If all failures were paid there would be only successful companies.
While you are likely trolling, no one is suggesting failing companies should be propped up with public money. But successful companies still often have many failed projects, and this is especially true for any company which relies heavily on R&D. Like they say, if you aren't failing you aren't innovating. A solvent company needs to pay for its failed R&D projects with its successful projects or it would go under.
It is very similar to running a VC company. They obviously don't think ever venture will be profitable, but they are hoping to make an overall profit on those 20% of companies that actually succeed.
You give the verbal offer and *then* do the background & reference checks?
Yeah, I was wondering about that too. WTH?
Hopefully the verdict is in before he gives notice at his old job...
I assume it takes a month because all of the background checks take two weeks and then they have to wait for the employee to give the current employer a two week notice. That is what happened in a company change I made earlier this year, although it only took a week for the background checks.
If you look at the listing of 20 tech positions, the Software Engineer position is a strange outlier. Its 35 day duration is almost 7 days higher than the #2 position, Senior Applications Developer, which is 28.3 days. The rest of the time-to-hire durations group together much nicer, which the overall trend being more senior positions taking longer and entry level positions taking less time.
So the duration for senior level tech positions appears to be around 27-28 days, which is what the summary should have focused on.
Or does "cross-platform" in this context mean "Linux+Windows"?
Yes.
Sorry I guess I am a bit too old and still don't think of mobile when I say cross-platform. But not old enough to immediately think embedded when saying cross-platform. I have been living purely in the desktop / server world for over a decade and that is where my project resides as well.
The project is very similar to writing an database management system. I didn't want to get too much into the details so people aren't commenting about the virtues of the project itself.
There is no UI component; it could be thought of as a cloud service.
My perfect solution would be developing it in C# while having complete control over memory allocation and release. I have done extensive testing using System.GC.Collect() to manually control garbage collection with no luck.
I started programming with C++ in high school and began my career with the language so I'm not too worried about moving back to the language, but I realize I am far more competent with higher level languages right now.
Personally, by the sounds of this project, I would probably code it in C# (or Java if that's your thing) and then bind in anything that those languages can't do using the native interface and a small C library (probably easiest to stick with straight C when doing native interop, though you can go C++ if you feel you really need it). For small projects I feel like going full native is rarely going to be worth it.
The only thing stopping me from doing this now is I need the ability to release memory on demand, and System.GC.Collect() is not sufficient. I really wish it was since I would work in C# if it was sufficient, but all prototyping I have done so far has not been successful enough.
Really.. C++ is a relatively high commitment language, and performance is one of its mainstays, however you dont feel you will spend much time optimising it?
I started my career working with C++ so I am not new to the language, but my work used very little of even the standard library let alone other third party tools. I used in house libraries that were already written. I was also a novice at the time, so a good deal of the last few months has been spent reading material like Effective Modern C++ and others in the Effective C++ series, along with a throwaway project to practice while reading.
I am a firm believer that most performance is in the algorithms not the language, so I am definitely not choosing C++ primarily for performance reasons. I need certain aspects like memory management, but my choice is not because I think my algorithms will run faster in C++ vs Java. There will probably be some very important modules I need to optimize, but all of that will likely be long after I have a working prototype.
I had a project a year ago where tokenizing terms needed to be as fast as possible, so I tried creating a C library to do it. I am confident I did it well by not copying memory but just keeping track of the location and length of each word in the existing character array, but I still couldn't match the performance of just doing it simply in LINQ (although it was almost identical performance). There is likely some kind of CPU caching or other tricks I was not doing right, but my point is I understand moving to C++ is not some silver bullet for performance, which is what I meant when I said I wasn't moving to C++ for performance reasons.
If you cannot look quite quickly over the descriptions of Boost/ASIO and see what they do (and dont) bring to the table, then you will be fighting a very uphill battle.
I can and have read up on Boost::Asio and a little on QT, which is why I know how they would be useful to me in this project. But I am looking for advice from people who have used them extensively and know the gotchas. In my experience it takes a couple years to really know how certain aspects of a framework will affect your project long term and I want to gleam as much insight from the community as possible before I start down a certain path. It may not be possible to learn anything substantial with one Ask Slashdot post, but I figured why not try.
