acscott

From the question without even reading a thing, why would any set of events follow a gaussian?

No evidence to support the thesis. No special personal perspective to share the secret sauce.

The unfilled job number of 6 million is an interesting data point. I'll give them that. But a job does not equal having a good life.

In short, the only data point to take away from this is waste of time. Am I being harsh? Not as harsh as un-empathic, presumptive declarative what people in America need (by the way you need to provide evidence and support to make claims like this at least).

My grandpa who still legally drives turned 100 last year. He loves to eat meat (rare to raw), rich foods, and wanted to share with me his stash of liver pate in the refrigerator on my last visit. When I asked him about how he could hook me up to connections while he bragged about his successes he replied "They're all dead!!!". He's said that happiness is a racket and myth; that success is different for each person; that you should never say you are sorry; that you should put your track shoes on early, run like hell, and never look back. There's more. But I think, the long-lived, are not the best sources of information on how to live long.

This reminds me of setting noatime for disk mounts (http://askubuntu.com/questions/2099/is-it-worth-to-tune-ext4...)

Now I want to know the number of other configs to reduce the number of system calls. This all adds up to being significant the greater the number of hosts in your environment.

Today's db optimizer builds a set of execution plans and chooses the best one based on "cost". Number of rows, memory access vs. disk access, and other things factor into this cost. Also, the higher the number of joins, the greater the number of plans. 7 joins would be 7! possible plans +. This has to happen fast, so db optimizer cannot generate every possible plan and pick the optimal one. There's a body of research to delve more into how it does this. The point is that the optimizer does real work, as fast as possible to generate the execution plan (they called this dynamic programming in one paper I read).

The LINQ interpreter on the client would have to retrieve the statistics from the server's tables and indexes of interest and perform the same operation as the optimizer (costing more network and some db cpu). Next it would have to send back the plan to the db executor in some way. This plan "marshalling" would cause more network traffic, requiring the executor to "unmarshall" the plan costing more CPU. This is less efficient than the current scheme.

Alternatively the LINQ language could be implemented on the database but with its own inherent difficulties, but in reverse.

Once a plan is cached and is reused, this inefficiency goes away to some degree. So there could be a possible mechanism for the server to send back to LINQ client a hash identifying the plan if it is cached and then have LINQ only send the hash with parameters to the DB on next execution. (You would have to see if this isn't covered by some patent of course!)

The constraint is the network connection. If the network connection between client and server were faster and bigger than the data bus on the computers, then it would change the equation significantly. But longer distances means slower communication all things being equal (lightspeed and all). So a network connection being better than the data bus would be inefficient and quickly remedied in a competitive marketplace.

Interesting discussion as it considers how SQL is implemented, what is an abstraction, etc.

On the topic of concept-rightness you quickly veer into a language game. gcc transforms c code into machine code (and may also output error messages, warnings and such). For some, this is not important, and may not be conceptually right. But if you are interested in say the ABI for instance, you do care.

On the point of "fundamentalness of abstraction", I interpret it as a measure of how many layers of abstraction (Ab) can be decomposed into the concrete thing of interest. LINQ generates another layer, that of SQL. If it generated an execution plan and sent that to the database optimizer, then I would say it does not generate another layer and would be equal in level of Ab to SQL.

But if LINQ can generate SQL that runs on the database, then it is also possible for the database to support LINQ natively. And maybe that was the original intent.

However, as it stands today LINQ to SQL costs CPU resources. So in adopting LINQ one of the tradeoffs you are adopting is CPU resources for developer use/benefit of LINQ.

"Science" has now many definitions. My personal understanding of "science" is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYPapE-3FRw

Didn't see any answer on how to "raise a genius". The presumption is that we want more geniuses and that Ph.D.s are precious resources to society. Is there also a tacit belief here in the Great Man theory of history?

The message here is, well if you don't get a Ph.D., make a lot of money. If you don't make a lot of money, get a patent. If you don't get a patent, at least get published. There are other things that we also want to be able to cultivate other than those I bet.

When a group of geniuses could build a nuclear weapon to take out a whole country, I believe the interest in genius started to spark. Before then, what was the icon of a a genius (I'm thinking before Einstein became iconic)?

The article is interesting, what were the lessons though?

There are other measures of value to society other than STEM publications, income, patents, and Ph.D.s It's often the outliers that don't even fit the Gaussian that are more interesting to me. (Feynman said he scored 120 something on an IQ test.)

It's junk. Tried to get something useful done and version incompatibilites and poor documentation made it a losing battle. Type theory is over-wrought for getting things done. My boss doesn't care that I have to cast an integer to a string.

