bcg1

Recently referred a friend for an opening at the company where I work. He didn't even get an interview because someone from HR has decided that all developers should have a four year degree (he only has an associates degree despite 15+ years experience). Maybe this would be fine for entry level positions, but it is straight up age discrimination for senior level ones (since there are still talented people in the workforce who went to school when CS programs were much less common).

One theory I have is that HR depts are pushing back against the upward trend of developer salaries; if they create an onerous process that tries to make candidates feel inadequate, it might make it more likely that they can land a low ball offer with whoever is desperate enough to stick it out. Also, if the HR department itself is incompetent and not capable of attracting talent, they can always point to their tests etc to "prove" that there are just no qualified candidates in the workforce.

Also, what is with all the coding tests etc? That stuff is obviously useless. Why don't hiring managers just ask candidates to read some code that is similar to what they will be working on, and observe how they approach stepping through it and how quick they can understand it? That is far more similar to what real work looks like most of the time.

Many people correctly surmise that the benefits to individuals are temporary and will sunset, after which their taxes will be higher than when they started.

Also, provisions such as repealing the individual health insurance mandate lead to an increase in other expenses, though admittedly those are not federal taxes. I work for a health insurance company, and earlier this year the company filed with the state regulators to say there might be close to a 50% hike in premiums, depending on whether or not the individual mandate was repealed. Whatever your feelings are about that politically, the increase in premiums will be real and directly related to that bill, and the money is fungible so people can't be blamed if they consider it an increase.

One more thing, a deficit funded tax cut today means a tax increase tomorrow to pay for principal+interest. People could be thinking of that when they say their taxes will go up.

Fair enough, maybe it depends on your definition of "full bust".

But consider this... if the price were to go back to where it was just a year ago before the current mania (which is a common thing to happen when a financial bubble pops, after overcompensating to the downside) then it would be a 95% retracement from the highs (where, almost self-evidently, many people were buyers). And BTW a 95% retracement requires 20,000% gains to break even.

If you gave me a $1000 and I gave you $50 back, I think most people would say that I took all their money, even though technically they could still buy a couple pizzas or something.

So, again, it just depends on your definition of "full bust"

Bitcoin absolutely could go full bust. It is not a physical commodity, there is no utility outside of its perceived value. It is not a company, so it doesn't even have book value as its floor. And the technology is open source and well known, so there is nothing special or scarce about Bitcoin technology at this point. Even the companies that have capital investments in Bitcoin hardware could just repurpose that for a forked coin or possibly some other purpose altogether

About one-third of internet users stream cable TV without paying for it by using credentials of someone they don't live with

There is no way this is true. Not saying that it isn't a problem, but statements like the above are approaching the same level of BS as when the ad industry says most people would prefer to trade their privacy for the privilege of being manipulated by targeted ads.

"On the oth­er hand, we still lack a de­cent high-quality JSON Schema lan­guage."

This turns data integration with JSON into a total nightmare. And to make matters worse, Swagger is a total shitshow. Combine the different flavors of JSON schema with OpenAPI/Swagger and you have are left with a regression from SOAP/XML that approaches the same complexity with with fewer features and no standards.

Even mf COBOL has a standard schema definition for data. For new projects I'm still cranking out XSD definitions and doing transformations to JSON if I have to. Even if they come out with a decent schema format I would probably skip it and jump straight to gRPC, Thrift, or some other IDL and just continue to treat JSON as an "also supports".

This should give the big Wall St banks the ability to muck with crypto prices however they choose, just like they can do with gold and silver and other commodities (for example, Goldman magically closed gold positions and sold short 2 days before historic 25% price drop in 2 trading days in 2013[0])

Hopefully people will read those contracts and understand how delivery actually works and realize that COMEX or whoever can halt delivery and settle in cash if they want to, etc.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/id/100630626

That's what the insurance industry is for. Just make the companies liable, and they will seek insurance. Insurance companies will force them to take reasonable measures in order to carry a policy. Nothing new under the sun.

Criminals, on occassion, fail to comply with the law.

It is correct to hesitate to guess ethnicity based on names. Quite sure there are plenty of people of color named Smith and Johnson.

Also, even if these were Caucasian names, the article states that the system disproportionately targets people of color; looking at the 10 most common combinations proves nothing one or another with respect to the assertion in the article.

Critical thought often requires intentional effort, even by those who value it. And many people that I come across do not even seem to value critical thought, especially when it comes to politics... to the contrary, there exists a movement promoting the idea that thinking is a practice that makes you some sort of elitist.

I find your post to be cynical.

The article you attribute to Adafruit is not written by them, they just linked to it from their blog, ostensibly as food for thought and discussion.

A couple of years ago I had the opportunity to interact with Limor and PT over email after they reached out to me in response to a project I'd posted on a forum. I found them to be gracious, supportive, and genuine, and based on the conversations we had I find your claim that they don't care about open-source hardware to be dubious.

Why are we to assume this is a bad thing, or that it is even something that won't be sorted out by natural selection?

True enough, I just think it is a bit misleading to act as if that is somehow the colloquial Model F Keyboard when really they are recreating a pretty obscure keyboard relative to the XT or AT Model f's.

All of your criticisms are kind of superficial and senseless:

- type annotations + HTML in comments - it is called javadoc

- 80 column limit - lowest common denominator for most people, also historically part of Sun code conventions for Java - http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/documentation/...

- single character variable names - who cares, a symbol is a symbol

- variable declarations inside loops - more readable, no chance of referencing stale value outside of scope, and HotSpot will probably recompile anyhow

Article is a little misleading... you don't need "extensive modification" to use a Model F keyboard with a modern computer... the Model F AT keyboard can plug directly into a PS/2 port and be used as-is:

https://deskthority.net/wiki/IBM_Model_F#IBM_Personal_Comput...

