mbaha

Original comment never mentioned that SQL wasn't a baseline for programmers anymore.

What you don't realize about Epitech (and other similar private schools) is that the only value you're getting is paying a bunch of millionaires the right to join a selective program.

I graduated from an enginnering school, and you can absolutely skip all classes if you wanted to. Sure, the teachers don't encourage you to do it, but the freedom is definitely there.

BUT, since there will always be a percentage of students who don't succeed in a "traditional" way, a bunch of rich people will always attempt to lure them into a paid program (which is, I repeat, selective). So they learn quite a bit, and they can become high-earners in the future, since they're all hanging out with technically good people.

Were you an engineering graduate ? Because 30k€ even in Province right now is extremely low (university graduates are starting at 33k€ in Lyon for example, with engineers 33-38k€)...

“Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves,” the New York Times editorialized in October 1963, as demolition of the old Penn Station began.

I suggest a corollary:

"Any web community gets what it admires (fancy UX and feeds that work like magic), will pay for (=nothing), and, ultimately, deserves."

Spot on. While the idea behind can be interesting, it is implemented by accepting people who have the same "social status" background (same schools, same opinions), but are of different gender/race.

I think that a white factory worker could add way more insight into how other communities views things, than hiring a black/female attorney does...

Having said that, I'm really afraid what the backlash against this type of diversity-thinking will be. The system will surely corrects itself in the future (it's already starting), but I'm not certain going back to another extreme would be very wise...

I don't really understand why you would think that "avoiding change" is an offense to be fired for.

Your opinion seems to lack every bit of possible nuance: say i'm manager A trying to raise awareness about tech B in company. I have every right as employee C to be skeptical because if B is bad and pointless, I'll be punished for following A's decision. Of course A has every right to spread B even if bad, because it will make A seem awesome in the process.

My general point is: resistance to change is a spectrum and is often mixed with office politics and strong opinions on both sides. Trying to blame someone merely for wanting to keep the status quo is absurd.

I have a feeling they've been working on this. Their https support has always been top notch!

Am suddenly interested in building a product that handles your taxes when you give it read access to your Coinbase account.

Yes.

I'd argue that berating economic success as the main metric for measuring a country's success is precisely what is slowly but surely eroding the West's precious institutions.

Since when people just want to live comfortable lives and leave their collective fate to be decided by a minority whose interests do not necessarily align with the people's interests (otherwise, they would just allow fair elections).

Small example: of course, country-wide surveillance à la China would lead to "economic success", do you think it's criticized because it would lead to mass poverty ?

It would lead to a perfectly stable future for the population, with ever improving quality of life and security. The problem, as you may guess, lies elsewhere.

I have to admit I slightly misread the parent comment, but still: as long it's not a democracy, how can you consider that China "can give their people what they want".

The "they" cannot be referring the people of China, or the majority because China is just not a democracy.

This is the main difference between a country which holds free elections every 4 years, and a single-party country.

Following your logic, China is better off because instead of having one party protesting but failing to reject a law promoted by the elections-winning other party, it's just better to have one single party control everything.

Sorry but I find this just mindblowing.

Seeing comments like yours today on this Bloomberg piece is quite reassuring.

I technically count as a "minority" and I have no other way of phrasing this: it is extremely irritating to see companies push for diversity by hiring based on skin colour or gender.

Luckily, I live in a country that strongly opposes these kinds of policies, so I get to feel proud of my (very modest) achievements in this field.

To see these students and other minorities never being able to experience that feeling makes me quite sad.

Couldn't agree more. Although to be more precise, ETH/ICOs are threatening the standard financing model proper in Silicon Valley, and not SV as a whole.

I basically see the future as being both really dystopic and utopic at the same time:

So (mostly rich) people will be able to invest their money without any friction, but this will destroy the rent-seeking institutions that weren't meant to exist in the first place

=> power to the geeks and the rich, but you won't be able to make any money by just making "deals".

Would love to be convinced otherwise though....

This reminds me of the scene in The Big Short where a manager casually talks about CDOs, synthetic CDOs and squared CDOs. And Steve Carell's character start asking: "what are squared CDOs... ?"

Seems awesome. Wonder why this wasn't just launched as a regular open source project. I (& people) would contribute the heck out of it.

Try to use UI kits.

Love how you just summed up (in my mind) the reasons for Netflix's success.

Really glad that the market really played its role by providing customers with a near-perfect (Netflix's library is inconsistent to say the least) viewing experience.

Yeah!

I feel like you're talking about an experience that precisely emerged from the Starbucksization of food and beverage production.

Where I come from, staff in cafés would kill to make a consistent coffee every time (and they mostly do) but they're stuck with old machinery. But now that Starbucks has delivered that, customers want to go back to an authentic experience that really has never existed.

The same thing will happen to food i.e most people would love to have decent restaurant meals delivered at a really low price. The fact that some people will try to taste gourmet food prepared by real chefs is rather irrelevant to say the least...

That's mainly because the rate of change is far greater. Will need to get used to it though.

A lot.

What you're describing has been basically begun from the first time a spreadsheet was opened by a decision maker in a bank.

From then, the calculations only got more advanced, but computers have always hidden how they worked (especially when they reach a certain scale of customers).

X

Spot on remark. Consumers should be voting with their buying decisions. Markets will eventually correct themselves.

I'm scared of network effects for Julia, personally. Python is garnering tremendous amount of users.

But then, I remember a computer vision teacher 3 years ago laughing at the idea of using Python instead of Matlab as Matlab is the "obvious industry standard".

I think you nailed the key insight here... The Matlab community maybe needed a really close alternative at the beginning, but we should really strive now for python-centric solutions (and/or Julia/R...).

Matlab is a tremendously poor ecosystem. Not flexible at all in terms of libraries, slow, closed source and poorly designed as a language.

You could just see what Python has achieved in the last years as a scientifical tool: awesome libraries, interfaces with web/mobile applications, tons of rich courses/tutorials.

I hope it teaches other fields that open source can really be key in making tremendous progress.

Completely agree.

Python users shouldn't run standard loops in any scientific computing. Only valid examples are looping over a set of http parameters in a web app...

In which case, the computation will definitely not be the bottleneck.

Looking at this issue more broadly, I definitely agree that non-IT industries need to take into account Agile methodology to improve their results.

I've been looking for the reason why IT has come up with Agile before anyone else (I don't consider Lean Industrial Management as Agile whatsoever) and I simply think it's because the first industry with so much information in it (it's in the title even...).

Now that other industries have to orchestrate huge processes with huge amounts of information, I hope they'll take into account what IT brought up to solve this issue instead of taking the "IBM route" further (more policies, more guidelines, more bureaucracy).

Yeah, my thoughts exactly when I read that part.

It's not news, companies go away because they make repeatedly bad changes, one after the other, thinking they're doing the best ones.

I think German automakers are simply too late for the Tech train. Don't get me wrong, they'll sell lots of cars in the near/far future, but they'll probably become a "commodities" type of industry, like Oil.