I agree completely with much of your advice, but I must take issue with this:
I dissagree with the sentiment that it is difficult and costly to start a business - in our industry, startup costs are much lower than in any other industry especially if you start with a Home-Office IT/programming related type of business.
Having started or been involved in starting several businesses, I think the previous poster was right: most people drastically underestimate the cost and difficulty of starting a successful business.
In particular, among friends and acquaintances I've seen two big mistakes. The first is underestimating how much time and money it will take until they're in the black. The other is not realizing that starting a business involves more time and way more responsibility than just having a job.
My three big pieces of advice to first-time entrepreneurs are: 1) If possible, start your business but keep your day job until you have so much work that you can't keep doing both. 2) Have enough cash (or small enough expenses) that you can make it for a year without income. 3) Expect your business to take over most of your life.
No, people haven't stopped having children entirely. But for the past 30 years or so, the U.S. birthrate has been below replacement level.
Replacement rate is somewhere slightly above two births per woman, and the US has been pretty close to that lately. Moreover, US population is expected to increase from 290m to circa 420m by 2050. Why? Because births are not the only way we get new taxpayers; immigration is the major source of US population growth.
So although Europe is facing major demographic problems that demand serious pension system reforms, that's not the case here.
As others have pointed out, the article is talking about something completely different than what you had in mind. Even so:
Any of the enterprise databases will with gobs of memory end up caching the entire database in memory.
That's still much slower than in-memory approaches that don't use a database at all. For apps that are amenable to the stick-it-all-in-RAM approach, serializing all your data access is a performance killer.
A writeable database that doesn't need to be written to disk is not a database, it's called a nonpersistent cache.
Well, there are different ways of guaranteeing reliability than the way databases do it. If you're keeping all your data hot, transaction logs with lazy snapshots may be a better solution than the database's approach, which treats the disk as the master copy and RAM as a place to story temporary copies.
Even so, according to IMDB, total wordwide box office receipts for Spidey 1 & 2 (which are both in the top 15 grossers of all time) is approx 1.6 billion. Must take some kinda nerve to try and claim they made no profit on that.
That's an excellent point. Kids, don't try this at home. It take a trained professional asshole to lie that brazenly.
the moral of the story is, as always: when the company and stockholders win, you better be a stockholder. because if you're an employee, you're screwed.
Could somebody explain to me how on Slashdot we get outraged when somebody without perfect technical knowledge comments on a technical issue but we mod up people who comment on economics without apparently knowing a thing about it?
It's true that sometimes employers and employees play zero-sum games: if one side wins, the other side loses. But the main activity of any company is for investors, managers, workers, suppliers, and customers to play positive-sum games, ones where everybody ends up better off. If you don't get that, you will be unable to comprend how capitalism works.
study that came out that says that outsourcing is good for the economy. but is it? what it really provides is a decline in the quality of jobs in america.
Again, you don't have the faintest idea of what you're talking about. If overseas trade were such a bad thing, then wouldn't drastic increases in trade over the last few decades have resulted in drastically worse standards of living? The answer is no, because trade is generally a positive-sum game, and because the principle of comparative advantage means that trade pays off not just for poor countries, but rich ones as well.
I certainly grant that lowering trade barriers can hurt some workers, even though the populace as a whole gains. Those people we should help, but we can pay for that with plenty of room to spare out of the gains that come from freer trade.
Our socety may pay a cost, but our taxpayers shouldn't.
You're missing my point entirely. I'm saying that, as a practical matter, giving them access to certain government services will save money over the long haul.
Take cops. If millions of people are afraid to go to the law, then this aids criminals by providing them with easy pickings. Giving criminals a niche in which they can grow strong incurs huge long-term costs.
And like it or not, most illegal immigrants will end up staying here, especially the ones who grow up here. Rounding all of them up and deporting them is, aside from being morally questionable and practically difficult, a political impossibility. So our choice isn't to have them or not have them; the choice is whether we aid them in becoming productive citizens or not.
As illegal immigrants, they are already not law-abiding.
Ever driven over the speed limit? Well, you're not law abiding either. Clearly, we should make sure your kids can't go to school.
Honestly, have you ever met an illegal immigrant? Coming here, even from Mexico, is hardly a cakewalk. The ones I've met have all been serious, honest, and hardworking. Their willingness to dodge the INS implies nothing about their willingness to commit other, more serious crimes.
