Actaully, Uber drivers can't negotiate the price with passengers because the passengers aren't actually the driver's clients, Uber is, and the passengers are Uber's customers, not the drivers, so driver has absolutely no authority to negotiate a different rate of pay with them. The driver can either accept the rate that Uber said they will pay... or not. Accepting what a client said they would pay does not make the contractor who agreed to work for that amount an employee.
I wonder if a tweak to Uber's business model might fix that... and also mitigate the "surge pricing" complaints.
Rather than Uber setting the prices, why not allow the drivers to? Let drivers set their own rates, and have the app show the rider the list of available drivers and how much each would charge to transport the rider (estimated), along with the estimated time of arrival? A market would quickly develop with drivers competing against one another for riders. Surge pricing would still happen, but it would happen naturally; during periods of high demand when riders exceed rides, drivers could raise their prices. Uber could track the distribution of prices accepted by riders and see the surges happening -- or even predict them -- and notify off-duty drivers accordingly.
Uber could go a step further and allow riders to offer prices if they felt the drivers' prices were too high, or if they wanted a fixed-price trip rather than an estimate. Drivers could see a list of offers near them, alongside time & mileage estimates for the entire trip (including travel to the pickup point), and they could choose to accept, reject or counter. To avoid acceptance by drivers who were too far away, the rider could also specify a maximum pickup time, and only drivers that are close enough would see the offer.
To make it a bit more sophisticated yet, drivers could set "auto-accept" rates, perhaps as a percentage of their ask rates, and Uber could automatically notify them when they're the closest automatic accept at the offered rate. They'd still have the right to reject the trip, just as they do now (and subject to being rejected by Uber if they reject too many rides, just as now), and then the system would go to the next closest automatic accept. If none exist or all reject then the offer would go up on the offer board.
Drivers who want could also indicate that they will never reject a trip that meets their auto-accept rates, and if they're not busy, and then Uber could actually automatically schedule drivers who are currently transporting a rider but will be dropping the rider off near the location of a rider making an offer. This could work very well for drivers who want to stay busy.
Low offers aren't all riders could make, though. Riders who find that they're having difficulty getting a ride could offer higher than normal rates and Uber could broadcast that information to off-duty as well as on-duty drivers who are close enough to respond within the rider's time limit. It might provoke a driver who is far enough away that it wouldn't normally make sense to pick up that rider to accept the offer, or one who isn't currently working but has time to go get that fare. Uber could wait a minute or so after the first acceptance comes in and then choose the closest driver, to avoid making it a buzzer race and to get the rider their ride quicker.
Bottom line, Uber could turn itself into a real-time auction, removing itself from controlling the pricing. If that's all that's required to make the drivers self-employed contractors, it seems like a no-brainer.
Of course, police, prosecutor and jury bias pushes those statistics upwards. I'm not claiming there isn't an element of reality in the stereotypes, but the stereotypes also help to generate the reality.
Irrelevant. Being a member of a minority does not mean you aren't capable of being a racist asshole.
Indeed. Surprisingly, it's even common that some members of minority groups are racist assholes against their own group. The stereotypical example is black male police officers who racially profile and even brutalize black men.
It's not that the riders were black, but rather that the names chosen "sounded black". This is significant as it introduces culture as a possible data point which wasn't controlled for.
The whole experiment was about culture. Race is a cultural artifact. The most compelling example of that is the study that found that being arrested makes you black. Racial identification -- both by self and by others -- is often influenced by both culture and by life experiences, and often changes throughout individuals' lives.
Having a black-sounding name is a strong indicator of being a member of black culture, and apparently Uber and Lyft drivers don't want to pick up blacks.
If you disagree, and you're a programmer, then answer this: do your managers give you extra time on your tasks to make sure your code is secure? Have they ever encouraged you to care about security, or is it the opposite? Do the encourage you to treat user-input carefully, and as a potential exploit?
Yes, yes and yes.
Further, there are explicit security review processes at the concept, design and implementation stages (there are also privacy reviews which have a similar structure but a different focus). There are mandatory internal training courses that all developers must attend which train developers about user input validation as well as considerably more sophisticated security issues. There are teams whose entire focus is security, to build secure infrastructural components which make it difficult for the general developer population to build insecure software. There are other teams whose whole job is to find vulnerabilities. There are large systems that do nothing but automated fuzz testing of our products. Third party penetration testing teams are regularly hired to attempt to find vulnerabilities, and those teams are given the wholehearted support of the development teams, and full access to all relevant information. External researchers are paid hefty bug bounties for reports of vulnerabilities in our products. Discovery of security vulnerabilities provokes a post-mortem process to analyze how the vulnerability was created and to identify what changes to tooling, processes or training could have prevented the vulnerability from being created.