This article seems to be about a business that is actually re-engineering the Model F to be more modern... which is certainly interesting and impressive, but the article is a little misleading.

One really nice feature of these keyboards is that they use capacitance sensing to detect when a key is actuated, instead of a matrix of columns and rows, so there is no ghosting effect when multiple keys are pressed. If you disassemble the keyboard you can actually type right on the PCB with your fingers like a touchpad.

Would love to see the creative functions y'all can come up with to validate this...

Are you sure it wasn't Jasmin?

http://jasmin.sourceforge.net/

His father inherited his money from his own father, who moved to the Klondike in order to dodge the German draft and became wealthy by running brothels catering to gold prospectors.

Tried it out to see the easter egg... not only does it work, but the game is pretty awesome too

This feels like deja vu, except that I can remember that we've heard all this before. Still waiting since 2008 or so for Ruby and Rails to eat Java's lunch.

I have no problem with Ruby or Node BTW, but let's be real.

And pizzagate

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/03/26/521545788/...

Sorry, but this article is kind of full of assumptions and it has more storytelling than facts. Multiple times author says "I have no objective measure but one time I met a guy..."

Perhaps the worst assumption is that we have a capitalist economy/society and thus its ills can safely be attributed to capitalism. In America at least, we have a mixed economy in which the state is deeply influential in most industries through regulation and/or outright participation. Additionally, all income can potentially be taxed and interest rates and money supply are controlled by a quasi-governmental corporation (and since barter is rare, money is in general half of every transaction).

I would suggest that it is possible that many (or a majority?) of the "pointless" jobs exist because the income tax (if people aren't working, they aren't being taxed) and because of government laws and regulations (more laws and regs = more pointless paper pushing = more people being taxed). My theory has as much logical support as the author provides at least.

Also might want to look up the term "contrafreeloading"

If you have these compiling with a modern toolchain, you may wish to ditch the python subprocess wrapper and compile them with something like emscripten (compile to javascript) or NestedVM (compile to JVM bytecode). Then you won't be exposing 30 year old unsafe code directly to the internet... at least it would sandboxed. If you use emscripten you could even have the programs run client side.

I have a fork of NestedVM that I've been using with success but I don't have any simple examples for you:

https://github.com/bgould/nestedvm

Here is an example of compiling the Apache Thrift compiler to run on the JVM:

https://github.com/bgould/thrift/tree/nestedvm/contrib/neste...

And I have a version of the toolchain precompiled as a docker image:

https://hub.docker.com/r/bcg1/nestedvm/ https://github.com/bgould/thrift/blob/nestedvm/contrib/neste...

Also exciting is the "Fibers" functionality for I/O as well as the updates to the vm instructions that will more naturally facilitate JIT compilation. Especially now that a 2.2 release has been cut, I wouldn't be surprised if JIT compilation makes it upstream soon:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2017-03/msg00...

1) Your data is in the cloud, you do have do worry about controlling it yourself.

2) There is no perpetual license to worry about, only pay as long as you need your data.

3) Access allowed business people to muddle through creating database that IT hated to have to maintain... this is obviously different.

Tilda should not be left off the list.

https://github.com/lanoxx/tilda

Why do you think rates are so low? Hint: its because the Fed printed a bunch of money to monetize the debt.

This is good advice but I think it downplays the seriousness of government insolvency and the repercussions with respect to investing.

The worst case scenario for millenials is not just getting 3/4 of our promised social security; it could be far worse.

To wit, the national debt increased from ~$5 trillion to about ~$10 trillion on GWB's watch (doubled). It increased from ~$10 trillion to ~$20 trillion on BHO's watch (doubled). DJT has promised massive new spending on infrastructure, increasing funding for border patrol etc, a massive military buildup, no changes to SS or Medicare, and massive tax cuts - so it is reasonable to believe we are still on track to double the national debt again within the next 8 years. That is something not unlike exponential (and BTW that "national debt" is just the level of outstanding treasury debt; the actual unfunded future liabilities are much much higher).

To cover the massive debts of the government (and maintain the stability of the economy and society) massive amounts of new money will need to be created to monetize government debt. This has already started, as the base money supply in the US has quadrupled since 2009. Velocity is low so we don't see the inflation (except in things like stocks, bonds, fine art, and tech startups) but DJT's Keynesian wet dream should get velocity up at least long enough for inflation to start showing up in the real economy, and even that doesn't get the snowball rolling, it is unreasonable to believe that velocity will stay so low forever and that the new money will not start flowing through the economy.

In any case, in such an environment bonds will get savaged and there will be great economic dislocations. A simple index-fund based asset allocation between US stocks, bonds, and international stocks is not necessarily going to work in the next 30 years as it did in the past 30. Past results are not guarantees of future returns.

That said, I think taking 15% of your income and sticking with a strategy that you are comfortable with is great advice. The best way to get rich quickly is to do it slowly indeed. But investing in the near-to-medium term might get interesting, just sayin ;)

I agree, the sodastream machine is phenomenal... I drink seltzer almost exclusively, and before I had the machine I hated having to deal with all the empty plastic bottles. I'm not sure that soda stream has a huge cost benefit over buying seltzer when in bulk when it is on sale... but I like that it doesn't generate garbage and also I like fact that it is much more compact than storing a bunch of bottled water.

Also, to nitpick, I think club soda is not quite the same thing... I believe it usually has some sort of sodium or potassium salt while seltzer is just H2O + CO2 like you describe.

Not sure if the flavored bottle would even really be that effective... and $25 for the bottle seems kind of expensive just to be able to try it out, especially since this seems fairly simple to DIY.