joeclark77

Have you considered learning a valuable skilled trade? There's plenty of opportunity in construction, welding, plumbing, electrical work, etc.

You could still make mobile apps as a hobby.

When playing Karateka on the Apple ][ (don't you dare write it Apple II), if the game starts to get boring, try flipping the floppy disk over to the other side.

IMHO the pretension by coastal billionaires that they are the "elites" who know what's good for us better than we do ourselves, is part of what the people on Twitter are calling #HowYouGotTrump. Google, for example, usually does one of their cute special-edition homepage graphics on every obscure Muslim holiday and the birthdays of famous Communists, but rarely ever celebrates Independence Day or Easter. Nice way to show how much contempt you have for a large segment of your customers, Google!

I would suggest that founders be a bit more respectful of their employees' and customers' diverse opinions. If you treat people with respect, they might just be willing to listen to what you have to say.

The problem with mixing politics and business is that you get what Nassim Taleb is calling a 'dictatorship of the most intolerant'. If someone foolishly thinks it's safe to express a mainstream opinion, a minority of radicals will attack relentlessly with intent to destroy that person's career. Conservatives and Christians in academia and Silicon Valley have first-hand experience with this. Like Brendan Eich, we know that we can lose our jobs if we identify our political views. Not because we're in the minority, but because radicals make more noise, and most employers are cowards.

Therefore when liberals, who know their jobs aren't at risk, repeatedly ask that we all talk about politics in a professional forum, it comes across as a dare.

My one tip is this: get to know each other in real life, and make sure you know how to find and contact each other if Facebook, Twitter, Google or whatever big left-wing internet service decides to silence, shadow-ban, or delete your account.

The problem is this: a human can make a mistake but a machine cannot. For example a human driver may need to choose between swerving left or swerving right and, in hindsight, either choice could be defended because we know he had to make a split-second judgment, the outcome wasn't premeditated, etc.

With a self-driving car though, some programmer sitting in an office in the cold light of day had to make a conscious decision to kill the driver, or to kill the pedestrian. The outcome is programmed, and there are no mitigating factors like instinct or accident that can excuse it. This poses a very different moral problem for the creator of the self-driving car.

Well, one of the reasons they call it Big Data is that it can get big. You can store the same data point multiple times - once in the "player" record, once in the "game" record, once in the "weapon" record, etc. Whatever makes it faster/easier to process.

You have to forget everything you learned about "normalization" if you've ever studied relational databases and SQL. If redundant copies or even multiple platforms and data models allow you to make faster queries, use them!

HyperCard comes right to mind, although it's been at least 20 years since I saw the documentation. http://hypercard.org/ has screenshots of one of the on-screen documentation files (click HyperTalk Reference), itself a HyperCard stack.

Here's the original manual (PDF from Apple): http://download.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Manuals/so...

What I can't find is the "Hypercard Tour" referenced there.

I have a couple of questions for clarification:

1. When you say "thousands of inserts/updates per second" do you mean thousands of both? Or just thousands of inserts and maybe a smaller number of updates? It makes a difference because updates require finding the record first, and some data stores (like Hadoop) are basically write-only.

2. Are these "aggregations" going to be run on whole database tables at once (like the top score of each game), or on small chunks of them (like an individual player's scores)? For small chunks, strategies like indexing that speed up queries are essential, but for big batch processes, the MapReduce algorithm is the way to go.

I'm going to give my two cents based on a couple of alternative scenarios. In the first scenario, you're capturing gamers' scores/achievements/whatever and it's really only inserts, no updates or deletes except to correct errors. In that case you might go with a basic star schema implemented in a relational database, or something like BigTable if you need it faster. Read the Kimball book (The Data Warehouse Toolkit) if you don't know the model. Basically it's optimized for aggregation -- sums/averages/counts sliced and diced and pivoted any way you want to see them. At the middle of the star schema is a big "fact" table that basically records all events/transactions in a write-once-then-read-only manner.

