dspeyer

Rainbows End (Vinge) has a very interesting and not exactly dystopic vision.

Less political influence due in large part to shrinking numbers. Greater chance of terrorism due to increased fanaticism among those who remain. There wasn't anything like Oklahoma City in the 1950s, was there?

"The market"?

The market consists of buyers and sellers. Since a bed typically lasts over 10 years, a typical buyer buys fewer than 7 beds in a lifetime. That's not enough to get educated or even keep up with change.

So in fact the market consists of sellers and what they can get away with. Nothing to do with being reasonable.

Calculating my vitamin D intake sounds difficult and unreliable. Is there any way to measure my vitamin D levels by examining my body?

I always have water next to my bed when I sleep. Usually tap water, but in a bottle with a screw cap. I can open and close it without opening my eyes, and it won't spill.

If people were indifferent (50% chance of wanting facebook) then the likelihood of at least 27 out of 37 randomly asked people saying "no facebook" is about 1 in 300. And that's counting the "Yes but I hate it"s as yesses. Count those as "no" and it's 1 in 3000. Highly significant.

This assumes the "random tourists in Pike's Place market" are an effectively random sample. It's possible that facebook fans are less likely to take vacations in Seattle, but Occam's razor is against it.

I think the destabilizing thing was how long Google _didn't_ play the MAD game. So Apple went on the warpath feeling safe. But Google militarized really fast.

These how-to-apply-math skills are valuable, but they aren't math itself. Math is about building more general abstractions, keeping strict rigor, being careful with axioms, and developing techniques that are really, really broad as a result.

Granted, calculation isn't a very good way to get into this either.

> Remember, the contrast between white and black on computer monitors is greater than on the printed page, because computer-monitor white is brighter than a page usually.

Only if the lights are off in the room.

There may be such a thing as too much contrast. I haven't encountered it. But it doesn't make the text completely unreadable the way too little contrast does. When I copy+paste the text of a website into a text editor, it's always because the contrast was too low.

When it doubt, increase contrast.

I thought Oracle had agreed to $0 in damages for the rangeCheck copyright infringement ( http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9228298/Oracle_agrees... ) so they could get on with appealing the API copyrightability and the patents. Why are they arguing about it now. Did I miss a step?

Wouldn't an 850GHz signal be lost if an insect flew between sender and receiver? Isn't that going to make it pretty impractical? Honest questions. I could easily be missing something.

High-res radar seems viable, though.

Rather than await a moment of silence, perhaps now is the time to carefully see what can be preserved. Somewhere in possibility-space is a model in which great minds teach in only the ways that they are well-suited to. Giving the same monologue year after year will likely die, but the teaching time that frees up could be used for some sort of mentorships or discussions or teaching of subtleties.

The first step is to characterize exactly what is lost moving from a traditional model to a Khan-academy-like model. Then to determine how to focus on those things. Then to experiment.

Seems unlikely to me. The Motorola acquisition took forever to get through the EU, and that's a different industry. The legal burden of acquiring a major direct competitor like yahoo would be more than the company was worth.

Google of the past was built on A/B. The new UIs are designed by a small, closed-eared team of graphic artists.

Have you ever tried to read any Demeterized code? It's an idea that needs to die.

If I see book.line(n) and I want to know how it counts footnotes, and Book::line is defined as this.sectionWithLine(n).line(n) and those are defined in terms of Chapter::line and Page::line I'm going to need notepaper. And as I'm flipping among five nearly-identical functions with the same name, I'm going to have a terrible time finding which one has the footnote logic in it.

I'm not saying they won't get a flood of resumes for every opening.

But the best people, who know they can get a position at any major tech company, will be weighing Apple against the likes of Google, Facebook and Amazon. It's possible that Apple has an edge over those in money/environment/opportunity, but it isn't a clear or solid one. The thought of being looked down on by fellow nerds for working at a patent aggressor could turn the balance.

And building products with 98th percentile engineers instead of 99th percentile is a big deal. Look at Microsoft.

But might it be seen by the average potential Apple employee? It's structured as "don't buy from apple", but it also covers "don't work for apple", which they actually need to fear.

