loopbit

> not sure if one could learn to takeoff and land a Cessna badly in a week long bootcamp

Yes, you can. Taking off is extremely easy, you just need to accelerate with the flaps down and pull up at around 90km/h (if I recall correctly, it has been many, many years since I last flew an airplane).

Landing is much more complex, but you can do decent landings[0] in normal weather conditions after a few classes. The course I did (as I said, many, many years ago) had 35 flight hours and I did it in a summer (2-3 classes per week, usually 1 hour of theory and 45 minutes of flying) and you were perfectly able to do the exam (and pass) after it.

[0] Of course, in the eyes of many pilots, a decent landing is one you can walk away from. A good landing is one where you can use the plane again.

Maybe I'm not exactly the case you are asking for, but let me tell you my experience:

I started college in '97 and specialized in robotics and AI. Dropped out during my fifth year (2003) for several reasons (some having to do with the university, others were personal/family related). My working experience begins in a startup in '99 doing web stuff.

Now, in my country and in the early 2000's there were no jobs in robotics/AI, so I continued doing web stuff and, through the years I've moved up and down the ladder (I was development director of a multinational, left for a senior developer position because I was bored), lived in 4 countries and moved into different sectors and technologies. AI/Machine learning/Robotics were a hobby and I tried to keep up to date[0], but I had very few opportunities to apply that knowledge in my day to day.

In terms of education, I'm a drop out: I went through five years of university and have more than enough university credits for a bachelor degree, but have never felt the need to go back and officially get a degree[1]. I started a master's degree in Ireland and left it after the second module[2].

Now, finally, the point I wanted to make (sorry for the long introduction, I felt it was important to give a bit of background):

About five-six years ago, I got my first official position working full time with AI and machine learning[3] and suddenly found that my maths knowledge was definitely lacking. Even today, although I'm always improving, I find that when talking about deep learning, the maths are definitely my weak point even though I'm able to implement models, systems and tweak them enough to get good results.

So, to answer your question: Yes, I keep being offered jobs. Maybe not as well paid as someone with a similar level of experience and a PhD and definitely not research-oriented. If the company does have a data science team, those jobs are usually working with them to take their models and integrate them with the rest of the product/s.

[0] I went through Andrew Ng, Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig courses originally through Stanford Online and I'm constantly following one or two coursera or MITx courses in the area. I also have an account in Kaggle but I don't usually push my results, I'm more interested in the datasets.

[1] I'd need to go back to my country and fight the bureaucracy there while trying to get documents from a university that no longer teaches computer science.

[2] I felt a bit cheated, to be honest: The syllabus looked great, the content was mediocre at best and the papers we had to do had very little to do with the stuff we learnt and even with IT in general. 4K euros per module (for an online master) and the time spent wasn't worth it just to get an official piece of paper.

[3] "Data science", I don't specially like that term and, if anything, I prefer to call myself a data engineer. I don't do science, I don't do research. I can take a research paper, implement it and add all the stuff that makes it useful and production-ready. But I don't call that science.

If we are not the target market, then who is?

I mean, yes, I agree, the average consumer is not going to use ethernet nor function keys. The average consumer is going to use the laptop to browse, write documents, watch videos and, maybe, do some basic media editing.

And that precisely is who the macbook line is for: slim, portable, affordable (in apple terms) and, let's be honest here, more than powerful enough to do anything you might want to do with it.

The pro line, as I understand it, was always oriented to professionals; people that maybe needed more from their computers. That usually means much more horsepower: More powerful chipsets, definitely more memory, in many cases a better/dedicated graphics card, better and larger drives... And yes, sometimes, function keys.

Usually, it also means having the ability to connect external stuff: a standard media output for meetings and presentations, a network connection (even today, plenty of companies don't have wifi, or if they have, it's a guest one), external storage, graphic tablets and plenty of other stuff. Sometimes you need all this at the same time.

Personally, I've found the sd card reader useful a few of times but I could do without it, the hdmi port has always been very useful, I'd like more than two usb ports, but they are usually enough and the only times I've used the lightning ports has been to use adapters for other stuff (like an ethernet cable).

I also use Rancher and quite happy with it.

The cool thing is that you can set up and environment using cattle (their own orchestration system), k8s, mesos or swarm. Up to you and your preferences.

Also interested in something like this but I don't think I have time to do it on my own. If you end up taking it up and would like some help, give me a shout.