And you know what? There are still security bugs.
Yes, software companies should make a serious attempt to write secure code. No, it is not reasonable to expect that they'll succeed, not in the general case, not without increasing the cost of software by two or three orders of magnitude. Reasonable effort in design and implementation, defense in depth, actively seeking vulnerabilities and aggressive patch deployment are the best we know how to do in the general case.
As Kim Stanley Robinson proposed in his recent novel Aurora , the longterm survival of human biology might be inextricably dependent on Earth's ecosystem. Not just the sort of Earth-like features one can reproduce in an artificial habit for a few years, but the planet-wide scale that Earth offers.
Ah, right, the "Earth is magical" argument.
Any chemical process required can be performed a different way. There's no magic here. There are a lot of details we don't yet know about, and many of them won't be discovered until we actually try it, but when we do we'll find the problems and devise solutions.
"As it turns out, our best historical sea level records tend to be located where past sea level rise was most likely less than the true global average."
It's most likely that tide gauges were placed at locations where the economic impact of tides (on shipping, etc.) were most significant. So, even if the bias in sea level measurements is real, factoring in this impact cancels out the higher levels. In other words, who cares? If the sea level in the middle of the ocean is rising more than near the coast, most of us live near the coast.
I don't think that follows. Gauges are placed mostly in and around harbors that have a lot of commercial shipping, yes, but those aren't necessarily the areas that are most prone to damage by rising sea levels. Actually, given their relative wealth they're probably among the coastal areas most capable of adapting to changing levels, and they're the areas that tend to already have sheltered natural harbors or artificial breakwaters (or both) in place, which will reduce the impact of higher storm tides.
You evil denialist filth! Off to the gas chambers! The models are always right! The science is settled dammit!
Science is never "settled". In fact that's what makes it "science", that it's always open to revision in the fact of new data, or new theories that provide a better explanation of the old data.
Science proceeds by a method that produces a long series of successive approximations, asymptotically approaching "truth". This doesn't mean you can just ignore the current values, even though they're known to be wrong in some degree, because they're also closer to right than what we had before -- and almost certainly much closer to the truth than whatever you wish to believe.
GPLv3, which is part of why it's being seriously overtaken by llvm, which is using a custom permissive license.
Licensing has nothing to do with why GCC is being overtaken by clang. The reason is that clang is better, easier to modify, and has a community that's easier to work with. There's nothing about the GPLv3 license vs v2 that has any relevance to compilers.
Explain to me why I'd want to interview with Goog/Facebook and the rest of the SV crowd? I make a very comfortable living with my current employer, have a very satisfying career and I don't have to move to that septic tank in northern CA. Goog, facebook and their ilk aren't the be all end all. There are far more satisfying developer jobs that help to produce things that really matter to the world.
You have to decide what you want to do. I like working for Google because I work with a lot of really smart people and do stuff that has significant impact on the whole world.
I'm with you on living in CA, though. I don't, though I do visit from time to time.
Assuming your "older programmers" are indeed programmers with two or three decades of experience under their belt, rather than older people who would like to become programmers (not an unreasonable thing, but I don't know anything about how to train them), they already understand the theory and lots of practice, so all they need to pick up new technologies is to dive in and do stuff with the new technologies. Read books, practice, build stuff, etc.
For being able to do well in the sort of interviews that Google/Facebook/Amazon/etc. do... again, it's just a matter of practice. Brush up on the theory, review your data structures and algorithms course, make sure you understand big-O complexity, etc., then get a good book of practice problems and work your way through it.
These sorts of arguments always degenerate into a war of anecdotes. "I installed Linux on 10 machines and nothing worked!" "No, I installed Linux on 20 machines while walking in snow uphill both ways, and it always works!" Etc.
I'll add one more anecdote on the other side:
I just bought an HP laptop for use on a certain project that requires Windows. Specifically, it requires Windows 7, but I didn't know that when I bought the machine, and it came with Win10 on it. So, I bought a Win7 DVD and installed it.
Holy hell was it painful.
Oh, the basic install was okay. I had a USB DVD drive lying around which just worked, plug-n-play. But once Windows got up and running almost nothing worked. I knew it would look awful because it would be using default VGA video drivers (of course, any decent Linux distro would do better), and I knew there was a good chance it wouldn't have any Wifi drivers. What I didn't expect was that neither the Ethernet card nor the USB controller would freaking work! How the hell was I supposed to get the drivers onto the damned thing with no network and no USB?