Remember Amazon and one-click? There was sufficient backlash that they never tried anything like that again. Could work with Apple.

Ah, I see.

I'll admit I haven't seen a lot of explicit on-the-job training (besides that dealing with internal technologies), but I have seen a lot of people who's first job is less challenging than their later ones, who use it as a growing experience and a stepstone.

The real question is whether a large number of programmers don't reach their full potential or do so significantly later than they would have with proper mentoring. A difficult thing to find evidence for either way.

The tech field is like that. Work won't be any easier. In fact, expect major libraries and build tools that are internal to a large organization to be less elegant and documented. Learning stuff like that quickly is a skill you're going to need.

I don't have a lot of advice besides "practice".

Well, I do have some. Don't be afraid to open up the tool's source and read it. Try to design the tool yourself and you'll get a better sense of how it's likely to do things.

But mostly, practice.

This article is playing word-games. When employers and economists talk about talent, they mean capability, regardless of whether it's natural or comes from hard work. Your dictionary may say "natural aptitude or skill", but that's irrelevant to the job market.

Because there's a tremendous amount to be gained on the off chance that the appellate judge is smoking crack?

For the cases I was easily able to count, this is one bug per thousand lines of code. I realize that's a handwavy metric, but it's enough to say we're not talking about a ton of bugs.

On the other hand, successful conversion of these codebases is a very interesting result. Apparently static, at least static as sophisticated as Haskell, actually can express most of the idioms in standard python. This surprises me, as I've never seen a C++ program of significant complexity that didn't resort to void*s somewhere.

If I were interviewing you and you said "I don't know" I would say "try to work it out". Jumping ahead and saying "I don't know but I think I can probably..." will earn you a few extra points.

I recall one interview where I asked what sort of responses an HTTP GET might result in. The candidate knew 200 and 404 but that was about it. Then I asked, "If you were writing the HTTP standard, what other responses might you include" and he told me about HTTP 304 Not Modified and the related cache-* headers, which he was clearly re-inventing on the spot. I scored him very highly for that.

The open source movement isn't. The "proprietary software is ok so long as not much is at stake and you weren't likely to tinker with it anyway" idea is.

We do need RMS.

Compromise is a dangerous game. Especially when the proprietary world doesn't compromise back (and it usually doesn't). How long could the free software movement have continued to mean anything if each year it had crept a little closer to the mainstream technological community?

It's hard to be sure without a full transcript, but there doesn't seem to have been any actual humor. Or plausible attempt at humor. Just serious sexism in a flippant tone.

Why would people laugh at this? There are three possibilities:

* Classic Flippancy: The idea of women outside the kitchen is absurd to the point of humor.

* Self-Parody: This level of sexism is absurd, and we're laughing at the character with the microphone. This is Sacha Baron Cohen's "Borat" schtick and it's very hard to pull off because of Poe's Law.

* Commonality/Relief: This is what we've all been thinking but can't say because of the PC police. It's such a relief to be in a safe space where we can say it. This is the how most "observational humor" functions.

Options 1 and 3 are seriously misogynistic even (especially) if the audience laughs.

> Shipper: Hmmm. I don't think that list is valid... > Google: Good. So your program will have to detect that.

Your program might receive bad input, and it's your responsibility to output an error code if so.

The implication seems to be that students with no experience can catch up with experienced students in one semester. Or perhaps that the experienced students have an advantage in perspective but not in actual knowledge, and the perspective can be taught in parallel with the knowledge at little cost.

These implications strike me as implausible. I think it would make more sense to create the for-true-beginners course with the expectation that the regular intro course comes after it.

That's the theory. Enforcement makes things harder.

At least in the US, (and I strongly suspect in Canada as well) it's up to a jury to decide if the given rationale is genuine or an excuse to cover bigotry. Anyone who knows anything about how to do the job is likely to get blocked at jury-selection. Imagine explaining to 12 literature majors why cubic-time lookup is bad, while opposing council wants to know how often you use key-value stores in your day-to-day work.