In the second scenario, you're storing gamers' saved games or something, and really need to do updates and deletes as well as inserts. Yet you want to run aggregations on data at the level of individual gamers and on individual games. In this case I think I'd use some NoSQL database with very fast access and redundancy, based on Amazon's Dynamo. Riak is based on that model. I can't remember if Cassandra is. You could have two "tables", one for players and one for games, and each data point would be inserted twice. So you could get all the data for a game with one quick hash lookup, or all the data for a player, and then run your aggregation at that level of detail. Really big system-wide analyses could run on the whole database using MapReduce (you mentioned Spark, that'd do it).

Gamification is the only area where you really can't run out of ideas. Find ways to pull some of this sensor data, whether from the smartphone, the Nike+, the fitbit, etc, and create games out of it. That would also seem to be a good easy way for a young developer to get something simple but finished (rather than complex but unfinished).

It could be just a basic competition among friends -- whoever walks the most steps in a day gets a badge. Or you could do something crazy like Pokemon Go except where the Pokemons run away from you at a 10 minute mile pace (6 mph) when you spot them, and you have to chase them down. Or do an internet-of-things project where you change your TV channel by doing the corresponding number of push-ups. These ideas are free of charge, you're welcome.

Idea #1: Just submit the paper normally and hope for the best.

Idea #2: Write your work as a book or pamphlet and publish it as an e-book, for example on LeanPub.

Idea #3: Do a favor for a pal in academia and let him co-author the paper with you. It helps him with his tenure/promotion progress, and with his experience he may be able to help you prepare the work to go through peer review.

I suspect it will be non-healthcare jobs in healthcare. People are noticing that at the same time their premiums are doubling, tripling, quadrupling, doctors and hospitals seem to have larger and larger staffs of computer technicians, billing specialists, insurance negotiators or whatever the heck those people are doing. It used to be that a doctor could be self-employed, with just one nurse who doubled as a receptionist. Now fewer people are going into medicine, at the same time millions of people are going to be trained to work in the healthcare industry.

I think a lot of the resentment against "Obamacare" is that people can see this non-value-added waste (muda) and they saw government making a deal with the insurance industry to add even more bureaucracy to an already wasteful system. If there is going to be any compromise betwen left and right on healthcare, it may be that we keep the mandate (pleasing the left) but cut the regulation and bureaucracy that creates all the waste (pleasing the right).

That would be good for doctors and patients, of course, but very bad for insurance companies and other parts of the healthcare-industrial complex.

Maybe do a little guerilla refactoring? If you're spending 55 hours per week staring at the screen, then using some of those hours to work on something unauthorized isn't really stealing or cheating your employer at all. Either openly or in secret, come up with a rewritten or refactored version of your product that doesn't have all the technical debt. Couldn't hurt!

In sales and marketing, the job becomes orders of magnitude easier if the product is actually as good as promised. When your product is lower quality than the competition, advertising it is possible but difficult (and I would say ethically questionable) and you're not going to succeed with everyone.

It's the same with "convincing someone of something". The job becomes many times easier if the thing you're trying to persuade them of is actually true. If it's true, you can use plain facts and clear logic. If the thing you're trying to convince them of is false, you'll have to make increasingly more effort and will see a lower success rate. You'll also have to use dishonest tactics, like changing the meanings of words and declaring certain lines of argument taboo or unacceptable in polite society (i.e. political correctness).

A corollary is that, if you (from your POV) find it increasingly difficult to persuade People of Things, it might be worth considering the possiblility of whether those Things might in fact be wrong, rather than jumping to the conclusion that those People are deficient. You should at least consider it, and maybe take some time for personal study of the issues and arguments before redoubling your advertising budget.

Well, scientists often consider the two factors of relevance and rigor. A scientific study must be rigorous in its methodology in order to pass peer review. But it must also be relevant to a question or problem that matters. So you often start a paper with a few paragraphs about "the problem" and how/why your contribution is important. This would be even more important if applying for a grant, because funders want to make sure there's a good reason for the study.