As unfunded drains on our economy (often paying no taxes on property or income, and because of their situation, usually not carrying health, life, or auto insurance), they make this a harder place for me to live.
The notion that they are one-way drains on the economy or make this place harder for you to live is unsupported by the data. Unless your life's dream was to become a dishwasher, that is.
The reason they don't pay income taxes is because we don't let them. Some of them would still probably work under the table if they could, but that's true of citizens as well. Ditto for auto insurance. They probably do pay property taxes; as most are renters, that's taken care of through their rent. And I can pretty much guarantee you that most people working at the wages that illegal immigrants get are not paying for health insurance, so that's hardly something you can pin on illegals either.
And immigrants, legal and otherwise, provide the economy with substantial benefits. one study mentions that once you count an immigrant's children, taxpayers make an $80,000 profit on each immigrant. That's not evenly distributed; costs of schooling come now, and the taxes come later. But given our demographics, that's a great thing: if it weren't for immigration, we'd be facing a demographic time bomb just like Europe.
So I agree we should help Mexico. (And free trade is the best way to do that; with more work in Mexico, there's less need for them to come here.) And I agree that we should try to control illegal immigration as much as possible. But for those who are here to stay, we should make sure that they become productive members of society.
This question is on the declaration form you fill out every time you fly to the USA from Canada.
As about 30 other people have pointed out before you posted this, that's a government official with a government form collecting information for a government agency to grant you a shiny government-issued visa.
Cory Doctorow, on the other hand, was grilled by an airline employee with no official form collecting information for an unstated purpose with no notion of what legal authority might be behind it, for what purpose the information was being collected, or how that information would be managed.
you are treated like a king if you are Mexican [...] and the cops are not allowed to check if you are legal or not
Yes, in the US it's only royalty and illegal Mexican immgrants that are allowed police protection. [rolls eyes]
The poster might give you the impression that the state of California offers all sorts of special benefits that accrue to illegal aliens. As far as I know, that's not the case; it's just that many government programs help out all people rather than checking to see whether you're a citizen or not.
Personally, as a Cali taxpayer, I'm glad of that. Humanitarian considerations aside, society pays a heavy cost if illegal immigrants are afraid to report crime, or if their children are forced to be sick, malnourished, and ignorant. Whether we should let them come is one question, but as long as they are here to stay we might as well make sure they make it.
What if you can't afford a second machine to cover the "duplicate" test environment?
About 95% of the time I hear this, it's false economy. Most hardware is pretty cheap these days, and good developers are very expensive. It takes very little time savings to justify the purchase of new hardware.
In the few cases where it's too expensive to duplicate hardware, then you can fall back on careful profiling and simulation. For example, if you know that your production hardware has X times the CPU and Y times the I/O bandwidth, you can set performance targets on your development environment that are much lower. Or if you can't afford a network of test boxes to develop your distributed app, then things like VMWare or User Mode Linux will let you find some things out.
Of course, every time your tests diverge from your production environment, you add risk. A classic mistake is to develop a multithreaded app on a single-processor box and then deploy it on a multiple-processor box. So as you get cost savings by reducing hardware, it's good to keep in mind the added cost of inadequate testing.
For reasons I have yet to understand, there seems to be a prevalent myth that performance can be bolted on after the fact (the "make it work, then make it work fast" mindset). The truth of the matter is that performance has to be engineered in from the beginning or you simply spend a lot of time and money rewriting code that should never have been written in the first place.
Myth, eh? Personally, I do no "bolting". The steps I happily follow are
make it work
make it right
make it fast
The notion here is that you get something basic working. Then you refactor your design to be the right one for where you ended up: a simple, clean design. Then you do performance testing, discover what the real bottlenecks are, and find ways to get the speed with minimal design distortion here. The you go back to step 1 and add more functionality.
There are a couple of benefits to doing the optimization last. One is that a clean design is relatively easy to optimize. But the big one is that by waiting until you have actual performance data, you get to spend your optimization time on the small number of actual bottlenecks, rather than the very large number of potential bottlenecks. That in turn means that you don't have a lot of premature optimization code of unknown value cluttering up your code base and retarding your progress.
Of course, this is not a license to be completely stupid. Before you start building, you should have a rough plausible architecture in mind. If there are substantial performance risks at the core of a project's architecture, it's worth spending a day or two hacking together an experiment to see the if your basic theories are sound.
As Knuth says, "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: PrematureOptimization is the root of all evil."
