This is wrong. As is the use of the word "troll" in the summary/article. Trolls and shills are distinct, and the difference isn't whether they get paid. You can be a paid or unpaid troll and a paid or unpaid shill.

Trolls post messages written specifically to generate responses. The term derives from fishing where trolling means to drag something through the water to catch fish. Internet trolls post baiting comments trying to get people to respond to them. Flamebaiting is a subset of trolling, where the aim is to generate angry responses.

Shills post messages to talk up some product, service, etc., trying to make it look good and its competition look bad.

Both categories also assume that the writer likely doesn't fully agree with what he or she is writing. If two people write the same words but one believes them while the other doesn't, the former is not a troll or shill, but the latter may be.

Note that paid trolls are pretty common on the Internet, but they tend to write the articles (or, on /., the summaries) not the comments. "Clickbaiting" is almost the same as trolling in this respect, except that a clickbait article is to collect clicks, while a troll article is intended to generate comments.

But really should be "Don't Read the Summary", since the summaries frequently get edited into incomprehensible trollishness.

I have mod points today, and I was really tempted to mod your post "Troll". Just because it would be funny.

I have told a lot of people that a short study of project management--just a crash course from a book--would be valuable because of the context for hierarchical decomposition. Project Managers break down projects. A project's scope is broken down into a work breakdown structure (WBS) by listing the project as the top node (whole), and then breaking it into its deliverable parts--including project management, testing, and so forth, as well as solid deliverables--and then further breaking those down, until you have fully-identifiable work packages. Risks are broken down the same way in a Risk Breakdown Structure.

I encourage you to watch this ten-minute video, which explains a WBS in a way I find accurate, concise, and easily-understood. It's very approachable, in plain English language. You'll undoubtedly see that this is an excellent approach to absolutely anything you want to do; it seems obvious but, as you say, it's not a natural skill.

Steam irons use a heated water reservoir to store steam. US irons use a hot plate through which cold water is injected. A steam iron can produce a constant stream of steam for a good half-hour, and doesn't cool when steaming... except in the US, where it can produce steam for about 10 seconds, then needs 10 more minutes to heat back up.

I agree with the PM. I think he reached his conclusions through faulty means, but that doesn't make his conclusions wrong.

He is an idiot, and his position is founded on sand; I think the position that everyone should be a computer programmer is also founded on sand, but I actually understand *why*.

This important distinction is missed by the general public, and so public policy is a popularity contest. Smart people incorrectly think X, people get behind the guy. In the case of coding skills and technology in education, it's computer nerds thinking they understand market economy, sociology, and primary education. Being able to code in AWK, Sed, and Bash have proved more useful to me than C, Visual Basic, Objective-C, Java Script, C#, and even Python--as useful as Python and C# are (don't ask me why, but I actually like C#); I still don't think these are primary skills. My idea of primary skills are the base skills of learning that will allow students leaving high school to recognize that awk might be useful, and spend an afternoon learning it inside and out.

FWIW, at least at Google it isn't about specialization. Google SWEs are expected to be generalists, able to specialize as needed.

In fact, it's generally recommended that SWEs change teams within the company every few years, and that they intentionally look for a change that requires them to learn new skills. The belief in the company is that this approach serves both engineers and teams, providing fresh perspectives and insights to both, and spreading knowledge across teams (by moving it) and within teams (by reallocating responsibilities).

There are exceptions, of course. Some skills are rare enough that people stay within that field, even as they move between teams. On the other hand, even those exceptions have exceptions. I won't mention his name, but Google employs a famous cryptographer who recently decided that after many years of breaking the world's encryption systems he wanted to work on image compression. So he is. Another engineer I know has a PhD in computational mathematics, with a specialty in image processing. After a few years extracting building details (exterior shape, mostly) from merged aerial and street view photography, he now works on UI frameworks.

