CaptainDecisive

Not only for a surprisingly long time, but also in surprisingly good condition. For example at Vindolanda on Hadrian's Wall archeologists have found not one or two, or even ten but over 5000 amazingly preserved Roman shoes that were apparently thrown away into the fortress's moat and survived buried in the mud <https://www.vindolanda.com/Blog/the-curators-favourite-shoes>.

Hilariously they're never found a pair of shoes, only singles. So that's why they think they were thrown away as rubbish, because one shoe broke so they threw it in the ditch. In the museum on site there's a fantastic "wall of shoes" on display where you can see the amazing leatherwork from 2000 years ago <https://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/37305>.

I lived on 2nd Ave NYC for a while which matched your observations on interacting with neighbours. However there's an interesting urbanist video [1] that suggests that even in a higher density neighbourhood with appartment buildings, the amount of traffic on the road affects both how many friends you have and how much you socialise with neighbours in your building. Ie in a car lite environment, everyone is friendlier.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESgkcFbGiL8

So really we should be asking when a car is going to break the mythical 500 km/h barrier and not some also-ran number ;-)

Although apparently that barrier was broken in 1937 by Thunderbolt, so I'm not sure what record we're actually talking about here.

Second this approach. If someone interrupts, just keep talking. Do not back down before the interrupter stops. Think of it as a conversational filibuster :-)

If both parties keep talking it will get awkward for everyone in the conversation. This is what you want, as it will lead to immediate understanding that an interruption happened and that it's not OK. You can calmly discuss afterwards that you were interrupted, and after a few occurrences even those with only a modicum of social awareness will get the message and change behaviour. And peer pressure can then help those stragglers.

Your comment is interesting because it hadn't even occurred to me that the parent comment might be being sarcastic. I thought the emphasis on love was being serious. My experience is older folks (maybe 80 and up? Not really sure) start to lose confidence or ability with driving and give it up. Hence need to walk and take public transport. So less cars and a more walkable neighborhood is a win for them as well as everybody else :-)

Agreed, I've read you get about 4g peak deceleration going down stairs. But people seem to survive that process on a regular basis. So a temporary 10g is not a problem, and the effects of gravity loads on the human body are well studied and understood by military and aerospace organizations.

I think you've got a fair point. But democracy is the least worst system of government that we know of. This idea has been around for a long time. I know the Churchill quote 'Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.' Apparently he said this in the 1940s but he attributed it to some earlier source.

Modern well established democracies have just had a longer time to refine the system to a slightly less shitty version of the democracy that come before them.

So you might be right, but I wonder if it's the journey that matters? Ie is it that countries have to go through the process in order to get to a better place? So you can't just drop a democracy system from another country in place somewhere, and hope that it works. That of course doesn't mean you shouldn't learn from the mistakes of others.

I'm a kiwi and did the reverse and moved to Scotland. I do know a number of people who were offered jobs in NZ while still abroad. Technical sales, developer, psychiatrist. That's just anecdotal, but it's definitely possible.

However my approach in moving to the UK was to actually show up to look for a job. Seems to me like it's very different having a faceless person send in a CV from the other side of the world, compared to them walking through your front door wearing a suit, shaking your hand and saying 'Hi, my name's Peter'. If you're right there in front of them they know you're serious, not just firing off random speculative applications. And human nature is that you form an opinion of someone within moments of meeting them, so if that opinion is positive you'll be treated very differently to an email sitting in their Inbox. If someone then asks 'Do you have a visa?' then you can explain that if they offer you the job then you will get the visa and have that conversion with them.

I understand that approach may be more difficult to commit to than applying remotely, due to current job, family, financial reasons - but it worked for me.

One funny thing I've realized is that I like the smell of coal fires. It must have been horrible back when cities were choking on it, but coal is so completely phased out now that when I occasionally do smell coal smoke from a domestic fire or say a steam engine I really like it.

I did some work for an electricity utility and they wanted to get the pole IDs described in the article into our database, alongside the GIS data. The client explained that getting the IDs was kinda difficult and there were several different data sources for the various regions they provided service to. By and by we found a guy there who knew how everything worked and promised he'd get us the data that we needed - which he did.

But he told me an interesting story - the utility had about 50,000 power poles in their network. But due to various historical reasons and how their assets were digitized over the years he reckoned there were probably about 1000 of them that were on their maps, but that didn't actually exist anymore. And interestingly, he thought the inverse was also true; that there were perhaps 1000 poles out there that weren't on any of their maps. Big ten meter tall poles, some probably carrying live cables - didn't know they were there.

Generally yes, weather is less of an impact on rail, but occasionally you can get <cue ominous music> the Wrong Type of Snow (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_wrong_type_of_snow)

I live in Edinburgh, and I've personally counted half a dozen of these little, one or two person IBS type shops open up round town in the last couple of years. They have a small retail space at the front, an open workshop at the back, and the mechanic stops working on a bike to have a chat with you when you come in to the shop. Edinburgh's pretty bike friendly, so given the number of these shops springing up, they must have a viable business model here.

I have a Macbook Pro (2015 15") at work and a Dell XPS 15 (9550) at home, and personally feel that I'm a very lucky lad to have the two best laptops in the world. My previous job I had a couple of high-end Dell Precision laptops and while they were nice enough machines they were bricks compared to my current laptops, which look far better, feel much nicer, slip unnoticeably into my backpack for my bike commute, and yet have all the heavy hitting hardware I need for my GIS development work. For me, the "toys" win hands down.

The SpatiaLite extension (https://www.gaia-gis.it/fossil/libspatialite/index) handles spatial data and includes indexing. It's solid and we've been using it in production for years. The only real downside I've experienced is that the SpatiaLite-gui browser is a bit flaky.

