mvindahl

My wife works as a teacher, 30 hours a week. It's not lavishly paid, and taxes are kind of heavy here (.dk). If she were to become a housewife, we'd be able to cut down to one car and we could even pull our youngest son out of kindergarten. All in all, it would be a very modest strain upon our economy.

So why not just do it, at least for a period of time? Partly because having a job can give a sense of purpose, partly to not lose her options for later, but most importantly because staying at home all day with nothing but kids to talk to is kind of hard on your psyche. After all, almost everyone else is at work.

Contrast that with her grandmother who was a housewife in the 1950s. According to her, there was plenty of manual work involved, and it could be stressful in its own ways. On the upside, the neighborhood was full of housewives. They would drop in for coffee, they'd look after each other's toddlers when necessary, and when the older kids came home from school they would pretty much roam freely with the other neighborhood kids. For better or worse, this kind of "infrastructure" is missing today.

Maybe some kind of inverse life insurance. Give pile of cash to insurance company and receive monthly paycheck for the remainder of your life. Essentially you are betting on a long life and they are betting on you driving your golf cart off the edge of a cliff. I think products like this exist in my country of residence; I'd be surprised if there is not a similar thing in the US.

On a side note, I read at one point that in France there is a tradition (not sure how widespread) of selling your home with the condition that the buyer must wait for you to move out, whether for health reason or because you die, and that you pay no rent while staying. Of course, the price is adjusted accordingly. Again, both parties are making a bet on the duration of your lifespan.

Thanks for the tip :) .. got it and it's slick

> I think the more interesting question is, if you could live even if society didn't value what you were doing, and you could do anything (even nothing) and still be provided with everything you need to survive - what would happen to individuals and what would happen to society?

I think there are historical precedents, at least if you define "society" in a narrower sense. European royalty and nobility in the 18th century, present day natives of Dubai or Saudi Arabia, hereditary upper classes of all times an places. The common denominator being born to affluence and mainly mingling with your subsection of society.

The verdict? Seems like people turn out in surprisingly different ways when freed from toiling for basic necessities. Some become great scientists, artists, philosophers or philanthropists. Some become revolutionaries or even international terrorists. Some become insufferable whiners. Some just live a quiet life.

Agreed. Also, apart from mowing, a lawn can really be as easy or hard to maintain as you choose. Mine it kinda bumpy, has several patches of moss and has plenty of dandelions; I don't think "fixing" these problems will ever become enough of a priority to get it done. And of course, I'd never use chemicals of any kind for the lawn.

Apple Music was never much of a problem for me, probably because I just dumped my curated MP3 collection on my phone to make it play in the car. Only piece of the UI that I interact with is the play button.

But the Podcast app, oh boy! This is an app that I actually use, and it's still incredibly confusing to me. Probably will be an enigma forever.

I played a ridiculous amount of Civ1 back in the day, and later Civ2 and Civ3. I deleted Civ3 around 2003 because I felt that it was sucking too much time away from my real life. Haven't played any of the more recent versions but I'm sure that they're great.

Instead, a few years back, I took up the occasional Civ1 again, downloaded as abandonware, and running in a DOSBox. A nice thing about Civ1 is that I can usually complete it in a few hours; as I recall, Civ3 could easily take a night to play through. I even played it with my son for a while. I think that he should know the classics.

As for strategy, I play with three civs, I always prioritize research over taxes, and I prioritize expansion over fortification early in the game (I quit when this backfires).

Once I get my civ rolling I have found the best strategy for getting a high score is to track down the other civs as fast as possible and to knock them out, starting at the capital. Once their capital has fallen and a few main cities, they will make peace. Then rest of the cities can be conquered at my leisure or they can be cheaply bought by diplomats and their building sold for scraps, decreasing the price further. An important prerequisite for the aggressive strategy to work is to get to them before they build city walls.

Often, however, I find myself gravitating towards a "tech hub" strategy instead. It rarely leads to scores above 100% on king level but if feels kind of satisfying. The point of this is to appoint some city with potential for trade and growth (ideally all of its accessible squares should be plains or convertible to plains). Then build, as soon as possible, the Colossus (+1 trade per trade square). Then, in some order, a library (+50% science), a granary (faster growth), Copernicus' Observatory (+100% science), university (+50% science), and Shakespeare's Theatre (everyone is happy). Bring in caravans from the rest of the continent to speed up production, and to set up trade routes from the tech hub. Elsewhere, build the Pyramids (switch to democracy) and J.S.Bach's Cathedral (two happy faces per city and only way to keep democracy while dispatching a sail or a frigate with caravans from the tech hub). Research railroad and, once achived, assign all settlers to put railroads on the area surrounding the tech hub, boosting growth (in preparation for railroad, clear any forests and swamps, and build roads and irrigation). Postpone researching electricity since it will cancel the Colossus.