I made the comparison not for the purposes of an exact analogy, but in order to evoke the image of an unbalanced financial house of cards. Which is what Social Security is.
Compared with what exactly? I agree that unfunded liabilities aren't so great, and I personally favor funding those liabilities explicitly, but something that has gone 70 years and will go decades more without any adjustment and at least decades further with moderate adjustment is hardly a "financial house of cards".
The only way that Social Security could be even vaguely analogous with a pyramid scheme or a ponzi scheme is if we expected that at some point people would stop having children entirely so there would be old people without any children to pay their pensions. Somehow I'm not expecting that. But if that happens, pensions are the least of our worries.
If you want to see a financial house of cards, take a look at the current US private pension scheme. The PBGC, the government agency that guarantees the solvency of private pensions, is in deep trouble and has been headed that way for years.
It would be nice to see the Bush administration fix immediate and pressing problems with retirement before embarking on ideology-driven, fuzzy-math solutions to problems that are, worst case, decades away.
So for someone to use your online banking, they not only require your pin, but they also have to phyically have your bank card.
See, this attitude is the opening for crime. That's the *goal* of the fancy secure-token card, but that's not necessarily the result.
To get at the money in your online banking account, a bad guy doesn't need the card. He merely needs to convince you to type the confirmation code into a web site under his control. As long as he's prompt, he can still seize control of your bank account and send your money off.
Using a secure token like this doesn't eliminate the opportunity for phishing scams to work; it just requires more cleverness in doing them. That's a step forward for sure, but just a step.
I don't want to be in. [...] So much for Land of the Free.
We, as a free people, have jointly decided that letting old people starve in the streets is bad for us. We have made similar decisions about all sorts of things, like being invaded, getting polio, or getting mercury poisoning. You can't get out of paying for those, and you won't get out of this one, either.
Of course, there's no requirement that you collect Social Security. You're absolutely free to decline the checks and give the money back. What you aren't free to do is get out of paying for the things we've jointly decided are necessary, and you aren't free to welch on the promises that we, through our government, have made to the elderly.
If you don't like this, you're welcome to try to move to a first world country with a less burdensome set of taxes. Let us know how it works out!
No, the best solution is to solve the core problem, and not put bandaids on the symptoms. The core problem is that social security is a giant pyramid scheme. The concept itself is broken and needs to be discarded.
Personally, I agree that saving money for future pension liabilities is a fine idea. But calling the current setup a pyramid scheme is just incorrect. It make me wonder which it is you don't understand: pyramid schemes or Social Security.
Funny thing about that "surplus" - while the deficit was (supposedly) negative, our National Debt was still increasing.
Is that funny? I always thought they were referring to what's known as the "primary deficit/surplus" which is basically the current budget excluding interest. When we have a budget surplus, the total debt can still increase if the surplus is smaller than the interest on the debt. Even if you don't charge anything on the credit card, to get ahead you have to pay them more than they charge you in interest.
Let's say this construction compay hires people based solely on an upper body strength test. And that whiles 80% of men who apply are hired, only 30% of women are. Is this sexist discrimination, do the different numbers simply reflect the fact that men tend to have bigger muscles?
Even with such an apparently clear-cut case, the answer would be "it depends".
The first question I'd ask is "Why did they pick a test so obviously likely to favor males?" If the work involved requires upper body strength and nothing else, then maybe it would be legit. But even simple construction requires a lot more than that. The fact that they picked a test that poorly represented the actual work and one that happens to reinforce the position of the group making the decision makes a suspicion of bias, conscious or not, reasonable.
And this isn't just a theoretical problem. A female friend of a friend spent years doing construction, and seeing the work she does on her own house, I'm sure she was good at it. A big part of why she got out of it was the blatant discrimination and harassment.
It has been social science dogma since the 1960's that all gender differences are socially constructed. This notion was based not on observation but rather on philosophical ideals. The evidence refuting this postulate is substantial
This is true, but I think the reason the the "men are better at math" argument sends some women ballistic is that a some people use "innate differences" as cover for a lot of unfair sex-based treatment. I think much of that is unconscious, but that doesn't make it any less painful for the people on the wrong end of it.
Until we've got good data on actual innate sex differences and a well-tested model of how much those differences play out in the long road to becoming math professors, it's good to keep in mind that for centuries women were excluded from pretty much everything, including things like voting, because it was thought that innate differences made them unsuited for it. Having made a big mistake about innate differences once, I'd rather we erred on the side of caution until all the data is in.
