You don't need to eat processed food AT ALL to eat a balanced plant-based diet, you can get everything you need from unprocessed foods just fine... yes, everybody going veggie will start with the processed foods for familiarity and ease of cooking, I of course did that myself, but you don't have to stay there if you don't want to.

It takes a while to retrain your tastebuds, of course, and it makes it next to impossible to eat out, this can be a deal breaker for some, but I have been eating plant-based whole foods for years and am doing just fine. It does take more planning but in general various combinations of a grain, beans, greens and veggies can give you what you need. The only thing you can't get on a purely plant-based diet is b12, and that's the only "supplement" I take, nothing else.

From my perspective the less labels one uses the better, in the end putting aside any ethical considerations (which people might or might not agree with) it is unarguably more environmental to eat lower on the food chain, so the more plant-based meals people eat the better for everybody: it is nice to see more effort being put towards simpler goals (like vegan before 6, meatless mondays, etc. etc.) to lower the impact our food has on the planet without being too black-or-white about it, this is also why I don't like the term "vegan" anymore as it has way too many judgemental overtones.

I personally eat plant-based 100% of the time, but I realize it's not for everybody (it is definitely difficult especially in the working environment where these days it seems "team lunches" are a mainstay of most jobs), this said IMHO it's not hard to lower the amount of animal and/or processed products you eat at least some of the time, and having an egg substitute that works exactly the same as "real" eggs is a good step in that direction (not to mention that folks allergic to eggs would sure be happier!).

it is still really shortsighted anyways, because you might end up with a top performer that's going through a temporary rough patch (divorce, health issues, ...) and they could get caught and let go when if the company stuck with them a bit longer they would reap the benefits. I remember some time ago reading a comment here on a previous discussion on reviews where the manager stuck for this employee (who was going through a divorce iirc) and a year later and for many years afterwards they ended up being extremely, extremely, extremely high performers (as well as loyal, showing gratitude for what the company did for them).

When I read this article and read that 'involuntary departures went up by 50% because there are more frequent "tough discussions"' it makes me feel like this could easily degenerate in a climate-of-fear where if you have an off month you might end up being let go, a yearly review is not optimal but short-term dips are obviously more easily counterbalanced by good productivity the rest of the year when the issue was resolved, not to mention if you have yearly reviews on record for several years it becomes it more obvious when dips are temporary or there is an underperforming situation (which might not be the employee's fault, could simply be an issue of not having the right person in the right job or vice-versa).

As an addition I do think companies should decouple raises from performance reviews, in general the budgets tend to be fixed and low, so if you have a good team you can't really give people the raises they merit, because say if you give the right amount to three people they'll be happy and the rest will get nothing (even if they did well) while if you give a little to everybody nobody's happy (since they'll feel they just got a cost-of-living adjustment for a really good solid year of effort).

I suggest you have a "sticky" top story for beta remaining at the top of the page ( maybe with a different background ) until this is decided one way or another, this way hopefully it will be more likely beta discussions will stay in there vs in every story that's posted.

I think the restaurant metaphor is misleading, because it assumes your patrons are entirely interchangeable. /. to me is more akin to a club, where you do have the old members with the most knowledge, and the new members joining and learning from the old members and perpetuating the club "culture". If this redesign goes through, a lot of the mentors/old members will leave, and if they go under the critical mass needed to sustain it there is a risk the site itself will become non-viable and just a news aggregator with lowest-common-denominator discussion.

I can't see why sites continue to change their look to be "fresh" while not leaving the previous look available for people that prefer it, if you have your articles in a db it should be trivial to leave the old codebase up and running "forever" if you really can't be bothered to have your new codebase support the old format (which in my opinion should be the #1 feature of any code redesign, backwards compatibility).

A similar charade is going on with my.yahoo.com right now, which has force-update everybody from the old very comfortable and information-dense layout to a new "fresh" layout with less functionality (can't hover on stories to read the abstract for example, which should be a fairly basic feature) and gobs more wasted whitespace and large fonts everywhere: users are up in arms on the suggestion boards and have been since it was in beta, but the company went forward anyways and it looks like it's unfortunately here to stay.

The only constant in life is change, but it sure would be nice if this change didn't always seemingly happen hand in hand with reduction in functionality and less customizability. It would be like if the next version of emacs forced you into a 3-pane buffer with 16pt fonts and mandatory purple on white font/colors because it looks more "fresh", just because something is old it doesn't mean it's "stale", it can just mean it's tested and works well and so should be left alone.

change happens, sure, but when change is for the worse should we really embrace it? There is no shortage of news sites on the internet, I think the majority of old users like myself still come here for the comments/discussion, and if a redesign makes the comment section less usable and so causes people to leave, what's left then?

I worked quite a bit in Motif ages back at a fairly involved level, I wrote a 'cross platform' (which at the time meant 'different versions of unix') GUI creator in Motif (compatible with several versions of Motif too) where you could drag & drop motif widgets, resize them wysiwyg etc. and I didn't find it too bad to use. From a user perspective there were also some really really really nice scientific commercial widgets you could buy that made it really stand out for some applications.

I do agree it could've been made easier to use in some scenarios though, for example from the subclassing perspective, I managed to create a working text widget subclassed from XmText that did rectangular highlighting but that was quite hard to get to work correctly.

I still have the O'Reilly complete X programming series of books on my shelf, I spent quite some time with them, fun times...

can you clarify what you mean by 'limited mode'?

as far as I can see from reviews, total system consumption for a modern card doing 2d is very low: as I was saying this is workable *if* all you do is (text) coding all day, of course if you plan to run some 3d stuff every now and then then this won't work. This said somebody else in the thread was also reporting you can drive 4k with the onboard intel GPU so that would of course work even if you bought a prebuilt PC.

the article was suggesting that 30Hz gives mouse lag, I mean, when I'm coding I am 99% on the keyboard anyways, but mouse lag is annoying enough that I'd rather spend more and get a 'real' monitor that will do 60Hz vs a TV that does 30Hz (or a low end 4k monitor, like the new cheap dell which does 30Hz max too)

have the business people forgot all about amortization plans and so on? it would definitely be interesting tooling a factory up thinking only about a yearly budget...