frankc

It could do without the snark, but it does have a ring of truth to it, doesn't it?

1000 days over 27 intervals

It is actually legal to discriminate against young people. It's only illegal to discriminate against people over 40.

http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/age.cfm

Also, requiring experience is reasonable anyway since its easy to make a case about why it's required to do the work. I'd dying to here what kind of BS hand-waving argument could be constructed for why having too much experience prevents you from doing the work.

Unvalidated/untested hypothesis are not "pseudoscience".

The engine is not on while serving. However, most trucks do have gasoline powered generators. The city does have a legitimate interest in regulating the usage of shared space but the way it is done now is like it was designed by the Soviet Union.

Also, the trucks mostly target the office lunch crowd, not tourists.

One of my best friends owns a food truck in nyc and by association I've come to know a lot about the subject.

1) The requirement of a food handling license for every employee is not a trivial problem. It completely distorts the market for hiring, really making it almost impossible to do legally. Remember, this is not the kind of job where people stick around for years so a 2 month lead process in hiring is tolerable. And it's not like this food handling license is in any way helpful to maintaining the public health; its not required for regular restaurants (for every worker like in food trucks).

2) In reality there are next to no legal spots to park a food truck in nyc. In manhattan, pretty much every spot is metered, and therefore illegal. However, as long as no one complains, usually the cops leave you alone. Usually, but its unpredictable.

3) Arbitrary and capricious enforcement of health regulations by health inspectors that can lead to large fines and confiscation of your permit. Again, don't underestimate how big a deal this is. At any time, for approximately any reason if the inspector doesn't like you, your entire business can be shut down. Think about how patent lawsuits affect startups and then imagine that a class of patent inspectors can just bust in unannounced several times a month to shut you down. It's like that.

4) You can't actually get a permit legally because the city doesn't issue them any more. All food trucks get their permits on the black market and the costs is up to $20K per year now. It's not just the cost but also the hassle of having to deal with that. It's also completely stupid from the city's perspective as they could be auction off permits as they do for taxi medallions. Instead the benefit goes to people who just happen to have been issued a permit many years ago for $200.

5) You must park in a licensed commissary as mentioned in the article. It means you basically have to pay 3x in rent what you would if you could park legally in a private lot. And plus those places are actually completely filthy. I've been to several.

All that said, the article is actually quite wrong about it not being a profitable business. The people I know are raking in cash hand over fist. There is huge demand as long as your food and concept are decent. If the city actually fixed some of these regulatory issues, there would be a huge explosions of trucks overnight.

Rate of a return is way too crude a measure. Real Estate is more stable, tax advantaged and most crucially to your wealth creation, the only investment class where John Q. Public can get 4:1 leverage (or better!).

Did you mean pancreatic cancer or something else and not prostate cancer? I believe prostate cancer has close to a 100% cure rate.

Would this work with an LD_PRELOAD of libfaketime?

I know nothing about Heroku's architecture than what I just read in this post, but couldn't you alleviate this problem greatly by having the dyno's implement work stealing? Obviously the they would have to know about each other then, but perhaps that is easier to do that global intelligent routing.

If you liked this article you should read Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence people as it is very much along these lines. It's a famous book for a reason: the advice is tried and true.

Base graphics is poweful but definitely full of crazy. However, ggplot2 is well designed as one integrated system and makes total sense. The model is a bit more complicated to understand than literally specifying what goes where as you do in most graphics apis, but the documentation is very good and there are lots of people who know it well and respond helpfully on mailing lists and stackoverflow.

Not doing it wrong, but only using a subset of R. For instance, R has powerful data manipulation ability that can get your data to use the subset of R that does what Excel does. R also has a huge library of packages that go way beyond what Excel can do, especially for statistics. Sure, you can do an ols regression in Excel, but you can you do a complicated machine learning model?

cash flow positive just means you had more money coming in that going out. Profit is calculated on an accrual basis, not a cash flow basis. For instance, if I sell you a car, I can recognize the revenue from that before you give me the cash. The debt you owe me is now an asset. On the other hand, there are things like depreciation of assets which count as expenses even though no cash changes hands right now. These are just a couple of examples on how cash flow and profit are not the same, but to get the full gist of it, you need to cover basically what gets covered in an intro accounting course.

I use unix in the same way and for the same purpose as the described in the blog, but I have come to the opinion that once you get into the describe and visualize phase, it's much easier to just drop into R. Reading in the kind of file being worked on here is often as simple as

foo <-read.csv("foo.csv")

Getting summary descriptive statistics, item counts, scatter plots and histograms is often as easy as

summary(foo)

table(foo$col)

plot(foo$xcol, foo$ycol)

hist(foo$col).

