PhilWright

Surely today you would get them made in China at the same kind of total cost. No more lacerated fingers putting them together yourself. There are fulfillment companies that take your stock and then send them out to customers as orders come in. Setup a website that hooks into the fulfillment company process and you have a virtually no touch process.

One rule to remember is that your time is more valuable than any of the people working for you. So any task that you are doing that could be done by someone in your team should be delegated to the team. Spend your time doing what only you can do. Such as setting priorities, making big calls on the technology for future projects and so forth.

I would also recommend that meeting your team members once per week is about right. More than that and your starting to micro manage and you remember as an engineer how annoying that is. More than a week and things can go too far off track before you can pull it back into line again.

As Slack/Skype and many others already exist you would need to find a compelling reason for businesses to adopt your offering instead and why it is worth the price. Then start by having a good website and use SEO so that the keywords of the problem you are solving mean people end up at your site. Give people a sign up form and then contact them to discuss what they are trying to do and how it might fit what you offer. Initial feedback should help you decide on your product viability and future changes.

I thought the presentation was very good. I was pleasantly surprised that the design was professional and modern looking.

It seemed to be a single page application because once you got started it was fast to get through the process. I suspect the SPA nature was a deliberate decision to offload workload from the servers. Imagine how much more traffic would been needed if every page/section on the form required another call to the server.

Why does the press lap up anything that Stephen Hawking says?

He is a brilliant physicist so I would definitely listen to his opinion in that specialist area. But he is not an expert on climate change, artificial intelligence or global extinction events. There are experts in those other areas that are worth listening to but just because Mr Hawking says something in those areas does not mean it is gold dust. If you want to know the possible dangers of AI then talk to Andrew Ng but Stephen Hawking is not your man. Would be listen to Kim Kardashian's opinion on climate change? I hope not as she is not qualified in that area, being well known does not mean you have expertise. Just an opinion and that opinion might be no better than the general public.

/RantOver

Sorry but I gave up like half way through. He was like, sounding like a 12 year old. With so many likes you know. Like annoying. Like.

Link doesn't work. So how did it manage to get voted to the front page?

You have to identify something specific and then look at that specific factor across the entire population of companies.

If you survey all CEO's of the Fortune 500 you might find that they are all workaholics. Do you conclude that being a workaholic will make you a CEO? Of course not. Did you look at how many workaholics there are that don't become CEO? That is survivorship bias.

You also need to look at cause and effect. Is it that you must be a workaholic to become CEO? Or is it that as you climb the ladder you end up working hard and harder because that is a requirement of each position. Maybe being a workaholic is an effect of climbing high.

I would argue that they did not miss mobile phones so much as poorly execute on it. They knew mobile phones were an opportunity from the outset and made multiple attempts at gaining traction. But all the attempts missed. How many versions of Windows did they try out for the phone?

I have a Lumina phone running Windows 10 and it is a great phone. But it is way too late. Just because they know they need to be in AR/VR does mean they will be able to execute on it and win.

You should investigate the RISC-V project.

It is an open source RISC based ISA along with open source implementations of example processor cores. Then you could have had a processor that was completely open and did not include any proprietary code.

https://riscv.org/

Well there are already several such systems. University provides accreditation or certification via a CISCO or Microsoft style exam.

Your approach has a fundamental problem. Who pays for it? If I pay to take your test and get a poor score then I will simply never tell anyone I took it. If I do great I will boast about it on my CV. In that case I might as well go with a Microsoft/CISCO style certification because it is well known. If the employeer pays for it then I will still need to take five of them as each employeer will want you to take a test.

Based in Melbourne, Australian I can confirm that it is impossible to get on the census website. With a population of over 20 million and everyone supposed to fill in the online census on the same day, that some serious testing must have been done in advance. I mean, they must have tested it with a million simultaneous users? Didn't they? Or maybe their AWS account hit its credit limit?

