junkscience2017

The NRA is no longer seen by many gun owners as a pro-2nd amendment org...they have become a mouthpiece for the gun INDUSTRY and will periodically support curtailing rights in favor of increased sales for gun manufacturers

I don't know why America thinks gun owners universally support the NRA

the ongoing hypocrisy of luxury resorts draining the wealth of a generation so professors can espouse socialism is an important, if not essential facet of our Hunger Games world

at Stanford, a blade of grass cannot deviate by a millimeter, yet the professors decry capitalism

this is petty pandering and moral grandstanding. if he thinks his gains are truly ill-gotten, he can purify his money by giving it to charity. instead he is buying bespoke suits.

The Apple Campus is not intended to be discarded after eighteen months of use. Your phone is.

This is a popular response whenever the topic of education is brought up...I hate to trot out the now-hackneyed term "privilege"....but really.

Very few people in society have the privilege of treating education as a route to becoming cultured. The storied universities you cherish were built by the rich for the rich, it is only recently that we have determined that the masses desperately need a grounding in romantic literature. Is it important to you that your accountant know Chaucer? Does your favorite artist really need to know chemistry?

In the end you have to feed yourself. I don't want to be responsible for feeding you and you don't want to be responsible for feeding me. If that means you learn something applied that is only useful for ten years and requires you to learn something else useful in the next ten years, so be it.

As it stands, why do people put such an emphasis on what someone studies as an undergraduate? Personally, I love reading history...read dozens of dense history books a year, and consider myself a decent self-taught historian. My degree is not in history. Why does it need to be?

Why do people assume HSR will not have TSA lines? All it will take is one credible threat. Indeed, given the inevitability of a threat emerging, it seems obvious that a TSA line will be part of the model from day one.

People will probably end up "packed like sardines" on HSR as well, as HSR will inevitably have to be made to be economical.

okay, well if you really believe this...why the article?

nowhere did I claim that only engineers were numerate, logical or analytical

counter example: the world economy, most of which is still kept running with the threat of repercussions

so I am either a lifelong academic physicist or I am an idiot?

Who takes out your garbage?

#1 flows from the strange rationalization that regardless of anything else in life, studying humanities for four years in college turns one into a great abstract thinker....while studying engineering for four years permanently transforms you into a robot

amazing that people still believe that an undergrad education either turns you into Napoleon or R2D2

author cites the problem of motivating a sales team...anywhere I have worked, this has been the quintessential "objective" process; meet quota, get bonus. fail to meet quota thrice, adios.

these are so contrived...the correspondence of highbrow book <-> endorsement is just too well-aligned...I would find these lists more amusing and insightful if they included trashy sci-fi fantasy pulp, The Far Side compendiums purchased in an airport bookstore just to lighten a day, biographies of total idiots, etc etc. you know, things people ACTUALLY enjoyed

I also get suspicious of any high-intensity CEO telling me about 1000+ pages books they read within a short period of time after publishing. "Grant" (which I will soon start) is over 1000 pages and was published in October. No, no Lloyd Blankfein, you have not read this to completion yet while simultaneously running a huge bank, sorry. No one with ANY day job is going to have that book finished any time soon, let alone a Fortune 100 CEO

Going back to my MAD magazine backlog....

Go is impoverished compared to Haskell but not when it comes to concurrency. The Haskell analogues for these concurrency primitives seem laborious...and they were even moreso prior to the advent of the `async` library.

surely less impactful than the collective trash heap generated by coastal technocrats replacing their phones every year

not surprised the subjects of the story are in their 70s...seems like a huge bore unless one's notion of a good life is reams of idle time surrounded by fawning servants

no you can't. take the absolute highest resolution images you can buy, and take 100 of the best mathematicians and using only maps you won't even be able to guess within 20%...analysts can already estimate within 1% of expected earnings

I don't blame the practitioners, I blame the business people who foolishly believed it was easy to shake billions out of their data if they applied enough wizardry.

for most, Big Data has been a sham, but it was very profitable for cloud vendors

I am absolutely saying that the expected case for data science is writing basic sql

as the tools become more sophisticated, the more rote the work will be

if a cloud vendor deploys a tool that derives some canned results very quickly at the push of a button, business leaders will prefer those to magic deep queries that take a weekend to run

probably some realization that 99% of their actual job is ORDER BY, GROUP BY, SUM...not a bunch of cool math scrawled on a whiteboard

I tried warning people off of this field given that they would be doing sql query monkey work and drawing simple line charts...most definitely not an upgrade from software development like it was sold as

look at the last "who's hiring?" ...every month I see more and more listings outside of the Bay area

zero surprise that the Atlantic staff would free up time to do a hit piece on the Midwest. It's not like anyone had previously thought that UW Madison would match Yale in the endowment Dept. Atlantic loves doing cultural victory laps over the Midwest to assauge their other more obvious setbacks

skyscrapers are mostly about making a statement....there are very few places in the world where land is truly so expensive that absolutely everyone, even the wealthiest corporations in the world, must build up.

Apple's new campus for example is basically a landscraper.

I love it. We do not live on Coruscant, space is not at such a premium even in London or NYC that you must push higher and higher. Skyscrapers are sterile; nothing happens at street level. The entire purpose is to isolate. The landscrapers have a more humane elevation and will end up creating entire neighborhoods.

okay, no more complaining about not being able to afford houses

Whenever people fantasize about some mysterious fourth "regional" level of government in the Bay Area, it is always assumed that this plays to their advantage...that someone from San Francisco will hold sway over the suburbs and impose their will.

But San Jose is larger by population...if you propose that this same layer of government instead be centered in San Jose, all of a sudden people lose interest.

If three levels of government can't get anything done, how will four help?

In any case this "regional" government already exists in the form of transit agencies, utilities, waste and water districts, etc....I see very few people clamoring to give the bureaucrats of BART any more power.

If you look at who actively votes in local elections, this is already the case.

They thought that in Vancouver too. They didn't bank on wealthy foreigners who would gladly keep condos vacant.

You will see the same thing happen in the Bay Area...there is no law that requires new construction to be allocated to "locals". The YIMBY crowd will still be locked out.

The Perl6 Advent calendars are great year after year. The language is a huge beast that demands a curious mind. You won't arrive at Perl6 if you are just looking for just a tool. If you are interested in what a modern dynamic language might look like (concurrency, gradual typing, metaprogramming), check it out.