Microsoft does not grow food, build houses, create clothes, cars, or protect you from foreign invaders. The basic human needs are not met by MS. The business that claimed that open-source was a cancer is just a marketing company with memetic feedback loops. Plenty of over Operating Systems are out there. Their office product is no longer relevant (vis. a vis. Libre Office, Google Docs, and others). Are you telling me a multi-billion dollar company cannot compete with a startup such as Google? There's a reason why. They do not create. Just marketing.

Maybe consider moving away from Windows/ You are living in their world. If they want PowerShell to be adopted their whole program management will make sure you can only get things reasonably done with PowerShell. It's their world, and you don't have to be a non-paid employee of Microsoft.

Microsoft operates as though, and under the assumption that their software is needed. It's a faulty premise. The presumption is arrogance incarnate.

As a business I can fully, completely operate without any of the their software, profitably, peaceably, and with at least the same amount of friction or less. And more securely.

If you think otherwise, you are ignorant of the tools available for free and of some intelligently thought-out engineering.

Quality of a language is such a trite, over-used discussion that the results/goals of software are completely forgotten. This too is arrogant ignorance.

How many software engineers are there in the world? It's more than taxi-cab drivers. More than Dr.'s More than teachers. Cooks, farmers, and builders (not combined of course). This is evidence of software for software's sake. There is no quality. Just a moving shell-game of "you need this".

I love writing algorithms--that PowerShell and .NET are some kind of something that will solve people's problems any better than something else is simply marketing. I have a pet rock to sell you.

Didn't even see a mention of what science really is. I bet you many "scientists" don't know (pun intended) and couldn't tell you what science is.

Knowing an experiment or observation is not repeatable _is_ knowledge that _can be_ useful. What are the causes of non-repeatability? That's even more useful to know.

The observation and experimentation processes of science may be reflexive and would be worth investigating.

The money spent on "science" has created ecosystems where the novel, accidental discovery might be more likely.

The claim that "science" is self-correcting must be supported by evidence.

Finally, the media reporting of science does injustice to scientists by making claims not put forth in publications so frequently, that you are wise to disregard any media reporting of the science, and must go to the paper itself.

Thanks for the rant! I'm with you. Many people probably would not read an article about incremental advances in science. As an economics topic, genomics may be turning into a bigger influence.

For a scientist working incrementally, accumulating data, sieving it for information, fighting for grants, doing administration while making sure family gets three squares, articles like this may cause a wince. But they probably influence support for more funding. Pro scientists I know do not have time to read these articles and will never see them unless it's from someone else, but budding scientists, career-changers, influencers, all get misinformed.

In short, news on science causes long-term damage for short-term gains.

Cool essay written 1930. If you get a standard income for being a citizen that gives you shelter, food, clothing, healthcare, education. You then will be working for improving the quality of those items. And there will be some people who reproduce without an economic disincentive not to. Citizenship will now be even in more demand. Workers will be motivated not out of fear of losing shelter, healthcare or food. Firing a worker will not have the responsibility of having taken food out their mouth.

We already have a population that does not work. As of Mar 2016 there are 16.6 million men age 16 to 65 not disabled not in labor force, and 28.2 million women. (44.8 m total) (from: http://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpsatab6.htm) A lot of those are probably those who gave up though.

Many though are retired or in school. In 2014 ages 55 to 64, 13.8% were retired. (http://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-4/people-who-are-not-in-t...) (Note I consider home responsibilities as working as you would probably have to hire someone to do those if you didn't do them yourself). In 2014, both genders age 25 to 54, 1,479,000 were retired!

It's also bigger than necessary when a sequence will do. Large PKs mean larger indexes. For very large databases or very high volume every little inefficiency adds up.

As I always say, if we don't split hairs now, we'll be splitting heads later.

Feynman said he scored 124 on an IQ test. IQ is not a good predictor for the kinds of meritorious achievement that SV mythologically prefers. Once you get lucky at findind the gold mine, you want people who are best trained in mining. That pretty much sums it up.

But probably more apropos, the laws for H1-B and other hiring processes make it such that you don't want to have any hint of impropriety that would convince a judge the plaintiff would even have a case. Once the judge rules there's a case, you pretty much open up your bank account and settle.

Then there's the counter, if you're so awesome why aren't you my competitor?

Dis-ease. Semantics. There can be morphological (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2785515/) and biochemical indicators of depression and anxiety.

To make mice depressed they will do a forced swimming test (poor mice). So this is another way to induce depression: physical+psychological stress.

If there were good science with good funding it's feasible to come up with a lab test for depression--and anxiety--that's very, very accurate.

No, the article is incorrect. It does not have citations either. Explore pubmed for plenty of information. (Keep in mind the sad reality is that even good science is wrong lots of the time--I'm hedging, okay most of the time.)

