merciBien

I assumed from the article that most census taking was done online last year, do you know if there were fewer face-to-face surveys than in previous years?

The article says Australian and other country’s online census tools don’t allow people to continue with incomplete answers. The US version evidently does.

It seems obvious that design decision would lead to more incomplete answers than the more restrictive design.

In my experience a bachelors degree is not required for most development positions.

What is required for a non-intern position is experience in development work, and even that has to be in the same technology and language as the job you’re applying for.

Most companies will quiz you on your experience, and want specific details on what you can do. Some will give you a coding exercise to complete, I’ve seen many that don’t care how you completed it, they want you to intelligently describe your design, strategy and execution. Writing a unit test or two is usually impressive.

In old-school companies and government contracts you might get weeded out for not having a degree. Most startups and smaller companies are looking for experience, not academic success.

Yeah sounds like Bari was unfair to Tulsi, the war in Syria is complicated and messy.

Ironically I think this interview with Winston Marshall shows how he dealt with being unfairly judged in a similar way.

I often wonder if people’s financial irresponsibility is due to a parenting failure. It’s easy to blame the government for taking your last dollar if you’re unaware that you’re living like someone who makes 3x your income.

I was raised by working parents, we bought used cars, lived in the same house for 20-plus years, went on road trip vacations, ate out at a buffet once a week. We watched tv, but I was mostly confused by the lifestyles we saw there. I’m not saying it was a perfect experience, I hated my parents until I started paying my own way. Suddenly I saw my coworkers were struggling on twice my income. I have lots of problems, but money isn’t one of them.

I admire your empathy for the dog, I love animals too! From the ironic tone of the rest of the article, I feel confident that Jake the Labrador is fictional. “No animals were injured in the making of this satire.”

This is so painful to read, Venezuela sounds like a failed state, it can’t even provide running water to its people in Ordaz. The daily human toll must be ghastly.

How does a country ever get back on a positive trajectory after such a catastrophe?

Was it Mark Twain who said the coldest winter he ever experienced was a summer in San Francisco?

>>> My friend Al, with Tesla Owners of East Bay, invited me to crash with him and his family and he advised me to get a jacket. Mind you, I was in the Louisiana heat and it was 95 degrees with 100% humidity, so I thought he was exaggerating. California is supposed to be warm right? In June?

… charged with 17 counts of intentional damage to a protected computer and one count of obtaining information from a protected computer. This case is being investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Edited to protect the innocent!

Thanks for posting this podcast, I enjoyed hearing Douglas and Terry talk about their “multimedia CD-ROM”. For them it was a major advance from text adventure games!

@ajarmst is that last related idea you quoted your own? That’s a powerful expression of how I see human culture: question everything, but remember to respect the ideas of the people who came before you. There might be a baby in the bath water you’re discarding.

Is the second sentence that starts with “The latter” a typo for “The former”? Or am I misunderstanding the paragraph?

>>There has been an attempt ongoing for some time to harness the respectability of science and conflate it with an increasingly popular philosophy known as scientism. But scientism and science are different things. The latter is a powerful method of obtaining and applying material facts and information. The latter creates a subjective world view using the pretense that science has the capacity to tell us objectively right from wrong, the ethical from the unethical, best from worst, etc..

Agree! I need to find the video I used to rewire my bedroom light switch. The guys who painted my bedroom somehow connected it so my alarm clock would short out half the house. I watched some handyman’s video 10 times going bayand forth to the outlet!

I hate to sound old-school, but Jenkins sounds perfect for your use case, with scheduled jobs, job retries and job history built-in. Reading the Jenkins install docs on https://www.jenkins.io/download then googling “Jenkins run python” should give enough info to get your scripts running.

Thanks for sharing this! It was worth reading just to learn about csvsql

I thought I knew Fubar’s etymology, this article deepened my understanding a bit.

I don’t know why I enjoy this kind of word history, especially the speculation on what language a word derived from. Thanks for posting this, it was a fun read for me.

I wonder if Google Wave, or something like is more likely to succeed now that some many of us work 100% remotely.

I don’t read medium.com blogs anymore, I got annoyed by the reminders to login or lose access. Maybe I’m alone in that feeling, but I suspect not.

This might be my favorite post of the year. Powerful technology and years of experience focused on an important problem. Thanks making my day!

That depends on what you mean by God, and what you mean by control. If something controls the weather, perhaps a combo of Physics, Geography and random chance, could that be a god worthy of respect and study?

I think we can agree on what we mean by weather, but I’m not certain of that either.

I love these paintings, reminds me how much I loved my art history classes in college. The interplay of math and art in the textures and sight lines are fascinating for me.

Fascinating to imagine witnessing these events. The mad king, disguised and dancing at a party, narrowly escapes death!

For those who were curious, this is a lecture by Richard Wolff, who Wikipedia describes as an “american Marxist economist”

His recent Twitter posts suggest that economic inequality in the US can be achieved through taxing the rich, which while not an original thought, seems sensible.

Truly impressive design and engineering work here! Not to mention the commitment to the project.

My engineer neighbor picking weeds in his yard while sitting on a low beach chair, “I just work on the areas I can reach, then move to where there’s more to be done”. It took me a few years to understand how powerful that is as a strategy for completing big tasks.

I love this type of story-based learning! I was playing with twilioquest this weekend, I really appreciate the developers’ creativity. How can I find more tools like these?

thanks for posting this.

“There were ages of darkness, and then enlightenment came.”

we often see those who came before us as savages. Didn’t they have triumphs and failures, families and friends that they loved? Did the think of their lives as ‘dark’?

Drove a truck delivering paint for a local paint company. Carried heavy 5 gallon buckets up stairs at construction sites. Decided to go to college, to avoid doing manual labor for the rest of my life.

Edit: added buckets

My manager had us all watch The Moneyball movie with Brad Pitt, and informed us that the company would rely on Data Science and metrics to make decisions. I’ve seen some good come from that strategy, and some not-so-good.

I think the hard part is in measuring the data we collect, we don’t always see how data is related to what we’re trying to achieve. The data doesn’t lie, but if you make a mistake interpreting it, it can seem like the universe is conspiring against you.

I hope you're not serious, Bill. I really don't want you to go to jail. :)

The government is slow to act, that's often a good thing to keep it from reacting quickly where some discussion or just delay is the wiser course. I get the impression the IRS has proposals to add these types of identity checks, but the inherent delays in decision-making mean any real change is years away. Does anyone know of a plan for the IRS to improve validation of refund requests?