johan_larson

I'm guessing investors are leery of funding expansion in an industry that is still illegal under federal law. The businesses themselves also have all sorts of trouble because banks don't want to deal with them.

I agree it makes sense to install safety devices to protect against carelessness and inattention. But cruise ships already have that, with waist-high railings around all outdoor public areas.

Going further, with horizontal netting or 6 foot fencing, would be trying to protect passengers against injury even in the case of outright thrill-seeking or tomfoolery. I'm guessing the cruise lines resist that partly out of cost considerations and partly because they don't want the ships to start looking like prisons. Passengers aren't going to like it if they bought a luxurious getaway and they find themselves in a cage.

I think the author is stretching to make a point. I mean, the case she opens with is a drunk woman who climbed a railing to sit on it. Guess what? She fell off into the water. If she had gone out on the water in a dinghy as drunk as she was, and had turtled the boat and drowned, no one would pity her.

Yes, my take is that this is a positive. The three big things that are expensive enough to mess people up these days are medical care, housing, and education. And at least part of what's keeping housing expensive is restrictive zoning. So loosening zoning a bit is a good thing.

Because once a community has lost its central economic purpose, it tends to develop all sorts of pernicious dysfunctions. If the one factory in a small town closes, the town just lost a lot of its tax-base, so it's hard to pay for services. Many people can't find other jobs, so they end up on the dole or on drugs or on the street. And anyone with options leaves. Such towns are essentially economic zombies. They died a long time ago, they just haven't fallen over yet. This is the case where I think it makes sense to shut down the community, and help the remaining residents build better lives elsewhere.

I have no quarrel with small towns per se. Some host substantial mining or logging or manufacturing operations. Some provide services for large surrounding agrarian areas. Others are bedroom communities for city workers who trade a commute for cheaper living arrangements. These are all fine. These towns have solid economic reasons for existing, and are therefore viable. No problem. But others are not so fortunate.

Indeed. But the skills mismatch is one of the things I am proposing to address. People can be retrained, at least if they're on the younger side. Trying to retrain a 55 year old factory worker whose employer moved the plant to Mexico or China probably wouldn't work too well. It might be better to let him retire early.

Maybe we shouldn't be trying to keep these small town alive. Maybe we should focus on shutting them down in an orderly fashion and help the residents move to more dynamic areas, probably in large part by helping them acquire skills that are actually in demand there.

Wow. I hadn't realized Google is so dominant in online ads. Even Facebook is a distant second. And Amazon is barely in the running.

Hedonism is respectable enough that textbooks in ethics keep presenting it. The other ethical approaches kick it in the shins pretty hard, but no one seems to have a decisive refutation. Ethicists from other traditions just think hedonists are punks.

I'd be more enthusiastic about such requirements if humanities/lib-arts courses actually provided a solid answer to how one should live and what one should want. But they don't. They provide lots of different answers, with no great way to choose between them. Going through a mass of required reading only to reach the conclusion that living for bling+bitches is actually a pretty OK idea doesn't seem like a good use of time.

I am not being sarcastic. By choosing the title he did, the author is setting himself up for comparison with a really famous work, and I have to wonder whether that was wise. It was, to say the least, bold.

Would I have reacted differently to something similar done by someone who is not Asian? Hard to say; I can't interrogate my mind with complete reliability from the inside. But believe the answer is no, I would have reacted the same way regardless of the race of the author.

That's rather an ambitious title, isn't it? W.E.B. Dubois might be the most respected African-American intellectual, and "The Souls of Black Folk" might be his finest work. Yang is setting the bar rather high for himself.

I think this is just Google growing up. When you're a smallish company with little influence, what you say and who you talk to just don't matter. But when you're a big company, with big responsibilities and a big footprint, everything you say and do are closely watched, and therefore matter. You just can't run a multi-billion dollar enterprise like a free&easy five-person startup.

Why is this so hard? Other countries manage to construct high-speed rail and subway lines for a fraction what the US spends.