With the tech hub strategy, the science light bulps of the tech hub will often overflow into the next panel on the city details screen and I'll usually have armors and planes and railroads before reaching 0 AD. After that, I guess the correct path is to switch to communism and eradicate all resistance. I tend to do this too late, though.

'Getting a car to drive this way was an impressive feat. But it’s also a bit unsettling, since it isn’t completely clear how the car makes its decisions.'.replace(/car/g, 'human')

> if negative externalities of energy and resource use were priced in, most people couldn't afford to live in the suburbs

Depending upon the definition of "negative externalities", this may be true for most of the developed world.

Maybe the Amish were right after all ..

> You must be able to get a job if your company collapses

On the bright side, with lower cost of housing the mortgage will cost you less and will be easier to pay off. I'm in my early 40s, have three kids, and we actually own our house. If we had lived in a similar house in a larger city we'd still be grinding through the mortgage.

I guess what I'm tring to say is that there plenty of middle ground between living in San Francisco and living the Unabomber dream in the Montana forests. There are a lot of places on the face of the earth where there are not hundreds of nerby companies hiring, but maybe five or ten within driving distance. And where you can actually afford to buy a house.

I thought the same thing. Maybe because it's the only definition that makes sense. If you measure everyone against the department Wally (the lazy guy from Dilbert), you'll probably find plenty of 10x programmers. Not that it would mean anything.

Also, sample size would matter. Assume that there really is a Superwally out there who has worked in programming for seven years for some company without accomplishing anything at all. And I imagine that there is. It would matter a lot if he is part of the sample. In fact, the only sample that would make sense would be all programmers in the world, and now, thanks to Superwally, we all look pretty good.

And of course, there is probably some Hyperwally as well who can smugly boast seven years of negative productivity. Deleting random stuff, breaking functionality, leaving messy code for others to untangle. Adding Hyperwally to the equation and the relative productivity of everyone else would approach singularity levels.

Milk & honey

"The median U.S. worker is 42. However, StackOverflow’s survey on age shows that there are just about 13% of developers after 40. Where are the others?"

I think most of this is due to the simple fact that software development has been a steadily growing profession for decades. Thus, the "population pyramid" of software engineers will very much be a pyramid and older developers will be proportionally scarce. If you want to make meaningful predictions about your personal likelihood of staying in software development beyond a certain age, you'd need to slice the numbers differently.

I believe that once the number of software engineers stabilizes, the age distribution will become more similar to other fields. Some will leave the field during their career due to changes of interest or due to life throwing them curveballs. But a lot will stay.

I'm 43, BTW. Still find software development and tech enjoyable.

Excellent point. I, too, had been wondering about Uber's priorities. Realizing that the stock valuation at the time of IPO is their only guiding metric has made the pieces fall into place for me.

Whoever dumped these on imgur should show a little respect for the original artists and attach proper credits.

Dane here. According to the article he is from the Danish People's Party. Although pretty right wing on issues like immigration, they're not exactly a fringe party these days but also they have never been a governing party.

As for the official foreign policy, I think our government is sorry to see the UK leave ship as we have often had similar objectives when it came to EU politics. I don't think there is any desire to "punish" Britain as far as the Danish government is concerned.

This is a discussion that I've occasionally tried to raise with colleagues. I usually find myself in a pretty isolated position, but anyway..

My viewpoint is, roughly:

1) DI, as described in the GoF book is a great pattern. You compose objects by passing other objects to its constructor as needed. These are the stored in final fields for the lifetime of the parent object. The pattern gives a lot of flexibility and handles a lot of use cases which it may otherwise be tempting to handle using the inferior concept of inheritance. It's simple, it's typesafe, it's easy to debug.

2) DI, as implemented by virtually any DI framework, is the Devil. Most DI frameworks is little more than a big dictionary mapping interface types (or magic strings) to implementation classes, along with some black-box magic to make it work (and bloat your stacktraces). It saves you the effort of calling constructors explicitly but any gains are lost as soon as you need to debug stuff. It shares a lot of traits with that other big dictionary where you can dump stuff for convenience: the global scope. It also has the same backdraws.

But anyway, this is a minority position so there is a large chance that I'm dead wrong and a small chance that history will prove me right.

