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To play a bit of devil's advocate here:

At what point does a socialised health service with limited resources, stop providing care for "self-inflicted" injuries?

In a busy hospital, the doctors have to triage and make priority decisions over where to apply resources and who to treat first.

Much like an alcoholic would never be at the top of a liver transplant list, at what point would an anorexic - who in this case had already been through over 30 mental health sessions - start to be denied care? At what point is it more ethical to spend those resources treating someone else, who might actually respond to treatment?

Again, just playing devil's advocate here. My personal opinion is that the NHS is critically underfunded at the moment and that should be fixed first. But I thought it worth pointing out the ethical debate over treating self-inflicted injuries in a socialised healthcare system is quite tricky. Especially considering that almost all mental health issues can fall under "self-inflicted" if you want to be callous.

From what it looks like, yes.

Because people have a natural tendency to give when they have plenty.

A poor person can spare little, a comfortably off person can spare more. If you really want to increase the charitable givings of a population, decreasing wealth disparity and making more people feel comfortable about their finances (ie. redistributing wealth), is a pragmatic way to do it.

The more I have, the more I give. The more the general population has, the more they will give.

Everyone ultimately has to focus on themselves in hard times. Want to increase charitable givings? Make it easy to be charitable.

Timestamptz is better practice. Same size (8 bytes) on disk and saves you from headaches further down the line.

I wouldn't be that pessimistic. The key difference is that Firefox used to have a lot of market share that it lost to Chrome, whereas Opera never really had any to begin with.

I think there'll be a big rise in near-shore work. I've worked at companies in the past with either direct satellite offices in eastern Europe, or just simple sub-contracting to an outsource firm.

The difference between a team of 6 UK/EU devs living in London, vs. 6 EU devs remote working from Poland isn't that much. It's a little trickier to manage, but is cheaper in terms of living expenses and therefore salary.

So far from Brexit bringing back jobs to the UK, it'll just drive away anything that can be done remotely.

This means that the companies will probably still stay in London, but the jobs will go elsewhere.

That is my experience recently. Developers storing 500GB on a database (pre-launch), with < 1GB of meaningful data. A bunch of json logs that they knew data science would want eventually, but couldn't be bothered to either pare down or put in a more sensible place.

The thing is, it didn't really matter; Postgres still had a ton of performance left over even after the product went live. If you can still fit it in RAM, why waste $$$ of dev time over the $$ cost of a bigger instance.

Doubt it will succeed. I use "hoover" when I'm actually using a Dyson. I'd never say I'm googling something when I'm actually using Bing.

You still need to remember to sync your new books to your local device at some point. This lets you do it anywhere/anytime, thus avoiding the scenario of leaving for holiday and forgetting entirely.

Redshift is designed to fill the classic accounting datawarehouse role in an organisation. Whilst I'm sure there aren't too many companies with account ledgers that large (or any), I doubt too many accountants would be happy with statistical inference of their books... ;)

This new model of processing directly on S3 is pretty much aimed specifically at eliminating the "Load" part of the ETL process. Just dump to csv from whatever sources you originally had, and don't worry about the schema conversion/loading into a DB. The fact that it happens to scale to exabytes is just good marketing fluff.

Yeah I'm much the same. If I've got one monitor, give me 32" with as many pixels as you can get. Two monitors, give me 2x24"; Three monitors, 1x24" central, 2x22" side panels.

I use a tiling window manager. If I have a single monitor I'll split it evenly, but I'll need as much space as I can - whilst using virtual desktops to avoid clutter.

If I have two monitors I'll tend to use full screen apps rather than split, but may occasionally split open a terminal or small chat window. By small I mean, a narrow vertical tile rather than a wide horizontal.

If I have three monitors, the extra width of large monitors starts to get annoying with how far around you have to look to see the farthest extent to left or right. It's easier to have smaller monitors (although still as high definition as you can get) and run them with full screen applications.

The big problem though with the large monitors is that you have to do too much window management. On a 22" screen a horizontally designed app at fullscreen is great. At 32" you start feeling like you wasted a ton of space off to the right. So you use your tiling WM to do a vertical split. At that point the horizontally designed app at 3840×2160 is now a vertical oriented app at 1920x2160, which is not at all what you want, so you adjust the tiling to make the 2nd frame smaller. But if the 2nd frame should also be horizontal, you have to move it to a different monitor... Thus ending up doing a load of annoying window management when your WM is supposed to do it for you.

So really, big monitors are just a tad annoying unless it's the only monitor.

I've never 100% bought into the idea of the singularity. Yes, in concept sure - if we make a computer sufficiently smarter than us, it can then design a smarter successor and so on.

But in practice? What if there's an asymptotic limit to intelligence? ie. We can get really smart, but there's only so smart we can get. What if we just get faster?

You could set an average person a really hard math exam and maybe they'll get 50% correct over the course of 2hrs. What if all we get out of AI is a computer getting 50% correct in 2 seconds?

Anecdotally, this is also my general impression of the state of AI as it exists today. Our big advances are generally just making simple calculations much much faster than before. Deep blue, AlphaGo, Google Search, Deep Learning in general; it's not smarter, just faster.

Yeah, it's a bit like a scientific atheist version of finding God on your death bed. Really hoping that the singularity comes about before you kick the bucket, because then maybe it's not the end.

That isn't just a Google issue though. You'd have had the exact same trouble with AWS/RDS if you're running with no replica. The lack of filesystem access is a security "feature" for both. If you have no HA setup then you have no recourse but to restore to a new server from backup, or wait for your cloud provider to fix it.