As almost everything else has equal or better cross platform support, it seems to me like you need to look more closely to what you mean/need by 'granularity' and perhaps change your mentality using familiar languages, and the solutions for problems in those areas.
Okay, basically I need to be able to allocate and release memory manually and without waiting for any garbage collection. I need complete control over concurrency and memory sharing, and as little overhead as possible when accessing the hard disk. I have not been able to find a way during prototyping to control memory enough in Java or C#. A language with a great cross platform library but no memory management would be perfect, and right now C++ is the only language I know of that comes close to those requirements.
You haven't provided nearly enough information to make a decision here. You haven't defined what you mean by "granular level", whether you need a UI, what functionality you have to provide.
The project is very similar to writing an database management system. I didn't want to get too much into the details so people aren't commenting about the virtues of the project itself.
By granular level I mean I cannot be in a managed environment like the JVM or.Net JIT compiler. I need to be able to allocate and release memory manually. I have done some prototyping in Java and C# hoping I could control garbage collection enough for my needs, but it isn't possible (or at least I can't figure it out).
There is no UI and it will only communicate via networking. It will also be distributed and concurrency control will be important.
There is no UI required for the project, although I realize you can use modules like QtNetwork without the UI libraries. I am a bit worried about tying myself too closely to the QT event loop. Can anyone provide any insight on if the event loop will complicate concurrency throughout the rest of the application or if it is even necessary? I have briefly read through some documentation but I am most looking for advice from someone who has used it before and has dealt with the gotchas that every framework has.
I have leaned more towards trying Boost over QT mostly because it relates closer to the standard library and has less overhead and framework buy in necessary. Or at least that is my impression. Has anyone tried both and have any advice on which they prefer for a project where you don't want to completely drink the framework's Kool-Aid?
$600 a day? I'm sorry, but nothing is worth that. Your employer is a sucker. Those lowly full time employees you look down your nose at are ultimately the ones paying your extortive rate of pay.
Either that, or you are completely full of shit and just trolling.
You are either very young, in a low paying field, not very good at your job, or live in rural Kentucky if you think $600 per day is extortion. That is not even $100 per hour. I make that as a software developer as an FTE even without including benefits in the midwest in my mid-30's. And my employer is getting a great deal and knows it, which is why I am paid extra for overtime which includes either extra bonus or extra PTO days to compensate. My young daughter and second on the way are what keeps me from taking more risks in my career and probably making much more money (emphasis on "probably").
Come to think of it I am probably just wasting my time here because you are likely just trolling yourself.
It is for this reason I despise seeing C/C++ on CVs. It implies that you don't have a strong foundation in either language as idiomatic code is so different between the two.
I actually list C/C++ on my CV purely to imply I am not strong in either. It was my main language in college and I have used it sparingly in my career, but I don't consider myself a C or C++ developer. So if you are looking for a senior C or C++ developer, look somewhere else. But if you want someone who at least understands pointer arithmetic and/or may have to lead a project where some of the developers are working in C or C++, then I may be your guy. I always clarify if asked, and never apply for jobs where I know they need a C++ guru anyway.
Maybe kids will change that, but I don't expect it to. We nominally live off my income (including retirement and other savings) while my wife pays for additional school with her part-time earnings.
Obviously your altruism doesn't have to change when you have kids, but a family budget without kids is grossly different than one with kids. All of a sudden you are paying $1700 per month for day care, or you are living purely on one income. Because you are the sole breadwinner, you need $150 per month for life insurance (if you are healthy; much more if you aren't).
Then you realize the home you live in isn't in that great of a school district, and you find there are no cheap homes in good school districts (done on purpose with zoning so property taxes per child are high). Then your housing goes from $1500 per month to $2500 per month. Then you realize college already costs $25k per year at state schools now, so you better save $400 per month for your kid's college education. The cost of clothes and toys and child furniture starts to grow, and you realize how expensive supplemental formula and diapers are.
It adds up.
my wife and I (both about 30) have managed to pay off our obligations and give about 12% to charity.