However, skin color isn't a skill except in those rare cases where you worry about sunburn or vitamin D, and having a particular set of reproductive parts isn't a skill unless the goal is to make babies.
Ok, I'm going to try very, very hard to presume this is an honest question and not just somebody trolling. That sound? My teeth just make that grinding noise sometimes; nothing to do with you personally.
You should probably go chat with people you know who have different skin colors and ask them if having a different skin color than the majority has in any way influenced their experiences in life. Alternatively, you could try living in a place where you have an obviously different skin color and see what you notice. I've done both of these, and I promise you will find them educational.
You may not be aware of this, but it also turns out that different skin color is strongly correlated with different cultural background. Thus, when people talk about racial diversity, they are not strictly talking about getting a balanced distribution of skin albedos.
Now as to what this has to do with work, well it's a little complex to break down here in a Slashdot post. But once you've done some serious professional work, you may discover that teammates with different backgrounds and experiences help your projects along in ways that wouldn't have occurred to you alone.
It seems like it is okay to say anything negative about men, white people, Christians, or US citizens.
I think that has to do with power. None of those groups are exactly underdogs.
I don't think it's ok to say anything negative about people with power. But I do think it's reasonable that those with more power end up getting more criticism than those with less. The obvious reason is that their actions matter more, and so should be more closely examined to make sure that they aren't taking advantage of their power. More subtly, I think that power distorts communication in ways that close off negative opinions, so both people with power and people without it should encourage vigorous examination and frank discourse about the actions of people with power.
Why is it you have concluded that the mere observation of a difference between men and women automatically results in the limiting of women's opportunities?
Because studies show that, on average, people who quote things like that stop their analysis right there, rather than going on to examine the full range of factors and making a nuanced decision.
It doesn't mean that you can't do something in math if you're a women. Far from it, and I know several brilliant women in the fields of science and math. It's just that it explains the likelyhood of a math or science major being male. It's there, why do you ignore it?
Is that true? It seems to me that it would explain that a smaller proportion of women would be math PhDs, not that a smaller proportion of math PhDs would be women.
But even if that's the case, I can see why women in predominately male fields bristle when this comes up. Why? Because even if it's true that on average men are genetically predisposed to be better at math, bringing that up is often a lazy way out of really looking at the many factors that influence how specific, non-average humans end up in life. A good eye-opener for the Slashdot crowd is CS Prof. Ellen Spertus's paper, Why are There so Few Female Computer Scientists?.
I'm a little bit curious how you would consider someone who wrote that he was proficient in only one language. Java is pretty much the only language that I feel comfortable enough with to start off coding right away, but I've dabbled into lots of other languages
The important thing is to be clear about your skill level. You could do it as
Skilled: Java; Familiar: C#, Perl
Personally, I think it's great that people dabble, and it's a given that any good programmer can pick up the rudiments of a new language quickly. But in an interview I'm looking to see not just what skills a person has but whether they have a realistic view of their abilities, and I prefer to see a bias toward modesty.
I look at it this way: the ideal employee is, among other things, thoughtful and honest. If an interviewee seems to be overly modest or too self-critical, that's a problem that I can deal with pretty easily by encouraging them to stretch their range. If an interviewee seems arrogant, foolish, unrealistic, or willing to deceive in order to get what they want, then those characteristics are a big management problem because I have to keep more of an eye on them.
So if I have to choose between two guys of equivalent skill, one who listed only Java and one who claimed strong skills in four different languages, I'll always pick the humble one. But to make sure you get in the door, it's probably best to list all your skills in a way that's upbeat but honest.
I'm glad to let neighbors use my bandwidth, so my SSID is my street number and street name (e.g., "123_Oak").
This was good, in that it led me to meet a couple of the neighbors. But it was bad in that one of them rang my doorbell to get tech support for their own wireless network. *sigh*
Many of them have worked in a single consulting position (same desk, same type of work) for 3-4 years.
Generally I hear that called "contracting" rather than "consulting". Contractors do work; consultants talk about the work. E.g., management consultants mainly tell you how to manage things rather than actually coming in and managing your second-shift workers for you.
Of course, the line is blurry in tech-land, as people who can't do the work often say some pretty dumb things when they try to talk about it. And if you can find somebody who can talk about it usefully, it's natural to ask them to do it as well.