My email is miguel at <username>.com

Not technical and the "creating new products or services that have changed the world" is hugely debatable, but how about Amancio Ortega[0]?

A spaniard, son of a railroad worker. Started working as a shop hand at age 14 and it's now, at least according to Forbes[1], the richest man in Europe and the wealthiest retailer in the world. You can't be more self-made than that.

On the other hand, some of the people you mention were already well-off to begin with, even if not really rich.

Once said that, I agree with you at some level: The mindset in Europe is (or was, maybe it's changing?) different from the US and, generally speaking, more risk-averse. Also, the feeling among most of the european entrepreneurs I've met is that the US is the place to go if you really want to succeed: Funding, market fit, know-how... all that is perceived to be better/easier to get in the US.

Anyway, just my 2 cents and my very personal, very subjective, anecdote-based perception of it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amancio_Ortega [1] http://www.forbes.com/profile/amancio-ortega

I've almost always used story points and actually find them useful. As for the author's complaint, for me the key is this:

> First of all, what are story points? Are they measures of time it takes to complete a story? If yes, then why are they not in terms of time?

I don't think I've ever read the official scrum guide, but ever since I started using scrum (around 2004) the concept of story points was clear: They were "perfect days", i.e. days where you don't have any distractions and nothing goes wrong and everything works first try.

As a fairly experienced developer, I can easily estimate how many of those perfect days will take me to do a task (at least if it's a technology I know). When estimating, the whole team estimates all tasks until there's a consensus (and you are right, ideally, all the stories should require similar effort).

After that, the "perfect day" thing is forgotten, the estimates have no unit and the velocity starts playing it's role.

And here's exactly why I like points: The link between real days and points is lost, it doesn't matter. All that matters is that you completed X points in a specific sprint. Chances are that you'll complete X points in the next sprint. Iterate through a few sprints and you'll have a pretty good idea of what will be finished when.

El Capitan improves performance compared to Yosemite, just as Snow leopard improved on Leopard, but if you look into more than two generations of the OS the trend goes the other way.

I currently have two apple laptops, an old macbook that came with Tiger and use it to test beta versions of OSX. It's running El Capitan right now but is almost unusable.

My main computer is a rMBP that came with Lion. It worked better (faster, snappier) with Mountain Lion than it does with El Capitan.

As I said in other comment, the antibiotics one is a very simple case, but I've had plenty of other examples.

As to report the doctor... To whom? Do you know how difficult it is to prove almost any kind of malpractice? I've had a doctor insist that I had a sprained wrist when it was a broken radius (as another doctor and a simple x-ray proved). Another said that the cramps I was having were from an unborn brother (ahem). My wife was told in the hospital that she wasn't having an allergic reaction to antibiotics because she had had them before (surprise, antihistamines helped and further tests detected she's allergic to penicilin).

Of course, nothing gets written and doctors are very quick to cover each other. So how do you report these?

As for the doctors not being able to dedicate extra time to patients, I totally agree and indeed mention it in my first message.

You are right, the antibiotics one is pretty simple, I ran with it because I didn't want to get into personal details.

Let's put a simple one from my experience: No doctor has been able to tell me what the bilirubin is. They go on to tell possible causes, and what it means to have a high value and so on.. but after hours with them, no one could tell me what it is.

The closer I could get was for one of them to tell me that its secreted by the liver (close, but no cigar). The first paragraph in wikipedia explains it perfectly.

I know that my computer is powered by electricity. I know most of the ways to produce said electricity, but I've forgot the details of an hydroelectric plant even though I studied it in college; it's not part of my daily life.

I also know that power lines use alternate current and computers use direct current, but I've forgot the details of the AC/DC converter. Even though I was able to design one from scratch in university.

I also studied the internals of microprocessors up until the pentium, how they were designed and manufactured, but nowadays all I remember, vaguely, is the x86 assembler.

Do you remember every single detail you studied in college? Do you know how to calculate the root of a number by hand? I don't. Not anymore.

Not only in Canada, it's like that in every country I've seen a doctor.

As for the 'why'... You'd be surprised on how difficult is to get an answer like that from any doctor. My suspicion[0] is that they simply don't know anymore: It's something they learnt in college, but after a few years of dealing with symptoms and prescribing treatments, they forget about the why.

Don't get me wrong, I kind of understand it. On one hand I've found that most people don't care about the 'what's or 'why's of medicine. They go to the doctor and either take the treatment they prescribe or not. I think the people that want to know the 'why' are a minority and doctor's time is valuable, so they end up processing people as fast as they can.

