the state is killing you is only significant if you can make it rationally, and a 10-99% tax isnt killing you unless it doesnt exclude the poverty level in its gradients and then you dont need to be the one being killed to make the argument. A 99% tax rate that can get 50% of the vote may indicate another failure though.

> So if I decide that taxes are too high and I present evidence that the tax rate is at the wrong end of the laffer curve I could get my money back?

How does that flow from these quotes?

To be equivalent, you would need to prove that the tax rate is so insane that it has a substantial chance of killing you. Equivalent arguments for tax relief are in relation to poverty, medical costs, food and basic necessities, etc and generally win.

Microsoft has to address the amount of crapware vendors ship and the permissions they have and deffinitely plays some games of chicken with them to try to keep windows market share.

While it makes sense to hit the vendors directly to the extent possible, it also costs these platforms trust when most of the ways users end up with them have them compromised from day one. I.e. do I give relatives a list of vendors I think might be safe to use without a complete wipe and fresh install? For windows that is impossible.

I think today's equivalent to what I used to do (i.e. playing with an accidental ProDos prompt) is running the browser's developer console (which you most certainly can do on a chromebook) and perhaps running a shell on the RPi.

I don't really understand why a good editor is necessary in the sense of my old nostalgia or how I would try to streamline the learning/tinkering process today. While I see no specific value in anything in the gap between using whatever debugger/interaction the system offers to futz with the most visible levels and jumping to an online Python/processing/whatever notebook, I suppose starting anywhere that stokes one's curiosity is just as good as anywhere else.