johan_larson

16 ms·

91.
by johan_larson 8y ago
Well, at least he didn't try to order a pizza. "Jaa, I vaant too laage pies vit pepperuuni. Let me give yoo die oobital parametaas."
92.
by johan_larson 8y ago
I'm guessing investors are leery of funding expansion in an industry that is still illegal under federal law. The businesses themselves also have all sorts of trouble because banks don't want to deal with them.
93.
by johan_larson 8y ago
I agree it makes sense to install safety devices to protect against carelessness and inattention. But cruise ships already have that, with waist-high railings around all outdoor public areas. Going further, with horizontal netting or 6 foot
94.
by johan_larson 8y ago
I think the author is stretching to make a point. I mean, the case she opens with is a drunk woman who climbed a railing to sit on it. Guess what? She fell off into the water. If she had gone out on the water in a dinghy as drunk as she was
95.
by johan_larson 8y ago
Yes, my take is that this is a positive. The three big things that are expensive enough to mess people up these days are medical care, housing, and education. And at least part of what's keeping housing expensive is restrictive zoning.
96.
Minnesota and Oregon move to end single-family zoning(slate.com)
3 points by johan_larson 8y ago|3 comments
97.
by johan_larson 8y ago
Because once a community has lost its central economic purpose, it tends to develop all sorts of pernicious dysfunctions. If the one factory in a small town closes, the town just lost a lot of its tax-base, so it's hard to pay for serv
98.
by johan_larson 8y ago
Indeed. But the skills mismatch is one of the things I am proposing to address. People can be retrained, at least if they're on the younger side. Trying to retrain a 55 year old factory worker whose employer moved the plant to Mexico o
99.
by johan_larson 8y ago
Maybe we shouldn't be trying to keep these small town alive. Maybe we should focus on shutting them down in an orderly fashion and help the residents move to more dynamic areas, probably in large part by helping them acquire skills tha
100.
by johan_larson 8y ago
Wow. I hadn't realized Google is so dominant in online ads. Even Facebook is a distant second. And Amazon is barely in the running.
101.
by johan_larson 8y ago
Hedonism is respectable enough that textbooks in ethics keep presenting it. The other ethical approaches kick it in the shins pretty hard, but no one seems to have a decisive refutation. Ethicists from other traditions just think hedonists
102.
by johan_larson 8y ago
I'd be more enthusiastic about such requirements if humanities/lib-arts courses actually provided a solid answer to how one should live and what one should want. But they don't. They provide lots of different answers, with no
103.
by johan_larson 8y ago
I am not being sarcastic. By choosing the title he did, the author is setting himself up for comparison with a really famous work, and I have to wonder whether that was wise. It was, to say the least, bold. Would I have reacted differently
104.
by johan_larson 8y ago
That's rather an ambitious title, isn't it? W.E.B. Dubois might be the most respected African-American intellectual, and "The Souls of Black Folk" might be his finest work. Yang is setting the bar rather high for himself
105.
by johan_larson 8y ago
I think this is just Google growing up. When you're a smallish company with little influence, what you say and who you talk to just don't matter. But when you're a big company, with big responsibilities and a big footprint, e
106.
by johan_larson 8y ago
Why is this so hard? Other countries manage to construct high-speed rail and subway lines for a fraction what the US spends. Maybe it was a bad idea to have everyone with a brain cram into med-school, law-school or b-school. There are other
107.
by johan_larson 8y ago
There are a lot of white collar jobs where being able to do a bit of coding, if only at the level of Excel functions, is somewhat useful. If I had kids, I think making sure they learn to code would be sort of medium-priority. Less important
108.
I Won’t Teach My Kids to Code, and Neither Should You(slate.com)
10 points by johan_larson 8y ago|2 comments
109.
by johan_larson 8y ago
Yup. That line is just north of Montreal, so the area south of it includes Canada's two largest metropolitan areas. Did you know there's a tiny bit of Canada that is further south than the California-Oregon border?
110.
by johan_larson 8y ago
The bones of excessively inquisitive natives.
111.
by johan_larson 8y ago
Yes it is. My favorite anecdote about it is that the province of Ontario is big enough to have vineyards in the south and polar bears in the north.
112.
by johan_larson 8y ago
Both of them, really. There's a lot to know if you want to build a modern database system. But no work I am aware of addresses the specific question of how to build a database system from scratch. A reasonable approach might be to star
113.
by johan_larson 8y ago
You might try this collection of papers about DB technology. http://www.redbook.io/ Fair warning: this is not for beginners. If you find the going too hard, start with a DB textbook. Also, that site doesn't seem to inc
114.
by johan_larson 8y ago
#2 and #4 have already been done, haven't they? Amazon has a significant dev office in Toronto, and Canadian immigration rules are much more straightforward than the US ones.
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by johan_larson 8y ago
This is nonsense. Toronto is a backwater in tech. There is no first-tier tech company headquartered here. Heck, there isn't even a second-tier company. Plus the pay is peanuts. That article is a PR plant at best.
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by johan_larson 8y ago
Thanks for the info, but I'm not sure databases belongs in that list. I work on a database system (Couchbase), and our codebase is pretty mixed. The oldest part of the system, the Key-Value storage engine, is C++, but the newer parts a
117.
by johan_larson 8y ago
Are there many new projects being started these days in C, or even C++? I would expect most of that to have moved over to Java or Golang, with most C-family coding being on extensions of older projects.
118.
by johan_larson 8y ago
From the hiree perspective, it's clear that many companies are over-listing requirements and it makes sense to apply if you approximately match the position but don't tick every last box in the formal requirements. I'm not su
119.
by johan_larson 8y ago
I've never worked on a product that I thought was evil. But I have worked on a product crufty enough that if I had had a chance to inspect the codebase before taking the job, I would have passed. One of my employers had a Java codebase
120.
by johan_larson 8y ago
I imagine a 2-3 hour test that costs something like $200, which seems like a reasonable investment, if many or most employers are looking for it. For the companies, it would save an hour or two of interviewing. If they accepted the test as

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