On the other, medicine is a vast field and they need to keep up to date with the latest developments, so I can see how they can start to forget seemingly superfluous pieces of information when faced with all the new info they have to absorb.

[0] From personal observation, so I can (I hope) to be mistaken.

> as part of their WRT line is intended to support open source firmwares

Not sure about the 1200, but I have the WRT610N and it has never worked completely with Open/DD-WRT. The best I got (before leaving it and returning to the original firmware) was a functional router but no USB and no 5GHz band.

Foreign exchanges giving worse exchange rate is better than the situation I've had many times in england, were I was simply unable to pay with or exchange northern irish or scottish pounds.

Someone told me that, by law, they have to accept those notes, but I still have ~40 NI pounds that I took to london on a trip a couple of years ago and had to take back with me.

Weird... I actually tried with a couple of different browsers (FF, Chrome and Safari) to check that it wasn't me logged in or something like that. Could it be ip-based, as I did all my tests with the same computer? Hmm...

Anyway, thanks for expanding on it; I've shared a few images through imgur and never had this issue (maybe it was before this change, or maybe the people receiving them never complained), so I was a bit puzzled by your comment.

I was wondering about what you said about linking to a direct image being tricky.

As far as I can see, you can put the link to imgur (like http://imgur.com/gKt0Owa) or directly to the image (http://i.imgur.com/gKt0Owa.jpg) and both (as well as the html, bbcode and markdown versions) appear directly in the image page.

Not OP and don't care much about this, TBH, but:

>> Remember the iPhone 4?[...] > translation: I was too stubborn to buy a case / bumper to prevent this and suffered and bitched for a year instead

It might be just me, but a phone that doesn't work as a phone should mean refunds. It's a design problem (industrial design) and the case is a temporary workaround at best. Are we going to start blaming the clients for the mistakes of a company?

>> apple TV[...] > Obviously defective unit. too dumb to replace it.

Funny, I have the same issue now, a few years after I got it (as a company gift, I wouldn't have bought it), I wonder how many apple TVs that are 4-5 year old are still working. But again you are blaming the client for mistakes that are solely in the hands of apple.

I agree with you on the other points and personally, the only apple thing I have (apart from the apple TV, as I said, not my idea) is a rMBP that is 4 years old and still works flawlessly. I stand with you on things that are his/her opinion. But faults in manufacturing being passed as client's stupidity?

The main one is that, at least with the providers I used (three, including Fedex) there was no api and no way to interface with their systems automatically, everything had to be done through archaic websites with a usability designed before the dot com boom or by phone. During busy times (christmas shopping, for example), we had several interns dedicated exclusively to handle sending the info (number of packages, destinations...) to the supplier and printing the shipping labels.

I think that when you reach the thousands of packages per day, you are offered those services, but as a small setup with 'only' hundreds of packages, the only option was to do it manually. We had a simple system to handle orders, inventory, manufacturing... It would have been a breeze to integrate an api with it to print the labels automatically to give the guys actually preparing the packages.

We didn't get a lot of issues that usually pop up when talking ecommerce (scammers, false orders), we didn't even get many returns (I only remember a couple of cases) but we did get a few packages that disappeared in transit with no explanation or, obviously, a refund. The process to report those was horrible, similar to cancelling a mobile phone contract and in most cases we had to simply write-off the package and send a new one to the customer (actually, we are waiting for the resolution of a case when a package worth a few thousand euros was lost, we might actually get back that money).

Another thing that was annoying, although I know it's understandable, is that to start getting discounts they require a volume that, as a new company or sole trader you are simply not going to get. Paying the normal rate for Fedex, for example, makes packages quite expensive when you are talking international (and the fact that I live in an island with a population of less than 10M people doesn't help). We basically kept shipping costs to a minimum by eating into our profit margin. We got less money, but helped improve the sales.

As the ex-CTO of an ecommerce startup, I really hope you succeed and wish you the best of luck.

There's plenty of us, little guys that need logistics/fulfillment and the options just suck. There's a huge space between starting (when you can do it yourself with UPS/equivalent or even standard post) and when you hit a few thousand packages per day (when Fedex and similar is a decent option).

You forgot Gibraltar, but your point stands.

