958 karma · joined March 24, 2015
1. We adopted chip cards quite late, so a lot of legacy hardware still exists - including payment terminals built into restaurant point of sale machines with a magnetic strip reader, instead of a separate card terminal.
2. Wireless card terminals are not common in the US, outside of things like Square or Toast readers. Readers are usually hardwired to the POS and aren't able to be "undocked" and carried around.
3. Outside of contactless, signatures are still usually required, and people are still used to having the receipt printer at the host stand alongside the terminal, instead of built into the card reader.
This is all slowly changing, and I honestly chock a lot of it up to stuff like smartphone payments (remember, we got Apple Pay before having contactless embedded in the majority of cards!) and smartphone-based POS systems like Square.
If you're a weather app, being able to tell your users "it will start raining in 35 minutes but pass in 55 minutes" is a huge value add over "80% chance of rain in the next hour". I found it to be quite accurate down to the 5-10 minute increment when I used to live in an area with frequent summer thunderstorms.
Some of today's most interesting and exciting "technical" challenges have their roots in many disciplines. Cybersecurity can be tackled from a full range of perspectives, from the highly technical (e.g. cryptography) to traditionally non-technical disciplines like law, public policy, and design. The kind of deep thought our world needs on things like AI and ML needs people who are just as informed about the social sciences, psychology, philosophy, and economics as they are about computer science. Our ongoing debates about issues like content moderation or digital privacy need folks who understand how to think about people, including those who are at risk and vulnerable, and then translate that knowledge into the language of engineers.
And even though we've made progress on this front, our governments, courts, and legislatures are still running on a deficit of knowledge about tech, which is a whole different ballgame. (I'd encourage reading Bruce Schneier's site on public interest technology if you're interested: https://public-interest-tech.com/)
All this is to say: if your daughter wants to go the hardcore tech route and loves solving CS or software engineering challenges, more power to her! But I also hope that she doesn't feel limited or boxed in by the traditional definitions of the discipline.
* www[0-9].example.tld -> [0-9].example.tld, e.g. www1.nyc.gov -> 1.nyc.gov
* example[ac|co|gov|edu].tld -> example.[ac|co|gov|edu].tld e.g. exampleac.uk -> example.ac.uk
My guess, as someone else further down the comments mentioned, is that some URL handling library is doing more than expected to its input. I filed an internal bug report referencing some of the public reports from a dev build of Android 12, so hopefully this will get triaged soon if someone hasn't already done a similar reproduction.
(I work at Google, but on nothing remotely related to Android.)
Depending on what you do, you might have a natural gift or be a good learner for management skills—but you also may not. If you're not and shoehorned into it for tenure (or whatever other reason), both you and your students suffer.
This reminds me of a classic paper: "Improper linear models are those in which the weights of the predictor variables are obtained by some nonoptimal method; for example, they may be obtained on the basis of intuition, derived from simulating a clinical judge's predictions, or set to be equal. This article presents evidence that even such improper linear models are superior to clinical intuition when predicting a numerical criterion from numerical predictors."
Dawes, R. M. (1979). The robust beauty of improper linear models in decision making. American psychologist, 34(7), 571.
(Source: I have one, and the only time I've entered the PIN is at a British train ticket machine.)
Afterwards, I moved to a nicer but even older building where the landlord had bothered to retrofit a modern boiler with separate heating zones for the different apartments. Crucially, the radiators had new control valves the lines had modern insulation. It was like night and day. I think the retrofit cost over $10k, so like you said, the path of least resistance is often crappy heat.
And that university chooses to use Zoom over another solution for many reason - after-sales support, SLAs for performance and availability, pre-written API integrations for their CMS and student ID system, guarantees from their sales team about regulatory compliance, and the like.
There are some other apps like Transit App that attempt to crowdsource the same data to reflect ETAs.
(Source: I work at Google and located the relevant bug, but I don't work on maps.)
If you take a ride in one of the "newer" Bombardier cars (the octagonal ones) the ride is much smoother and the bumps are almost imperceptible with little swaying. I'd imagine the new trains post-electrification will also be much better on the suspension front.