I obviously cannot claim we couldn't donate over 10% of our income if we tried. We shop at Brooks Brothers and Lululemon, have one nice $200-300 dinner-date per month, and buy the latest phone & iPad every other year. We rationalize it as being necessary to stand out as elite professionals to keep our incomes growing, which is party true but mostly self-serving. We buy mostly organic foods, and an extreme amount of fruit to satisfy my sweet tooth without buying Skittles (organic grapes are not cheap).
But then again we spend almost $30,000 per year in federal income taxes after all our deductions, which is about $20,000 more than the average US household. So I guess we do give about 10% of our income in donations; its just that the government would force us to even if we didn't want to.
Re:The problem is that landfills are too cheap
on
Recycling Is Dying
·
· Score: 1
Do you pay somebody else to run your washing machine, too?
About half of our laundry is done by my wife, and the other half by a service. They come by every Thursday morning and pick up the clothes and drop them off on Friday morning. My wife has trouble trusting our infant's clothes / bedding and our non-dry clean but still delicate work clothes to a service so that is why we still do some laundry.
I don't waste my time vacuuming my own home
Wow, you ARE lazy.
I work 50 hours a week at my full time job, another 15 hours or so on side-projects after my daughter and wife are asleep, and spend close to 100% of the rest of the time with my daughter and wife (and friends and family, but usually with my wife and daughter). Every hour I would spend vacuuming or doing laundry is an hour I wouldn't spend crawling around chasing my daughter, playing peekaboo, and reading Olivia the pig.
Every load of laundry I don't do is virtually the same as giving someone $10 for an extra half hour with my daughter. Money well spent. I doubt I will sit on my death bed worrying I didn't spend enough time vacuuming and too much time with my family.
Re:The problem is that landfills are too cheap
on
Recycling Is Dying
·
· Score: 2
That, and most Americans are too fucking lazy to sort, or have any kind of care in avoiding contamination (or even learning what that means).
As another post mentions (although a bit rudely), there is no reason why I need to sort my trash myself. Mixed waste recovery facilities can achieve almost 80% landfill diversion rates. One such service in South Pasadena costs under $40 per month, which is the same as standard garbage service in nearby LA.
There is no reason why I should waste my time sorting trash. I don't waste my time vacuuming my own home or landscaping my own house either. I pay professionals to do it who will do it much better and in less time. And for lower cost since I charge my employer a much higher rate.
The only reasons areas like Pasadena and Bevery Hills started mixed waste recovery was because no one was sorting on their own. The only way to force municipalities to start doing sorting the right way is to stop sorting yourself. Just like voting it is unlikely any one person can make a difference, but if everyone felt that way no change would ever happen.
You hit the nail on the head: Student loans are the absolute worst debt one can get because they don't go away.
There are many criteria for determining what the worst type of debt is. Student loan debt tends to be at a much lower rate than most loans other than mortgages. So while student loans are worse when going through bankruptcy, they are one of the better forms of debt to have for the 85%+ of people who will never declare bankruptcy. The asset the borrower bought is also likely the most valuable asset they will ever have.
Also, student loans are not always immune to bankruptcy. A 2011 study found that about 40% of bankruptcy filers who attempted to discharge student loans were at least partially successful (25% received full discharge, 14% received partial discharge). The issue is that only 0.1% of filers even attempted to discharge their student loans.
The study found 69,000 filers who were good candidates to have their loans discharged, but only 300 actually attempted them. The author couldn't be sure how many of those 69,000 filers who have succeeded, but it would almost certainly have been over 40% of them since they were very demographically similar to those who did successfully discharge student loan debt. These demographic markers where seekers who (1) have a medical hardship, (2) are unemployed, and (3) earned less income in the year before filing for bankruptcy than the median discharge seeker earned.
So it is very likely that at least 10% of bankruptcy filers who have student loan debts could discharge their student loans in full, and an additional 5% could receive a partial discharge. And I want to stress the words at least these 15% of borrowers could get help with student loans from bankruptcy.
