Imagine stating the location of your work and the cost of your time in $/hour (whatever you assign to it), and the size of housing unit you want. The, you would see a map colored based on the delta between the cost of your commute (via either personal vehicle or public transit) and the cost of housing in various areas. I bet that, for most urban dwellers, there would be a few surprising points on the map.
How much "noise" in terms of false leads must the world create to make scams like these unprofitable? Would it be sufficient to mine a spam filter and auto-respond en masse with various canned responses? How about a site which facilitates scam baiting, sans the hand-carved 80's era computers and other extremes of 419eater? It could be positioned as entertainment and a public service rolled-up in one. Want a break at work? Check-in on your currently active scams and send out some email. The site would link-up to gmail/hotmail/whatever accounts you create (to avoid TOS issues) and use Twilio to facilitate anonymous phone calls. It would be like a virtual customer service/call center application. There would be suspense, intrigue, and surprise. How will the authors of this piece of spam attempt to con me?
I've often been surprised by how silly the "Russian girl coming to the US" genre of spam sounds when reading it. "Oh, I decided to come to America, found you randomly on the 'net somewhere, and decided that I'd like to meet you." Like the Nigerian scammers, these folks want to induce selection bias toward a population of men who will suspend disbelief and do almost anything in a futile attempt to meet a girl. It would be interesting to respond to such spam in a way which suggests relatively low motivation and see how the scammers respond. Send a casually-shot photo of a reasonably attractive man and claim it to be yourself. Perhaps a photo of such a man with a reasonably attractive woman who quite plausibly could be an ex girlfriend. The idea is to imply that you have options for forming relationships beyond relying on a Russian woman's successful journey to the US. [The scam apparently involves asking for money to pay for unexpected airline fees, etc. -- pay the money, and the girl will be here soon] Then, for contrast, send a photo of an ugly man and compare the scammers' responses.
I once saw a TV segment showing some starlet being photographed for a print clothing ad campaign. The stylist used metal clips (the sort one can buy at an office supply store for holding 50 sheets of paper together) to tighten the garment around her torso. From the front, the dress looked like it fit her perfectly. However, the back exposed a bunch of black metal clips holding back fabric. How does such an ad compare ethically to the specially-made McDonald's burger? A woman with the same measurements buying that same garment would not look as good as the starlet being photographed.
For the system I've been working on for the past year, most domain-ish objects extend from a class called AbstractImmutableObject which implements both hashCode() and equals() as final methods. Then, subclasses are forced to implement a "collectObjects()" method which effectively creates an array of instance variable references (plus autoboxed primitives) for a deep implementation of equality and a guaranteed consistent hash code. Immutability currently is enforced by convention, but I think FindBugs could help out. Presuming that all the instance variables in the graph of AbstractImmutableObjects are primitives or JDK objects with consistent hash functions, the resultant hashcode will be consistent as well.
[As an aside, I dislike this sort of utility base class, but it's a small price to pay for avoiding awful bugs related to hashcodes being inconsistent with equals, etc.]
I also argue that computing a hash on a serialization of an object graph is problematic as well. What are the rules for computing the hash of a serialization of a set of Strings? Must one sort the Strings before serializing them to ensure that any two Sets with the same values have the same hashcode? Sets are not required to maintain an ordering and equals() on sets ignores order (but not on SortedSet), so I would expect my "distributed" hashcode to be the same for any Set containing the same Strings. Such a scheme couples my serialization scheme tightly with my rules for equivalence. As I like to use serialization schemes written by others when possible and I don't want to eat the cost of serialization whenever I want a consistent hashcode, I'd prefer to decouple these ideas.
Recently, I've gone a step further with our domain objects and have written a generator of builders and instances using dynamic proxies (just the out-of-the-box JDK 1.3 era stuff). Developers just define interfaces, and unit tests enforce rules about what objects may be contained within the object graphs. This makes it really simple to implement things like round-trip JSON ser/deser. Because the realm of possibilities is so limited, it's easy to ensure correctness.
[As an aside, I'd love to have a DSL for such domain objects and then write a bunch of dynamic pieces parts for serialization, meta-stuff (creating a Guava function in a literate sort of way for any path through a domain object, etc.), builders, etc. I guess this is one step down the rabbit hole of model driven development, but I'm looking for something a bit lighter than, say, AndroMDA).]
The claims of environmentalism seem laughable. Surely the cost in terms of increased material requirements, wasted space due to 104 elevators, etc. makes this building a bad choice w.r.t. the environment compared to constructing, say, 10 buildings of 1/10th the size?
A good start. Does Buffalo offer any sort of SLA which promises timely firmware updates? What scares me about buying a router is that vendors silently stop supporting them. So, while grandma's grandson might have turned on automatic firmware updates, widely known security issues might not be patched after a year or two.
