As mentioned in the summary this has been discussed a few times on Slashdot, and the original discussion was kicked off by Paul Graham's assertion that the cool hacker kids were into Python and the only people using Java were boring corporate types who had no passion for their jobs and were often mediocre programmers. In this sense, "coolness" does matter a little bit - if you're starting a new project, you don't want to choose a language where the labor pool that you're recruiting from is full of crappy programmers.
And yes, I know good programmers can pick up new languages quickly. But it can take months or sometimes years to master all the libraries and frameworks around the language. Someone with relevant experience can hit the ground running and have a shorter ramp-up period than someone without. I'm not saying that this is more important than general coding ability - it's not - but this is valuable to a lot of smaller companies and startups who don't have lots of time to train up new hires.
What makes Java uncool isn't so much the language itself, but rather the community around it. I actually like Java as a language better than Python, but there's a real culture of overengineering in the Java community, and people there really value convoluted architectures that are (ostensibly) maintainable and extensible. In the Python community, people value simplicity and hackability, and you can see it when you do things like file I/O or compare popular frameworks from both languages.
Not directly related to Java, but a while ago the tech lead for OAuth 2.0 resigned citing cultural differences between the "web" and "enterprise" communities. The "cool" languages are definitely the ones that are favoured by the web community, and the uncool ones favoured by the enterprise community.
So as much as people might think that it's just language syntax, it's not - it's also about communities, culture and different ways of thinking.
The magnitude of a quake is the total energy released at the epicenter, and it's true that you can't estimate the magnitude from feel since you have no idea of the distance. But the intensity is the amount of shaking at a particular location, and is probably what bazmonkey was talking about.
Was strong enough to wake me up in San Francisco too, but not strong enough to bring anything down. There are some maps from the USGS that shows that it was a lot stronger in American Canyon than it was here.
That's true but the article (and even the summary) says that the correlation with internet speed is stronger than with income. So there may be more to it than just rich people can afford premium services.
Maybe families that value education more strongly are more likely to get broadband, or maybe there's is actually some causation.
Yeah, I remember around the early to mid 2000s there was an article on Slashdot along the lines of "who will be the next Microsoft?" and the general consensus was nobody - because Microsoft wouldn't be stupid enough to be the next IBM. IBM's mistake in the 80s was to hand over control of DOS, and Microsoft understood this and wouldn't repeat it.
Now in 2014 it's easy to see that IE6's stagnation and Ballmer's laughing dismissal of the iPhone has put the company in a very similar place to where IBM was in the mid 90s.
Even if they were all gone, there's still plenty of tricholoroethylele in the ground water undernearth Silicon Valley left over from the silicon companies back in the day.
In my experience ebooks are great for things like novels, where it's mostly paragraph after paragraph of text. But for textbooks that have a lot of images, tables, diagrams, mathematical formulae, source code snippets, etc. the formatting doesn't always come out looking nice.
I think the epub format is basically zip'd html, and the kindle format is not that different. Text gets resized and reflowed according to the reader's screen size, and this means that things move around and don't look the way the author or publisher intended them to. I imagine this would be a problem for a lot of university textbooks, especially in fields like science.
I don't think the market values their skills that highly. Only the most successful actors make this kind of money, and if you wanted to compare this to (for example) engineers then the right comparison would be with startup founders who got lucky and sold out for millions (or didn't, and went on to make billions).
The difference with engineering is that a lot of regular engineers make a decent living. For every rich and successful actor or athlete, there are plenty of others who can't make ends meet. If you add all of this up, you'll see that the world values engineering much more highly than acting or sports.
Some rough numbers for perspective: the US film industry takes in $10 billion per year in box office revenues, whereas Google alone pulled in $15 billion last quarter. So at least in this example, I don't think the market valuation is that out of whack.
Ever noticed how Amazon consistently breaks even every quarter? Sure there's like a hundred million loss, or sometimes profit in other quarters, but that's nothing when quarterly revenue is $20 billion. The company knows how much money is coming in, and they're using all of their profit to invest in their infrastructure, and grow out their businesses. They could decide at any moment to stop doing this, and the company would become hugely profitable overnight.
But their revenue last quarter is about 25% higher than it was this time last year, and it has consistently been seeing this kind of growth for years. The right thing for Amazon to do, from a shareholder's perspective, is to keep investing and ride out this wave of growth for as long as it lasts. To do otherwise would be to give up their long-term position just to maximize their short-term quarterly profits.