The choice of when or if to move to another team, and which, is the engineer's. The destination team also has a say, but most teams are perpetually short-staffed. Unless the team in need of some deep skill (e.g. a PhD in computational mathematics with specialization in image processing), or unless the engineer hasn't been performing well in the previous role, they're unlikely to refuse. This is why apparently-odd moves aren't uncommon; people decide they'd like to do something different, so they do.

What you just said makes no sense and has nothing to do with safety.

Yeah I've been wishing it wasn't so ridiculously hard to change mains voltage. If only we could distribute at 220V, or get 220V feed lines to build 220V circuits. Europe has all these 15 amp appliances like steam irons that you can't get in the US because you'd need 30-35 amps to run them--they're 15A at 220V. Same appliances in America are low-power (1800W), and operate as if they're severely defective.

High-voltage, low-current is the way to go. We have 20 amp bedroom circuits; we don't need 20V 120A circuits.

Utter nonsense. Please don't spread such misinformation.

Bulk collection may indeed be unconstitutional, but the court said nothing about that. What they said was that section 215 did not authorize bulk collection, so if Congress wants to authorize bulk collection they have to pass a law to say so. If Congress does that, then the court will eventually have to rule on constitutionality.

Without any programming experience it's not likely you'd get hired. While specific language doesn't matter, you have to have sufficient knowledge and ability to be able to have a detailed discussion about solving problems in software design and implementation, and prove that you can write clean, accurate code, and do it quickly.

My recommendation is that you first spend some time working through many of the problems provided by Project Euler, or the Top Coder challenges, or similar. Or maybe one of the coding interview books, like this one.

When you're comfortable that you can take on a not-completely-trivial software problem, design an algorithm to solve it, accurately characterize the big O time and space complexity of your solution (not prove it... though you should be able to prove it, given more time), explain why there aren't any more efficient solutions, code it up on a whiteboard, and explain how you'd go about testing it, all in the course of a 45-minute interview, then you're probably ready.

You see what I mean, folks? Assholes. They show up everywhere.

Her defense wasn't delayed by injustice; it was delayed by assholes. Injustice is a thing, a concept, one not entirely tied to reality; it is an abstract aligned to our moral beliefs. We don't consider the vicious treatment of pedophiles in America injustice because we hate them, even though empirically we can make some arguments about mental health and the fermentation of social pressures forcing people with an internal sickness into hiding, stress, and then the shape of something they could have avoided with proper social support. We consider victimization of Jews injustice because we've started this moral narrative about how hating on Jews is bad.

The fact of the matter is it's people who made decisions about their regards toward and actions about race that delayed this Ph.D. defense. It's assholes. It's people who decided to bar this from being heard. Injustice is a diffuse thing, like the injustice of a court system which executes more blacks than whites on similar evidence; it lifts blame off the participants and onto the mode of society or of misfortune. We pretend these actors don't exist, or at least that they aren't directly responsible for their actions, even though the victims are directly burdened by them. That nebulous ideal is immaterial to the consequences of society; the fact that people went along with it instead of using their human reason and empathy to decide against these happenings is squarely the fault of those people, not the fault of the speculation about what those people did.

What happened wasn't wrong; *you* were wrong for doing it.

The only way to ensure the possibility of a good paying job is to match labor supply with labor demand; that is, to make sure there aren't 100,000,000 computer programmers and 4,000,000 programming jobs.

"Keeping the US Economy competitive" is ludicrous. It's like eating shitloads of donuts to keep a sumo wrestler competitive: your body gets sick and you die, and all you really need is good sumo skills to wrestle people in your weight class successfully.

The US economy won't be competitive if it's completely and totally ill from a glut of computer science specialists and the constant suppression of salaries by state-subsidized college education. If the US economy runs well, a well-tuned machine with all of the parts correctly built and sized for need, it will outperform any other economy on earth. An arms race to stockpile perishable goods we have no intent nor ability to use before they expire is only going to make us a poor and shaky economy weak in the things we sacrifice for stacking up tons of tomatoes that are going to rot away next month.