I ended up booting it from a Linux LiveCD, repartitioning the drive and putting the Ethernet and USB controller drivers on a separate (FAT32, though I could have done NTFS) partition. Then I reinstalled Win7 on the rest of the drive and after it booted it was able to see the FAT32 partition and I was able to install network & USB.
After that I spent two hours repeatedly downloading various drivers for devices that weren't working, installing, and rebooting. Over and over. At the end the device manager still tells me there's one unknown device. I've installed everything HP has listed for this model, and I have no idea what that one device is. I could have dug in and found the PCI device ID and looked it up, but everything seemed to be working well enough so decided to ignore it.
I didn't spend a lot of time with Linux on this machine, but everything seemed to work perfectly off the LiveCD... video, audio, wifi, Ethernet. I didn't try suspend/resume and I wouldn't be shocked if that didn't work without some tweaking. But it was one hell of a lot smoother and more pleasant than Windows 7.
I realize that the core of the problem was that I was installing an old OS on new hardware. But I'd bet money that if I downloaded a 2009 Linux distro and put it on this box, it would work better than Win7 did. I'm sure there would be plenty of problems, but I'll bet it would be able to use generic ethernet and USB drivers to get basic functionality.
After I whined about this experience on/., another poster one-upped me (of course) by describing a machine he'd tried to install Windows on. Windows wasn't able to use the SATA controller out of the box, so the installation couldn't even succeed. As soon as it got far enough that it tried to use Window drivers rather than going through the interfaces provided by UEFI, everything stopped. He had to figure out how to slipstream the necessary driver into the Windows installer.
I'm really glad I don't have to deal with Windows more than once or twice per decade.
Means more room for humans. We're succeeding as a species. I suspect it wont end well for us though.
I don't see any reason to believe it will end badly, at least not for reasons related to this issue.
Homo Sapiens has proven to be an extraordinarily adaptable and successful species, a global superpredator, which has inevitably displaced many other species. The Holocene Extinction, which has been in progress for thousands of years, is the result. The rate of extinctions accelerated dramatically in the last few centuries, particularly as the human population has exploded.
However, in the last few decades humans have become aware of the issue and have begun to care about it. This isn't to say that we'll ever value other species as highly as our own, but we've begun to think that it's important to avoid destroying them. That coupled with the fact that human population is likely to peak within 30 years and then begin declining and the fact that new technology is enabling us to tread more lightly means that extinctions directly produced by human activity (e.g. habitat expansion) will slow and perhaps cease.
Indirectly-caused extinctions will likely continue for millenia, though. Global warming is going to do in a lot of species (though it may create a good number as well), as climate shifts exceed the ability of species to migrate. It may also provoke some more directly-caused extinctions as it causes humans to migrate. Not much, though, since we already live pretty much everywhere. The accommodation of human-transplanted "invasive" species is also going to take a lot of time, and transplantation is probably going to continue as much as we try to avoid it, so there's going to be a sort of homogenization effect across the globe which will wipe out a lot of species as more aggressive and capable species get moved into their area. If humans choose to begin engineering planetary climate and stabilize it, so that it stays permanently within a particular range, that large driver of new speciation will be eliminated which will also contribute to the establishment of an equilibrium that will likely contain many fewer species than the planet has had for most of life's history upon it. It's also possible that we'll begin engineering biodiversity as well. That's hard to say.
Or maybe we'll have a massive nuclear war, simultaneously removing ourselves from the picture, ending the Holocene extinction with a spike, and kicking off an explosive new round of speciation. I think that and similar humanity-caused, humanity-ending disasters are unlikely, but I am an inveterate optimist.
Huh? Amazon has had many profitable quarters. It's had five straight and the next quarterly report (to be announced today) is expected to show a profit as well.
That's indeed the kind of ideas that is now floating around. I rank it in the category of Iraq coming to kill us all, with the same combination of inflating the threat and at the same time regarding the opponent as a pushover. I think Colin Powell has made some sensible comments on that. Russia is paranoid about us, about NATO. We scare them. They are a small power, we're a big one that is surrounding them more and more, and then sabre rattling is a sensible response.
That doesn't explain why they weren't rattling their sabers a few years ago. The Economist has a recent article that does offer an explanation that covers that as well The thesis is basically that domestic troubles caused by a weak economy have motivated Putin to seek ways to distract his people from domestic concerns. Specifically, he's tried to recapture the superpower position of the Soviet Union. He can't, really, because Russia isn't the Soviet Union. Without the central planning structure to force the massive overproduction of military resources, the Soviet Union wouldn't have been the Soviet Union, either.