So to answer your question, "long term" happens when sales growth disappears, and the investments that Amazon makes into its infrastructure no longer provide any returns. With the sales growth that Amazon is seeing right now, this is clearly not the right time to stop building out the company.
That's what I thought when I read it too. I wonder if Slashdot did an a/b test with its moderation system and did some sentiment analysis on the resulting comments, would there be the same outrage?
All government services are based on "theft" of resources from people who don't use that government service. This includes the roads that private cars drive on, which are funded in part by gasoline taxes but mostly through non-user-pays revenue streams such as income taxes.
I think there are two problems. The first is that if you assume that women are a) not inherently less qualified to do tech jobs and b) given an equal opportunity, then it would be reasonable to expect that 50% of Googlers would be women. But obviously the data shows that the ratio is much lower, so one of those assumptions is incorrect.
If you believe that the first assumption is incorrect - that women are inherently less qualified - then sure I can see why you think this is not a problem. Maybe you think they have different brains or something. But society as a whole, and Google's hiring department in particular, don't believe that, and so the logical conclusion is that women are not given equal opportunity.
I hope that you can see why that is clearly a problem. It might not be the fault of Google's hiring process - it could be a bias in the education system, or the exclusionary "bro culture" in the tech industry, or something else in some other part of society. Whatever it is, there's some subconscious bias somewhere that is holding women back, and figuring out where that is coming from could unlock a lot of potential talent, as well as making the world a fairer place.
So that's the first problem. The second problem is: who the fuck, male or female, wants to live in a place that is a complete sausage-fest? It's gotten so bad that it doesn't just affect individual companies or university departments anymore - in the Bay Area the gender ratio of the entire city of "Man Jose" is all fucked up.
That's what I find so strange about this ruling. Search engines like Google have to remove links to certain articles, but newspapers and journalists are explicitly protected when publishing said articles.
Although most of us only have experience with open source and consumer products, and the support forums that come with them, the OP is most annoyed with niche proprietary software tool vendors:
it's completely unacceptable when dealing with proprietary design tool vendors that are charging several thousand dollars for software licenses for tools that are the only option if a customer doesn't want to drop an order of magnitude more money to go with 3rd party tools (e.g., Synopsys)
For these tools, your employer usually pays tens of thousands of dollars for support contracts, which are meant to include direct support from engineers. It's unlikely that any third party will have the ability to provide support for such products, because:
1. You need access to source code and the ability to make changes and release patches. 2. The tools are so niche that you won't be able to find people who know enough about the software to provide support. 3. Even if you could, you need licenses to reproduce the issues that your customers are reporting to you. The cost of licenses for things like Verilog synthesizers from Synopsys (which are not cheap!) would need to be passed on to your customers.
Having lived in both Japan and the US, I've noticed that people in Japan tend to think "living in a small town would be inconvenient because I wouldn't be able to get to a train" whereas people in the US tend to think "living in a big city would be inconvenient because I wouldn't be able to drive my car".
So the Japanese tend to be drawn towards large cities (about 60% live in one of the 3 biggest metro areas - Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya) and Americans tend to self-organize into a fairly uniformly sparse suburban environment.
It's interesting how people can't seem to see beyond their society's local maxima, but anyway this leads to vastly different ideas of what it means to be "overpopulated".
When I lived in Japan I didn't find it to be overpopulated at all, even in the middle of Tokyo. The high population density isn't a problem that needs solving - it's a defining characteristic that makes the city great, and has attracted 35 million people to live there. There are plenty of rural backwaters north of Tokyo in Tohoku but not many people want to live there.
So what for? If a society prefers large cities, why not let them self-organize into a two or three big cities? Which is what Japan has pretty much already done.
Yeah, let's restrict access to scientific knowledge, and make sure those third worlders are stuck in poverty forever. That'll make the world a better place!
I think you're asking the wrong question too. Why should I care what the US GDP per capita is? What matters to me is the global GDP per capita, and how that is distributed.
To be fair, Ford no longer manufactures the Crown Victoria so this is not an option for police departments anymore.
A top-of-the-range SRT Charger costs about $47k MSRP and not all cops are driving around in SRTs (except maybe Highway Patrol?). With the model that the police are buying, together with the "police package", they're paying $42k (according to http://cjonline.com/opinion/20...) and I doubt the Crown Vics would've been much cheaper than that.