I certainly agree that the spread in productivity between the best and mediocre seems to be huge in software development compared to most other industries. In fact, I cannot think of another one quite like it off the top of my head.

We do have certain other advantages though. We can create a start-up and potentially make a huge amount of money. This is a realistic possibility for a substantial percentage of good developers. Much fewer people from other industries have that kind of chance.

With modern dating apps such as Tinder it is now possible for someone to realistically find and go on a huge number of first dates. This was just not practical before the Internet. It would have taken a massive effort to just find and meet and then get a date with that number of people.

Surely this means people will become far more picky than they were in the past as they feel they have a larger possible pool to pick from. But if everyone becomes more picky does that mean the desirable people are getting many more offers than before and the less desirable then finding it impossible to develop long term partnerships?

There is nothing unique or special about being a programmer.

Programmers think they are undervalued and should get more. But guess what, nurses think they should get more as well because they are saving lives. Soldiers think they should get more for making us all safe. Police think they should get more for reducing the level of crime in society which benefits us all. Teachers think they should get more because they are educating the next generation of wealth creators. Everyone thinks they should get a little more of the pie.

How do you resolve this? (Hint: supply and demand)

As an Englishman I have first hand knowledge of the country and much of its history. So I can see the article is not very accurate and very simplistic.

Great Britain was the pre-eminent 'empire' in economic, political and military power up until about the first world war. The military power was based mainly on naval superiority for protecting our overseas empire with a mediocre army. But from that point onwards it was in decline. We did not realise it until the second world war when the full industrial power of the United Status make itself felt. Winston Churchill may have sat with Roosevelt and Stalin but even he know that we was the junior partner in the talks.

Even after WW2 we had an outsized political influence because of our special relationship with the USA and influence with many ex-colonies. The UN security council was setup with five permanent seats, the five countries that at the time had nuclear weapons (USA, Russia, China, France, UK). Obviously the UK is not likely to vote itself off of that council and they have veto power.

The Brexit vote is based purely on the issue of immigration. Part of being in the UN is that all people from the EU countries can travel and work freely within any of the countries. Given that English is a very popular second language in the poorer countries you can see that many of them come to the UK to try for a better life. I would do the same in their position. Imagine if the USA joined in union with Mexico and part of that meant the border between USA and Mexico was completely open. Do you think there might be a large number of people moving to America and do you think that would cause stress on the education, health system and resentment from the local population? I think it would and so it has with the UK population. Add on top that the British have never really liked the Europeans very much and that much of the EU is actually controlled by a German/French power block and you have plenty of people who want out.

"officials said they had concluded that between 64 and 116 civilians died in 473 strikes."

This is a shockingly high number when you consider that any male 18-50 with the target is automatically considered to be a combatant. So the real figure it likely to be considerably higher. Imagine if you heard that Vladimir Putin was sending agents abroad to assassinate people that Russia considered terrorists. But they managed to also kill innocent civilians every other time. I suspect most people would condemn that action. Is the drone war any different?

Not to mention that I believe the drone war is actually counter productive in the long term. Imagine you live in a village and regularly hear a drone overhead. Every few months it kills somone in the village. Sure, might have been a bad guy but that's not a great environment for people to live in. Only likely to create resentment and create more terrorists.

America seems to never learn from conflicts like Vietnam and more recently Afghanistan. If you sit in someone's backyard and kill people you create more of the people that want to kill you. Want to bet how many years the drone war continues before you realise it has not solved anything and your just perpetually creating and then killing terrorists.

An interesting project but with no real technical details.

You state 'Every person is offered deals by the devil...'.

This is a religious assertion. So putting a disclaimer that you are not suggesting any religious explanation is therefore nonsense.

Presumably the big different is that 200 years ago you did not have decent batteries and electric motors.

I think the panic over automation of cars and trucks is a little premature. At the moment you cannot buy a car or truck that will auto drive. I mean auto drive in the sense of not needing a driver at all. Until you can completely remove the driver then there is no danger to the taxi/trucking industry, it will be only a driver aid in the same way cruise control is a driver aid.

