peter-row

I think their marketing is off.

It's 10-20% of the price of a segway, and you can climb stairs, and carry them much more easily. They also look easy to put on (unlike rollerblades).

If they can sell 500 units, they'll easily hit their stretch goals. I think they'll do OK.

They just shouldn't be afraid of being the next segway - segway didn't fail because it was "dorky". pg was using that as an example of the problems companies get when they run fat and are too cloistered. Segway had a lot of other problems (with the same root cause) - it was way too expensive, and it was too awkward outside a controlled environment (both of which these skates seem to solve). It also tried to sell 50,000 units on the first iteration, while these guys are selling maybe 1000 (for the kickstarter), and can then tweak things based on customer feedback.

Also, not knowing what scope a variable has when creating closures.

Yes and yes. It's still probably the biggest upset ever, but not as unlikely as their model suggests.

I think he's saying it's a souped-up poisson model, not an agent based model. It's not trying to predict individual behavior.

A poisson model is probably valid, but it should perhaps be refined a bit. Maybe it should account for a systematic drift if the whole team plays badly (or a vital player, like the goal keeper, has a bad day). But it's probably really hard to calibrate that, and it's probably not too relevant unless you want to model major upsets.

Statistically, high paid CEOs are worth less than low paid ones. There's a negative correlation between CEO pay and stock performance.

FTA, it seems she's front-running some approvals requirements and the sales / payola cycle by running a testing lab as well as developing the tests.

To IT people, this is counterintuitive. You don't vertically integrate, you go for a horizontal slice. Intel won by making chips, not making whole systems (like IBM did).

I guess vertical integration might make more sense in healthcare though, for regulatory and market reasons. I guess the market might be a bit more like IBM renting out mainframes than Intel selling CPU to OEMs. Also, making the tests cheaper (which is the main thing she's doing) might be unattractive to labs, if cost-plus pricing is popular - existing providers might not want to cut their prices.

Just a stupid question ... what is it?

edit: Answered in other people's comments - it's somewhere between HTML5BoilerPlate and Bootstrap - a basic "hello world" bunch of HTML / SASS / js boilerplate code. This one has an emphasis on mobile.

Can you fix it by adding random gaussian noise to the input?

No, the ASU (which is part of the government) is doing its job. Starbucks is forking over a few hundred dollars per worker as a perk.

Ideally, if you can convince a court there's a reasonable chance that the property was legally obtained (using income you legally earned), and that it wasn't purchased with the intent to primarily use it for illegal activities.

Proof beyond reasonable doubt doesn't mean you're definitely guilty. But if it seems reasonably likely (to the judge, or better the jury) that something was legitimately purchased for legitimate reasons, it should be yours.

Campervan fitted out as a mobile meth lab? That should get seized. The house your kid sold drugs from, but is your primary place of residence, and you paid for it with legally obtained money? That should be yours.

The problem is, US police forces seem to want to seize anything that's remotely connected with illegal activities, to raise revenue.

It sounds like the Soylent Revolution will be pleasurable.

If you have Soylent for one or two meals a day, then you'll really enjoy everything else. The mechanics of pleasure are well understood - you enjoy things more when you don't get them so often.

And it's cheap(ish), and apparently not too unhealthy.

Python 3 isn't really good. It's not really bad, either. There's really not that many magic bullets (other than proper functional programming, maybe, which isn't about to happen in Python).

People are leaving Python for Go because people have always left Python for fast compiled languages. Google ditched Python for C++ and Java. Java! I've seen a lot of projects get re-written in Java from Python, but no-one worried then.

Python 3 adds some cool stuff (async, in particular), and fixes some warts. It's a bit rude of them to force people to upgrade, but that will eventually pay off. It will add more things in the future.

The people who start new projects in Python 3 will have some short-term pain, as some libraries take time to port. There will be a long term benefit, though - future libraries will be better for Python 3, and they won't have to port their project.

The only controversial thing was the use of unicode. IMO, Python 3 made the right choice - you should make everything unicode where-ever it's feasible, because it's just a mess otherwise.

No, it won't.

Unless the economists have seriously screwed up, then capital gains will be done on an accrual basis - 100 people will all be gaining income from their homes.

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference, right?

Your problem is not really knowing if you can change things. Or whether it's worthwhile to change things. Ultimately, you can't really know whether it's better to try to change things (communicating better, focusing more on design vs writing code faster, getting a new job), so you have to accept that.

So ... whatever you choose to do, you can't really beat yourself up over making a bad choice. It's a hard decision. Whether you stick with the job and try to change people's minds, do things the way you currently are (but without stressing so much), or find a new job is a difficult decision, but no choice really stands out as a clear winner (from the little you've said), so just pick one and go with it.

If you want a new job, go hit up linked-in.

If you want to do things the way you currently are, just accept that programmers "waste time" - there's a reason why competent programmers often only write 10 lines of code a day - it's not easy work.

You can try to communicate better, but really, some people just don't listen. Or maybe the managers don't have a choice - they either have managers or customers.

Finally, work harder on documenting / presenting your progress. It never hurts to write stuff up, and explain the decisions you're making or the technical reasons why progress is slow.

Apple Fanboy and MS basher here.

Seriously, the Surface is a great move. Aside from the whole Pro / RT naming thing, of course (confusing customers is not good).

The Surface is, AFAIK, the only good tablet PC out there - it's a real flagship product for Wintel tablets. The OEMs will eventually beat MS on value, but I suspect Microsoft will be OK with that. Microsoft can afford to take a loss creating the market for Windows 8 tablets, and won't be upset if other OEMs start competing in the space - they'll then make money on software sales.

MS needs tablet PCs to be a thing. Tablets are a thing - people love tablets. People will either choose between a laptop and a tablet, or just a tablet that can also run Office. If there's good Windows tablets, people will tend to go with that. As Intel improves mobile x86 chips, the choice will be even easier.

Microsoft does not want everyone using Android / iOS tablet, because then the software ecosystem will move to iOS / Android apps (as it is already doing).

Whether Microsoft should have made the hardware itself, or let OEMs do it is a good question, but I think they were right to do it themselves. Just look at what the competition has been like - every other Windows tablet I've seen (not a huge sample) has been pitiful - ugly and either not portable enough, or grossly underpowered.

Also, making Surface probably gives them the institutional knowledge to make Windows better for tablets.

http://peter-the-tea-drinker.com/pages/longjing-exmple.html

Summary - if you don't want to break the web you should do this:

1. If you must use Javascript templating, inline the JSON into the document.

2. If possible, actually template the document too.

Yes, single page apps are faster (because of the joke called javascript loading ... yes there's async, but it's broken, and you can load a script to load other scripts, but really ...). Except for when they load. Then there's a trip to your server, a trip to the CDN for the Javascript, then another trip to your server to get the document you wanted.

Inlining the JSON saves 1 trip. Having the document already prepared saves another (since most browsers will render before the Javascript at the bottom).

You won't notice running on localhost. It probably works ok on a good connection, if you're located in the same timezone. But with 200ms latency (on a mobile) and two round trips (plus your initial get) it makes a difference. And people using lynx or no-script won't tell you they can't read your site.

For the ~80% of people who only visit your site once, this is close to optimal.

You could trim it down a bit by querying your document, and building your data model from the static content, but that's just over engineering.