Having said that I totally agree with you that US police departments are not allocating resources effectively.
This paper shows the difference between the content of mechanically-separated and hand-separated meats (see tables 2 and 3). There's less protein, and more ash and bone in the mechanically separated stuff, so it is different nutritionally.
Also it's not "half the animal"; the amount of extra meat recovered from mechanical separation is probably only a few percent at most. And anyway, there are other ways to use the rest of the animal, such as making soup stock or bone meal. We wouldn't have to waste anything if we stopped making pink slime.
A good steak really is an amazing thing, and no meat substitute is likely to replace it. A fake meat product that is made from "peas and plants" doesn't sound anywhere near as nice as a rare filet mignon, but it still sounds a lot better than mechanically separated pink slime and the mystery meats that fast food restaurants put in burgers, hot dogs, chicken nuggets, etc.
It's still early days and I'm sure this Beyond Meat product will get cheaper, to the point where this could replace the low-grade meat that is so common in the food industry. This would be a massive win in terms of animal welfare, sustainability, nutrition and maybe even cost to consumers.
I suspect that a lot of people would prefer vegetables that have most of the taste, texture and protein of meat, rather than food that is grown in horrific conditions but technically meets the definition of meat despite being quite different nutritionally.
Maybe the Russians are just writing off their losses? I've got no idea about the terms of the loan, but if someone owed me a ridiculous amount of money that I knew would never be paid back, I'd settle for 10% of it and a commitment to a payment plan.
I'm not sure what the author means when he says that the student was "lost to history", because at the end of the article he says that it was Diane Hartley.
The BBC aired a special on the Citicorp Center crisis, and one of its viewers was Diane Hartley. It turns out that she was the student in LeMessurier’s story.
Her name is also mentioned in some papers on engineering ethics:
Slashdot Mirror
As mentioned in the summary this has been discussed a few times on Slashdot, and the original discussion was kicked off by Paul Graham's assertion that the cool hacker kids were into Python and the only people using Java were boring corporate types who had no passion for their jobs and were often mediocre programmers. In this sense, "coolness" does matter a little bit - if you're starting a new project, you don't want to choose a language where the labor pool that you're recruiting from is full of crappy programmers.
And yes, I know good programmers can pick up new languages quickly. But it can take months or sometimes years to master all the libraries and frameworks around the language. Someone with relevant experience can hit the ground running and have a shorter ramp-up period than someone without. I'm not saying that this is more important than general coding ability - it's not - but this is valuable to a lot of smaller companies and startups who don't have lots of time to train up new hires.
What makes Java uncool isn't so much the language itself, but rather the community around it. I actually like Java as a language better than Python, but there's a real culture of overengineering in the Java community, and people there really value convoluted architectures that are (ostensibly) maintainable and extensible. In the Python community, people value simplicity and hackability, and you can see it when you do things like file I/O or compare popular frameworks from both languages.
Not directly related to Java, but a while ago the tech lead for OAuth 2.0 resigned citing cultural differences between the "web" and "enterprise" communities. The "cool" languages are definitely the ones that are favoured by the web community, and the uncool ones favoured by the enterprise community.
So as much as people might think that it's just language syntax, it's not - it's also about communities, culture and different ways of thinking.
The magnitude of a quake is the total energy released at the epicenter, and it's true that you can't estimate the magnitude from feel since you have no idea of the distance. But the intensity is the amount of shaking at a particular location, and is probably what bazmonkey was talking about.
Was strong enough to wake me up in San Francisco too, but not strong enough to bring anything down. There are some maps from the USGS that shows that it was a lot stronger in American Canyon than it was here.
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/ear...
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/ear...
That's true but the article (and even the summary) says that the correlation with internet speed is stronger than with income. So there may be more to it than just rich people can afford premium services.
Maybe families that value education more strongly are more likely to get broadband, or maybe there's is actually some causation.
Yeah, I remember around the early to mid 2000s there was an article on Slashdot along the lines of "who will be the next Microsoft?" and the general consensus was nobody - because Microsoft wouldn't be stupid enough to be the next IBM. IBM's mistake in the 80s was to hand over control of DOS, and Microsoft understood this and wouldn't repeat it.