There is a huge gap between Google testing a driverless car, with a person in it for emergencies, and actually seeing hordes of driverless taxis of trucks on our streets.

I can imagine a new trend with bored teenagers. Jump in front of the driverless car or truck and watch it emergency stop. Then run away. Or wait for the news report where all the driverless cars in the city have gone to the same car park because a hacker thought it would be hilarious. Just one truck accident that wipes out a few children and the trucks will be taken off the road. After all, if one truck has the bug then they all do. When a person makes a mistake we don't stop all trucks because we blame the person, when a software version crashes then they all could crash.

Prices do not increase just with inflation. Imagine how much the standard of living has increased over that time. So peoples income will have increased faster than inflation.

It would be more interesting to compare the price of the paper compared to the average wage.

You can always create a simple utility that converts the EDN syntax to JSON. That way you get the syntax you want with a trivial and correct automatic conversion.

I think the reaction of this thread is a little over the top. Lets calm down and be professional and adult before we convict someone based on scant information. I know it is fun to rail on someone but firing a person is not a minor issue and could potentially destroy someone's career.

The information we are presented with is minimal. This is perfectly understandable but it means that no one in this thread has anything like enough detail or context to make any judgement on firing someone.

What if the man was simply making a pass at someone he liked but unfortunately was clumsy and inept at doing so? Should it never be possible for a man to ask a woman from work out on a date? What if the woman has a reputation of being a social justice warrior that hates men and loves any excuse to complain about any perceived slight. We have no idea on the ages or marital statuses of the two people. What if he is a married middle aged man with three kids and she is a young intern? That makes it sound a lot more creepy. What if they are both single and the same age and seem to have the same hobbies? Does that change things a little? You cannot judge this scenario based on a couple of sentences from the OP.

My point is not to defend him, I have no idea if he is a predatory creep or a good guy that made a simple mistake. But then neither does anyone else here. Get a lawyer so you can follow a sensible policy of sitting down with the accused and ask about his side of the story. Depending on the response determines your next action.

People are not guilty of their parents crimes/behaviour. If you meet someone that has a parent that committed a hideous crime then we do not blame the children.

This also works the other way, if your parent is national hero that does not reflect on the children either. You should not take the credit for a parents good work.

Obviously it can be difficult for immediate children to take such a dispassionate attitude to parents actions but as more generations go by it should become easier.

If I pay $200 for a printer and they immediately send me back $150 as a rebate because of a special deal, then what is the printer worth? It is worth $50 because that is the actual net cost.

If I pay $2B for Zynga and then pay myself back $1.5B from its cash reserve then it has only cost me $0.5B to buy. Hence its net worth is $0.5B.

I am sceptical that robots will lead to mass unemployment.

We have heard this luddite fear repeatedly since the start of the industrial revolution. There used to be 90% of people employed in agriculture but today we are down to something like 10% in the UK. Do we now have 80% unemployment?

A hundred years ago the UK had mass employment in heavy industries such as ship building. They have long gone and the UK is now a services based economy. Do we now have 80% unemployment?

There is no limit, so far, to human wants and needs and so releasing people from some industries will allow them to move to others or create entirely new ones.

Is there something wrong with my browser? Because looking at the website it is designed for the visually impaired. The font must be something like 72point.

A CEO does not get hundreds of millions unless they have a large chunk of the company. So either a founder or given lots of shares so they are like a founder.

Anyone that uses the phrase 'monthly expense profile' to indicate they have large monthly expenses is clearly great at marketing. Your credentials are proven sir.

As an employee you get paid employee wages. If you want founder wages then you need to become a founder. Instead of joining an existing company/start-up I recommend you reach out to your network and join up with others starting a company.

Alternatively you could start your on your own. As a marketing expert you should have the skills to market your new business to others that need marketing skills. If you cannot, then your marketing skills are not that great!