wonton2

They are much more comfortable to drive. Electric cars kind og just floats where fossil fuel cars struggles at first. If you have charging at home or at work you never need to go to a gas station, you always simply get in to the car (not turning on the enginge) and go where you want. I think those are the biggest two, but I guess it is one of those things you need to try to understand. There are tons more benefits though, like they are less noisy, the lack of a big engine makes the interior of the car more flexible design wise, the acceleration increases the fun factor even at low speeds, easier repairs, they just feel more modern.

His just circles the problem i think. It is a symptom of programmers not taking responsibillity for their own code. To cover your ass in the best possible way you have to write as little code as possible and that is what happens when a person sees a function that sor of doeas what they want. For some reason we think this is deduplicating code and it is good. But at least I have never been taught this in scool or by anyone in my work. We should treat it for what it is: an antipattern used by programmers to avoid taking responisbility. Another side to this coin is some times the «enablers» who create unneccesary abstractions. These are people who play at being livrary designers when they sre supposed to be developing applications as fast and safely as possible. The people who creates complex tools and unneccessary integrations inside the application code they write. Now, we are all risk averse and enablers to different degrees and at different times. To counteract these antipatterns i think it is important that we teach a few things: that functions/method should have a single purpose, if ou have a boolean argument and a if you should refactor. Rabbit theory of code. And at a higher level: always keep the focus on the business requirement and do codt brnefit analysis (light wieght in our head). And take time to learn the domain and tools you are working with. This also requires experience. But if we focus more on teaching people to learn sbout these things i think it may improve things

How can you still hold this belief after reading articles like this?

I think neolefty answered it very well. I guess i forgot to mention i also have lived in china and have a chinese wife, wich has taught me the same. Reading articles and watching the news teaches you very little about humans compared to actually talking to them, in my opinion.

Thank you, this is exactly my thoughts also. The one you replied to was the kind of person my post was meant for.

I agree to most of the things the author said (except for America being the center of the world and a moral lighthouse for everyone of course). But what I think will get overlooked by most people is the beginning where he notes that the chinese he has met in his daily life are very nice people. Do not forget that they are the same as you. It sounds obvious but I think most people don’t realize how similar we all are. Probably every deeper concern you have had a chinese and russian and american person have also had. No they do not live worried lives where they think that if they break an arm they will be bankrupt. No they are not afraid every day of government agents knocking on their door to drag their father away. The risk of each one is larger in one country than the other. But day to day people think about the same things. Every country have their introverts and extroverts, engineering types and warm hearted caring types and the discussions that one does not exclude the other. Superficially chinese cut in line because if you dont cut you get cut and i am sure you would do the same if the situation was the same for you. Unless you are the quiet introverted type, which is also the case in China. Dont forget that this person talks about governments. You should dislike Xi for what he does to the chinese people, not for what effects you fear he may have on USA (the government, not the people).

I have sent back dishes multiple times in China and gotten a new one with no problem and waiters are generally very nice (and not just to foreigners in tourist places). I guess waiters are different everywhere, restaurants are different and individual preferences are different.

I think in Scandinavia it is different because we actually have laws saying you cannot force people to work the extreme amounts of overtime that they do in USA or in China. So older devs could be using the time they have more efficiently. My experience is also that older devs are very sought after. It could also have something to do with the shortage of developers here though.

Some countries have free (and good) education alternatives. Some countries also have student loans as a public service. Education is probably one of the most important things to preserve a democratic state, so you would think it is in the public interest.

Just imagine the sheer difference in size, there are millions every year finishing their higher education in china, chinese cities are bigger than scandinavian countries. When you have this many people labor is cheaper and you have more employees in the big companies. The way og managing people in scandinavia simply cannot happen there. It is like the only thing that can manage such big companies are policies and the chain of command. So for example i imagine if you told your managers to tell their sub-managers to hire senior staff all you would get is higher salaries because people get to where they are not based on merit but because how good they are at politics. So then the only rational choice would be to get naive young people who will believe what the boss say without questioning and cost less.