It's a branded thing from a guy who wrote a book called the Bulletproof Executive. He uses MCG oil instead of coconut oil. I heard about it from Ace of Spades's blog. Ace is on a diet called "intermittent fasting" and he writes about the coffee here: http://ace.mu.nu/archives/364949.php

I can't testify as to its magical properties, but it does help me get through several hours without breakfast and tastes great.

For me it's one large k-cup of coffee with:

1 tbsp unsalted butter

~1 tbsp coconut oil

1 packet Flavia sweetener

pinch of cinnamon

Get an immersion blender (a little hand-held device that looks like an O-shaped coil at the end of a wire) and use it to mix it all up frothy...

I've been drinking "bulletproof coffee" lately as part of a diet. Basically coffee with butter, coconut oil, and flavia. Supposedly gives me good fats and no sugar to serve as a mini-meal and help me keep a fast. The one thing about it is that it's tedious to prepare in the morning. Maybe that's a hint that there could a business selling "health" coffee drinks, coffee with supplements, etc. That's one thing I really haven't seen offered commercially.

This reminds me of me when I finished the MBA, thought I was trained in "business", and tried to find a job as a "businessman". Oh, the folly of youth! It doesn't actually work that way in life. All businesses do specific things. All technology projects use specific technologies. If you want to make yourself a "generalist" that either means specializing in something that's used in a lot of different jobs (like PHP or Python), or specializing in more than one thing.

The key paradigm shift you need to make is this. You are probably viewing any kind of specific knowledge as a hindrance, a chain that will limit your freedom to do other things. In fact, though, it is the collection of such knowledge (as much as you can get) that eventually makes you multi-skilled hence free.

In Python you can code an MMO, manipulate a database, set off a Hadoop job processing petabyes of big data in parallel on a thousand servers, conduct statistical analysis on the result set, generate beautiful and meaningful data visualizations, run a web server to make your program accessible to the world, stick an API onto it, and give artificial intelligence to a robot. As Heinlein wrote, "Specialization is for insects."

"avoiding ruffled feathers with the US" is what I meant by China deciding his data was too hot to handle. I agree with the other possibilities, too.

My first programming class employed Pascal. It hasn't held me back. Let them learn Ruby... one day they'll tell it to their grandchildren and everyone will have a laugh.

My impression is that he went to the ChiComs first, they decided his stolen files were too hot for them to handle, so he went to Russia as a backup plan.

You guys go first. I'm going to sit this one out.

Github Pages is free and extremely easy for a static site, especially for someone with no skills. (I've used it with non-technical students to host their first simple web pages.) You don't even have to use Git -- there's a drag-and-drop interface to "Upload Files".

Have you looked at Coursera's catalog and found it wanting? They seem to have specializations (sets of 5-6 classes) in Finance, Marketing, Human Resources and other topics under "Business".

Just bought an Osprey Flapjack this week (https://www.amazon.com/Osprey-Mens-FlapJack-Backpack-Black/d...) and I'm very impressed. It's pretty compact, holds a laptop and a few notebooks very snugly, but still has various pockets for pens, chargers, wallet, phone, sunglasses and other small stuff.

As a Mainer I have been using LL Bean bags of various types all my life, and have several which are great, but they tend to be roomy "bookbags" and it made me nervous that my laptop and things were flopping back and forth in that big space. I'll still use the LL Bean bags for hiking, the gym, and so on.

I think that "affordable", "attractive", and "urban" form kind of an Iron Triangle in the sense that you can have any two out of three.

The author is ignoring the 800-lb gorilla in the room which is the anti-truth, anti-rationality fashions -- modernism and post-modernism -- that have dominated and corrupted philosophy for the past century. The analogy to physical science would make sense only if the mainstream of science since about 1910 was dominated by politics and founded on a premise that whatever makes you feel happy, man, must be what makes the universe go round. In such an environment, it would be entirely reasonable to ignore the modern trash and have your kids read Newton...

In general if you put down less than 20%, you have to pay for mortgage insurance, which pays neither principal nor interest. That may vary by region and by other things like first-time homebuyer or veteran status, so YMMV. But from first-hand experience I can say that paying 20% makes life a lot happier.

Maybe it's time for Perri-Air (from Spaceballs) to become reality?