CS/CoE Researcher (Dr. Beard), US Army Vet (Captain Beard), Hacker, Techie, Runner. interested in HPC, Bioinformatics/Comp Bio,ML,robotics,CSED, Opinions mine., Also @jonathan_beard or see me at http://jonathanbeard.io my pet project: http://raftlib.io
The invasion of Iraq was stupid. It was likely illegal, based on false pretenses, and well....shouldn't have happened. The invasions initial execution was beautiful (first few days). The US Military performed splendidly. The follow through (driven by political leaders) was idiotic. Stupid decisions like not listening to his generals (Bush), disbanding the Iraqi security forces (Paul Bremer), and the odd focus on turning on the oil taps as soon as possible after the invasion doomed any hope of short term success (yeah, sure, lets pay for the invasion with oil...that'll work, right). Many generals argued for an occupation force in the millions to keep the peace. If the occupation were modeled after the plan for Germany in WW2 where the allies planned for a prolonged insurgency (that never really appeared, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werwolf), we should have had more troops than were available in the entire US Military combined. Likely given a real, concerted effort (Marshall Plan-like) to re-build Iraq after we'd destroyed it, we might have had a chance. Oil never lasts, it's not sustainable, and in every country where natural resource mining is dominant, we see a rise of more despotism. We never understood the cultures of Iraq, nor will most people. To defeat an enemy you have to understand them (see Sun Tzu). NYT isn't the only problem. Our pride was the problem. We thought we could fix everything, do it better. The US was led by a person (Bush) who spouted all kinds of wonderful nationalistic straight talk (sounds like somebody that's running for president this year). Bush had no real plans and he unfortunately didn't listen to his experienced military leaders. He, as the commander in chief, is where the buck should stop for Iraq...and the long slow disaster that followed. Sure, we're all to blame for going along, but short of impeachment from our congress there is nothing the American people could have done to stop it.
They're unfortunately becoming common in the upper regions of Texas. At least I can verify Austin, TX has had quite a few. Thankfully pesticides take care of these not so little critters.
Exactly, most science fiction representations fail on the engineering test. That' snot to say that some future change in our understanding of physics might not change what is in fact possible. One reason I love scifi is that the authors/readers/watchers are free to drop the need to be fully grounded and go for something truly cool. I suspect what we view as totally impossible today, might be within the realm of possible 2-3k years from now.
Exactly, the question is...how to pay for the daycare. My son went to daycare. When I went to grad school, it was half my salary. Literally half. Thankfully I had the US GI Bill, otherwise I'd have been hosed. Dealing with the churn in society, and lets not argue semantics, if you're on welfare it's likely the skills you have don't meet the market needs. We need an education system that enables people to learn to fish, while giving them fish to survive/take care of their families. Right now, that system is slightly borked. Online education is awesome at providing access to many people, the problem is getting employers to recognize the value of the degrees/certificates that result. Some do, many don't. I totally get it, the quality is all over the place. Then again, so is the quality of in-person institutions.
No, sometimes people do fail. People get jealous, they get mad, they sometimes do silly things. We put processes in place to prevent those malfunctions from negatively impacting our organizations. Unfortunately, even perfect processes can fail when humans are involved. That's why it is important to remember that people skills are as important to a manager as are project planning skills.
Hi, I didn't intend on this getting posted quite yet. But, looks like somebody liked it...even before I've added more new features. The main project page is http://raftlib.io. If you're interested there are a few talks on my website: http://jonathanbeard.io/media. This is purely an open source side project for me (Apache License), so...nights/weekends. I continue building it b/c I like it....so, if anyone has any suggestions, pull requests, or you just want to say hello feel free. And to xf00ba7, thanks for posting! I hope you're one of the stars/followers/forkers (hmm, forkees??).
Umm, send this to peer review. Here's the link to Góes actual paper(http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2016/wp16160.pdf) published as an IMF working report which doesn't even have the backing of the IMF/managers/etc. I doubt it'd get published if reviewed. Really, out of the centuries of data they could have pulled in, they chose to use 1980 through 2012? Return on the capital is not ~1%....flawed assumptions, flawed model IMHO. Amazing that WSJ parades it as if it were peer reviewed fact. Then again, I'm not an expert. I only did mathematical modeling for HPC systems, not economies.