The big consulting firms (e.g. Accenture) don't help the confusion in that their big goal seems to be to use the strength of their actual consultants to breach the gate and then fill companies with just-out-of-college contractors that they pass off as consultants so that they can charge absurd rates for them.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree completely with much of your advice, but I must take issue with this:
I dissagree with the sentiment that it is difficult and costly to start a business - in our industry, startup costs are much lower than in any other industry especially if you start with a Home-Office IT/programming related type of business.
Having started or been involved in starting several businesses, I think the previous poster was right: most people drastically underestimate the cost and difficulty of starting a successful business.
In particular, among friends and acquaintances I've seen two big mistakes. The first is underestimating how much time and money it will take until they're in the black. The other is not realizing that starting a business involves more time and way more responsibility than just having a job.
My three big pieces of advice to first-time entrepreneurs are: 1) If possible, start your business but keep your day job until you have so much work that you can't keep doing both. 2) Have enough cash (or small enough expenses) that you can make it for a year without income. 3) Expect your business to take over most of your life.
No, people haven't stopped having children entirely. But for the past 30 years or so, the U.S. birthrate has been below replacement level.
Replacement rate is somewhere slightly above two births per woman, and the US has been pretty close to that lately. Moreover, US population is expected to increase from 290m to circa 420m by 2050. Why? Because births are not the only way we get new taxpayers; immigration is the major source of US population growth.
So although Europe is facing major demographic problems that demand serious pension system reforms, that's not the case here.
As others have pointed out, the article is talking about something completely different than what you had in mind. Even so:
Any of the enterprise databases will with gobs of memory end up caching the entire database in memory.
That's still much slower than in-memory approaches that don't use a database at all. For apps that are amenable to the stick-it-all-in-RAM approach, serializing all your data access is a performance killer.
A writeable database that doesn't need to be written to disk is not a database, it's called a nonpersistent cache.
Well, there are different ways of guaranteeing reliability than the way databases do it. If you're keeping all your data hot, transaction logs with lazy snapshots may be a better solution than the database's approach, which treats the disk as the master copy and RAM as a place to story temporary copies.
Even so, according to IMDB, total wordwide box office receipts for Spidey 1 & 2 (which are both in the top 15 grossers of all time) is approx 1.6 billion. Must take some kinda nerve to try and claim they made no profit on that.
That's an excellent point. Kids, don't try this at home. It take a trained professional asshole to lie that brazenly.
the moral of the story is, as always: when the company and stockholders win, you better be a stockholder. because if you're an employee, you're screwed.
Could somebody explain to me how on Slashdot we get outraged when somebody without perfect technical knowledge comments on a technical issue but we mod up people who comment on economics without apparently knowing a thing about it?
It's true that sometimes employers and employees play zero-sum games: if one side wins, the other side loses. But the main activity of any company is for investors, managers, workers, suppliers, and customers to play positive-sum games, ones where everybody ends up better off. If you don't get that, you will be unable to comprend how capitalism works.
study that came out that says that outsourcing is good for the economy. but is it? what it really provides is a decline in the quality of jobs in america.
Again, you don't have the faintest idea of what you're talking about. If overseas trade were such a bad thing, then wouldn't drastic increases in trade over the last few decades have resulted in drastically worse standards of living? The answer is no, because trade is generally a positive-sum game, and because the principle of comparative advantage means that trade pays off not just for poor countries, but rich ones as well.
I certainly grant that lowering trade barriers can hurt some workers, even though the populace as a whole gains. Those people we should help, but we can pay for that with plenty of room to spare out of the gains that come from freer trade.
make what?
By "make it" I meant "become productive citizens". Sorry if I was unclear.
Our socety may pay a cost, but our taxpayers shouldn't.
You're missing my point entirely. I'm saying that, as a practical matter, giving them access to certain government services will save money over the long haul.
Take cops. If millions of people are afraid to go to the law, then this aids criminals by providing them with easy pickings. Giving criminals a niche in which they can grow strong incurs huge long-term costs.
And like it or not, most illegal immigrants will end up staying here, especially the ones who grow up here. Rounding all of them up and deporting them is, aside from being morally questionable and practically difficult, a political impossibility. So our choice isn't to have them or not have them; the choice is whether we aid them in becoming productive citizens or not.
As illegal immigrants, they are already not law-abiding.
Ever driven over the speed limit? Well, you're not law abiding either. Clearly, we should make sure your kids can't go to school.