What surprised me was the number of responses along the lines of "you don't need this -- just install DD-WRT, OpenWRT, whatever and configure the foo,bar, and baz features as such." I'm likely in the 99th percentile of the US population in my ability to do such a thing, and I still have to spend a bunch of time Googling. Worse yet, I don't have the certainty at the end that I've done it right.
When learning just about anything, there's a period during which the rate at which you discover additional aspects about that thing which you don't know is greater than the rate at which you learn. So, your self-assessment of capability decreases before it increases. At least this always happens to me. I've come to accept this as a sign of progress.
So, Amazon has said since the introduction of EC2 that, to ensure really high uptimes, customers should use multiple availability zones and architect their applications to survive an outage in a single availability zone. While I would question Amazon's competence if outages of any sort were overly frequent, Amazon has not had many at all and no recent cross-AZ ones. [This is correct, right?] I recognize that architecting applications to be performant across datacenters (tolerant of relatively high-latency replication), but Amazon seems to be a poster child for keeping its promises w.r.t. availability. Is my take on this incorrect?
It seems like the risk of not collecting $500 from a bunch of developers is peanuts compared to the real threat MSFT now faces of people choosing to develop non Windows-specific apps which happen to still work on Windows. How many "apps" have you installed lately which are really just local servers with web front-ends? Qt-based stuff? Java SWT/Swing? What else? While many of these apps likely are built upon 3rd party components developed using Visual Studio (perhaps a free version), the makers of these apps almost always provide a Mac and Linux version. Microsoft has passed a dangerous tipping point where it is now like Apple in the early 90's -- fighting to attract developers who will provide killer, platform-specific apps. We all laughed as Ballmer screamed, "Developers, developers, developers!" However, he's all too well aware of the danger Microsoft faces of losing its dominance as a platform provider. I'd say "lost" as I believe they're already running on fumes, but they still control a huge portion of the desktop market. They should be worrying that developers won't develop anything at all which relies on their APIs and forgo the overly ambitious goal of buying developers' use of Metro. In a storm, any 'ol port will do.
I'll trade a 1% reduction in implementation time for 10x the jar file sizes. I'll take "lighter" in terms of API surface area, memory/CPU usage, etc. though.
"Only 1.1M" Why do I care? Is this framework designed for embedded systems or mobile apps? Smaller is better, but one MB vs 10 MB makes no difference for me as a guy writing server-side Java.
Some friends who are using OkCupid say that their potential date's use of proper grammar is one of the best predictors of compatibility and that this signal is surprisingly hard to fake, especially in mail exchanges (vs. profiles which could be wordsmithed by a friend).
I'd never thought about the idea that a "better" designed for-sale site where users would be lead toward creating a proper listing would actually provide worse subjective predictors.
It amazes me how many people will list something for sale on Craigslist without publishing obvious facts like model numbers. There's an upside if you a buyer who compares your price for the used item with the price for a new-but-superior item. However, the downside risk of wasting your time with people who walk away once learning the details of the item seems to outweigh this benefit.
Perhaps the greatest downside is that people like me will determine that the person selling the item is an idiot and apply a discount factor for the risk of even dealing with them.
A month or so ago, I shopped on Craigslist for a used 42"-ish TV. As the article states, people wanted way too much for them and didn't state specific model numbers. I ended up buying a low-end new TV with some stacked-up promotions as suggested by a Slickdeals.net commenter.
Flat panel HDTVs? I've seen plenty of good-as-new CRT TVs there -- right beside the perfectly good VCRs, record players, tape decks, and non-surround receivers.
I live in Cleveland, but I've been working during the week in Chicago for the past year. When I first started spending time in Chicago, I noticed how thin the average person in the city is compared to Clevelanders. A year into this contracting gig, I've lost 35 pounds without much effort. Want some coffee? The good coffee shop is around the block. Want to meet some friends-of-friends for lunch? It's only a few blocks away. Nice night, maybe I should just walk "home" (I bought a condo in Chicago) -- only 1.5 miles. Oh, and because that condo was an icky short-sale condo, I end up doing stuff like scrubbing floors in the evenings. It's the little things which seem to add up. Stocking my kitchen with mostly stuff which is not awful health-wise surely helped as well.
Being "educated" != having a college degree. What was missing from the piece was any mention of the difference. Vivek Wadhwa was portrayed as someone who believes "you gotta have that piece 'o paper to make it in America." Also, the piece was somewhat disingenuous in that it kept harping on the supposed risk those dropping out were taking even though it later mentioned that most in the program easily could re-enter college. It's like those saying that the 18 year-old LeBron James was giving up his chance for an education when he chose the NBA over college. Perhaps Thiel could have defined opportunity loss for the audience (sarcasm, of course).
