artsrc

You say "gatekeeping device" like it is negative. All companies I have worked for have had a system of gatekeeping that includes things like university qualifications. I don't see why this system can't be improved.

Many companies now invent their own proficiency exams. We do.

Medical graduates work in a specific setting under supervision for a period after extensive education. I don't think the conditions of their work are ideal, but many people make it through without burn out.

Although technologies are changing, there are some things that transcend technology. Concepts about like documentation, naming, decomposition, components, interfaces, concurrency, locking, algorithm efficiency, many considerations of user experience.

White Light is actually a mix of colours, the rainbow. You can split it into parts with a glass prism, or in good weather a sprinkler?

Light is a bit like a wave through the air and in the blue light the waves are closer together.

The sky aboves us has a small amount of dust.

Because the blue light waves are closer together they hit more dust.

This means they are more likely to bounce towards us, so we see blue when we look up at the sky.

At sunset the blue waves are more still more likely to hit dust, and so be blocked, so we see red.

Not simple enough, but I gave it a go.

In the discussing the "acid rain scare" and Scandinavia, the situation with fish and lakes there is worthwhile understanding. I did a quick google, but my searching is probably no better than yours:

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-009-3385-9_...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3698327/

There may or may not be be a story on acidification of lakes in the USA, but I am ignorant on that.

building a lane of high speed urban transport is really expensive.

And a rail lane has 50 times the passenger capacity of a private motor vehicle lane.

So if the problem is linking people to sfo, rail is much cheaper.

You need to get the link to rail at both ends right. Maybe you need baggage check and parking available in Marin county where you get on the train.

Some say other things:

If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/mar/03/tim-cook-...

Let's imagine you care about educational outcomes and child poverty, what kinds of things would help?

Certainly free and easy access to sex education, contraception and abortion is something that is a good policy.

People, even poor people, have always, and will always want children.

Once children are born to poor parents, you need to address that poverty, or you will get poor educational outcomes for those children.

Certainly stigmatizing poor people, rather than focusing on bad luck they have had, will provoke different policy outcomes.

LaMattina counters that pricing should be based not on R&D costs but on the value a drug delivers to patients.

I love this line. We should do it for oxygen. Your bill is pretty high because oxygen delivers a lot of value.

Pricing should be based on cost of provision. Because if it is higher in a market economy someone else can enter the market and provide at a lower cost.

Amazon will sell you audio files, they won't sell them to me. I live in the wrong country.

Amazon will sell me a CD at the same price you pay, plus shipping.

Apple will sell me audio files, at a 30% premium over what they charge you.

The thing you watch in the living room will increasingly be connected to the internet, and be able to function interactively.

In the kitchen appliances will increasingly be connected to the internet and be able to download recipes.

The ingredients list your blender displays for Pesto will be transmitted in HTML. But I will write it in markdown.

Your crispy skinned pork roasting application will execute as JavaScript. I wrote it in JavaScript, I will think about writing it in Clojure next time.

ReST shows that a person can invent a technical term, write a long dissertation on what it means, clarify any ongoing misconceptions on the web, and have people use the word to mean whatever they like.

http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hyperte...

REST APIs must be hypertext-driven

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj819168.aspx

Using the REST Services with .NET In order to make use of JSON serialization in .NET

This is not new. Codd spent ages talking about why every relational database was not a relational database.

My ideological fairy tale is that hiring the most qualified person leads to better outcomes.

My reading of this analysis is that they compared 100% male boards, to ones with at least one female (but still many males). And found under performance in the all male boards.

And anyway do boards run companies, or do they just hire the people who do, and vet large decisions?

Maybe a diverse board is better than a homogenous one, even if the individuals are less capable?

I don't think the conclusion that women are better on average is well supported by the Credit Suisse study.

I wish people who believe it would just invest in female led companies or start an index fund of such companies. Let the market sort it out.

I think a fund that invested in companies which made a reasonable attempt to hire the best people would out perform based on analysis I have seen.

In particular about 10% of hereditary company CEOs are significantly worse managers than the 10% worst hired CEOs. (I am sure that can be phrased better, sorry)

I would go a slightly lower temperature than sea level boiling point.

I think you put hot water in.

Creating really nice steamed milk is more difficult than creating an intense coffee liquid that will I enjoy.

operation of these plants that are vital for steady, dependable electricity supply

Maybe.

http://theconversation.com/baseload-power-is-a-myth-even-int...

Solar usually generates the most supply when there is the most demand, when the air conditioners are on in summer.

It think this is a pricing problem. I run my dishwasher in the middle of the night because I get charged the least for electricity then. If I got charged less I would run the dishwasher in the middle of the day.

If a timer could turn my freezer down in the middle of the day, then used the stored coldness for both the freezer and fridge the rest of the day that would be cool too.

It seems to me that all you need to gain above average return is to identify someone who will accept below average returns.

For a long time US shares that paid high dividends were disadvantaged from a tax perspective compared to those that paid low dividends. So if you are a zero tax entity (retirement fund) you could reasonably consistently outperform by selecting those companies which pay high dividends.