But his people don't really realize this and, frankly, the rest of the world tends not to realize it much, either. So Putin can rattle his rusted and broken saber and the rest of the world reacts as though he was the mighty Soviet Union. Except... there is one area in which is military isn't so rusted or broken: nuclear weapons. Oh, his nuclear armament is aging and dilapidated, but it's still very real and Russia has the technological wherewithal to build highly functional nukes and missiles to carry them. Russia can't afford to build very many of them, but it doesn't really take all that many.
So, as it becomes more and more apparent that Putin doesn't really have the conventional forces to make the world treat Russia with the fear and respect that the Soviet Union got, he's almost certainly going to be making more and more use of the nuclear threat that the world can't ignore. And that will help to keep his people feeling like they're a major world power again, which will keep him in power.
No, it was never seamless in the sense that iMessage is. The seams were harder to see, and that was exactly the problem that motivated the clear separation; the failure modes of the combined messaging were subtle, hard to understand and opaque to users. The upshot is that the combination made Hangouts messaging appear to be unreliable.
Actually, iMessage isn't really seamless either. It breaks badly if iMessage thinks the destination device is an iPhone but it isn't. It's very good in a pure-Apple world, though.
Hangouts does everything you describe. It's what I use all the time. It is seamless across my phone and table and my PC. And it is seamless across windows, linux and apple.
It is seamless between SMS and the internal delivery system, and the conversations are synced to my gmail account allowing me to search them.
I like Hangouts and use it constantly, both personally and for work (I work for Google, where it is arguably the primary means of communication), but it isn't quite as seamless as iMessage in one respect: SMS integration. In iMessage there is no distinction between SMS and iMessage messages; they're all just messages. If they can be delivered via Apple's infrastructure, they are, if not they're routed via SMS. With Hangouts, SMS and Hangouts chat messages are distinct. They look similar, but they're different in subtle ways.
Of course, Hangouts clearly is superior to iMessage if you or your friends use non-Apple devices, because Hangouts works on a much wider variety of platforms, and for those who understand the distinction it's *good* to know what is SMS and what is not, because SMS is inherently unreliable -- and in some parts of the world SMS is also ridiculously expensive while data is cheap.
So, although depending on your context Hangouts may be better than iMessage, it's definitely not as seamless in a pure-Apple world as iMessage is.
It's not "gun controllers bringing it up", it's manufacturers working on them. What do you have against manufacturers developing new products?
I have absolutely nothing against manufacturers developing new gun safety products and offering them on the market. The concern with these "smart" guns is that they'll be mandated by law. This has already happened in New Jersey. The 2002 Childproof Handgun Law says that three years after "smart" guns are available for sale in the US, all guns for sale in New Jersey must be "smart". The law doesn't require that the guns be in any way reliable or have obtained any significant market share, just that they've been available for sale. So if these actually make it to market people in NJ who want reliable guns are screwed. And if any other states, or Congress, passes a similar law, then all of us are screwed.
Actually, I'd have no problem with smart guns if they were really reliable. And there's a really simple reliability screening test we can use: offer them to military and law enforcement personnel. Cops in particular should see a lot of value in smart guns because cops occasionally get shot with their own guns. However, they also need their guns to be extremely reliable, and big departments and the FBI have the institutional resources and motivation to seriously test them. So, once the technology reaches a level where police are not only willing to use smart guns but actively want them then it's fine to mandate them for civilians.
Of course, thanks to the NJ law, civilians are going to fight like hell to keep these things off the shelves, which means that the years of refinement needed to make them reliable is never going to happen. Not in the US, anyway.
Google no longer supports non-security questions for account recovery.
FTFY. Security questions are a joke. The answers are almost always easy for an attacker with a little bit of information about you to find, and a lot of the time the legitimate user can't remember them. Moreover, those two traits are strongly correlated: the harder it is for an attacker to find the answers, the more likely it is that the user won't be able to find them either.
Google doesn't actually want your phone number for security. Google wants your phone number so that they can link the account in their database to other information that contains your phone number.
The number is to make account recovery possible in the event you've forgotten your password. The assumption is that attackers won't have access to your phone. That assumption is violated if your telco will transfer your number to the attacker's phone, of course.
If you prefer not to give your phone number to Google, don't. Just turn on two-factor auth using a non phone number-based auth method, either the Authenticator app or (better yet) a security key, or both. Then download and print out some backup 2FA codes and keep them somewhere safe. Google won't have your phone number and you won't be vulnerable to mistakes by dumb telco customer service reps.
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Actaully, Uber drivers can't negotiate the price with passengers because the passengers aren't actually the driver's clients, Uber is, and the passengers are Uber's customers, not the drivers, so driver has absolutely no authority to negotiate a different rate of pay with them. The driver can either accept the rate that Uber said they will pay... or not. Accepting what a client said they would pay does not make the contractor who agreed to work for that amount an employee.