Without ADHD meds, our son often can't concentrate long enough to finish a sentence. He starts one, shifts to another, and repeats. Often, in the mornings before his meds kick-in, he lacks sufficient impulse control to avoid hitting his mother (also my wife -- the English language seems to lack a single word which denotes both relationships) or threatening her with physical violence. The differences in behavior are striking in their contrast. While I don't like the idea of "medicating away" a problem which could be solved via better parenting, I don't see how we can possibly be effective parents if we had to spend most of our time with him (1) protecting his little brother from his aggression, (2) protecting physical possessions, or (3) attempting to correct behaviors which himself seems to wish he did not have but can not stop due to lack of impulse control. On meds, we can do what normal parents get to do.
A good question. Certainly, without preparation, I would have received an above average score. IIRC, CWRU required a 33 on the ACT for the better of two merit-based scholarships. I got a 34 the 3rd time I took the test. I think the difference between the two scholarship levels was around $18K. Given that I think my studying was worth at least a point, I can argue that my time was rewarded at at least $180/hour.
[To answer what I think is an obvious question, I doubt the overall utility of my hundred hours spent studying. However, it wasn't like CWRU was going to give me the same scholarship for having done something more useful instead.]
We just sent in our six year-old's Montessori application for first grade next year. Our suburban public school system has an amazing reputation, and the passing rates for standardized tests are some of the highest in the state. Sadly, our little Aspie with ADHD issues has already expressed his dread of first grade. He doesn't want to do "seatwork", "paperwork", or any of the other drudgery that our local district tells him is "his job". [Quotes indicate words used by teachers with the best of intentions.] I can't figure out the value of this pseudo-rigor. Maybe I'm unusual in my autodidactism, but I can't think of anything I know which I (1) find valuable and (2) learned by force.
I bought a K'NEX roller coaster kit and helped him put it together. At first, he didn't grok the pseudo 3D instructions or the way the pieces fit together. However, after an hour or so, he was rotating our partially assembled segments in his head to compare them to the illustrations. But, this doesn't count as rigorous seat work. Oh well.
Our school actually does an excellent job of avoiding the binary incentives of No-Child-Left-Behind and attempts to provide somewhat individualized instruction to students. Ohio has yet to adopt a value-added measurement scheme, and I wonder how our district would fare, especially if achievement was normalized for socio-economic status (the average household income is over $100K, a high number for Ohio).
We hope that the Montessori school's motivated teachers can use their freedom from mandated curriculum requirements, standardized testing, etc. to facilitate our son's exploration of what interests him. I don't care if his education is seen as incomplete, unbalanced, or otherwise non-standard so long as he grows to become a curious, thoughtful, and creative person. When has someone with these qualities ever failed because he had some perceived weakness in his childhood education?
If I think I need a new suit and the only information available to me is the colors of various suits and their thread counts, I might be forced to make a selection solely based on these attributes. But, because I can touch the suits, try them on, and examine their quality in whatever ways I deem fit, I don't have to rely upon price as a measure of quality. Without exchanging experiences with other kids' parents, aren't these "shoppers" forced to make do with the available data? Perhaps a parents' "shopping night" where each teacher gives a short talk on his/her education philosophy and then sticks around for Q/A would allow use of better selection criteria?
I probably spent over 100 hours preparing for the SAT/ACT exams as a 16 year-old. Given that I received over $50K (early '90's) in merit-based college scholarship money based mostly on these scores, I effectively "earned" $500/hour studying. I have yet to earn this much as an adult.
When I was at CWRU in the mid-90's, I was on a student panel which provided large donors (those whose last names were the same as large area companies, mostly) with an opportunity to ask questions of students. Several donors wondered why Case students studied so hard and participated so little in extra-curricular activities. After all, one said, I'd rather hire the interesting, well-rounded student with a 3.0 GPA than the boring one with a 3.7. Several students on the panel explained that many of their peers feared the short-term consequences of low GPAs -- lost scholarships and limited job opportunities. The donors were surprised to learn that most companies (in come cases including their own) would refuse to allow students with less than, say, a 3.5 GPA to even sign-up for on-campus interviews.
One might consider such comments as little more than posturing. Recall Steve Jobs explaining that the iPhone could not have apps because users would not tolerate a rogue app taking down the mobile network. However, his statements are so obviously false that he must either think his listeners are fools or be one himself.
Right. The data center owner had no obligation to allow the FBI to return the server. [IANAL] This was a convenient choice on their part. Is there any reason why this human rights organization can or should not post a torrent of the server's disk images so that knowledgeable folks can determine what the FBI might have done to the machine?
What are the US laws in regard to search and seizure of rented storage facilities? This seems like an interesting point on the continuum between an apartment and a data center rack.