I’m I the only one who get fomo by using my smartphone? Consider all the experiences and face to face conversations you miss by looking at others on social media or when you are playing candy crush.

I had this game with my friends where you are supposed to guess who you are (name on a note on your forehead). I wrote Bill Gates on a note, thinking that would be easy, and none of them knew who he was before i explained it. They are not stupid people and all of them have higher education. Just none of them in a technical field, also not americans.

The point, I think, was that CIA is biased, not that they came to these results. You cannot really trust their research, since they analyze their «enemies». It is like when a skin care company cites that «9 out of 10 said this is the best skin cream (in a survey of 30 people)»

I have found out that the only thing that motivates me is thinking about the people that will use what i code. Either the users find it useful and enjoyable or the company find it profitable. I dont see any reason to work on something where i cannot see my role in contributing to these things.

I think many places it is simply illegal with political advertisement. They use facebook groups though since that is outside the country borders, but I dont see why that would be hard to make it illegal also.

What does analytics data have to do with it? It is neither personal nor sensitive if it is a game. Why are you trying to compare this with a social media site that can sell your sexual orientation and all your friends location to anyone. The uses are not just limited to manipulating the masses, it could also be used by kriminals or foreign governments who are looking for weaknesses among public officials (for example through their families). Analytics from a game (or any small app) cannot tell you these things on a useful scale and granularity.

This whole thread of comments seems constructed. The obvious answer to a obvously leading question ending in 3 (mine is the 4th) replies that basically disagrees with regulating advertisers. the first reply of the 3 belongs to one of the participants, but how and why would two more suddenly start participating in this thread many hours after the original post left the front page? It looks exactly like the strategy russia was using to manipulate social media conversations.

Regulations dont have to be so heavy that you require consultants or a legal department. Regulation that protect the broad population from being exploited is neccessary everywhere. Just look at the crypto market compared to the more mature financial market. Issues with corporations manipulating the law makers is a separate problem.

I think it should be illegal to require people to accept an agreement that enables facebook to sell their information to anyone. Not saying it is easy to do though. I guess that is part of what GDPR attempts to do in Europe. Intentions can be argued, but it is something.

Thech giants never stole the web. Governments have just failed to regulate them or failed to see the power they get with their currently vast scale. They need laws and a set of ethical rules people will leave them for breaking.

I was thinking requirements in the sense of «tell don’t ask». And I reslly believe that if we can define intent as implementation (on a high level of course) we have solved many problems. For example if you want to sort transactions by time in a accounting system you should only have to ask for a sorted collection ( sort(transactions)) and not worry about what way the data is sorted. Then the people developing the library for sorting will be able to optimize the implementation independently. This is something we do today, but I think this concept can be taken a lot further if we think of avstracting even higher. At the same time I think this requires rigor and extremely well defined boundaries between layers, so we dont end up with a mess like java null pointers.

I agree, but the consequence of getting fired for a employee is worse than the consequence for a employer not being able to fire someone. Also a company is more often a organization of several people which can be used to leverage a firing (or what you call it). A union only seeks to counter this by giving each employee a more level playingfield. Without unions and worker laws it is basically a third world country where anyone is at risk of being fired for reasons they dont understand or was never informed of and never given a chance to improve. The importance is in the power balance. It could even be argued that unions are just as important for distributing power and wealth in a society as a democracy. The scandinavian model is by some attributed to the power of the worker unions. Of course anyone working in management and business osners will always oppose unions. But it makes no sense that workers themselves opposes it. Skilled workers will still get work and get better compensated for it.

You could use the exactly these arguments for union and against. But in modern justice systems you are innocent until proven guilty, simply so anyone cannot just scream witch and have someone burned.

I really like this explanation. I think code could be thought of as extremely formal requirements interpreted by the computer extremely rigidly (called instructions). And the process of making software is a translation from high level requirements specified in all sorts of ways (like this law text) to gradually lower levels of abstraction. We meet somewhere in the middle by using apis/sdks. And I think programming languages could benefit a lot from becoming more elastic in the sense that they should allow you to consiusly choose which level of abstraction you need at every point in a project lifetime. Not in the sense that php is dynamic and eats errors, but more in the way the optional type forces you to consider if you care about what values tou really need and what to do if you dont have them. Or kind of (not this but kind of!) the way some business process modelling tools lets you create a graphical model of what work needs to be done and lets you automate parts of it gradually. I dont know if this makes sense, but programming languages have a very long way to go and i think they can be used in far more ways than we imagine today.

