GS chief gives up bonus for now… Some more discussion here and here.

Here is a money quote (pun intended):

There are instances where bonuses are justified, deserved, and in the best interests of the investment bank involved. Your very best people are people you want to hold, and your very best people will have opportunities even in this environment to transfer allegiance.

So the rationale behind the pay structure, allegedly, is to use the bonus as a kind of bribe money, to keep proprietary information (some term it “talent”, laugh) locked up within one firm. So in a way, bonuses have gotten far away from being a performance incentive.
(Read the article)

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Technology Review had a discussion of Charles Simonyi’s intentional programming work. Such a frustrating article. It didn’t say anything — certainly too little about how intentional programming is implemented. Most of the article was just saying, yes, cross layer design is always difficult, abstractions leak (not to mention sometimes abstraction leak is intentional to preserve performance), so on and so forth.

No, the reason this was an interesting article was the biographical part, and of the biographical part was a nugget of a quote by Simonyi:

Simonyi was born in Budapest in 1948. The son of a physics professor, he fell in love at 15 with his first computer–a mammoth Russian Ural II in Hungary’s Central Statistical Office. By the 1960s, the Ural, which received its instructions through cash-register-style keys and had a roomful of vacuum tubes to perform calculations, would already have been a relic anywhere else in the world. But Hungary’s Communist leaders were trying to use the Soviet castoff to optimize rail and trucking schedules. The Ural wasn’t up to the task: there was no way to input real-time data on shipments. “It was completely hopeless,” Simonyi recalls. “It could have been done very easily by supply and demand. Unfortunately, that was politically incorrect.”

An apt observation that the free market is but a machine of humans running an optimization algorithm.

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Wikipedia says:

In Internet terminology, a troll is a person who enters an established community such as an online discussion forum and intentionally tries to cause disruption, most often in the form of posting inflammatory, off-topic, or otherwise inappropriate messages

What is a troll in Chinese? I don’t think there is a term. Wikipedia’s “in other languages” sidebar offers up 小白 for troll, but that just means idiot or annoyer, someone with a thick skin or someone who doesn’t get it; so no, that’s not exactly a troll. It doesn’t capture the aspect of intention and the not infrequent subtlety of trolling. The article on 小白 itself is hilarious. It’s obvious the usage is restricted to Taiwan.

Mainland and overseas Chinese BBS are full of subtlety to begin with, for reasons not worth mentioning at this moment. Maybe every Chinese is a native troll. Certain Chinese history points to training in – ah nevermind, I’m trolling. However, a subset of more benign trolling behavior seems to elicit more condemnation on these Chinese BBS and have terms associated with them. For instance: posting off-topic messages and inappropriate messages can take the form of 刷屏 or repeated re-posting, or posting in multiple sub-forums. Posting a stream of emoticons or other useless messages (to readers) such as 顶, 批, 阅, 路过 to increase the number of posts by one is known as 灌水. The meaning of 灌水 has expanded to include, in some cases, posts that are not just useless, but specifically useless for ongoing rational discussion. Since a post that elicits 灌水 behavior is known as a 坑 and somebody who writes such is engaging in 挖坑, then 挖坑 may yet emerge as the logical equivalent of trolling (verb). It has been used in that sense already.

Still no word for troll (noun), though 坑王 is a good candidate.

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