I suspect this altruism won't last long. With in a year his credit card and auto debt will become a burden and he'll keep everything for himself. If he gets out of that, he'll meet some girl and then the money will be sucked out of him again. THEN, he'll get her pregnant and end up paying nearly $250,000 [google.com] until they turn 18...more if he's a real Dad and pays for college. So just take that money and put it into a Roth Account or something.
Stop stealing my life story.
I just finished paying off everything but my mortgage and student loans two months ago, and then promptly found out baby #2 is on the way. There is a certain guilt that my wife and I make over 3x the median household income but still give less than 1% of our income to charity. Although the costs keep adding up, especially when you want to give an upper middle class lifestyle to your children.
Just an FYI, jbolden works for Microsoft. So his experience and comments would be related solely to SQLServer.
jbolden appears to be a managing partner of his own consulting firm, and his linkedin resume not only doesn't mention Microsoft but it lists Oracle multiple times with no mention of MSSQL Server.
But that only makes his post even more confusing, since there are very few scenarios extreme enough that Oracle cannot handle the database workload as well as any NoSQL solution. Although there are many scenarios where a novice Oracle DBA could not get the same performance as a novice NoSQL DBA. But god help those novice developers using the NoSQL database set up by a novice DBA when they don't comprehend what they are giving up by saying "no thanks" to ACID compliance.
You do know that for company formation the UK is scored better than the USA by some Rightwing think tanks - we don't have those dodgy judges in texas helping patent trolls for one.
Apparently you don't understand how well the right wing can disseminate propaganda. Part of convincing citizens that lowering tax burden and removing regulation is a good idea is convincing them these things are hurting businesses enough to damage the US economy. Telling people that even the anti-business EU has countries which beat us in company formation is a great way to do that. It works even better when people believe a right wing think tank would have some natural bias against giving credit to Europe, so the situation must be even more dire.
To be fair, approximating PI to 3 is usually good enough for all practical purposes. It's really not in the same order of magnitude than dividing something by 0.
Approximating PI = 3 is perfectly valid. But approximating PI = 3.0 is not.
I can think of a lot of situations where I HAVE TO GIVE an answer when a value becomes Zero and I'm dividing with it. Animation, bank accounts and artificial intelligence to name a few.
Any time you have a situation where you have to give an answer when a denominator becomes zero is an example of error handling. Just because you have found a specialized way to handle the error while continuing on with your algorithm does not mean the function actually had a value when it divided by zero.
Treating 5/0 as NaN and having your algorithm either skip the value or treat it as zero when computing an average would be an example of handling the error. But it still was an error, although in your specific instance you have determined handling the error was better than fixing your algorithm (which may become needlessly more complicated in your situation).
So what value does the sinc function ( y = sin(x)/x ) have at x coordinate 0 ?
It has no value. What you have here is a discontinuous function. The graph may appear continuous to the naked eye, but it is not. Just pretending that y = sin(0)/0 = 1 is not proper math.
Also, nature does not have a problem with this 'invalid' result of the mathematicians. It just uses 1 as a substitute.
Nature has no problem with this situation because no practical application of sin(x)/x could ever have x = 0. This is the difference between just computing functions and actually applying them.
It looks like someone just relied on the power rule to get through Calculus 101, and never really understood how what limits are. You use a lot of the terminology someone who understands Calculus would use, but there is a strong disconnect in understanding if you think finding where a function is approaching before it becomes undefined is the same thing as defining an undefined value.
You do not divide by zero in Calculus, you determine what value the function approaches as the denominator approaches zero.
Frankly, this should be basic Computer Science 101 type stuff.
It is CS 101 stuff, which is why so many people are saying it isn't possible. What I don't understand is how many people are actually defending the OP and agreeing that they would want the same thing. I guess these are the same programmers who cannot pass the Fizzbuzz test.
The point of the original post is that it could be pretty handy to have a sane predicable default result instead getting a runtime error or having to introduce conditional logic every single time you do divide by a variable or calculated value..
We understand what the OP was asking for and why it would be handy. We are simply explaining why it is not possible. Not just why it is probably not possible, but why it is literally not possible.
I would also love a programming language which always knew what I wanted it to do during runtime errors automatically; I simply don't see it happening before we figure out general artificial intelligence.