I cannot understand how this could be the womans fault? Is it because of the rules of jaywalking in USA? Where I am from it is always considered the drivers fault, even if a pedestrian literally throws themselves in front of the car. Simply because the car can kill a pedestrian and not the other way around. The way I see it the uber vehicle should have slowed down to a speed at which it would have been able to react to these kind of abrupt motions. This should be cracked down hard on, not making it illegal for self driving car but the fine should be high. I dont like the thought of a self deiving car company becoming «too big to fail» and getting excused for killing pedestrians that dont understand how self driving cars work.

iPhone from 6 and up are notoriously bad at cold weather. Previously people talked about reduced battery life in cold weather, but it was never really a big problem (I guess the batteries were thicker). But with the iphone it drops from 80% to 5% then dies in a matter of minutes. People I know have been talking about it and I dont go out on a cold day with the battery at less than 50%. Which was never the case before, even with iphone 5.

Edit: now we are talking temperatures below -10c

I think the focus in the article and in the comments is all wrong. The benefit of blockchains is on the businesslevel. If you have several manufacturers, of course you can integrate with all their databases, but that requires an enourmous amount of managements and hours in meetings and implementation. The next step, which i guess some banks have done is to cooporate on a common solution which is operated and run by a commonly owned entity. This also requires tons of management and a whole new organization which eventually becomes its own business area. A third option is like uber for transporting goods, a huge independent third party which is efficient, but eventually gets too powerful, so people revert to one of the other solutions. Blockchains on the other hand has a model for distributing trust and operations. It provides a more general solution to a mexican standoff than months of meetings and long contracts. Your contract is embedded in the blockchain. Of course the blockchain needs to be updated and maintained, so i think the real issue with blockchains would be that people cannot agree to using a single one for a specific purpose. But then it is much easier to agree to using a blockchain than to use solution x provided by company y because of all the organizational overhead it could abstract away.

This is assuming they both want the same thing. Society pushes us into marriage and getting kids, not just into gender roles. I think greater equality will lead to more single people, not more men doing house work. Because people will realize they actually have a choice. Most people don’t want to clean and administer the same stuff every day. And although nobody would prefer that thir kids were never born, people would not feel like they are losing out if they never get kids. Developed countries have people get fewer kids later in their lives. Maybe it is because of the economy, but kids could help their parents with money, so i dont think so, i think it is by choice. You could call it people getting more selfish, i say it is people getting more rational, or «analytical» if you will.

I have always wondered why anyone would not use an IDE. I have tried to start using editors like vim and sublime. But I just think it makes me type endlessly and wait for compile to see my typos and so on, when in intellij or netbeans you type a few letters and get code completion and automatic imports. This blogpost, however, is the first concrete evidence that I havent really missed anything, and I should not spend a lot of time trying to free myself from the ide.

If no one buys into their wind farm, there won't be much money to put into the pension fund (I mean it will, they earn money form oil, but no "wind money").

First: I would not use my claim to evaluate weather or not i will buy into their solution.

I work in IT, not offshore. My claims are based on living in Norway and reading about Statoil almost daily, and talking to people I know working in offshore, and on IT projects at Statoil. It is hard to find hard evidence for claims about Statoil. The closest thing i can find to evidence is to tell you to just check the headlines on some random Norwegian newspaper. This one is on the front page today: http://e24.no/energi/oljeinvesteringer/frykter-slutten-paa-s... one of the things stated there which could be relevant is that one project scheduled for completion in 2022 has had its construction costs cut in half from 100 billion NOK to 50 billion. Some would say this is evidence of Statoil being able to rationalize well. I would say this is evidence of Statoil having a history of over-spending. It all depends on your point of view, it is next to impossible to get the full picture.