967 karma · joined March 27, 2018
I worked with Erich before Visual Age when he developed the Presentation Framework. He came up with a process identical to XP. When XP came out I realized that Erich and Kent Beck were friends.
Erich is so prolific that he doesn't remember everything he invented. He is also generous.
I think there was wishful thinking since many of the OSM maintainers are mountain bikers and the Santa Cruz mountains has some desirable mountain biking paths. The back part of our property is on The Soquel Demonstration Forest which has an awesome mountain biking path.
They were pretty good about fixing the issue when I pointed it out.
I used the OSM web page.
Just type in the address with zip code, and it takes you to a completely different different zip code. This is a relatively new bug.
I find it interesting that I am down voted by 4 points. The OSM fans must not understand the value of user testing. Maybe it is the google fans who don't understand user testing.
Google Maps used to be great - far better than Map Quest. Waze was pretty bad. Apple was initially bad. Open Street Maps was pretty good except they thought my driveway was a road.
In the past year Google got pretty bad. Apple became awesome. About a year ago Open Street Maps improved.
Then this morning I checked Open Street Maps and it now has the exact same bug that has irritated me with Google!
I suspect there is some bad code sharing between OSM and Google.
Details - if your physical address is in a different county than your postal office it confuses the heck out of Google. OSM used to handle this just fine, but not now.
Accuracy counts more than anything else!
Hans Rosling (RIP) did a great job of defining poverty and visualizing the changing nature of poverty. His area of focus was on child mortality - so it tended to focus on the mothers since they have the greatest impact on this statistic. Later he focused on other areas. Sanitation, water, transportation etc.
https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street/?countries=bd
At the Bangladesh level of poverty, a productive asset is a goat that produces milk. The Heifer Project is doing useful work in giving low income families productive assets. https://www.heifer.org/
Finally there is the whole world of micro loans. I have not looked into this as much.
I am also a unicorn - but a different kind. I used to always have to defend being a statical outlier so I know where you are coming from.
I always went on 2 practice interviews before the real interview and it worked.
Examples: "Go to college or else work for your uncle"
Turn this into boolean form: "If you go to college then <foo> or else you will work for your uncle"
But the "or" makes the meaning ambiguous: "If it rains then I will work inside or else I will work outside."
It is not clear if this means you will work outside if and only if it is not raining? Maybe working outside is another option if it rains.
Otherwise is far more clear. "If it rains then I will work inside otherwise I will work outside."
Removing the "or" completely makes the statements unambiguous archaic English: "If you go to college then <foo> else you will work for your uncle" "If it rains then I will work inside else I will work outside."
FWIW - I am very glad they chose else over otherwise...
The entire field of chaos theory is to make chaos deterministic so you are in good company. There is no general mechanism (yet) to do this. Quantum mechanics is the most interesting area.
The measure of determinism is that it predicts the future before it happens. People have been trying to do this for years in weather and the stock market. This is where the concept of Chaos came from.
Leaving math and physics - there is philosophy. To apply determinism to people you would have to decide there is no free will. Maybe this is true and maybe not.
I don't know who "the many" are - but I thought determinism had already been disproved.
I am not a physicist so I will not go into quantum mechanics - but I will take a simple example from Science Fiction, and that is the Temporal Paradox. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_paradox
How did I do it? I had small goals each day and each week and focused on those goals rather than the outcome. It is the outcome that creates angst for the introverted.
I had my own business for 3 years. The first year was painful the 2nd 2 years were productive.
When I went back to traditional employment I had a confidence that I would not have had if I stayed on a traditional business path.
As I said it had been 15 years since I have been actively managed my investments. When the stock market dropped I was surprised that our investments hadn't actually dropped so I wanted to find out why. So I put together a google sheet and tried to replicate the Intelligent Asset Allocator with just ETFs. This only goes back to 2005.
First I put in all of the ETFs with weekly data going back to 2005 from GoogleFinance. I then added in the dividend yields - which most online analysis does not do. Then I just used the google sheets correlation function. I set up the sheet so I could slice and dice across different time periods. And then I chose my own asset allocation based on what I saw.
I also looked at the optimal rebalancing period. It looks like it is 2 years for this set of data.
