hackula1

Agreed.

Zip codes make my life hell on a daily basis. The problem is essentially that the USPS does not design topological zipcode polygons. All they do is maintain a set of centroids, plus an assignment to a set of lines representing street segments (which they charge for).

This would be fine, if it was not for the fact that pretty much everyone who wants to use zip codes needs them in a topologically valid polygon format. This is a problem because roads change all the time, and this makes zip codes terribly unstable. Also, there are many zip codes that are really just points (a bit of an oversimplification, but military bases, prisons, schools, etc. often cause huge problems).

Census tracts are much more stable (topologically valid and only change every 10 years). Unfortunately, most people don't know which census tract they live in, so zips prevail. I have built several geocoding algorithms, and it always comes down to the data being the big PITA. What ends up happening, unfortunately, is that private companies pick up the slack and create topological zip codes (with high price tags).

Double unfortunately, every company has a different methodology in creating these polygons, costing everyone who uses them big money, on top of the licensing fees. The USPS could easily produce a standard set of polygons for an extra couple grand a year in labor and save the industry millions. I cannot get into much detail, but I know this issue quite intimately.

Spolsky did write for years about how he only hired devs who (very rough paraphrasing from memory):

- were geniuses - top of class - CS only - Ivy League - could recall the ins and outs of pointer arithmetic - Solve binary-recursive-whatcha-ma-callem puzzles in their sleep - are rockstars

Submitting an issue is often much more appreciated as a project maintainer than a big code dump pull request.

Would you pay differently for a lottery ticket that had a payout of 1MM if you had the chances of A) 1/2 B) 1/5 C) 1/50 D) 1/5000?

The potential payout is unchanged, but the value of the ticket changes as it gets more likely to pay out.

I would imagine that paying back their loans will be worth quite a bit in PR.

I hate to be the "revenues-dont-matter" guy, but stock prices could be based on the fact that they demonstrated that they are 4.6x more likely to succeed based on their performance this year. If stocks only followed revenues, trading would be pretty meaningless. A company like Tesla has a tipping point in value based on the viability of their model. I am in no way claiming that I think they will succeed, but this year has probably shown that they are more likely to hit a tipping point than last year. This matters a lot in highly speculative investments like Tesla.

When the message is basically "the government is collecting your emails" I am skeptical that the public would get that much more mad at a technical distinction like this. If there has not been an actionable backlash yet, what really could cause it? I am thinking that the leaks need to be something along the lines of "Kate Johnson of Columbus Ohio (made up name) had her explicit text message viewed by her ex husband, an NSA analyst, on N occasions." We have not had a leak that hits home yet for everyday people (non-tech non-world-leader).

This seems like a bit of a puritanical viewpoint. Taking a nap for an hour can be more productive than raking leaves, if rest is what you need most.

> I'm not sure if this was the intention of your comment

Definitely not my intention, although I did not specify. An expectation of anything over a 40 hr/wk average is completely unreasonable IMHO. I only meant to say that some people happily choose to work over that average for periods of time.

None of those would bankrupt me, without everybody getting bankrupt. An emergency fund and a modest lifestyle + a decent tech income = lots of security. I also avoid "straight tech" jobs, where there is no strong vertical experience. I work on data analysis and predictive analytics applications, which means I could easily make a jump into several other fields in no time. Call me paranoid, but I refuse to be the "HTML Designer" of the next crash.

Da Vinci most certainly worked 80 hour weeks, and I am sure he loved every minute of it. Why? Because he got paid to think up cool shit day in and day out. I have worked jobs that were so mind numbingly boring that I could barely muster 30 hours a week when I was single. Now I am married and could easily pull 60-70 hours a week at my significantly more interesting job. Work is the place you will spend most of your life. Do your best to find a place you can live with.

90% of people do not want better quality internet? I think even in our technophobic culture, people want to be able to watch videos of cats with greater speed and reliability.

I find this similar to the endless push to buy gold from people who are supposed to be the exemplars of common sense economics.

Also, we will lie about what we are actually doing. I can understand taking some drastic measures to prevent epic disaster, however, I see no good reason to cover up what is actually going on; threats and countermeasures. By lying, they are forcing us to assume the worst.

Cost is relative to the maturity of the business. They may not have had the funds or time to do things the right way the first time, and if they had tried, they might not have ever made it into near-unlimited-budget-land.

His options are certainly more limited now (considering most employers could not keep him safe). That being said, I imagine his existing options would be readily available and would all pay millions.