Maybe it was a bad idea to have everyone with a brain cram into med-school, law-school or b-school. There are other things that need doing.

There are a lot of white collar jobs where being able to do a bit of coding, if only at the level of Excel functions, is somewhat useful.

If I had kids, I think making sure they learn to code would be sort of medium-priority. Less important than learning to swim. More important than learning to dance. Perhaps on par with speaking a second language well.

Yup. That line is just north of Montreal, so the area south of it includes Canada's two largest metropolitan areas.

Did you know there's a tiny bit of Canada that is further south than the California-Oregon border?

The bones of excessively inquisitive natives.

Yes it is. My favorite anecdote about it is that the province of Ontario is big enough to have vineyards in the south and polar bears in the north.

Both of them, really. There's a lot to know if you want to build a modern database system. But no work I am aware of addresses the specific question of how to build a database system from scratch.

A reasonable approach might be to start with this high-level paper, and follow papers they reference until they get specific enough to address your specific questions:

    Joseph M. Hellerstein, Michael Stonebraker, James Hamilton. 
    Architecture of a Database System. Foundations and Trends in Databases, 1, 2 (2007).

For the sort of low-level issues that you are interested in, it might be useful to study a well-regarded persistence package, such as Berkeley DB.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_DB

Another system that might be worth studying is SQLite.

https://www.sqlite.org/index.html

You might try this collection of papers about DB technology.

http://www.redbook.io/

Fair warning: this is not for beginners. If you find the going too hard, start with a DB textbook.

Also, that site doesn't seem to include the papers themselves. But most of those papers are very famous, so if you search for the titles, you should find copies. Worst case, you might need to visit a university library.

#2 and #4 have already been done, haven't they? Amazon has a significant dev office in Toronto, and Canadian immigration rules are much more straightforward than the US ones.

This is nonsense. Toronto is a backwater in tech. There is no first-tier tech company headquartered here. Heck, there isn't even a second-tier company. Plus the pay is peanuts. That article is a PR plant at best.

Thanks for the info, but I'm not sure databases belongs in that list. I work on a database system (Couchbase), and our codebase is pretty mixed. The oldest part of the system, the Key-Value storage engine, is C++, but the newer parts are a mix of Erlang, Golang, and Java.

Anyone know what some of the newer systems, like Spark and Snowflake are written in?

Are there many new projects being started these days in C, or even C++? I would expect most of that to have moved over to Java or Golang, with most C-family coding being on extensions of older projects.

From the hiree perspective, it's clear that many companies are over-listing requirements and it makes sense to apply if you approximately match the position but don't tick every last box in the formal requirements.

I'm not sure why companies over-list. Some think it's so they'll have a defensible reason for saying no in subjective cases, others think they are just being lazy and listing every possible thing they would like to see in the candidate.

I've never worked on a product that I thought was evil. But I have worked on a product crufty enough that if I had had a chance to inspect the codebase before taking the job, I would have passed. One of my employers had a Java codebase that had been hacked on for fifteen years or so, and had all sorts of weird stuff in it. Working on it was a huge pain.

I imagine a 2-3 hour test that costs something like $200, which seems like a reasonable investment, if many or most employers are looking for it. For the companies, it would save an hour or two of interviewing. If they accepted the test as indicative of basic coding sanity, they could then focus their interviews on more general or domain-related skills.

> At least the people doing the stupid tests are checking for stuff that is relevant to them instead of wasting time with pedantic aspects of a programming language or tech stack.

I've done a lot of interviews, and many of the questions have been very generic, with nothing whatsoever to do with the job I was interviewing for. I've reversed a lot of linked lists in my time, and I was once asked to solve FizzBuzz.

You'd think it would be possible to create some sort of certification system so that we could prove we are clever and can code once rather than having to prove it again and again.

Sometimes there are conference rooms outside the secured perimeter of a building, in the lobby before you go past the receptionist and have to badge in. I've seen them used for interviews and such. Since Google X has all sorts of top secret stuff, I could see them doing things that way.