QQQ 1 XLK 0.9952440282 VCR 0.9813656495 SPY 0.9774334512 VHT 0.9749607257 DIA 0.9738966572 XLI 0.944646275 MDY 0.9418372572 XLP 0.9340495871 XLU 0.9322048846 VBK 0.9749569179 TLT 0.8238447288 IEF 0.7459539935 LQD 0.7698459752 VNQ 0.7211819234 SHY 0.5117276512 GLD 0.4880148474 XLF 0.4715141612 EFA 0.2721585482 XLE 0.04648142997
I still believe in diversification. If an ETF is sufficiently diverse I will buy the ETF. Some ETFs are not - XLE is nearly 50% Chevron and Exxon!
You should also read Taleb if you want to understand the fallacy of unsystematic risk. He is difficult to read because of his overinflated ego but he has some persuasive ideas.
I haven't been an active investor for 15 years so it took a little time to fire up my investing analysis tools. This is what I found out.
Index funds are highly incestuous. There is a high correlation across the top index funds because they largely have the same stocks. The exceptions seem to be reits, oil, foreign, and financial index funds.
The rest of the index funds all seem to be heavily weighted in big tech stock.
So - if that is true, why not buy the heavily weighted stocks directly and do your own financial analysis on them? For instance, I look at past 5 year sales growth. Then I look at yoy sales growth. Then I look at P/S over the last 5 years (to see if it is out of whack). Then I look at PEG over the last 5 years (to see if it is out of whack). Then I look at gross margins. Then I look at dividend yield. All of this data is available for free.
When my kids were little I thought I would teach them programming. The biggest problem I had was teaching them what a variable was. They finally did figure it out after a lot of work.
Abstraction is the same barrier between elementary school math and algebra. Some people never do learn algebra.
It does have Gateway on the list which had implausible black holes - so I don't think the plausibility bar is high.
Here is the early history of the internet/arpanet: http://mercury.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/arpageo.html
The internet clearly predated Minitel. The big difference is that it was not initially used for commerce. It was to link the military with universities.
I joined Xerox in 1985. Two years earlier the network we were on converted from Arpanet to Internet. There might have been some group somewhere in Xerox that was still on the Arpanet but the military were worried about security so they created the Internet. You can call the exact date of the split between arpanet and internet as being the birth of the internet.
Sometime in 1980 I was also involved in hooking up the internet to my college.
Urls also predated the web because they were used on the internet.
The web made the internet easier to use - that is true. But before then we still had email and discussion boards and distribution groups. It was all text based and somewhat ugly.
When my children were young my employers were very supportive of granting flexibility for my family responsibilities. I was also very productive and giving me flexibility was an obvious win win.
When my daughter had a young family she faced resistance because over the years hr has gained greater power and "if they give flexibility to one employee they have to give flexibility to all employees." The irony was the hr rules at her company allowed work sharing if she was in marketing but not for engineering. They waited until she quit to give her the flexibility she needed.
I think smaller companies are better able to work with employees than larger companies.
Once I realized that I automate my own processes and I am so much happier. I went so far as to purchase an annual $99 developer license even though I have no intention of selling apps.
I suspect this will happen ultimately with the drivers - although I can't imagine the drivers will be thrilled with a 20% cut in pay.
The one exception was they knew about me even though I didn't know about them. Halfway through one of my interviews I realized that I knew the interviewer by reputation.
My husband and I both worked our way through college. I didn't get the social experience at school. There is nothing like working for your degree to keep you laser focused on the reason why you are going to college.
We were both reasonably paid for working class jobs as he was a machinist and I was an electronic technician. Post graduate was so much better - he in mechanical engineering and I in software engineering.
Most of our socialization came on the job. We were both lucky enough to work for great companies with wonderful people.
Vitria was able to move the VC % lower because they were already profitable and demonstrated potential before approaching the VCs. They were only using the VCs for their contacts and not for cash.
VMware never got VC funding. I am not sure why - but they tried. They finally sold themselves to EMC and were later spun out.
A couple of months I joined, a room full of customers chewed us out for not publishing our vmotion compatibility tables. After 4 hours of chewing out - they then told us they reverse engineered the compatibility tables and reorganized their entire data center to conform to vmware vmotion. Then (of course) we worked with intel to make sure the compatibility matrix worked in the future.
I realized at that point that I joined the right company.