I'm surprised that tidal energy is not yet a big player.
The amount of potential energy is massive, and it's very reliable, unless the moon falls of its orbit.
One party is fixated on voter id fraud and ignores the cyber security, the other party i fixated on cyber security and ignores voter id fraud.
Both are significant issues which we should be addressing. An accurate election results should be in everyone's interest.
I think that Jira killed Agile. It's such an overhead on the Agile process. Engineers spend more time documenting stuff in Jira than actually solving problems.
I think zsh is the best shell ever, unfortunately, I've reverted to bash, because it's too much hassle to install zsh everywhere I work. zsh globbing is on another level.
You could say that. I'm from Poland, so compared to Soviet Union it was communist-lite. I had a brilliant math teacher in high school. He had the reputation that if he was your math teacher you were automatically accepted at the local university. He was a legend in my town, and managed to stay under the radar of the communist regime.
Being taught is not really what's taking place. It's more like here's the task, for example the LSVT dataset from UCI - go and build a classifier.
Obviously, pandas is a workhorse, and pytorch is also on the horizon.
But, in reality she's learning by Google and skype calls with Dad. I have to say I'm stoked that I'm being able to help my daughter in grad school with homework. So many people tap out in elementary.
I agree that if you have a background in a common programming language, R is not intuitive. I know it from personal experience.
However, for someone with no programming background, R may be quite reasonable. Just judging by my daughter's experience.
My daughter is in grad school, learning programming for the first time in her life. She's learning R and Python at the same time. She's finding R much more intuitive.
Russia had brilliant mathematicians even before the October revolution, however, the Soviet Union gave another incentive to become an academic - it pretty much guaranteed a highly respected job, even if the salary was modest, but also allowed most of the academics to not get involved in politics. So in a country where you couldn't form a business, being an academic or a doctor was pretty much the best career choice.
>>> The Future of Work Is Remote
Yes, in the sub-segment of economy where Gitlab is applicable it's true. It's been true for a long time, even before the Covid-19 virus.
But for a large segment of the economy it isn't.
I need a hair cut, but all barber shops are closed. Can Gitlab help?
I want to go out for a dinner, I'm tired of take-outs. Can Gitlab help? A telecommuting hostess, followed by a telecommuting waitress, followed by a ...
I've been working remotely for the last several years, but it has it's place. It won't fundamentally change what was already happening, except perhaps accelerating the trend.
That can be another productivity killer. You inherit some app to maintain/modify, and you're afraid to touch it. So you essentially fork the code, start making small tweaks to reassure yourself that you're not breaking anything and it's all good. But at some point you have to take a bigger bite and it's still scary.
I see the same on a micro-scale. I have a task that will take an hour of concentrated effort - I'm afraid to start because I know I'll be interrupted.
But it accumulates.
>>> Presuming that SF is representative for the US, then IMO: tap water, milk, butter, bread and cheese in the US isn't that great.
For one, SF is NOT representative of the US. In fact, one of the best places food-wise.
However, of the five items you've listed, I'd agree with you on about 4.5. The SF's sourdough can compete with any sourdough, but an average village bakery in Europe beats it hands down on other varieties.
You raise a very good question. Unlike C14 dating, where the halflife is independent of environmental conditions, DNA is a chemical molecule, whose decomposition is a chemical reaction, dependent on exposure to time, temperature, pressure, light, and chemistry of the environment.
I was hoping the article would explain why the conditions would be so favorable to make it possible.
I have a second home in the mountains surrounding LA, and it's such a joy to go out there for a few days. I love driving the curvy mountain roads. It's just exhilarating. Nowadays, with the Covid-19 quarantine, I'm taking circuitous path to go grocery shopping, just to get a little extra "me time" on the road.
>>> In my current job I write Python, which I really don't like very much and I get burned out on Python-specific things.
I've used Ruby for several years, and I love the language. I wish I could use it today, in my daily stack, but unfortunately, Python won in the marketplace.
Syntactically, Ruby and Python are pretty much equivalent, with Ruby appealing more to me. However, Python won - no arguments. Got to go with the winner.
Are you stuck in the rut of doing corporate cruft? I'm there, and it's unbearably boring. I'm finding inspiration in personal projects. Currently I'm investigating the effect of gerrymandering in the House elections. While I have strong personal political views, I'm doing this purely as a pet project. At the same time, I have to experiment with datasets and data sources outside of my day-to-day area of expertise. I don't have a deadline, but it's interesting. And I'm doing it in a Python, which is a new language for me.
Bottom line, it's a challenging problem, and a language challenge, so at the same time I'm expanding my skills.
The bubble chart is possibly the worst visualizations, in close competition with the abominable word cloud.
Yes, they are visually attractive, but so much more difficult to interpret than a trivial Pareto/bar chart.
I really like problem solving and estimation questions during interviews, and I favor them over coding skills, etc.
A question that I frequently use is how long would it take to evacuate a city like Phoenix, if there was a 24 hour warning that some dictator du jour is going to drop a nuke.
It boils down to assessing a throughput of various modes of transportation: cars, buses, trains, airplanes, and yes walking.
One candidate responded "by helicopters" at which point the interview was pretty much over.
I completely agree about the unit test point. I'm not arguing that it's useless - quite the opposite. But it's damn hard to write useful unit tests.
I've seen a case where an internal IT team took ownership of code I delivered. A few months later I was asked to make some enhancements, and I found that they've added a lot of unit test code. It was absolutely useless. Essentially, they were testing the compiler, not my code. Complete waste of time.
I'm concerned about safety not from the engineering side (although not dismissing it), but from the standpoint of an easy access to sufficiently large amount of radioactive material to build a dirty nuke. As the nuclear plants get smaller, the security is going to become a larger percentage of the operating costs and operators will be tempted to skimp in this area.
What is far more scary than the old stuff our government is running in COBOL, is the new stuff running in Excel.
Excel became a de facto Common Business Oriented Language (COBOL), accessibly to anybody. Old COBOL programs were still developed with some software engineering discipline. Current Excel spreadsheets have none of that.
And, this doesn't apply to the government only - private enterprise runs bazillions(?) untested, unverified spreadsheets.
Wish I could share what I've seen.
First time I saw one of these, I started laughing. I don't have a webcam.
It's hard to believe but people have actually paid the ransom. I seem to remember a post on HN matched some Bitcoin transactions by time and amount.
I completely don't understand interviewers who like to haze the candidates. When I interview a candidate, I'm rooting for him or her. My employer has already invested time and money in the candidate, I have invested the time to study the resume and prepare relevant questions.
My interviews are pretty challenging for the candidates, but I try to make the atmosphere friendly.