I wonder where those 9 people are though. Locally, for a given job opening, that could perhaps be true. Nationally however, unemployment is at historically low levels in many Western economies; 4.3% in the UK, 4.4% in the US, 3.9% in Germany, 6.2% in Canada, 4.8% in New Zealand.

Which should then drive an increase in wages. But it hasn't, and economists don't know why - or at least as far as this armchair economist has read ;-)

I don't know what the actual rules were regarding eligibility, but I am a permanent resident of the UK and not a British citizen, and I voted yesterday.

So some non British citizens were able to vote.

I'm also not convinced on the OP's idea, although I found it very interesting how the street cross section diagrams highlighted just how much space is consumed by streets. By it's also very interesting to see how public opinion goes in circles by comparing the 1850 Paris example. Some of the examples of slums that were demolished (eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Par...) were obviously very run down, but are precisely the sort of places that have been gentrified and are now worth crazy money and considered very desirable places to live.

He is likely saying that he interviewed 300 people to fill about six engineer positions, given he states a 1-in-50 hire rate from interviews. Still, that means 500 applicants per open position which, I agree, seems high.

In tech-ese, his use of the word "position" is referring to the abstract job role, rather than an actual instance of that role.

And further to this: which top companies? In TrialPay's case he lists his dozen elite companies. But what happens if you're hiring in a market where none of those companies have an office? For example the city I work in has a lot of large financial firms, but do those count as a "top company" on someone's CV? If you're hiring for one of those firms then probably yes, but if you're hiring for say a web startup then it wouldn't help.

So the vast majority of companies hiring will have to build their own "top companies" list, based on local conditions. Which in most markets means doing your own research and getting to know local conditions, aka networking.

Yup, that's what people usually really mean when they ask "Where are you from?"

I went NZ -> New York, NY -> Scotland and if I'm say on holiday somewhere, doesn't really matter whether it's in the UK, Europe, US, and someone asks "Where are you from?" then I have to think.

Depending on my mood I might answer New Zealand because that's the accent they hear and they really mean "What country were you born in?". Or I might answer Edinburgh or Scotland because that's where I live and consider my home, in which case the response is often "... but you don't have a Scottish accent", and I then explain and they get the answer they were looking for or expecting. Or I might answer "Where does the wind come from?" and disappear down the rabbit hole.

My children have triple citizenship and will no doubt have their own difficulties with "Where are you from?" in later life.

Yeah, same for me with Chrome. Irritating, isn't it. The site seems poorly designed. I can see a Flashblock icon in the top left so I know what's broken, but I can't click on the Flashblock icon to enable the content, as it won't take focus. Despite being interested in the topic I didn't dig deeper, so they lose a reader.

When my wee boys stand on their Lego I see it as a wonderful teachable moment. Lego is a great company to provide me with so many educational opportunities.

The parable about the elephant and the goldfish was wonderful.

I imagined, when the time is right, telling it to my little boys as I tucked them in to bed at night. And then imagined one of them coming in to my bedroom later that night and beginning with "Papa, why did the elephant ...".

There's a very large Windows developer community. And some of those developers have thought about "working individually, in smaller companies, or in startups, building consumer-facing apps or services", and then thought about having to learn a new language, and thought about having to learn a new development environment, and thought about having people seeing you with one of those phones (1), and decided that it wasn't worth the effort or pain.

So some of those developers are just the sort of people who might make the leap into the Windows 8 ecosystem. Microsoft has always looked after developers so I agree with fpgeek that it will be more about PR and marketing and image than the ability to attract developers. Indeed PR and marketing and reality distortion was what enabled Apple to become the dominant player in the smartphone market.

(1) See the religious wars article that happened to be on the front page concurrently with this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4150951

In Scotland there's an interesting situation like you mention where children born in Jan and Feb are able to choose which school year they start, either when they're 4.5 or 5.5. Children born from March onwards will start school the following year while those born in December or earlier will start school the previous year.

My older boy is a Jan birthday and we're dalaying him starting school till he's 5.5 for reasons that include those mentioned in TFA.

To continue the Star Wars analogy, the great thing about technological advancement is that as sooner or later some unknown farm boy shows up out of nowhere and bulls-eyes the fucking exhaust port and then, sha-boom, everything changes. And the powers that be never see it coming.

Now please excuse me, I have a movie to watch.

SPAM - please remove

Specializing is a very good idea ... for some people. It does however have it's down sides. One of those is that you can end up quite restricted geographically. Ie, you specialize in industry A or technology B and want to live in city X or country Y and unfortunately those options are not compatible. People optimize for different things and I've deliberately stayed a generalist to enable me to move to wherever I want to live and have no problems finding employment.

But for every one of those wealthy Americans who is looking for a way out there is at least one wealthy person, if not ten, from China, Malaysia, South Africa, well, as you say, everywhere - looking for a way in to the US.

Their money comes with them.

We live in a global economy, however the number of doors or opportunities that are opened to you is related to how wealthy and/or educated you are.

Remember we're talking about the top 1% or 0.1% of the population here. The unemployment rate simply doesn't enter their quality of life equation. But quality of life is a big deal for rich people.

There are a number of surveys (Mercer, Economist, International Living etc) that rank countries according to quality of life factors and it's always the same places at the top of the list: Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand, North America, maybe Singapore and Japan. These are all, unsuprisingly, expensive places to live.

Wealthy people immigrating is a global phenomenon too; a few months ago there was a spate of news articles regarding rich Chinese looking to get out of China due to the low quality of life (eg http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2077139,00.htm...).