I wonder if a tweak to Uber's business model might fix that... and also mitigate the "surge pricing" complaints.
Rather than Uber setting the prices, why not allow the drivers to? Let drivers set their own rates, and have the app show the rider the list of available drivers and how much each would charge to transport the rider (estimated), along with the estimated time of arrival? A market would quickly develop with drivers competing against one another for riders. Surge pricing would still happen, but it would happen naturally; during periods of high demand when riders exceed rides, drivers could raise their prices. Uber could track the distribution of prices accepted by riders and see the surges happening -- or even predict them -- and notify off-duty drivers accordingly.
Uber could go a step further and allow riders to offer prices if they felt the drivers' prices were too high, or if they wanted a fixed-price trip rather than an estimate. Drivers could see a list of offers near them, alongside time & mileage estimates for the entire trip (including travel to the pickup point), and they could choose to accept, reject or counter. To avoid acceptance by drivers who were too far away, the rider could also specify a maximum pickup time, and only drivers that are close enough would see the offer.
To make it a bit more sophisticated yet, drivers could set "auto-accept" rates, perhaps as a percentage of their ask rates, and Uber could automatically notify them when they're the closest automatic accept at the offered rate. They'd still have the right to reject the trip, just as they do now (and subject to being rejected by Uber if they reject too many rides, just as now), and then the system would go to the next closest automatic accept. If none exist or all reject then the offer would go up on the offer board.
Drivers who want could also indicate that they will never reject a trip that meets their auto-accept rates, and if they're not busy, and then Uber could actually automatically schedule drivers who are currently transporting a rider but will be dropping the rider off near the location of a rider making an offer. This could work very well for drivers who want to stay busy.
Low offers aren't all riders could make, though. Riders who find that they're having difficulty getting a ride could offer higher than normal rates and Uber could broadcast that information to off-duty as well as on-duty drivers who are close enough to respond within the rider's time limit. It might provoke a driver who is far enough away that it wouldn't normally make sense to pick up that rider to accept the offer, or one who isn't currently working but has time to go get that fare. Uber could wait a minute or so after the first acceptance comes in and then choose the closest driver, to avoid making it a buzzer race and to get the rider their ride quicker.
Bottom line, Uber could turn itself into a real-time auction, removing itself from controlling the pricing. If that's all that's required to make the drivers self-employed contractors, it seems like a no-brainer.
Would you begrudge the black drivers that?
Yes.
Whoosh.
Of course, police, prosecutor and jury bias pushes those statistics upwards. I'm not claiming there isn't an element of reality in the stereotypes, but the stereotypes also help to generate the reality.
Irrelevant. Being a member of a minority does not mean you aren't capable of being a racist asshole.
Indeed. Surprisingly, it's even common that some members of minority groups are racist assholes against their own group. The stereotypical example is black male police officers who racially profile and even brutalize black men.
It's not that the riders were black, but rather that the names chosen "sounded black". This is significant as it introduces culture as a possible data point which wasn't controlled for.
The whole experiment was about culture. Race is a cultural artifact. The most compelling example of that is the study that found that being arrested makes you black. Racial identification -- both by self and by others -- is often influenced by both culture and by life experiences, and often changes throughout individuals' lives.
Having a black-sounding name is a strong indicator of being a member of black culture, and apparently Uber and Lyft drivers don't want to pick up blacks.
In fact that's what makes it "science"
s/fact/face/
In face that's what makes it "science"
What? Your regexp needs work.
My regexp was applied only to the selection, which you conveniently did not quote :-)
But if the ecology of a self-sustaining space colony collapses, it will have to be evacuated.
No, it will have to be fixed.
If you disagree, and you're a programmer, then answer this: do your managers give you extra time on your tasks to make sure your code is secure? Have they ever encouraged you to care about security, or is it the opposite? Do the encourage you to treat user-input carefully, and as a potential exploit?
Yes, yes and yes.
Further, there are explicit security review processes at the concept, design and implementation stages (there are also privacy reviews which have a similar structure but a different focus). There are mandatory internal training courses that all developers must attend which train developers about user input validation as well as considerably more sophisticated security issues. There are teams whose entire focus is security, to build secure infrastructural components which make it difficult for the general developer population to build insecure software. There are other teams whose whole job is to find vulnerabilities. There are large systems that do nothing but automated fuzz testing of our products. Third party penetration testing teams are regularly hired to attempt to find vulnerabilities, and those teams are given the wholehearted support of the development teams, and full access to all relevant information. External researchers are paid hefty bug bounties for reports of vulnerabilities in our products. Discovery of security vulnerabilities provokes a post-mortem process to analyze how the vulnerability was created and to identify what changes to tooling, processes or training could have prevented the vulnerability from being created.