Slashdot Mirror
If all failures were paid there would be only successful companies.
While you are likely trolling, no one is suggesting failing companies should be propped up with public money. But successful companies still often have many failed projects, and this is especially true for any company which relies heavily on R&D. Like they say, if you aren't failing you aren't innovating. A solvent company needs to pay for its failed R&D projects with its successful projects or it would go under.
It is very similar to running a VC company. They obviously don't think ever venture will be profitable, but they are hoping to make an overall profit on those 20% of companies that actually succeed.
You give the verbal offer and *then* do the background & reference checks?
Yeah, I was wondering about that too. WTH?
Hopefully the verdict is in before he gives notice at his old job ...
I assume it takes a month because all of the background checks take two weeks and then they have to wait for the employee to give the current employer a two week notice. That is what happened in a company change I made earlier this year, although it only took a week for the background checks.
If you look at the listing of 20 tech positions, the Software Engineer position is a strange outlier. Its 35 day duration is almost 7 days higher than the #2 position, Senior Applications Developer, which is 28.3 days. The rest of the time-to-hire durations group together much nicer, which the overall trend being more senior positions taking longer and entry level positions taking less time.
So the duration for senior level tech positions appears to be around 27-28 days, which is what the summary should have focused on.
I originally thought the warning meant pregnant women are dangerous.
Or does "cross-platform" in this context mean "Linux+Windows"?
Yes.
Sorry I guess I am a bit too old and still don't think of mobile when I say cross-platform. But not old enough to immediately think embedded when saying cross-platform. I have been living purely in the desktop / server world for over a decade and that is where my project resides as well.
The project is very similar to writing an database management system. I didn't want to get too much into the details so people aren't commenting about the virtues of the project itself.
There is no UI component; it could be thought of as a cloud service.
My perfect solution would be developing it in C# while having complete control over memory allocation and release. I have done extensive testing using System.GC.Collect() to manually control garbage collection with no luck.
I started programming with C++ in high school and began my career with the language so I'm not too worried about moving back to the language, but I realize I am far more competent with higher level languages right now.
Personally, by the sounds of this project, I would probably code it in C# (or Java if that's your thing) and then bind in anything that those languages can't do using the native interface and a small C library (probably easiest to stick with straight C when doing native interop, though you can go C++ if you feel you really need it). For small projects I feel like going full native is rarely going to be worth it.
The only thing stopping me from doing this now is I need the ability to release memory on demand, and System.GC.Collect() is not sufficient. I really wish it was since I would work in C# if it was sufficient, but all prototyping I have done so far has not been successful enough.
Really.. C++ is a relatively high commitment language, and performance is one of its mainstays, however you dont feel you will spend much time optimising it?
I started my career working with C++ so I am not new to the language, but my work used very little of even the standard library let alone other third party tools. I used in house libraries that were already written. I was also a novice at the time, so a good deal of the last few months has been spent reading material like Effective Modern C++ and others in the Effective C++ series, along with a throwaway project to practice while reading.
I am a firm believer that most performance is in the algorithms not the language, so I am definitely not choosing C++ primarily for performance reasons. I need certain aspects like memory management, but my choice is not because I think my algorithms will run faster in C++ vs Java. There will probably be some very important modules I need to optimize, but all of that will likely be long after I have a working prototype.
I had a project a year ago where tokenizing terms needed to be as fast as possible, so I tried creating a C library to do it. I am confident I did it well by not copying memory but just keeping track of the location and length of each word in the existing character array, but I still couldn't match the performance of just doing it simply in LINQ (although it was almost identical performance). There is likely some kind of CPU caching or other tricks I was not doing right, but my point is I understand moving to C++ is not some silver bullet for performance, which is what I meant when I said I wasn't moving to C++ for performance reasons.
If you cannot look quite quickly over the descriptions of Boost/ASIO and see what they do (and dont) bring to the table, then you will be fighting a very
uphill battle.