The idea that the Greenland Vikings would assemble to hunt down sea mammals and that they would rely upon a partial diet of seafood is a compelling idea. After all, fish has always been an important staple of food along the Norwegian coast. Also, to this day, the inhabitants of the Faroe Island conduct annual, communal whale hunts (or "whale killings" as they call the tradition; there is a fair amount of blood involved). The Vikings knew farming but they certainly knew fishing as well.

An alternate explanation was that when it was reached for the first time, in the summer, during a period of warm climate, it really was a green and lush land. Sure, there was some ice going uphill and inland but I don't think the Vikings had any idea just how much ice.

On a similar vein, Iceland was also named from a first impression, having been initially reached at a colder time of year.

Thos are the explanations that I have heard. There is no way to know if they hold any truth.

In the future, our enemies will distract our drones by dressing up as blue ghosts and throwing fruits.

> If the person is properly compensated 100%, but keeps talking, it can be argued that their material damage has been fully restored, while they continue to inflict material damage against the other party.

Which they could handle in the same way that they would handle anyone else saying bad things about their brand. We should all have the same freedom of speech, within the same boundaries.

"Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond. When I read it in the late 90s, I had already read complete accounts of world history and thought myself well-informed on the topic, yet virtually every chapter blew my mind.

The book is about the patterns that drive human history, both the written history that we know and the vast period of prehistory which we have a pretty good idea about these days due to genetics and linguistics. A recurring pattern has been people moving around, displacing less fortunate people. Further, Diamond looks for root causes to explain why some tribes or nations would gain an edge over their neigbours, and a lot of the explanation is ultimately found in technology and animal farming.

Before I read "Guns, Germs, and Steel", I had been under the impression that the world was a fairly static and ecologically stable place until the European age of discovery started uprooting everything. In reality it was nothing like that. Almost every strip of land is inhabited be people whose ancestors fought off other people, and cultures expanding beyond ecological sustainability and suddenly collapsing is a common event.

Runner-up: anything by Hunter S Thompson

A favourite of mine as well. I read it when I was about 20 and it blew my mind. I later read other books by Joseph Heller but I really shouldn't have bothered. Catch 22 was really his main opus.

VSCode runs nicely on my MacBook. It doesn't feel like a web application to me, in the same way that IntelliJ IDEA doesn't feel like it's written in Java. I'm sure that both VSCode and IDEA could run even faster if they were ported to, say, C, but in both cases that would be a large investment for improvements that I wouldn't even detect.

So I guess it makes sense to optimize for maintainability i this case, i.e. not having one codebase per native OS.

It's kind of a crazy concept, especially if you are old enough to remember the days where RAM was counted in kilobytes and you would optimize assembler code to save clockcycles.

On the other hand, this is 2017, and people apparently don't care much about the footprint of their software, as long as it's convenient and it solves their problem. And ultimately that's what counts I guess.

Typically in Javascript, you would use npm's package.json for building, or you would use npm to install some well defined version of some build system, like you do for other packages. Like Maven builds, it works smoothly and predictably.

I think that as a beginner you can get far with async/await without truly understanding it. I also think that at some time the abstractions will leak and your head will spin madly.

Pros:

- it's a lot like XML but with less red tape. Looks nicer to humans. Also allows expressing the semantic difference between an (ordered) array and a map.

- it maps extremely well to Javascript, and a lot of APIs are consumed by web clients written in Javascript these days

I think the latter is the real explanation.

That being said, I agree that JSON is not a panacea. My personal pain points:

1) Missing an elegant way to express an unordered set. IMHO the three basic collection data types are array, set, and map. I think JSON would be stronger if it could express a set like you can do in ES these days: { "a", "b " }

2) Not really DRY if you encode a large array of objects and sned them over the wire. So yeah, your API should support more compact formats as well.

3) Allowing comments would be really nice when we use JSON for e.g. package.json. I don't think it would make the parsers any slower so why not? XML has it.

Dunno. I think for a startup it makes good sense to have a dynamic language with a good package manager. For someone writing something which needs to be performant, and the requirements don't change too much, C is probably a superior choice. It's all about tradeoffs IMHO.

"Beating the Averages" is also a good read.

I read these essays for the first time a some years ago at a time when I was being assigned to a Javascript project and, much to my own surprise, had gone from ridiculing the language to secretly kind of liking it. At the time I had been working with Java for 10+ years and Javascript had always been regarded as this inbred cousin from Kansas that you didn't really want to be seen in company with.

Anyway, reading Graham's essays on computer languages helped me understand that Javascript was actually one rung up the abstractness ladder compared to Java, and that the language that I had always considered to be limited was instead extremely flexible and hence, stronger.

BTW, a curious thing about Graham is that he measures the strength of a language by how many features it shares with Lisp. Hence, no language will ever surpass Lisp using that yardstick.