Agreed. Skills would be irrelevant. A brain dump alone would be worth hundreds of millions. That is the scariest thing about all of this. Every time I hear someone bash on Snowden about how he was a dropout, etc, etc I just think "ok, so you gave this guy who you say is an irresponsible idiot the ability to blackmail anyone who has a google search history?"

"... it's worse than that. They used git. They can git your kids, git your job, git your family; all with one command. They can even clone you. These hackers will be pulling and pushing this country apart!"

RMail (short for ReaganMail). The optics of hacking it would be similar to burning a pile of bibles in the Reagan Library.

While this another angle, I was referring to the fact that many people will see these engineers as immoral and spineless. I know that I would not hire the person who drew that smiley face or any of their accomplices.

I imagine anyone with a line on their resume that says "NSA - Software Developer - 2009:Present" is going to have a hard time finding a new job at many companies (although certainly not all).

To say that the right want equal opportunity is dead wrong. Anyone who wants to do away with estate tax clearly has no care for equal opportunity. As I have said before, I would be a libertarian 100% if we could have a 100% estate tax and devote 100% of the proceeds to education. A true meritocracy (or as close as I think we could get). IMHO Conservatives would be against this because it would allow their kids to fail, and liberals would be against it because it would allow accountability for the the people coming from nothing.

I write open source libraries primarily. A nicely formatted readme on github tends to be best, since most people will be there anyway. Fancy websites tend to drive me crazy for code libraries, since they tend to distract people from the thing they are really looking for; a simple pitch and documentation.

That being said... I have been working on a javascript geoprocessing library lately and am considering a full blown interactive website. The reason being that many of the features are difficult for people to understand without being visualized. I still want to keep it fairly simple though.

The idea would basically be to have a page for each operation with 2 maps and a description of the algorithm. The first map would show the example input and the second map would show the output. I think this would allow developers who may not be familiar with more advanced geo statistical methodologies to be able to see what is possible with their data and spark some creativity. The existing readme tries its best to get the ideas across, but I doubt it would be that effective in its current form for someone who is not very familiar with traditional gis analysis already. https://github.com/morganherlocker/geo.js

Not exactly trivial, but text can be extracted from a pdf.

It isn't, which explains wikipedia.

Before too long you'll hit some pretty terrible times in American democracy. McCarthyism, internment camps, slavery, trail of tears, witch burnings, and on and on all the way back to the beginning.

> Please don't put words in my mouth

Putting words in your mouth is typically claiming you said X. I am suggesting that you instead, SHOULD have said Y.

> I don't know why you think that a medical term is a "pseudo-science weasel word".

"Cloud" is a technical word in computing with a specific meaning. This does not stop tech marketers from using it to mean things it does not. "Toxic" and "toxins" are medical words that are abused to the point of being meaningless much like "cloud". You are calling something harmful (to your credit, you do not specify how harmful) without specifying a dosage. Water is toxic at certain levels. Words that give a strong impression one way or the other, but are broad and do not commit to specifics are weasel words.

> It's a lot less meaningless than the original statement "e-cigarettes are harmless", which is backed not by rigorous scientific research on e-cigarettes themselves, but rather (at best) on fairly questionable reasoning based on a misunderstanding of drug toxicology.

I agree that you are "more right" than the OP, however, "harmless" and "toxic" are both just as bad in the context where dosage is not specified. It would be misleading to say that asbestos is harmless, although pretty much accurate at small enough levels. It would also be technically accurate to say that most things are toxic at some sufficiently high level.

In a nutshell, this debate between you and the OP is useless without specifying the amount being consumed.

I use adblock, but I try to disable it on sites that

A) have solid content that keeps me coming back.

B) Do not have ads that open new windows or popups when I do disable adblock.

I actually appreciate ads when they particularly useful and focused. 99% of the time this happens when an ad network is not used and the ads are provided by the content provider intentionally (jobs in my area on StackOverflow) or banner ads on small blogs where the vendor has most likely personally contacted the writer because the market is dead on. Ad networks have a close to 0% success rate on showing me things I actually want, so I tend to disable those unless I am just trying to support the content creator with a few cents of impression money.

I tried the patch before using e-cigs to quit. The patch stopped the cravings for me even better than the e-cigs, but gave me horrifying dreams every night, and I would wake up every morning thinking for the first few minutes that they had actually happened the day before. Even if e-cigs are somewhat harmful, I would choose them over cigarettes and over wacky lucid nightmares.