Honestly, have you ever met an illegal immigrant? Coming here, even from Mexico, is hardly a cakewalk. The ones I've met have all been serious, honest, and hardworking. Their willingness to dodge the INS implies nothing about their willingness to commit other, more serious crimes.
As unfunded drains on our economy (often paying no taxes on property or income, and because of their situation, usually not carrying health, life, or auto insurance), they make this a harder place for me to live.
The notion that they are one-way drains on the economy or make this place harder for you to live is unsupported by the data. Unless your life's dream was to become a dishwasher, that is.
The reason they don't pay income taxes is because we don't let them. Some of them would still probably work under the table if they could, but that's true of citizens as well. Ditto for auto insurance. They probably do pay property taxes; as most are renters, that's taken care of through their rent. And I can pretty much guarantee you that most people working at the wages that illegal immigrants get are not paying for health insurance, so that's hardly something you can pin on illegals either.
And immigrants, legal and otherwise, provide the economy with substantial benefits. one study mentions that once you count an immigrant's children, taxpayers make an $80,000 profit on each immigrant. That's not evenly distributed; costs of schooling come now, and the taxes come later. But given our demographics, that's a great thing: if it weren't for immigration, we'd be facing a demographic time bomb just like Europe.
So I agree we should help Mexico. (And free trade is the best way to do that; with more work in Mexico, there's less need for them to come here.) And I agree that we should try to control illegal immigration as much as possible. But for those who are here to stay, we should make sure that they become productive members of society.
This question is on the declaration form you fill out every time you fly to the USA from Canada.
As about 30 other people have pointed out before you posted this, that's a government official with a government form collecting information for a government agency to grant you a shiny government-issued visa.
Cory Doctorow, on the other hand, was grilled by an airline employee with no official form collecting information for an unstated purpose with no notion of what legal authority might be behind it, for what purpose the information was being collected, or how that information would be managed.
But yes, other than that, it's exactly the same.
you are treated like a king if you are Mexican [...] and the cops are not allowed to check if you are legal or not
Yes, in the US it's only royalty and illegal Mexican immgrants that are allowed police protection. [rolls eyes]
The poster might give you the impression that the state of California offers all sorts of special benefits that accrue to illegal aliens. As far as I know, that's not the case; it's just that many government programs help out all people rather than checking to see whether you're a citizen or not.
Personally, as a Cali taxpayer, I'm glad of that. Humanitarian considerations aside, society pays a heavy cost if illegal immigrants are afraid to report crime, or if their children are forced to be sick, malnourished, and ignorant. Whether we should let them come is one question, but as long as they are here to stay we might as well make sure they make it.
What if you can't afford a second machine to cover the "duplicate" test environment?
About 95% of the time I hear this, it's false economy. Most hardware is pretty cheap these days, and good developers are very expensive. It takes very little time savings to justify the purchase of new hardware.
In the few cases where it's too expensive to duplicate hardware, then you can fall back on careful profiling and simulation. For example, if you know that your production hardware has X times the CPU and Y times the I/O bandwidth, you can set performance targets on your development environment that are much lower. Or if you can't afford a network of test boxes to develop your distributed app, then things like VMWare or User Mode Linux will let you find some things out.
Of course, every time your tests diverge from your production environment, you add risk. A classic mistake is to develop a multithreaded app on a single-processor box and then deploy it on a multiple-processor box. So as you get cost savings by reducing hardware, it's good to keep in mind the added cost of inadequate testing.
Myth, eh? Personally, I do no "bolting". The steps I happily follow are
- make it work
- make it right
- make it fast
The notion here is that you get something basic working. Then you refactor your design to be the right one for where you ended up: a simple, clean design. Then you do performance testing, discover what the real bottlenecks are, and find ways to get the speed with minimal design distortion here. The you go back to step 1 and add more functionality.There are a couple of benefits to doing the optimization last. One is that a clean design is relatively easy to optimize. But the big one is that by waiting until you have actual performance data, you get to spend your optimization time on the small number of actual bottlenecks, rather than the very large number of potential bottlenecks. That in turn means that you don't have a lot of premature optimization code of unknown value cluttering up your code base and retarding your progress.
Of course, this is not a license to be completely stupid. Before you start building, you should have a rough plausible architecture in mind. If there are substantial performance risks at the core of a project's architecture, it's worth spending a day or two hacking together an experiment to see the if your basic theories are sound.
As Knuth says, "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: PrematureOptimization is the root of all evil."