And you know what? There are still security bugs.
Yes, software companies should make a serious attempt to write secure code. No, it is not reasonable to expect that they'll succeed, not in the general case, not without increasing the cost of software by two or three orders of magnitude. Reasonable effort in design and implementation, defense in depth, actively seeking vulnerabilities and aggressive patch deployment are the best we know how to do in the general case.
As Kim Stanley Robinson proposed in his recent novel Aurora , the longterm survival of human biology might be inextricably dependent on Earth's ecosystem. Not just the sort of Earth-like features one can reproduce in an artificial habit for a few years, but the planet-wide scale that Earth offers.
Ah, right, the "Earth is magical" argument.
Any chemical process required can be performed a different way. There's no magic here. There are a lot of details we don't yet know about, and many of them won't be discovered until we actually try it, but when we do we'll find the problems and devise solutions.
"As it turns out, our best historical sea level records tend to be located where past sea level rise was most likely less than the true global average."
It's most likely that tide gauges were placed at locations where the economic impact of tides (on shipping, etc.) were most significant. So, even if the bias in sea level measurements is real, factoring in this impact cancels out the higher levels. In other words, who cares? If the sea level in the middle of the ocean is rising more than near the coast, most of us live near the coast.
I don't think that follows. Gauges are placed mostly in and around harbors that have a lot of commercial shipping, yes, but those aren't necessarily the areas that are most prone to damage by rising sea levels. Actually, given their relative wealth they're probably among the coastal areas most capable of adapting to changing levels, and they're the areas that tend to already have sheltered natural harbors or artificial breakwaters (or both) in place, which will reduce the impact of higher storm tides.
it's always open to revision in the fact of new data
s/fact/face/, of course.
You evil denialist filth! Off to the gas chambers! The models are always right! The science is settled dammit!
Science is never "settled". In fact that's what makes it "science", that it's always open to revision in the fact of new data, or new theories that provide a better explanation of the old data.
Science proceeds by a method that produces a long series of successive approximations, asymptotically approaching "truth". This doesn't mean you can just ignore the current values, even though they're known to be wrong in some degree, because they're also closer to right than what we had before -- and almost certainly much closer to the truth than whatever you wish to believe.
GPLv3, which is part of why it's being seriously overtaken by llvm, which is using a custom permissive license.
Licensing has nothing to do with why GCC is being overtaken by clang. The reason is that clang is better, easier to modify, and has a community that's easier to work with. There's nothing about the GPLv3 license vs v2 that has any relevance to compilers.
Explain to me why I'd want to interview with Goog/Facebook and the rest of the SV crowd? I make a very comfortable living with my current employer, have a very satisfying career and I don't have to move to that septic tank in northern CA. Goog, facebook and their ilk aren't the be all end all. There are far more satisfying developer jobs that help to produce things that really matter to the world.
You have to decide what you want to do. I like working for Google because I work with a lot of really smart people and do stuff that has significant impact on the whole world.
I'm with you on living in CA, though. I don't, though I do visit from time to time.
Assuming your "older programmers" are indeed programmers with two or three decades of experience under their belt, rather than older people who would like to become programmers (not an unreasonable thing, but I don't know anything about how to train them), they already understand the theory and lots of practice, so all they need to pick up new technologies is to dive in and do stuff with the new technologies. Read books, practice, build stuff, etc.
For being able to do well in the sort of interviews that Google/Facebook/Amazon/etc. do... again, it's just a matter of practice. Brush up on the theory, review your data structures and algorithms course, make sure you understand big-O complexity, etc., then get a good book of practice problems and work your way through it.
These sorts of arguments always degenerate into a war of anecdotes. "I installed Linux on 10 machines and nothing worked!" "No, I installed Linux on 20 machines while walking in snow uphill both ways, and it always works!" Etc.
I'll add one more anecdote on the other side:
I just bought an HP laptop for use on a certain project that requires Windows. Specifically, it requires Windows 7, but I didn't know that when I bought the machine, and it came with Win10 on it. So, I bought a Win7 DVD and installed it.
Holy hell was it painful.
Oh, the basic install was okay. I had a USB DVD drive lying around which just worked, plug-n-play. But once Windows got up and running almost nothing worked. I knew it would look awful because it would be using default VGA video drivers (of course, any decent Linux distro would do better), and I knew there was a good chance it wouldn't have any Wifi drivers. What I didn't expect was that neither the Ethernet card nor the USB controller would freaking work! How the hell was I supposed to get the drivers onto the damned thing with no network and no USB?
