sethg

79 ms·

781.
by sethg 17y ago
...and after a few iterations of reward, the next level of incentive has to come in the form of "promote to higher level in the hierarchy" rather than simply "increase salary", because of the bureaucratic norm that a manager can't be paid l
782.
by sethg 17y ago
...or, praise them for working hard in a subject where they aren't talented enough to whip through the homework in ten minutes. If the kid is razor-sharp in math but merely above-average in reading, then their efforts in reading are the
783.
by sethg 17y ago
There is a long-standing anarchist critique of industrial society, and both the Unabomber and Bob Black are part of that tradition. The Unabomber just never got the memo that "we tried bombing our way into anarchy back in the nineteenth ce
784.
by sethg 17y ago
Yeah, but that's about relations between the pirates and the states whose ships they pillaged . I'm wondering about the relations with the states whose ships weren't pillaged (as much).
785.
by sethg 17y ago
According to the documentation, you can't index on XML directly because there are no XML comparison operators (I suspect this is to avoid hair-pulling debates over whether `<foo x='y'>` should compare equal to `<foo x="y">&#
786.
by sethg 17y ago
Installing the buttons incurs a capital cost, and then there's the cost of maintenance, and the risk that vandals will pound on the buttons just for the hell of it. By contrast, the Dial4Light system builds on infrastructure for both contro
787.
by sethg 17y ago
I am salivating over the new WITH RECURSIVE ... SELECT ... syntax ( http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/static/sql-select.html ). There's a very hairy piece of C++ code in my group's codebase that grinds over a certain schema to perform a c
788.
by sethg 17y ago
PostgreSQL 8.3 (maybe earlier versions too, I haven't checked) has an xml data type. I haven't used it personally, but if I read the documentation correctly, you can do something like this: SELECT id, xpath('//node[@type=''title'']', d
789.
by sethg 17y ago
IIUC pirates operated with a certain amount of tolerance from the government--that is to say, from whichever government was unfriendly to the ships that were being pillaged. Legally there was a distinction between a privateer and a pirate,
790.
by sethg 17y ago
I would think that anyone who gets a degree from a reputable CS program would have to take a class in compiler design, so I wouldn't call such classes "obscure". Of course (a) just because you covered it in a class doesn't mean you remembe
791.
by sethg 17y ago
Just my personal story, but perhaps extrapolating from it will help answer your question. At my job I use Python because, well, at some point before I arrived one of the senior developers went on a jihad against Perl. :-) I've read stuff ab
792.
by sethg 17y ago
The truly hilarious episode is here: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=675
793.
by sethg 17y ago
I think one reason Linux user interfaces have been catching up with Windows (if not Mac) is that for the past ten years or so, desktop-app usability has remained stagnant (or, in the case of MS Office, regressed). Twenty years ago, Apple an
794.
by sethg 17y ago
But you're not taking into account advertising revenue. I'm not sure a Kindle-based newspaper could attract as much ad revenue as a print newspaper, because the medium just isn't as attractive to advertisers; ads on ebooks or the Web fee
795.
by sethg 17y ago
This is the sort of hack that Feynman himself would have pulled, back when he was an undergraduate.
796.
by sethg 17y ago
Subscribers pay much less than the newsstand price, and you can haggle down from the advertised subscription price as well, so I think your estimates are way off. The factoid I remember, although I can't cite a source offhand, is that the c
797.
by sethg 17y ago
It's a shame that the Times framed this as a Times editor's personal intercession to help a journalist, rather than as an application of Wikipedia's "Biographies of living persons" policy: "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a tabloid paper;
798.
by sethg 17y ago
I think it's a positive good that the Internet allows me to hear about the private lives of people who are otherwise (and may forever be) strangers to me. If for example I was struggling with depression or alcoholism or some other issue th
799.
by sethg 17y ago
When I started blogging I made a conscious decision to make everything public and put everything in one place. You go to my blog and you see my opinions about computer programming, Judaism, economics, sex, whatever. I wonder if my descenda
800.
by sethg 17y ago
For most of history, the modus operandi of governments has been to continue growing in power until they're so big they can't do anything but fail, then have a bloody revolution where the new radicals throw out everything the old guard did
801.
by sethg 17y ago
The line between "corporation" and "government" is not always so bright. For example, in 1987 GE sold its consumer electronics division to Thompson SA, which was owned by the French government.
802.
by sethg 17y ago
I'm not going to defend Naggum's online style, but for God's sake, the man just died and he probably isn't even in the ground yet. There was plenty of time for a meta-debate regarding netiquette while he was active on Usenet, and there wil
803.
by sethg 17y ago
When I saw the words "interactive" and "homicide" so close together, I really expected to see something different....
804.
by sethg 17y ago
I'm not sure the lawmakers are getting the message here....
805.
by sethg 17y ago
Yes, but there is a good reason for this: these different types of organizations do different things. Well... not always. For example, both banks and mortgage companies issue mortgages, but the banks are subject to more stringent regulat
806.
by sethg 17y ago
It seems to me that any wholesale reform of financial regulation has to prevent regulatory arbitrage. Right now, IIUC, banks and mutual funds and hedge funds and insurance companies and VC firms and non-bank mortgage companies are governed
807.
by sethg 17y ago
I learned the song when I was just a lad of ten.
808.
by sethg 17y ago
Is that why the song says "the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat"?
809.
by sethg 17y ago
The author seems to blame the two-party system and the class divide between politicians and voters for the fact that nobody is shrinking the size of the government. I have a much simpler explanation for this phenomenon: no substantial body
810.
by sethg 17y ago
See, that just proves that the browser is an integral part of the operating system.

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