If in C++, LLVM + Flex/Bison still the most productive for me. I've tried lots of other compiler compilers, but they're still the best once you learn them. If anybody is bored, I put together a simple word count example a long time ago that has taken on a life of its own: https://github.com/jonathan-beard/simple_wc_example
This article is mostly poo with a few bits of goodness sprinkled in to detract from the stench. Now, directly to your comment, I usually evaluate on the ability to get things done. Often that means libraries. Linking to C/C++ libraries is relatively easy so I'd say there is a lot of potential. If you go back in time to 1996, how many jobs were there for Java? I doubt that many, probably took a few years...even with Sun pushing it. C/C++, even Fortran are going to be around for a long time. Languages like Swift get a good kick in the rear by sheer force of Apple's market share. Rust has only the user community to adopt it. Adoption is fairly easy, market penetration is tough (lots of adopters). It'll either happen or it won't.
Bad management, oversight, and architecting returns bad code. Often team leads know better, but are driven by deadlines and the lack of a skilled workforce (with little time to train them) to produce a product. Of course this leads to turn-over...eventually. People will work for a year, realize that nothing they want to accomplish will happen quickly because of resourcing, then they'll run away. I really don't agree that the human cost of technical debt is a new concept. It's foremost in my mind when I think about giving tools to employees to add new features. Well written article, but not really anything new.
Ignorant article. It's all over the place, and unfortunately has no supporting data for the headline. The most backed-up line is: "Academics are more likely to cite papers that are already well-cited." Well, yes, this is true no matter which gender you are.
After the very old "war on boys in education" post. Read up on the issue. It's quite scary for me since the latest research suggests (and correlates roughly with my observations from my son's schooling) that the problem insinuated by the earlier atlantic posting (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/05/the-war-...) is quite real....seems most of the latest research centers around stereotypes. Hoping the more recent article (and data focus) will spark a bit more debate around the issues. I'm especially interested in the connections between education, SES status, and social mobility.
Used this for awhile on my old iPad when my main laptop was broken. iSSH, a wireless keyboard + cloud virtual machine and you can pretty much do anything you need for dev work as long as you have a cellular or wifi connection.
You know, some small cities in Europe (thinking of Germany) shut down for "quiet time" after lunch. Guess what happens? Nothing bad, life goes on. You know what would happen in America, we couldn't buy stuff for an hour or two. You know what else would happen? The voices of the people that make this country run would be heard.
Make it half days for two days. You can easily identify "critical" services like medical/fire/police and stagger them or have early voting. Things like this work, and they work well. Doesn't matter how long, two hours would likely be fine. I've had problems getting to vote in that amount of time. I've waited in a line at a Texas polling station for more than that (which is why I said a day).
These voting laws are only half the problem. Maybe via mail would fix the issue. I doubt people who decry "voter fraud" would trust mail-in ballots.
And ~30% of women probably run faster than I can. I also know a frog that can hop higher than me. There was once this dude I tried to out bench-press...didn't work out. You know what....who cares.
What's amazing to me is that people who bill themselves as "protectors of our liberty" have the audacity to blatantly subvert the democratic process that they claim to hold dear. Changing the voting rules to remove the ability of people to vote, it's madness. I find it repugnant. We (the US) should guard the right to vote for all people by making voting days mandatory time off. We should also relax the voting ID laws. Fraud has never been an issue, NEVER.
Being a manager is tough. It takes people skills, and multi-dimensional thinking. Anybody that says "lets get rid of management" has clearly had bad management and perhaps should go into it themselves. I see this a lot in the tech industry. Tech people aren't by default good managers (neither are people in any industry). You have to get the people you manage to want to do what you need them to do. You have to inspire them, basically at the very least have your own mini-reality distortion field to induce the desired motivation (especially in the tech field). Highly educated, well paid employees will still do what they want to do...even if their paychecks are tied to your vision. The managers job is to make the they're vision the one that each employee sees when they sit down to work. At least, IMHO.
I have a friend that does on a daily basis. Reminds me of the protein shakes I used to drink when I was an undergrad. These things are fads. A new one will come out in a few months, the new "future food." I'll stick with healthy food, that I can chew, taste, and enjoy.
Will be very interesting to see if the UK economy can actually recover at all with all of the acquisitions. There's a fire sale of sorts at the moment on UK's most valuable companies. The promises of the current prime minister to prevent the few big employers in the UK from being purchased have pretty much evaporated...such is the way of the snake oil salesman. The free flow of super smart labor in the schengen zone was a net positive for most UK companies, and for the foreign labor that contributed to the UK economy. The trick, as Hawking says is to ensure the fruits of the globalized economy is shared by all. In the US we have a huge issue with churn. Industries like coal will never return, however people like Trump promise that they will. What we need is a cheaper university system that provides a means for the children of those former coal miners to move onto something else (or even the miners themselves). Right now, if you're an out of work person in an industry that is gone...there's no way to move on. You can take out massive loans, or join the military to get free education. Those are about the only two practical options for most people (I for one took the military option), and that's not good enough. The managed capitalism that we've developed works well, we just have to remember that the government's role is to manage the economy...not to run the economy. Government should foster an environment for everyone to succeed, not just those who have a more favorable starting place in life (like Trump). Right now people are upset, mad, and often without hope. While I (and just about any other person with critical thinking skills) can punch holes in just about every one of Trumps lightweight arguments, these holes are ignored by the masses because they want to believe that there is a magic cure to what ails them. Unfortunately, like the magic pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, Trump's magical cure doesn't exist...just as the pot of gold that sold brexit will never be found.