I can and have read up on Boost::Asio and a little on QT, which is why I know how they would be useful to me in this project. But I am looking for advice from people who have used them extensively and know the gotchas. In my experience it takes a couple years to really know how certain aspects of a framework will affect your project long term and I want to gleam as much insight from the community as possible before I start down a certain path. It may not be possible to learn anything substantial with one Ask Slashdot post, but I figured why not try.
As almost everything else has equal or better cross platform support, it seems to me like you need to look more closely to what you mean/need by
'granularity' and perhaps change your mentality using familiar languages, and the solutions for problems in those areas.
Okay, basically I need to be able to allocate and release memory manually and without waiting for any garbage collection. I need complete control over concurrency and memory sharing, and as little overhead as possible when accessing the hard disk. I have not been able to find a way during prototyping to control memory enough in Java or C#. A language with a great cross platform library but no memory management would be perfect, and right now C++ is the only language I know of that comes close to those requirements.
You haven't provided nearly enough information to make a decision here. You haven't defined what you mean by "granular level", whether you need a UI, what functionality you have to provide.
The project is very similar to writing an database management system. I didn't want to get too much into the details so people aren't commenting about the virtues of the project itself.
By granular level I mean I cannot be in a managed environment like the JVM or .Net JIT compiler. I need to be able to allocate and release memory manually. I have done some prototyping in Java and C# hoping I could control garbage collection enough for my needs, but it isn't possible (or at least I can't figure it out).
There is no UI and it will only communicate via networking. It will also be distributed and concurrency control will be important.
There is no UI required for the project, although I realize you can use modules like QtNetwork without the UI libraries. I am a bit worried about tying myself too closely to the QT event loop. Can anyone provide any insight on if the event loop will complicate concurrency throughout the rest of the application or if it is even necessary? I have briefly read through some documentation but I am most looking for advice from someone who has used it before and has dealt with the gotchas that every framework has.
I have leaned more towards trying Boost over QT mostly because it relates closer to the standard library and has less overhead and framework buy in necessary. Or at least that is my impression. Has anyone tried both and have any advice on which they prefer for a project where you don't want to completely drink the framework's Kool-Aid?
$600 a day? I'm sorry, but nothing is worth that. Your employer is a sucker. Those lowly full time employees you look down your nose at are ultimately the ones paying your extortive rate of pay.
Either that, or you are completely full of shit and just trolling.
You are either very young, in a low paying field, not very good at your job, or live in rural Kentucky if you think $600 per day is extortion. That is not even $100 per hour. I make that as a software developer as an FTE even without including benefits in the midwest in my mid-30's. And my employer is getting a great deal and knows it, which is why I am paid extra for overtime which includes either extra bonus or extra PTO days to compensate. My young daughter and second on the way are what keeps me from taking more risks in my career and probably making much more money (emphasis on "probably").
Come to think of it I am probably just wasting my time here because you are likely just trolling yourself.
It is for this reason I despise seeing C/C++ on CVs. It implies that you don't have a strong foundation in either language as idiomatic code is so different between the two.
I actually list C/C++ on my CV purely to imply I am not strong in either. It was my main language in college and I have used it sparingly in my career, but I don't consider myself a C or C++ developer. So if you are looking for a senior C or C++ developer, look somewhere else. But if you want someone who at least understands pointer arithmetic and/or may have to lead a project where some of the developers are working in C or C++, then I may be your guy. I always clarify if asked, and never apply for jobs where I know they need a C++ guru anyway.
Maybe kids will change that, but I don't expect it to. We nominally live off my income (including retirement and other savings) while my wife pays for additional school with her part-time earnings.
Obviously your altruism doesn't have to change when you have kids, but a family budget without kids is grossly different than one with kids. All of a sudden you are paying $1700 per month for day care, or you are living purely on one income. Because you are the sole breadwinner, you need $150 per month for life insurance (if you are healthy; much more if you aren't).
Then you realize the home you live in isn't in that great of a school district, and you find there are no cheap homes in good school districts (done on purpose with zoning so property taxes per child are high). Then your housing goes from $1500 per month to $2500 per month. Then you realize college already costs $25k per year at state schools now, so you better save $400 per month for your kid's college education. The cost of clothes and toys and child furniture starts to grow, and you realize how expensive supplemental formula and diapers are.
