sethg

15 ms·

91.
by sethg 15y ago
I used to work for a startup, Kenan Systems, that was 100% owned by one of the founders. In 1999, Lucent bought Kenan Systems for over <dr-evil>one billion dollars</dr-evil>. Obviously, all the Kenan employees had understo
92.
by sethg 15y ago
I am generally skeptical of boycotts as a political tactic, because if the boycotts aren’t large enough to make a significant dent on the target company’s revenues, the effect is just noise. The Walt Disney company is grossing about $40 bi
93.
by sethg 15y ago
I'm not totally sure how a conversation like that means - as some same-sex marriage opponents seem to think - that one has to start describing the intricacies of sex, anal or otherwise. Because some same-sex marriage opponents are obsesse
94.
by sethg 15y ago
One of the problems in the American political culture is that wealthy interests set the terms of the debate , and the mass media goes along with that frame of reference, which means that certain political perspectives are dismissed as not
95.
by sethg 15y ago
Is it possible to make a living as a stock photographer these days? I’m curious how people manage that.
96.
by sethg 15y ago
Why shouldn’t the first photographer have a “sense of entitlement”? He’s entitled! He has the right to set prices for his work, and the rest of us have the right to pay, negotiate a better price, or walk away from the deal. But going up t
97.
by sethg 15y ago
I don’t know about the business of photography, but in the SF/fantasy world, there are a significant number of publications that pay at least the SFWA/HWA minimum of 5¢ per word: http://www.ralan.com/m.pro.htm
98.
by sethg 15y ago
I think I understand the point that the photographer is trying to make, but phrasing it as “It cost me $6,612 to take this photo” is leading to a bunch of tangential arguments over that specific number. The photographer’s beef is with peopl
99.
by sethg 15y ago
You don’t even need there to be conscious corruption. If the system churns out incorrect bills through simple error (perhaps because the hospital never bothered to drag its accounting system out of the 1970s), and an overcharge is just as
100.
by sethg 15y ago
It’s possible that in the second case, your insurance company was paying the hospital according to the diagnosis, rather than covering each procedure as a separate line item, and therefore no itemized bill was necessary. http://en.wikipedi
101.
by sethg 15y ago
The American health-care system thrives in the uncanny valley between the government and the free market. There are all sorts of laws and regulations that prevent normal market procedures from working (for example, emergency rooms can’t tu
102.
by sethg 15y ago
Like jsnell, I spent weeks’ worth of nights beating my head against the problem I selected, and the solution I eventually came up with was not good enough to earn me an interview. I gather that someone with a stronger theoretical CS backgro
103.
by sethg 15y ago
Wait a minute—the ITA puzzles were supposed to be solvable in three hours ? I wish I’d known that before I tried to solve one.
104.
by sethg 15y ago
In my experience, interviewers who give whiteboard problems are not expecting perfect answers or even syntactically correct answers, although if the interviewer sees a bug (e.g., missing some corner case), you may be prompted to look for it
105.
by sethg 15y ago
When the Obama Administration put forth a package of proposed financial reforms a few years back, one of their suggestions was that every mortgage lender would be required to make its most prominent offering a “plain vanilla” mortgage that
106.
by sethg 15y ago
Wars are often caused by faulty intelligence, of the “oh, yeah, we can take this territory in a week” variety. I’m not a big fan of the defense establishment, but keeping an eye on our opponents’ capabilities is one of the more benign form
107.
by sethg 15y ago
Similarly, an American Sign Language sign takes longer to articulate than an English word (because signing uses larger, slower muscles than speech), but to compensate, a great deal of ASL grammar is carried by facial expression, posture, rh
108.
by sethg 15y ago
At the time the Bush Administration got invasion-happy, it believed that Iraq almost had nuclear weapons. (In retrospect it looks like they weren’t that close, but let’s assume the Administration believed its most pessimistic intelligenc
109.
by sethg 15y ago
Any patent LEGO might have claimed on the basic brick design must have expired long ago. MegaBlocks makes bricks that are advertised as compatible with LEGO bricks, but in my experience the tolerance is just a little bit off.
110.
by sethg 15y ago
I would submit that events restricted to members of a certain class are not in and of themselves evil. If someone sets up a workshop for “Right-Handed People Learning Code”, I as a left-handed person would not react with outrage. But whe
111.
by sethg 15y ago
This reminds me of Donald Knuth’s advice in the TeXBook: anything that you find yourself repeating three times is a good candidate for wrapping up in a macro.
112.
by sethg 15y ago
The people who design car seats these days know that their customers would rather spend an hour rethreading/reinstalling their car seat every six months than spend over $200 on the seat. But if there were a large fleet of shared cars on th
113.
by sethg 15y ago
I have a whole pile of certificates like that in my desk. I call them “checks”.
114.
by sethg 15y ago
My options per se were not worth anything, but the company that acquired my startup gave employees a bonus on closing and held out additional bonuses if we would stay for two years.
115.
by sethg 15y ago
As far as getting a 62% on the reading portion, well that's just pathetic. For all we know, the reading test was either testing for a different kind of plug-and-play (“the author of the above paragraph is using (a) apostrophe; (b) synechd
116.
by sethg 15y ago
I would add that it is possible to make standardized tests that teach more than memorization, but those tests will cost more to construct, norm, and grade. Schools are caught between the imperatives of testing and budget-cutting.
117.
by sethg 15y ago
You don’t even need that much justification. http://www.samefacts.com/2002/12/secrecy-in-government/shhhh... [quote] When I was young and irresponsible, I worked for the Justice Department, analyzing drug policy. In that capacity, I was p
118.
by sethg 15y ago
If the testosterone hypothesis is true, then men who try t negotiate their salary also falsely perceive that they are risking their jobs, but they do it anyway. I find that hard to believe.
119.
by sethg 15y ago
Before my last salary review, I spent $50 on salary.com to generate a report customized for my job description, location, education, company size, etc. I brought the report to my manager and showed the vast distance between my pay, even af
120.
by sethg 15y ago
As others have pointed out in this thread, there is practically no risk to asking for more money.

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