I ended up booting it from a Linux LiveCD, repartitioning the drive and putting the Ethernet and USB controller drivers on a separate (FAT32, though I could have done NTFS) partition. Then I reinstalled Win7 on the rest of the drive and after it booted it was able to see the FAT32 partition and I was able to install network & USB.
After that I spent two hours repeatedly downloading various drivers for devices that weren't working, installing, and rebooting. Over and over. At the end the device manager still tells me there's one unknown device. I've installed everything HP has listed for this model, and I have no idea what that one device is. I could have dug in and found the PCI device ID and looked it up, but everything seemed to be working well enough so decided to ignore it.
I didn't spend a lot of time with Linux on this machine, but everything seemed to work perfectly off the LiveCD... video, audio, wifi, Ethernet. I didn't try suspend/resume and I wouldn't be shocked if that didn't work without some tweaking. But it was one hell of a lot smoother and more pleasant than Windows 7.
I realize that the core of the problem was that I was installing an old OS on new hardware. But I'd bet money that if I downloaded a 2009 Linux distro and put it on this box, it would work better than Win7 did. I'm sure there would be plenty of problems, but I'll bet it would be able to use generic ethernet and USB drivers to get basic functionality.
After I whined about this experience on /., another poster one-upped me (of course) by describing a machine he'd tried to install Windows on. Windows wasn't able to use the SATA controller out of the box, so the installation couldn't even succeed. As soon as it got far enough that it tried to use Window drivers rather than going through the interfaces provided by UEFI, everything stopped. He had to figure out how to slipstream the necessary driver into the Windows installer.
I'm really glad I don't have to deal with Windows more than once or twice per decade.
Means more room for humans. We're succeeding as a species. I suspect it wont end well for us though.
I don't see any reason to believe it will end badly, at least not for reasons related to this issue.
Homo Sapiens has proven to be an extraordinarily adaptable and successful species, a global superpredator, which has inevitably displaced many other species. The Holocene Extinction, which has been in progress for thousands of years, is the result. The rate of extinctions accelerated dramatically in the last few centuries, particularly as the human population has exploded.
However, in the last few decades humans have become aware of the issue and have begun to care about it. This isn't to say that we'll ever value other species as highly as our own, but we've begun to think that it's important to avoid destroying them. That coupled with the fact that human population is likely to peak within 30 years and then begin declining and the fact that new technology is enabling us to tread more lightly means that extinctions directly produced by human activity (e.g. habitat expansion) will slow and perhaps cease.
Indirectly-caused extinctions will likely continue for millenia, though. Global warming is going to do in a lot of species (though it may create a good number as well), as climate shifts exceed the ability of species to migrate. It may also provoke some more directly-caused extinctions as it causes humans to migrate. Not much, though, since we already live pretty much everywhere. The accommodation of human-transplanted "invasive" species is also going to take a lot of time, and transplantation is probably going to continue as much as we try to avoid it, so there's going to be a sort of homogenization effect across the globe which will wipe out a lot of species as more aggressive and capable species get moved into their area. If humans choose to begin engineering planetary climate and stabilize it, so that it stays permanently within a particular range, that large driver of new speciation will be eliminated which will also contribute to the establishment of an equilibrium that will likely contain many fewer species than the planet has had for most of life's history upon it. It's also possible that we'll begin engineering biodiversity as well. That's hard to say.
Or maybe we'll have a massive nuclear war, simultaneously removing ourselves from the picture, ending the Holocene extinction with a spike, and kicking off an explosive new round of speciation. I think that and similar humanity-caused, humanity-ending disasters are unlikely, but I am an inveterate optimist.
Amazon still hasn't had one.
Huh? Amazon has had many profitable quarters. It's had five straight and the next quarterly report (to be announced today) is expected to show a profit as well.
That's indeed the kind of ideas that is now floating around. I rank it in the category of Iraq coming to kill us all, with the same combination of inflating the threat and at the same time regarding the opponent as a pushover. I think Colin Powell has made some sensible comments on that. Russia is paranoid about us, about NATO. We scare them. They are a small power, we're a big one that is surrounding them more and more, and then sabre rattling is a sensible response.
That doesn't explain why they weren't rattling their sabers a few years ago. The Economist has a recent article that does offer an explanation that covers that as well The thesis is basically that domestic troubles caused by a weak economy have motivated Putin to seek ways to distract his people from domestic concerns. Specifically, he's tried to recapture the superpower position of the Soviet Union. He can't, really, because Russia isn't the Soviet Union. Without the central planning structure to force the massive overproduction of military resources, the Soviet Union wouldn't have been the Soviet Union, either.