Umm, so twitter is a private company. Yeah, they can censor whoever they like. Can the NYT censor if they want? YES! Should they, likely not b/c of backlash from people like us. What we have to realize, is that unless there is a non-profit totally open "commons" then there is really no recourse for us. Did Twitter damage us monetarily? Are they even responsible outside of their terms of service? Suspect even that has language that subjects it to change at any time. In short, the idea that "twitter's fucked" is well...stupid. You can say what you want, but you know what...twitter can kick you off at any time. That's just the way it works. Has been that way since the days of BBS and later AOL/Compuserve (and yes, I was kicked out of many of those rooms too).
Give me a break. Big data is a wonderful buzz word that means everything and nothing. It also has no relevance to the language. You can write awesome big data apps in C or Java or WingDings just as you could anything else. All it takes is a programmer who knows how to choose the right tool and the right constructs for the job.
Have you ever used multiple compilers? Try compiling the same thing written in C or C++ with: clang, then gcc, then icc and see how -Werror treats you within any remotely interesting code. It's hard to predict what one compiler feels is perfectly okay (or perhaps ambiguous) and another feels is downright wrong. It's downright infuriating in a cross-architecture environment. -Wall -Wpedantic and -Wextra are usually plenty.
Working two jobs is the symptom of not making enough money to survive on. My mom (a teacher) worked multiple jobs (and yes, single parent household). She had friends when I was growing up and we had neighbors who had multiple jobs with both parents. Service jobs often don't pay enough to live, however, these are increasingly the bulk of the employment opportunities. So back to my original post, we spend $1+ million on each cruise missile. That could send dozens to college. We can't get back manufacturing jobs. Even if they're in the U.S., they'll be automated. What we need is more innovation. We can't get back coal either, but we can figure out what the next big energy source will be. Who knows, maybe we can get coal back....perhaps there's a super efficient way to do carbon capture that we haven't developed. The point is we have a huge technical debt in our society. Education is just one bit of it.
You know, as a parent I'd heard many things about "Common Core" from the media, other parents, and even family members. When my son got to kindergarten I was a bit worried about overbearing tests and the lack of a tried and true teaching method. Well, what we got were concepts. In kindergarten, my son learned things that I recognized as basic number theory...almost as if it came straight out of Andrew's book of the same title. Nothing advanced, but the concepts were covered quite well. What he missed though was the ability to calculate quickly...this I had to get him to do at home, and it came in time. That being said, I think we need to divorce the common core from the testing standards. Pulling out of the teaching space, any good manager can tell you that applying a one size fits all approach to every person results in a lot of miss-match. Lets stop vilifying the common core, but rethink the way we're forcing teachers to apply it and the tests that states mandate to go with it.
One wonderful point that the author makes is something I've been saying for years (as have many people):
What is called “the achievement gap” is actually an “opportunity gap.”
The opportunity gap is many things. It's lack of a safe, low-stress home environment. It's a lack of time from overworked parents. It's lack of an environment that promotes kids social skills. Things like the boys & girls club provide some help in neighborhoods that have them, but there needs to be much more. I'm extremely pessimistic on this point. I don't think the willpower exists within our current generation of political power brokers (although I do have some hope) to do anything about the common core to all of our problems. Likely spending $1.59m per cruise missile is part of it, and the other part what we seem to value in society....locking people up vs. fixing the core issues (http://money.cnn.com/infographic/economy/education-vs-prison...). We should not have to eat war to exist (almost quoted disturbed vs. bad religion...but BR fit better).
Guess we can't have the cake and eat it too. Or perhaps if we do we need to go for a triathlon. Seriously though, I wonder how much of this is correlated with our sitting problem, back problems, knee problems that result from a sedentary + high calorie lifestyle. Stop looking at going to the gym to be like <insert god-like body reference here> and just get out for a freaking walk, do some pushups occasionally, maybe a few sit-ups. Even small steps can improve overall fitness. But yeah....probably a good IoT biz opportunity.