I made the comparison not for the purposes of an exact analogy, but in order to evoke the image of an unbalanced financial house of cards. Which is what Social Security is.
Compared with what exactly? I agree that unfunded liabilities aren't so great, and I personally favor funding those liabilities explicitly, but something that has gone 70 years and will go decades more without any adjustment and at least decades further with moderate adjustment is hardly a "financial house of cards".
The only way that Social Security could be even vaguely analogous with a pyramid scheme or a ponzi scheme is if we expected that at some point people would stop having children entirely so there would be old people without any children to pay their pensions. Somehow I'm not expecting that. But if that happens, pensions are the least of our worries.
If you want to see a financial house of cards, take a look at the current US private pension scheme. The PBGC, the government agency that guarantees the solvency of private pensions, is in deep trouble and has been headed that way for years.
It would be nice to see the Bush administration fix immediate and pressing problems with retirement before embarking on ideology-driven, fuzzy-math solutions to problems that are, worst case, decades away.
So for someone to use your online banking, they not only require your pin, but they also have to phyically have your bank card.
See, this attitude is the opening for crime. That's the *goal* of the fancy secure-token card, but that's not necessarily the result.
To get at the money in your online banking account, a bad guy doesn't need the card. He merely needs to convince you to type the confirmation code into a web site under his control. As long as he's prompt, he can still seize control of your bank account and send your money off.
Using a secure token like this doesn't eliminate the opportunity for phishing scams to work; it just requires more cleverness in doing them. That's a step forward for sure, but just a step.
I don't want to be in. [...] So much for Land of the Free.
We, as a free people, have jointly decided that letting old people starve in the streets is bad for us. We have made similar decisions about all sorts of things, like being invaded, getting polio, or getting mercury poisoning. You can't get out of paying for those, and you won't get out of this one, either.
Of course, there's no requirement that you collect Social Security. You're absolutely free to decline the checks and give the money back. What you aren't free to do is get out of paying for the things we've jointly decided are necessary, and you aren't free to welch on the promises that we, through our government, have made to the elderly.
If you don't like this, you're welcome to try to move to a first world country with a less burdensome set of taxes. Let us know how it works out!
No, the best solution is to solve the core problem, and not put bandaids on the symptoms. The core problem is that social security is a giant pyramid scheme. The concept itself is broken and needs to be discarded.
Personally, I agree that saving money for future pension liabilities is a fine idea. But calling the current setup a pyramid scheme is just incorrect. It make me wonder which it is you don't understand: pyramid schemes or Social Security.
Funny thing about that "surplus" - while the deficit was (supposedly) negative, our National Debt was still increasing.
Is that funny? I always thought they were referring to what's known as the "primary deficit/surplus" which is basically the current budget excluding interest. When we have a budget surplus, the total debt can still increase if the surplus is smaller than the interest on the debt. Even if you don't charge anything on the credit card, to get ahead you have to pay them more than they charge you in interest.
Let's say this construction compay hires people based solely on an upper body strength test. And that whiles 80% of men who apply are hired, only 30% of women are. Is this sexist discrimination, do the different numbers simply reflect the fact that men tend to have bigger muscles?
Even with such an apparently clear-cut case, the answer would be "it depends".
The first question I'd ask is "Why did they pick a test so obviously likely to favor males?" If the work involved requires upper body strength and nothing else, then maybe it would be legit. But even simple construction requires a lot more than that. The fact that they picked a test that poorly represented the actual work and one that happens to reinforce the position of the group making the decision makes a suspicion of bias, conscious or not, reasonable.
And this isn't just a theoretical problem. A female friend of a friend spent years doing construction, and seeing the work she does on her own house, I'm sure she was good at it. A big part of why she got out of it was the blatant discrimination and harassment.
It has been social science dogma since the 1960's that all gender differences are socially constructed. This notion was based not on observation but rather on philosophical ideals. The evidence refuting this postulate is substantial
This is true, but I think the reason the the "men are better at math" argument sends some women ballistic is that a some people use "innate differences" as cover for a lot of unfair sex-based treatment. I think much of that is unconscious, but that doesn't make it any less painful for the people on the wrong end of it.
Until we've got good data on actual innate sex differences and a well-tested model of how much those differences play out in the long road to becoming math professors, it's good to keep in mind that for centuries women were excluded from pretty much everything, including things like voting, because it was thought that innate differences made them unsuited for it. Having made a big mistake about innate differences once, I'd rather we erred on the side of caution until all the data is in.