Now in 2014 it's easy to see that IE6's stagnation and Ballmer's laughing dismissal of the iPhone has put the company in a very similar place to where IBM was in the mid 90s.
Even if they were all gone, there's still plenty of tricholoroethylele in the ground water undernearth Silicon Valley left over from the silicon companies back in the day.
In my experience ebooks are great for things like novels, where it's mostly paragraph after paragraph of text. But for textbooks that have a lot of images, tables, diagrams, mathematical formulae, source code snippets, etc. the formatting doesn't always come out looking nice.
I think the epub format is basically zip'd html, and the kindle format is not that different. Text gets resized and reflowed according to the reader's screen size, and this means that things move around and don't look the way the author or publisher intended them to. I imagine this would be a problem for a lot of university textbooks, especially in fields like science.
I don't think the market values their skills that highly. Only the most successful actors make this kind of money, and if you wanted to compare this to (for example) engineers then the right comparison would be with startup founders who got lucky and sold out for millions (or didn't, and went on to make billions).
The difference with engineering is that a lot of regular engineers make a decent living. For every rich and successful actor or athlete, there are plenty of others who can't make ends meet. If you add all of this up, you'll see that the world values engineering much more highly than acting or sports.
Some rough numbers for perspective: the US film industry takes in $10 billion per year in box office revenues, whereas Google alone pulled in $15 billion last quarter. So at least in this example, I don't think the market valuation is that out of whack.
Ever noticed how Amazon consistently breaks even every quarter? Sure there's like a hundred million loss, or sometimes profit in other quarters, but that's nothing when quarterly revenue is $20 billion. The company knows how much money is coming in, and they're using all of their profit to invest in their infrastructure, and grow out their businesses. They could decide at any moment to stop doing this, and the company would become hugely profitable overnight.
But their revenue last quarter is about 25% higher than it was this time last year, and it has consistently been seeing this kind of growth for years. The right thing for Amazon to do, from a shareholder's perspective, is to keep investing and ride out this wave of growth for as long as it lasts. To do otherwise would be to give up their long-term position just to maximize their short-term quarterly profits.
So to answer your question, "long term" happens when sales growth disappears, and the investments that Amazon makes into its infrastructure no longer provide any returns. With the sales growth that Amazon is seeing right now, this is clearly not the right time to stop building out the company.
That is also true of Windows and Mac laptops, at the kids' schools and their parents' offices.
Once you've figured out what you're pissed off about, don't forget to go to Mozilla and demand your money back.
That's what I thought when I read it too. I wonder if Slashdot did an a/b test with its moderation system and did some sentiment analysis on the resulting comments, would there be the same outrage?
Does size matter? Not when you're fapping to porn I guess.
All government services are based on "theft" of resources from people who don't use that government service. This includes the roads that private cars drive on, which are funded in part by gasoline taxes but mostly through non-user-pays revenue streams such as income taxes.
I think there are two problems. The first is that if you assume that women are a) not inherently less qualified to do tech jobs and b) given an equal opportunity, then it would be reasonable to expect that 50% of Googlers would be women. But obviously the data shows that the ratio is much lower, so one of those assumptions is incorrect.
If you believe that the first assumption is incorrect - that women are inherently less qualified - then sure I can see why you think this is not a problem. Maybe you think they have different brains or something. But society as a whole, and Google's hiring department in particular, don't believe that, and so the logical conclusion is that women are not given equal opportunity.
I hope that you can see why that is clearly a problem. It might not be the fault of Google's hiring process - it could be a bias in the education system, or the exclusionary "bro culture" in the tech industry, or something else in some other part of society. Whatever it is, there's some subconscious bias somewhere that is holding women back, and figuring out where that is coming from could unlock a lot of potential talent, as well as making the world a fairer place.
So that's the first problem. The second problem is: who the fuck, male or female, wants to live in a place that is a complete sausage-fest? It's gotten so bad that it doesn't just affect individual companies or university departments anymore - in the Bay Area the gender ratio of the entire city of "Man Jose" is all fucked up.
That's what I find so strange about this ruling. Search engines like Google have to remove links to certain articles, but newspapers and journalists are explicitly protected when publishing said articles.
http://m.holdthefrontpage.co.u...
This is kind of like legalizing piracy while at the same time forcing The Pirate Bay to remove links.