I work for a company where we are first banned from trading for a period, then given shares, which we must then sell over a certain period to get a particular tax treatment. We always feel that the shares trade lower over the period we must sell. And higher when we can't sell.

These are all fairly public, and I think just the tip of the iceberg.

What about the other half of the uncertainty?

The company does not know how much revenue each of those ideas will deliver.

People would work it out...

In Sydney, we have always had daycare next to home or work, in San Francisco I put the kids in a bike trailer.

The number one thing that worries me about my 9 and 12 year old getting to and from school are the cars. The 12 year old could bike to school if it were not for cars. The 9 year old walks, as did the 12 year old before starting high school and catching the bus.

Cars can be handy for carrying stuff. On the other hand I like strollers as a shopping trolly that goes all the way home.

In my family the person who does not work does not drive at all...

And disposable diapers (nappies) are cheap delivered. And you can use re-usable ones with a service that comes to your house.

life is better when I separate whatever holds the state from whatever has the behavior

If you are not doing what is traditionally taught as OO, and you are doing something better why not say that?

I wonder why you don't say: "OO is an inferior design because it tangles mutable state with behavior"

"Not OO" should not be pejorative. OO is definitely sometimes wrong.

Perhaps the male monkeys are brought up differently (I bet they are), and some part of the difference is the mothers rearing style (perhaps from culture or genetics).

I want to quote http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hyperte... :

I am getting frustrated by the number of people calling any HTTP-based interface a REST API.

If REST is to mean something useful then it should mean more than following the HTTP protocol.

This stuff from the article is in the HTTP spec:

People have a tendency to route everything, including non-safe operations, through a GET.

The Http Spec http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-9.1:

In particular, the convention has been established that the GET and HEAD methods SHOULD NOT have the significance of taking an action other than retrieval. These methods ought to be considered "safe".

I don't think "REST == Good" for all API's. In 2014! I think people who want to tell us about REST should know Fielding said.

Universities can put their whole course online for free and still charge $30K per year because you are paying for credentials or something.

Community colleges are quite cheap. $46 per course in San Francisco.

Lots of programming courses. http://www.ccsf.edu/NEW/en/educational-programs/ccsf-catalog...

These people were not getting an MBA from Stanford.

Eventually, software will handle that situation better than any human.

In the video you show 2 out of 3 affected cars crashed. In an automated car world eventually 0 out of 3 cars would have crashed.

Compared to any driver, a driverless car will react faster, and knows more accurately its own speed, and the speed and position of the object moving across in front of it.

A driverless also knows better than most drivers what is possible, including braking distance, turn radius etc.

So when the software is written to handle that situation it will always do better than I would, and sometimes do better than a fully alert Sebastian Vettel.

We lost the fight with viruses a decade ago. If you get infected with a deadly viral disease, like rabies, it's curtains. There's nothing any hospital can do for you except sedate you until you're dead.

The fight we have not yet one is the fight against poverty. Not many wealthy people die of rabies.

AIDS which was once fatal, is no longer, provided you can afford the treatment.

Software for in-house use might be fine.

Bureaucracy reduces efficiency.

The more organizationally significant the software the worse risk there is.

Processes and procedures are the ways institutions manage risk.

So the more significant the software is the less efficient the production of it is.

Amazon have a Kindle product that is an Android fork with serious market share. I don't know if Google has anything in the Kindle market place with GMail etc.

The fact that this sluggishness is not present in Visual Basic programs implies this is the library, not the programmers or the language.

Sorry I was not clear enough.

I am not making any kind of sufficiently smart compiler claim (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SufficientlySmartCompiler).

You think I am saying that a compiler can do optimization better than a human.

What I assert is that the implementation language of a the tool that generates machine code guarantees nothing about either the source language, or the quality of the generated code. This was the assertion of the parent that invalid. He said that because the Java JIT compiler was written in C, that necessarily implies that the generated machine code would be slower that C.

Consider an Assembler, written in C, that generates machine code. By your logic you can't argue that assembly code is always less efficient than C.

Or alternatively Fortran compilers, written in C, which produce machine code that outperforms code generated from C for many tasks.

I agree that C code is currently faster than Java in most benchmarks:

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?t...

There is no contradiction that a compiler written in a language with expensive semantics (say python), could compile a program written in another language (say C) to produce highly efficient machine code.

The JVM operations, such as JIT compilation and garbage collection, are bound by the performance of C code.

The performance of the code you write depends significantly on the quality of the machine code produced by the JIT compiler. This quality of this code is not theoretically dependent on the implementation language of the JIT.

C++ is a tool for language experts. If you can effectively apply that expertise it is extremely expressive and efficient.

Java does have some unfortunate complexity, but I don't think it is in the same league.

Java also includes a library that is more extensive in some areas than the vanilla standard C++ one.

The JVM is also more robust to some types of programmer errors than any run time for C++ that I know of.