No, in many cases the JVM performance will match and sometimes even outperform a C++ implementation in terms of performance and I've seen a few examples of that, although math-heavy operations is usually not one of them. In terms of size and memory usage, a C++ implementation will almost always win.

The problem with Java is that it's not as deterministic in terms of performance as C++, so in areas where that is a must, it has to be taken into account. Even after saying that, the GC can, and indeed should, be tweaked and optimized. The JVM gives you more tweaking options and tools to optimize the garbage collection than any other platform I've worked with, but most developers don't know about them or don't care.

In cases like the original comment mentioned, it may have been better to continue using the C++ implementation, or it might have been useful to spend a bit less in consultants and developers and a bit on Azul's Zing (and maybe a few people that understood the platform). It might have saved a lot in the long term and indeed there are plenty of algorithmic trading solutions written in Java.

At least the UK seems to be making moves toward a better system, Terry Pratchett had a bit to do with it. The rest of the european countries are blind to this issue.

This is something that hits very close to home, as I'm in the same path as Pieter and your father and I see that path getting me to the same end. If that happens, I'd like to end on my terms, not as the husk that you describe and not after having my family go through all the pain that you describe.

I don't see anything in the article that goes against gitflow. Is it just me?

They don't want to use Github for the code review and prefer to use Gerrit? Good for them, I don't either and actually prefer GitLab or BitBucket for git in general. But hey! thanks for the Gerrit introduction.

But gitflow?

I've been using the gitflow way of working for ~5 years (although not always the gitflow extension) and I don't see anything there that clashes with that way of working. You want to work on a feature, perfect: Branch from develop and work away.

After you are done and before you merge with develop again, you push your feature to Gerrit and do the code review/changes. And then merge back to develop.

Really, I don't see the issue between Gerrit and gitflow and still think that gitflow is a very sane way of working in a team, specially if you have people that are not used to work with [distributed] version control systems and you probably wouldn't believe how many developers are out there like that.

On the other hand, you have to consider ISP deals. I've just got the S7 plus the Gear VR for 200 euros. Way cheaper than any option that includes the Rift.

I don't think that's right, do you have any links?

Italy, Spain, Ireland, England... actually all european countries (AFAIK) use Monday as the start of the week. All countries with a strong christian tradition.

The only countries I know that use Sunday as the start of the week are the US and Israel.

A quick search in wikipedia[0] also mentions that it's used as the first day of the week in Hebrew tradition and in some muslim countries.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunday#Position_in_the_week

It may have come across dickish, It was not my intention. I had no time to go in more detail and just left it as a note.

As for the issue at hand, yes, it's mentioned nearly at the beginning of the book, when the narrator is discussing the motorcycles each character has and why they chose it, mentioning the two views[0]. If I recall correctly, there's no discussion, it's simply there to give an example of the concept of quality that the author is trying to define. Anyone thinking that the book has anything to do with actual motorcycle maintenance (or worse, trying to use the advice) didn't understood the ideas and concepts of the book.

[0] The tinkerer, open view, exemplified with an old motorcycle (of which I don't remember the make) vs the "it just works", closed view, using a brand new BMW.

If you had read Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance you'd known that it has very little to do with actual motorcycle maintenance, apart of using it as a tool to make its point.

Said in traditional business-speak:

Work in a profit center, not in a cost center.

AFAIK, depends on the country and legislation. In Ireland (and Spain) I've had to produce originals where the signature was clearly hand-written (they looked for pen pressure points, for example).

I've even had kafkaesque situations where I was asked for the original of a document that was only available online. In those cases I had to present a printed copy of the document and a signed document (from the bank in this case) saying that they didn't send hard copies/originals.

Funnily enough, I use a commercial app with the same name (Paperless) that does exactly that. It scans the documents, applies OCR and saves the pdfs in a folder that, in my case, is automatically synced with dropbox and backed up to a local NAS.

It doesn't have search functionality (well, it does, but it's basically useless) but allows to set categories and tags, which is more than enough for me.

There's an added issue with this kind of solutions, in most cases you still need to keep the original. Having them scanned is great for record keeping and for communicating with you own accountant, but if there is a problem (tax audit, proving ownership, etc, etc) you'll have to produce the paper original.

It's a very, very long shot, but could it be that you have virtualbox 4 installed?

With 10.10 and 10.11 I had the same issue, caused by the kext from virtualbox. Removing it and installing version 5 solved everything and haven't had a kernel panic since then.

If not virtualbox, I'd look at other kext you might have there.