The risks of not properly treating depression and anxiety is very, very high. So the article is very irresponsible in my opinion.

Upper estimation of human population is 7.4 billion. With average number of devices at 5, that is 37 billion. In decimal that is 11 digits. In HEX (‭89D5F3200‬) that is 9 digits.

Consider this: what are the odds that a coincidence won't happen?

Just feedback if you want to improve the discussion.

1) The example rows use first name and last initial for Client primary key attribute (e.g James H.). No one uses this in the real world for a name-based primary key. In fact, in a sufficiently large enough system, you would _never_ use a name for a primary key since names are not guaranteed to be unique.

2) Functional dependencies are interesting ideas. The discussion says that studID (student id) determines address. It would be beneficial to further discuss how we know that. For instance, more than one student could live at the same address. And a student could live at more than one address. So does studID truly determine address? Does the dependent attribute have to be unique? Does the determinant set?

3) The discussion moves from Data(studID, studName, ...) to breaking it out to three entities and says "The following structure is considerably better." But what criteria make it better?

4) It states that "Each student has his own address", but in the real-world that's not _always_ true. There will be cases when a student does not have an address, or the address is still unknown. Also, mailing address and physical addresses can be two different attributes. I'm being picky, right? But these things come up all of the time (so much so it gives me heartburn). So using good examples will help prevent future bad designs I believe.

5) courseID is supposedly functionally dependent on courseName. Again, courseNames can be non-unique in a real school. And courseID domain and range would be important to know whether courseID is unique. For instance there are many 101 courses out there. So is this a sequentially generated ID, a GUID? Only then can we know if it's truly unique.

6) Now to the really good stuff. Functional dependencies are abstractions that exist outside of the database logical and physical design and implementation correct? What if we identified all of the functional dependencies in our entities? Could we generate a good table design automatically from that? How do we prevent from modeling the entire universe and how do we prove that we've over-modeled? (I think one of the stated benefits of relation models is that once, you get to 3NF you can expand the model as needed. So how do we use FDs to determine whether we are 3NF)?

Interesting reduction of FDs to mathematical concepts, but to make it useful to a practitioner, more to go.

1. Feelings can be useful tools. "Confidence" is not "worth" or "value". Self-Esteem can be confused with confidence. It's important to be precise. Being snubbed by a co-worker, your question is really related to social skills. People act like jerks for many different reasons, but a confidence founded in reality--and not others opinions--is a strong and real confidence. You are there to solve problems, create solutions, do that, your reality confidence will grow.

2. You ask if it's normal I suspect to see if you would encounter this "style" elsewhere. It's probably more common than not depending on the organizational culture and budget. Older, bigger, companies that bring you in as a "junior" level usually have mentor programs and some even formal.

3. I don't know the answer to that. The word "all" usually is a signal that the answer is no. But to achieve a very high level of expertise probably requires foregoing lots of other learning (i.e. social skills) that other people encounter as they mature. But rotten attitudes can be found everywhere.

Recommended reading: Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innumeracy_%28book%29

Agreed. They taught this in high school economics class--a public high school economics class. I think the article is playing into the political rhetoric. For a politician to use the Unemployment Rate as a benchmark is fine as a delta since all the U values seem to track each other if this chart is accurate: http://www.macrotrends.net/1377/u6-unemployment-rate

3% of what? I would not characterize that as plummeting, but after looking at the graph you linked to, it very much looks like a "plummet".

It doesn't sound like they have a definitive answer of the cause. The data is done by survey, and missed surveys are "imputed". (ftp://ftp2.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps/techdocs/cpsmar14.pdf) So I strongly suspect (but cannot support) there's probably some kind of assumption of a gaussian somewhere, and of course human behavior can assume many different "forms". In other words, I think they should be providing an error rate with these numbers. The other aspect is they probably have faith in the Gaussian I suspect.

from wikipedia: "The attack on Pearl Harbor was intended to neutralize the U.S. Pacific Fleet, and hence protect Japan's advance into Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, where it sought access to natural resources such as oil and rubber."

The cause of war is not usually taught. It's the events that led up to war that is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Events_leading_to_the_attack_on...

You can correlate most anything with most anything. I'm not saying don't try, just to don't give correlations much credence in and of themselves. Thinking globally, what are the odds a coincidence doesn't happen? And when you exclude outliers, you may be excluding the most profound subjects, just as when you include non-outliers, the subjects may not be able to generalize outside the system of measurement.

If you randomly sampled a set of 93 dice floating in space from a set of 200,000, what are the odds that 20 of them are closely aligned along the same axes?

Is this a fair analogous question?