Spideroak One is miles better in terms of UI than the old version, but the performance is still baffling sometimes. eg. Edit a single ~5kb file and you can be seeing multiple minute upload times. Encryption doesn't take that long and even dial-up is faster for upload.

EDIT: I only use the free version though, so maybe the paid plans have better speeds.

Yep, that's why it's so scary. By the time the effects have become so obvious that even the strongest deniers realise something must be done... that's too late.

And it's not just about temperature. It's about the socio-political effects of climate change. How many people realise that a large part of the Syrian conflict is actually down to crop failures? Migration from country -> town led to big social conflicts, which massively contributed to the eventual military conflict.

I've never opened those since I bought the phone. Installed the sim and SD card and then never touched it again.

That's why I listed magnetic charging as a key feature ;)

Yep, the Sony Z3 compact did this a couple of years ago and was amazing. Top notch waterproof, superb battery, headphone jack, magnetic charger, SD card. Just one of those phones that really managed to hit the spot.

Oddly enough, the main complaint I had about it was that because it was so flush and shiny, it slid around too much on a table. Had to put a protective film on which was a bit more grippy.

A lot of the time you can't define exactly why you can't do something though. If someone asked me to just write a natural language recognition app, I'd be quite excited to give it a go, but instinctively I know it's a heck of a task. It's infeasible rather than impossible.

A bit like asking a golfer why he doesn't just hit the ball straight on the green every drive. It's instinct to attempt, but difficult to explain why it's not going to work. Not to mention if I had to explain every time why I can't just hit the green, I'd get pretty pissed off with people asking!

This was on the front page a while back, probably what they're referring to:

https://news.mit.edu/2016/artificial-intelligence-produces-r...

My local pub is a pokemon gym, so they got something right at least. Planning on going for lunch there tomorrow because of that, so I wouldn't discount the potential opportunities for local business advertising.

The real question is how do businesses get their location in the game? My local is older than the USA so I can imagine how it's a point of interest, but your average high street store?

Maybe they could sell micro-lures that have a very limited proximity. Instead of being a broad region, you have to actually get very close to the shop.

Undervalued if anything. Unity is almost ubiquitous in the indie games scene.

Yeah, they'd laugh at you in London for asking for this kind of valuation unfortunately. (Except for the usual caveat of knowing the right people, etc.)

> in the sense that she controls 50% + 1 of the votes

Well there's the issue, a lot of these companies distort their ownership structures with multiple classes of shares in order to get around the usual 1 share, 1 vote scheme.

So does the moral principle of ownership resulting in control still apply when they may technically "own" very little?

Depends on a number of factors for me. If it's a small, well-defined project, just go with whatever you're happiest in. If it's a large project or a large company, then go with who you can hire (eg. Java, C#, etc.)

Actual language/subject matter practicality is a relatively minor consideration in comparison. You're usually talking about some sort of performance/dev-time/cost tradeoff and short developer time almost always wins. So small projects go with a quick happy language, big projects go with a "enterprise" language designed for large teams. Ultimately they're both about reducing the total devtime.

It's very rare for any particular task to be tightly coupled to a language. I can only really think of a couple, Erlang and SQL. Maybe C/C++ for high perf jobs. Otherwise, since all Turing-complete languages can technically do anything any other can, you're probably going to waste more time fiddling about in a new language that might be more appropriate, than if you just got cracking in your everyday general purpose language.

Most considerations beyond the above are probably just going to be people's personal opinions about their favourite language. It's like arguing emacs/vim or tabs/spaces, not going to help much ;)

I would've thought that GPS is too unreliable due to the deliberate inaccuracy? Only the US military have the clean signal.

Particularly if you're using it to sync between two different time zones that could well be looking at different satellites.

However, I don't know how much inaccuracy is introduced and whether it would have too much of an effect for the purposes of Google, et al.

Yeah, that solves the price issue maybe, but it doesn't solve the space issue for Motion VR. Even in quite expensive houses, you're still going to be moving furniture to play a game. It just doesn't have the same ease of use of sitting back on a couch playing with a controller. I just can't see Motion VR growing beyond a niche market anytime soon.

The best idea I've heard so far is VR arcades, that would be fun.

There's the problem though. I don't think all that many people are ever going to get to play a room-scale title.

First there's the expense of the headset. Granted, it might come down a bit, but it's still a large expense on top of a console.

Second, there's the space that you need to play a Motion + VR game. It's not trivial for people to get that. A simple console + TV setup can fit in any tiny apartment around the world. Dedicating a whole room just to play a game? That's like asking people to move house just to play VR...

Even in my house which is fairly spacious, I'd still need to move around furniture everytime I want to play. It's just not going to happen.

Motionless VR, or at least, seated + arm movement VR, has a fair amount of potential however.

Now that's a cool idea! Not sure I'd want real people in it though, might end up a bit Second Life-ish. But if you could each get sharded into your own version of the world, that would be a cool experience.

Yeah, Witcher 3 is one of the best games I've ever played and has some of the best graphics too. The characters are simply amazing and the general look and feel is superb.

But... look at the ground and you'll just see a flat greenish noise texture. They try to cover it with clumps of grass and vegetation, which works to a degree, but not completely.

Look at the water flowing - particularly on any kind of whitewater rapids/waterfall - compared to the character textures and the buildings, it's really quite disappointing.

You need a fairly complete simulation to really fool the human eye and we're a long way from that.