However, skin color isn't a skill except in those rare cases where you worry about sunburn or vitamin D, and having a particular set of reproductive parts isn't a skill unless the goal is to make babies.
Ok, I'm going to try very, very hard to presume this is an honest question and not just somebody trolling. That sound? My teeth just make that grinding noise sometimes; nothing to do with you personally.
You should probably go chat with people you know who have different skin colors and ask them if having a different skin color than the majority has in any way influenced their experiences in life. Alternatively, you could try living in a place where you have an obviously different skin color and see what you notice. I've done both of these, and I promise you will find them educational.
You may not be aware of this, but it also turns out that different skin color is strongly correlated with different cultural background. Thus, when people talk about racial diversity, they are not strictly talking about getting a balanced distribution of skin albedos.
Now as to what this has to do with work, well it's a little complex to break down here in a Slashdot post. But once you've done some serious professional work, you may discover that teammates with different backgrounds and experiences help your projects along in ways that wouldn't have occurred to you alone.
It seems like it is okay to say anything negative about men, white people, Christians, or US citizens.
I think that has to do with power. None of those groups are exactly underdogs.
I don't think it's ok to say anything negative about people with power. But I do think it's reasonable that those with more power end up getting more criticism than those with less. The obvious reason is that their actions matter more, and so should be more closely examined to make sure that they aren't taking advantage of their power. More subtly, I think that power distorts communication in ways that close off negative opinions, so both people with power and people without it should encourage vigorous examination and frank discourse about the actions of people with power.
Why is it you have concluded that the mere observation of a difference between men and women automatically results in the limiting of women's opportunities?
Because studies show that, on average, people who quote things like that stop their analysis right there, rather than going on to examine the full range of factors and making a nuanced decision.
It doesn't mean that you can't do something in math if you're a women. Far from it, and I know several brilliant women in the fields of science and math. It's just that it explains the likelyhood of a math or science major being male. It's there, why do you ignore it?
Is that true? It seems to me that it would explain that a smaller proportion of women would be math PhDs, not that a smaller proportion of math PhDs would be women.
But even if that's the case, I can see why women in predominately male fields bristle when this comes up. Why? Because even if it's true that on average men are genetically predisposed to be better at math, bringing that up is often a lazy way out of really looking at the many factors that influence how specific, non-average humans end up in life. A good eye-opener for the Slashdot crowd is CS Prof. Ellen Spertus's paper, Why are There so Few Female Computer Scientists?.
The important thing is to be clear about your skill level. You could do it as Personally, I think it's great that people dabble, and it's a given that any good programmer can pick up the rudiments of a new language quickly. But in an interview I'm looking to see not just what skills a person has but whether they have a realistic view of their abilities, and I prefer to see a bias toward modesty.
I look at it this way: the ideal employee is, among other things, thoughtful and honest. If an interviewee seems to be overly modest or too self-critical, that's a problem that I can deal with pretty easily by encouraging them to stretch their range. If an interviewee seems arrogant, foolish, unrealistic, or willing to deceive in order to get what they want, then those characteristics are a big management problem because I have to keep more of an eye on them.
So if I have to choose between two guys of equivalent skill, one who listed only Java and one who claimed strong skills in four different languages, I'll always pick the humble one. But to make sure you get in the door, it's probably best to list all your skills in a way that's upbeat but honest.
I'm glad to let neighbors use my bandwidth, so my SSID is my street number and street name (e.g., "123_Oak").
This was good, in that it led me to meet a couple of the neighbors. But it was bad in that one of them rang my doorbell to get tech support for their own wireless network. *sigh*
Many of them have worked in a single consulting position (same desk, same type of work) for 3-4 years.
Generally I hear that called "contracting" rather than "consulting". Contractors do work; consultants talk about the work. E.g., management consultants mainly tell you how to manage things rather than actually coming in and managing your second-shift workers for you.
Of course, the line is blurry in tech-land, as people who can't do the work often say some pretty dumb things when they try to talk about it. And if you can find somebody who can talk about it usefully, it's natural to ask them to do it as well.
The big consulting firms (e.g. Accenture) don't help the confusion in that their big goal seems to be to use the strength of their actual consultants to breach the gate and then fill companies with just-out-of-college contractors that they pass off as consultants so that they can charge absurd rates for them.
Oops! Thanks for the fix!