It adds up.
my wife and I (both about 30) have managed to pay off our obligations and give about 12% to charity.
I obviously cannot claim we couldn't donate over 10% of our income if we tried. We shop at Brooks Brothers and Lululemon, have one nice $200-300 dinner-date per month, and buy the latest phone & iPad every other year. We rationalize it as being necessary to stand out as elite professionals to keep our incomes growing, which is party true but mostly self-serving. We buy mostly organic foods, and an extreme amount of fruit to satisfy my sweet tooth without buying Skittles (organic grapes are not cheap).
But then again we spend almost $30,000 per year in federal income taxes after all our deductions, which is about $20,000 more than the average US household. So I guess we do give about 10% of our income in donations; its just that the government would force us to even if we didn't want to.
Do you pay somebody else to run your washing machine, too?
About half of our laundry is done by my wife, and the other half by a service. They come by every Thursday morning and pick up the clothes and drop them off on Friday morning. My wife has trouble trusting our infant's clothes / bedding and our non-dry clean but still delicate work clothes to a service so that is why we still do some laundry.
I don't waste my time vacuuming my own home
Wow, you ARE lazy.
I work 50 hours a week at my full time job, another 15 hours or so on side-projects after my daughter and wife are asleep, and spend close to 100% of the rest of the time with my daughter and wife (and friends and family, but usually with my wife and daughter). Every hour I would spend vacuuming or doing laundry is an hour I wouldn't spend crawling around chasing my daughter, playing peekaboo, and reading Olivia the pig.
Every load of laundry I don't do is virtually the same as giving someone $10 for an extra half hour with my daughter. Money well spent. I doubt I will sit on my death bed worrying I didn't spend enough time vacuuming and too much time with my family.
That, and most Americans are too fucking lazy to sort, or have any kind of care in avoiding contamination (or even learning what that means).
As another post mentions (although a bit rudely), there is no reason why I need to sort my trash myself. Mixed waste recovery facilities can achieve almost 80% landfill diversion rates. One such service in South Pasadena costs under $40 per month, which is the same as standard garbage service in nearby LA.
There is no reason why I should waste my time sorting trash. I don't waste my time vacuuming my own home or landscaping my own house either. I pay professionals to do it who will do it much better and in less time. And for lower cost since I charge my employer a much higher rate.
The only reasons areas like Pasadena and Bevery Hills started mixed waste recovery was because no one was sorting on their own. The only way to force municipalities to start doing sorting the right way is to stop sorting yourself. Just like voting it is unlikely any one person can make a difference, but if everyone felt that way no change would ever happen.
You hit the nail on the head:
Student loans are the absolute worst debt one can get because they don't go away.
There are many criteria for determining what the worst type of debt is. Student loan debt tends to be at a much lower rate than most loans other than mortgages. So while student loans are worse when going through bankruptcy, they are one of the better forms of debt to have for the 85%+ of people who will never declare bankruptcy. The asset the borrower bought is also likely the most valuable asset they will ever have.
Also, student loans are not always immune to bankruptcy. A 2011 study found that about 40% of bankruptcy filers who attempted to discharge student loans were at least partially successful (25% received full discharge, 14% received partial discharge). The issue is that only 0.1% of filers even attempted to discharge their student loans.
The study found 69,000 filers who were good candidates to have their loans discharged, but only 300 actually attempted them. The author couldn't be sure how many of those 69,000 filers who have succeeded, but it would almost certainly have been over 40% of them since they were very demographically similar to those who did successfully discharge student loan debt. These demographic markers where seekers who (1) have a medical hardship, (2) are unemployed, and (3) earned less income in the year before filing for bankruptcy than the median discharge seeker earned.
So it is very likely that at least 10% of bankruptcy filers who have student loan debts could discharge their student loans in full, and an additional 5% could receive a partial discharge. And I want to stress the words at least these 15% of borrowers could get help with student loans from bankruptcy.
I suspect this altruism won't last long.
With in a year his credit card and auto debt will become a burden and he'll keep everything for himself.
If he gets out of that, he'll meet some girl and then the money will be sucked out of him again.
