ganley

High pay? A really good courier makes maybe $40K. Most make less than that.

In my family we call this "protective incompetence."

I'm not at all sure that's true. That is, I agree that many people probably understand that mean and median are both things, but suspect that a minority of them understand how and why they are different, or when and why one makes more sense than the other.

Good advice. My first (sometimes only) question when I interview people is: Tell me about your favorite project.

Back in the days when I traveled a lot, I would ask for some sort of on-the-spot compensation - usually, put me in first/business class on the rebooked flight. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not.

I've looked at this pretty hard and concluded that, inexplicably, it is not an April Fools joke.

You Europeans with your sensibly-designed cities. My shortest commute ever was 12km, and my current one is almost 30km.

There are many hunters who believe that it is wrong to eat meat unless you kill and butcher it yourself.

I was a vegetarian (abruptly) for a couple of years. Eventually I started to feel sort of icky, not properly nourished, though this is probably the fault of my specific dietary habits and not vegetarianism in general.

Since then I've stuck to a low-meat diet; I mostly eat vegetarian, and when I eat meat I try to eat low on the food chain. I'd say I eat fish and chicken about once a week each, and pork or beef maybe once a month. I also cook with chicken broth pretty often.

No idea which of us is more typical, but my doctor is awesome. Preventative care is deductible-waived, so there's really no good reason other than laziness for me not to get a regular annual physical.

A health problem that you are aware of. You're supposed to see a doctor periodically because they might catch health problems that haven't yet advanced to the point that you know they're happening.

About a decade ago, I got a physical after having not set foot in a doctor's office in about 12 years. The doctor asked what made me come to get a physical after so long, and when I said nothing in particular, he pretended to write on his clipboard "Wife made me come here."

He said middle-aged guys with no obvious health problems pretty much only come to the doctor for one (or both) of two reasons: Their wife made them, or they want Viagra.

I thought I remembered reading that the average price of the preorders was in the $40K's, in which case that $35k price isn't very realistic.

It's surprisingly difficult to find the median car price. I just spent 15 minutes googling and could find neither the statistic itself nor a source of the data from which I could compute it.

I'd like to see that math. Highly skeptical.

Please. A shitty, low-paying, long-hour job with a great mission is still a shitty, low-paying, long-hour job.

The best movie I've (finally) seen in recent months was El Mariachi. He made that for like $8K. Assault on Precinct 13 (the original one): $150,000. The list goes on and on. The Way of the Gun, a more recent favorite of mine with a bunch of big actors in it: $8.5M.

Another factor might be exorbitant star salaries. However, I think that's a symptom, not the disease. The real problem is that Hollywood is greedy. They won't touch a $10M film with no big stars in it because it's not likely to make an 8-figure profit.

Zaks is one of the best programming books ever.

Starving, no. But making a lot less than you could make elsewhere.

Well, it definitely filtered me out. And BTW, $163K is for a step 10. New government employees almost always start as a step 1.

Totally agree. I'm inspired by what they do, but working there would involve a big pay cut and a punishing commute, so (with some sadness) nope.

Turbo Pascal was also where I wrote my first professional software (not for $$$ - it was an internship - but I'm counting it). It was a program to gather, process, and display thermal data from an experiment rig.

I also wrote a ton of stuff for fun in Turbo Pascal, but I doubt I still have any of that code.

A colleague and good friend of mine was a surveyor before he went to college in CS. He said the surveying was very pleasant, but the job also involves a lot of driving.

As with Tesla, I skimmed for the price, and once I saw it, closed the window. I never cease to be amazed that there are enough people who will spend $100K on a car to make these businesses work.

I see Tesla's future as a race between saturating the market for an $X car versus reducing the value of X (i.e. producing less expensive cars), thus enlarging their potential market. It'll be interesting to see which way that goes. Speaking for myself, they're still over the price I'm willing to pay for a car by about a factor of 2.

The email also pointed to a new forum - http://forum.cppgm.org/ - which sheds no further light on things so far.

I thought this would be a fun exercise if it weren't so ridiculously over-scoped, but in any event once I discovered that I can't release my own code, forget it.

If I had a nickel for every hour I spent doing this as a teen... (Sinclair ZX-81, then TRS-80 Model 1.)

Also, that Zaks book rocks. To this day one of the best programming references I've ever used. http://www.z80.info/zaks.html

Also, good luck putting a spiral-bound notebook in a tight pocket.

My criterion (which is no more valid than anyone's) is that it's art if it elicits emotion. This clearly does. I'm fairly confident that this has already intellectually/emotionally stimulated the human race more than, say, some stodgy Renaissance portrait of some figure of minor royalty.

As for the people complaining about this being a waste of money, please, give it a rest. I assume you don't have cable TV, or a car, and live like Gandhi, if you feel you have the right to complain about how this guy spends his money.