But his people don't really realize this and, frankly, the rest of the world tends not to realize it much, either. So Putin can rattle his rusted and broken saber and the rest of the world reacts as though he was the mighty Soviet Union. Except... there is one area in which is military isn't so rusted or broken: nuclear weapons. Oh, his nuclear armament is aging and dilapidated, but it's still very real and Russia has the technological wherewithal to build highly functional nukes and missiles to carry them. Russia can't afford to build very many of them, but it doesn't really take all that many.
So, as it becomes more and more apparent that Putin doesn't really have the conventional forces to make the world treat Russia with the fear and respect that the Soviet Union got, he's almost certainly going to be making more and more use of the nuclear threat that the world can't ignore. And that will help to keep his people feeling like they're a major world power again, which will keep him in power.
Is this true? I don't know. Makes sense to me.
Hangouts used to have seamless SMS/Hangouts.
No, it was never seamless in the sense that iMessage is. The seams were harder to see, and that was exactly the problem that motivated the clear separation; the failure modes of the combined messaging were subtle, hard to understand and opaque to users. The upshot is that the combination made Hangouts messaging appear to be unreliable.
Actually, iMessage isn't really seamless either. It breaks badly if iMessage thinks the destination device is an iPhone but it isn't. It's very good in a pure-Apple world, though.
Hangouts does everything you describe. It's what I use all the time. It is seamless across my phone and table and my PC. And it is seamless across windows, linux and apple.
It is seamless between SMS and the internal delivery system, and the conversations are synced to my gmail account allowing me to search them.
I like Hangouts and use it constantly, both personally and for work (I work for Google, where it is arguably the primary means of communication), but it isn't quite as seamless as iMessage in one respect: SMS integration. In iMessage there is no distinction between SMS and iMessage messages; they're all just messages. If they can be delivered via Apple's infrastructure, they are, if not they're routed via SMS. With Hangouts, SMS and Hangouts chat messages are distinct. They look similar, but they're different in subtle ways.
Of course, Hangouts clearly is superior to iMessage if you or your friends use non-Apple devices, because Hangouts works on a much wider variety of platforms, and for those who understand the distinction it's *good* to know what is SMS and what is not, because SMS is inherently unreliable -- and in some parts of the world SMS is also ridiculously expensive while data is cheap.
So, although depending on your context Hangouts may be better than iMessage, it's definitely not as seamless in a pure-Apple world as iMessage is.
It's not "gun controllers bringing it up", it's manufacturers working on them. What do you have against manufacturers developing new products?
I have absolutely nothing against manufacturers developing new gun safety products and offering them on the market. The concern with these "smart" guns is that they'll be mandated by law. This has already happened in New Jersey. The 2002 Childproof Handgun Law says that three years after "smart" guns are available for sale in the US, all guns for sale in New Jersey must be "smart". The law doesn't require that the guns be in any way reliable or have obtained any significant market share, just that they've been available for sale. So if these actually make it to market people in NJ who want reliable guns are screwed. And if any other states, or Congress, passes a similar law, then all of us are screwed.
Actually, I'd have no problem with smart guns if they were really reliable. And there's a really simple reliability screening test we can use: offer them to military and law enforcement personnel. Cops in particular should see a lot of value in smart guns because cops occasionally get shot with their own guns. However, they also need their guns to be extremely reliable, and big departments and the FBI have the institutional resources and motivation to seriously test them. So, once the technology reaches a level where police are not only willing to use smart guns but actively want them then it's fine to mandate them for civilians.
Of course, thanks to the NJ law, civilians are going to fight like hell to keep these things off the shelves, which means that the years of refinement needed to make them reliable is never going to happen. Not in the US, anyway.
Google no longer supports non-security questions for account recovery.
FTFY. Security questions are a joke. The answers are almost always easy for an attacker with a little bit of information about you to find, and a lot of the time the legitimate user can't remember them. Moreover, those two traits are strongly correlated: the harder it is for an attacker to find the answers, the more likely it is that the user won't be able to find them either.
Everyone should stop using them.
Google doesn't actually want your phone number for security. Google wants your phone number so that they can link the account in their database to other information that contains your phone number.
The number is to make account recovery possible in the event you've forgotten your password. The assumption is that attackers won't have access to your phone. That assumption is violated if your telco will transfer your number to the attacker's phone, of course.
If you prefer not to give your phone number to Google, don't. Just turn on two-factor auth using a non phone number-based auth method, either the Authenticator app or (better yet) a security key, or both. Then download and print out some backup 2FA codes and keep them somewhere safe. Google won't have your phone number and you won't be vulnerable to mistakes by dumb telco customer service reps.