THEN, he'll get her pregnant and end up paying nearly $250,000 [google.com] until they turn 18...more if he's a real Dad and pays for college.
So just take that money and put it into a Roth Account or something.
Stop stealing my life story.
I just finished paying off everything but my mortgage and student loans two months ago, and then promptly found out baby #2 is on the way. There is a certain guilt that my wife and I make over 3x the median household income but still give less than 1% of our income to charity. Although the costs keep adding up, especially when you want to give an upper middle class lifestyle to your children.
Just an FYI, jbolden works for Microsoft. So his experience and comments would be related solely to SQLServer.
jbolden appears to be a managing partner of his own consulting firm, and his linkedin resume not only doesn't mention Microsoft but it lists Oracle multiple times with no mention of MSSQL Server.
But that only makes his post even more confusing, since there are very few scenarios extreme enough that Oracle cannot handle the database workload as well as any NoSQL solution. Although there are many scenarios where a novice Oracle DBA could not get the same performance as a novice NoSQL DBA. But god help those novice developers using the NoSQL database set up by a novice DBA when they don't comprehend what they are giving up by saying "no thanks" to ACID compliance.
You do know that for company formation the UK is scored better than the USA by some Rightwing think tanks - we don't have those dodgy judges in texas helping patent trolls for one.
Apparently you don't understand how well the right wing can disseminate propaganda. Part of convincing citizens that lowering tax burden and removing regulation is a good idea is convincing them these things are hurting businesses enough to damage the US economy. Telling people that even the anti-business EU has countries which beat us in company formation is a great way to do that. It works even better when people believe a right wing think tank would have some natural bias against giving credit to Europe, so the situation must be even more dire.
To be fair, approximating PI to 3 is usually good enough for all practical purposes. It's really not in the same order of magnitude than dividing something by 0.
Approximating PI = 3 is perfectly valid. But approximating PI = 3.0 is not.
I can think of a lot of situations where I HAVE TO GIVE an answer when a value becomes Zero and I'm dividing with it.
Animation, bank accounts and artificial intelligence to name a few.
Any time you have a situation where you have to give an answer when a denominator becomes zero is an example of error handling. Just because you have found a specialized way to handle the error while continuing on with your algorithm does not mean the function actually had a value when it divided by zero.
Treating 5/0 as NaN and having your algorithm either skip the value or treat it as zero when computing an average would be an example of handling the error. But it still was an error, although in your specific instance you have determined handling the error was better than fixing your algorithm (which may become needlessly more complicated in your situation).
So what value does the sinc function ( y = sin(x)/x ) have at x coordinate 0 ?
It has no value. What you have here is a discontinuous function. The graph may appear continuous to the naked eye, but it is not. Just pretending that y = sin(0)/0 = 1 is not proper math.
Also, nature does not have a problem with this 'invalid' result of the mathematicians. It just uses 1 as a substitute.
Nature has no problem with this situation because no practical application of sin(x)/x could ever have x = 0. This is the difference between just computing functions and actually applying them.
Looks like someone skipped Calculus 101.
It looks like someone just relied on the power rule to get through Calculus 101, and never really understood how what limits are. You use a lot of the terminology someone who understands Calculus would use, but there is a strong disconnect in understanding if you think finding where a function is approaching before it becomes undefined is the same thing as defining an undefined value.
You do not divide by zero in Calculus, you determine what value the function approaches as the denominator approaches zero.
Frankly, this should be basic Computer Science 101 type stuff.
It is CS 101 stuff, which is why so many people are saying it isn't possible. What I don't understand is how many people are actually defending the OP and agreeing that they would want the same thing. I guess these are the same programmers who cannot pass the Fizzbuzz test.
The point of the original post is that it could be pretty handy to have a sane predicable default result instead getting a runtime error or having to introduce conditional logic every single time you do divide by a variable or calculated value..
We understand what the OP was asking for and why it would be handy. We are simply explaining why it is not possible. Not just why it is probably not possible, but why it is literally not possible.
I would also love a programming language which always knew what I wanted it to do during runtime errors automatically; I simply don't see it happening before we figure out general artificial intelligence.