Although most of us only have experience with open source and consumer products, and the support forums that come with them, the OP is most annoyed with niche proprietary software tool vendors:
it's completely unacceptable when dealing with proprietary design tool vendors that are charging several thousand dollars for software licenses for tools that are the only option if a customer doesn't want to drop an order of magnitude more money to go with 3rd party tools (e.g., Synopsys)
For these tools, your employer usually pays tens of thousands of dollars for support contracts, which are meant to include direct support from engineers. It's unlikely that any third party will have the ability to provide support for such products, because:
1. You need access to source code and the ability to make changes and release patches.
2. The tools are so niche that you won't be able to find people who know enough about the software to provide support.
3. Even if you could, you need licenses to reproduce the issues that your customers are reporting to you. The cost of licenses for things like Verilog synthesizers from Synopsys (which are not cheap!) would need to be passed on to your customers.
Having lived in both Japan and the US, I've noticed that people in Japan tend to think "living in a small town would be inconvenient because I wouldn't be able to get to a train" whereas people in the US tend to think "living in a big city would be inconvenient because I wouldn't be able to drive my car".
So the Japanese tend to be drawn towards large cities (about 60% live in one of the 3 biggest metro areas - Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya) and Americans tend to self-organize into a fairly uniformly sparse suburban environment.
It's interesting how people can't seem to see beyond their society's local maxima, but anyway this leads to vastly different ideas of what it means to be "overpopulated".
When I lived in Japan I didn't find it to be overpopulated at all, even in the middle of Tokyo. The high population density isn't a problem that needs solving - it's a defining characteristic that makes the city great, and has attracted 35 million people to live there. There are plenty of rural backwaters north of Tokyo in Tohoku but not many people want to live there.
So what for? If a society prefers large cities, why not let them self-organize into a two or three big cities? Which is what Japan has pretty much already done.
Yeah, let's restrict access to scientific knowledge, and make sure those third worlders are stuck in poverty forever. That'll make the world a better place!
I think you're asking the wrong question too. Why should I care what the US GDP per capita is? What matters to me is the global GDP per capita, and how that is distributed.
To be fair, Ford no longer manufactures the Crown Victoria so this is not an option for police departments anymore.
A top-of-the-range SRT Charger costs about $47k MSRP and not all cops are driving around in SRTs (except maybe Highway Patrol?). With the model that the police are buying, together with the "police package", they're paying $42k (according to http://cjonline.com/opinion/20...) and I doubt the Crown Vics would've been much cheaper than that.
Having said that I totally agree with you that US police departments are not allocating resources effectively.
This paper shows the difference between the content of mechanically-separated and hand-separated meats (see tables 2 and 3). There's less protein, and more ash and bone in the mechanically separated stuff, so it is different nutritionally.
Also it's not "half the animal"; the amount of extra meat recovered from mechanical separation is probably only a few percent at most. And anyway, there are other ways to use the rest of the animal, such as making soup stock or bone meal. We wouldn't have to waste anything if we stopped making pink slime.
A good steak really is an amazing thing, and no meat substitute is likely to replace it. A fake meat product that is made from "peas and plants" doesn't sound anywhere near as nice as a rare filet mignon, but it still sounds a lot better than mechanically separated pink slime and the mystery meats that fast food restaurants put in burgers, hot dogs, chicken nuggets, etc.
It's still early days and I'm sure this Beyond Meat product will get cheaper, to the point where this could replace the low-grade meat that is so common in the food industry. This would be a massive win in terms of animal welfare, sustainability, nutrition and maybe even cost to consumers.
I suspect that a lot of people would prefer vegetables that have most of the taste, texture and protein of meat, rather than food that is grown in horrific conditions but technically meets the definition of meat despite being quite different nutritionally.
Maybe the Russians are just writing off their losses? I've got no idea about the terms of the loan, but if someone owed me a ridiculous amount of money that I knew would never be paid back, I'd settle for 10% of it and a commitment to a payment plan.
I'm not sure what the author means when he says that the student was "lost to history", because at the end of the article he says that it was Diane Hartley.
The BBC aired a special on the Citicorp Center crisis, and one of its viewers was Diane Hartley. It turns out that she was the student in LeMessurier’s story.
Her name is also mentioned in some papers on engineering ethics:
http://www.onlineethics.org/cm...
http://www.theaiatrust.com/whi...