I think that is lot simpler than a 4 or 5 command pipeline that can be mistake-prone to edit when you want to change column names or things like that. I still do these kinds of things in the shell sometimes, and I don't know if I can put my finger on when exactly I would drop into R vs write out a pipeline, but there IS a line somewhere...

Standardized tests don't have to be multiple-choice tests from a question bank, though. You can have practical sections, like in the CCIE. You can have long-form scenarios you have to analyze like on part 3 of the CFA. You can have the exams only given on specific dates at specific times of the years, as is done on several exams, so that the questions are always secret and not reused.

The highest quality certifications comnbine more than one of the above techniques. For instance, you might make phase 1 be just a multiple choice test. This mainly acts as a filter so that not too many resources are wasted scoring the more comprehensive sections for test takers who aren't really serious. Then phase 2 testers might take a more open-ended test with essays, etc. Finally, people who pass phase 2 might have some kind of practical, similar to medical boards or the network building in the CCIE.

This kind of process might not be cheap, either. A lot of people's time are involved in creating, administering and grading of this kind of rigorous testing process, but it even if it costs $2000 - $3000, it is still much cheaper than a university. It is still much more egalitarian as it is not open only to the chosen few.

It's not that simple. When you are in bankruptcy it's really up to the judge to approve who gets paid what.

That is not the case here. In fact, they are already in bankruptcy. The judge had imposed a new contract on the union that didn't accept, so they went on strike. The company claims they cannot whether the strike and instead are completely liquidating all assets of the company. They are closing down, not reorganizing.

As a design project it's cool. I think you did a good job and I don't mean to rain on your parade. But of course now I will. I think as a data visualization exercise, it's mostly what Tufte would call "chart junk". The graphics don't aid into understanding, and actually sort of distract you from the point. It would be a lot easier to read if the axis labels said things like "Warrior" instead of an obscure graphic, that even as a GW2 player myself, I have to think about. Also, the pie chart...pie charts are problematic for understanding data because we don't do a good job at interpreting area. A bar chart is considered more effective. Again, as a purely visual exercise, I think it looks cool.

You can parallelize this operation with xargs simply by adding a -P. You could add a & to your convert here but that would run all the jobs at the same time. xargs allows you to only run n at a time. That would be a lot harder to replicate in bash.

So many people are missing the key point...it is never ok to to remove data without warning.

First of all, I think my statement "the world needs C not Lisp" was meant to be taken metaphorically, not literally. Of course there is a place for Lisp, but at the end of the day, who has gotten more done in the real world? That certainly hasn't stopped the Lisp hackers from looking down their noses, however.

The bottom line is that the sense I get from the kinds of rhetoric in the OP is not the kind of high-minded idealism you express but rather just a bunch of software aestheticians casting value judgements on the people who are focused on making things happen. My perception could be wrong, I'll grant you that.

The irony of the whole thing is that it is usually the pragmatists and not the idealists who wind up "moving industry forward", because by definition, the pragmatists get things done. The world needs C not lisp.

Is this worth looking into for someone who already knows perl, R and the unix zoo? Or is it more targetted at people who don't deal with data on a regular basis?

Well, because you claimed pretty strongly this:

"Tools are tools. Whether its a hammer or a Scientific Linux Cluster the significant factor is the user, the carpenter or the physicist"

I agree with you that tools are a means to an end and that obviously the LHC is a lot more important that the choice of OS. I just think you were a bit too dismissive of tools in your post, though perhaps that wasn't your intent. If someone is going to rah-rah a tool, in this case Linux, they should be pointing out what role it played and what about its use was essential, not just that it was used.

Not so sure I agree with that in general. What about the LHC? That is just a tool, too. Is that too not worth mentioning?

This is not that insane, or at least relatively insane, because this matches the behavior of localtime(). I have heard the reason for using a 0-indexed month is for the convenience of mapping to an enum of month names.

I don't mean to beat this to death, but any kind of statement about moderation presupposes that we already understand how different amount of some substance will effect us. The topic under discussion boils down to "what is too little, what is too much and what is moderation?". You cannot answer that with "just go for moderation" when moderation is precisely what we are trying to define.

I see this kind of thing all the time and it irks me because I see so much agreement with what amounts to a circular statement.

It should be noted that the author of the linked article is Gary Taubes, who is best known for Good Calories, Bad Calories, a book that seeks to turn the conventional wisdom of nutrition on its head.

No offense but this is really an intellectually weak statement because moderation is dependent on what is considered "too much", and here we are looking to redefine just what "too much" really is.