natnat

For some businesses, Yelp puts a big consumer alert on their business page when they catch the businesses soliciting reviews on craigslist or whatever: http://officialblog.yelp.com/2012/10/consumer-alerts-because...

One really cool tool that web programmers should know if they work with JSON data a lot is jq: http://stedolan.github.io/jq/. It's a line-oriented tool like sed, awk, and grep, but it's for manipulating JSON data. It can be really useful for quickly making sense of JSON-formatted log files. For example, you can do something like

    jq -c .'select(.server_name == "slow_server") | .end_time - .start_time' < my_log_file

where your log file might look like

    '{"server": "slow_server", "timings": {"end_time": 1406611619.90, "start_time": 1406611619.10}}'

to get your web request timings.

Because it's line-oriented, it also works seamlessly with other tools, so you can pipe the output to, say, sort, to find the slowest requests.

Everyone writes unreadable code sometimes. Bad languages make it easier.

It's funny that a huge part of the reason that a business like this exists is the TSA. If flying commercial airlines didn't require an hour and a half of waiting in line for security and a fair dose of humiliation, I think people would be much more willing to fly from SFO to LAX.

Instead, we're running inefficient propeller planes for short distances and really high prices, and people are treating it like it's some amazing new innovation.

I think this has a lot less to do with taxes than it does with the prices of real estate. Buying a house in California is prohibitively expensive for most people, which eats up a huge amount of everyone's disposable income. In Texas, you make less money, but houses and rent are a factor of 2-4 times cheaper for what you get.

I think there are two main reasons for this: proposition 13 and CEQA. Prop 13 keeps property taxes really low, which makes buying and holding onto single-family homes really cheap. This is a giant subsidy for people who have lived in California for a while, but jacks up the prices for everyone else who gets in after them, since low ownership costs translate to high upfront prices.

The California Environmental Quality Act has a different effect that also raises housing prices: empowering NIMBYs. Because any new development can be pretty easily be slowed down/made more expensive/stopped altogether by a bogus CEQA request, new housing isn't getting built in nearly as much as one would expect given the demand. This makes existing housing more valuable, which increases prices even more.

In addition, some municipalities, notably San Francisco, have an insanely regulated rental market that makes renting incredibly difficult for a landlord, which makes it more attractive for people to buy housing instead of rent. This means there's less rental housing to go around, which makes the rent in SF absolutely insane.

In this case, enforcement doesn't matter quite so much -- if a heat scan counts as an illegal search, the evidence is inadmissable. Illegal searches happen all the time, and for most people there isn't much recourse. The fact that evidence gathered through illegal searches is generally not valid is usually enough to discourage illegal searches to the extent that the cops are more interested in building a case than they are in harassing you.

Let's not discuss politics here.

San Jose, which is ostensibly a city, is only a little more dense than Nassau County, which isn't anything like a city. Manhattan is more than four times as dense as San Francisco. Although there are a bunch of geographical barriers preventing super-high population density in the Bay Area, there's still a lot of room for more people.

That's not true. Ford is more than $100 billion in debt. If a corporate raider were to take over Ford, they would be saddled with a ton of debt too, making such a takeover a much less attractive option.

Young people tend to be single, which means they have a lot more at stake in terms of public image than married people do.

The government can borrow money at negative interest rates. People are literally paying the U.S. government to take their money. It may have a large budget deficit, but the government has no shortage of cash.

I'm pretty sure that Ubuntu, Debian, and Centos come with nano preinstalled. nano isn't nearly as powerful of an editor as emacs or vi, but it's got most of the basic features you'll need when you're just trying to get the network up and running, for instance. I'm not entirely convinced that, for an emacs user, the added power of vi over nano is worth it in the corner cases where you can't use emacs through SSH, considering how difficult an editor it is to learn.

A paragraph isn't an essay. Even though essay writing isn't a crucial skill for programmers, clear and effective English writing often is, especially when you need to explain technical issues to non-technical people. Besides, good writing ability is often a pretty good indicator of general, well-rounded intelligence.

When the government spends a million dollars building a bridge, it creates a bunch of jobs because people need to design the bridge, extract the raw materials for the bridge, and build the bridge.

When the government spends a million dollars building a bomb, it also creates a bunch of jobs for the same reason.

The thing is, a bridge gets you a useful public resource that makes lost of people's lives better and encourages economic growth by making trade easier. A bomb blows up, kills some people, and disappears.

> discount the military spending (arguing that any president would have done similar after 9/11)

I'm pretty sure a very large part of the military spending was because of the war in Iraq, which had nothing at all to do with 9/11.

When all you do is provide a dumb pipe, you're a commodity. When you're selling a commodity, and there is any competition at all, your margins will race down to virtually nothing pretty damn quickly. No one wants to invest billions of dollars to build up the infrastructure for a barely profitable ISP.

> Yup, plus don't forget that the risk posed by having bad engineers isn't nearly the same as bad doctors.

I'm not sure that this is totally true. I don't want to drive on a bridge designed by an incompetent engineer any more than I want to take drugs prescribed by an incompetent doctor.

How about, instead of creating arbitrary fuel efficiency standards, we just tax gasoline so that people consume less of it?

Fuel efficiency standards do virtually nothing to reduce gasoline consumption; they just make people buy gas-guzzling SUV's instead of gas-guzzling cars. The problem is, SUV's are heavier and less maneuverable than cars, which makes them much more dangerous to other cars and pedestrians.

If the government actually cared about carbon consumption, we would have something sensible like a gas tax rather than absurd fuel standards with a huge loophole for "light trucks". The thing is, I'm pretty sure the fuel standards thing is basically a subsidy for American car makers, who make lots of SUV's, but can't make luxury cars nearly as well as the Germans or the Japanese.

In the US, the unemployment rate for people with at least a bachelor's degree is only a little above 4%. This includes journalism, history, and interpretive dance majors.

Would unemployment be lower if these people got healthcare and engineering degrees instead? Of course. But I really don't think people with less practical degrees are nearly as big of a problem as people with no education at all are/

The government can indeed devalue or even confiscate your assets if it wants to. The problem is that legislators have no interest in pissing off well-heeled companies that can contribute billions to their opponents when the only people opposed to software patents are a few programmers and policy wonks with a whole lot less money than the companies that own the patents.

Also, keep in mind that lawyers tend to be much more politically connected than programmers.

The government can indeed devalue or even confiscate your assets if it wants to. The problem is that legislators have no interest in pissing off well-heeled companies that can contribute billions to their opponents when the only people opposed to software patents are a few programmers and policy wonks with a whole lot less money than the companies that own the patents.

Have you seen the GPS bugs that the U.S. government uses? They look they're from the 70s.

After you make about 375k, you have to pay 35% tax on every extra dollar of salary too.

A trust fund is a huge pile money that a wealthy person (a trustee) gives to some beneficiary under certain conditions. The money is dispersed gradually to the beneficiary (stereotypically a spoiled rich kid) so they don't spend it all at once, and to avoid estate taxes.

Basically, it's something that allows you to maximise leisure and minimise work.

I don't see how this is any more political than all of the articles about how the newest anti-piracy bill is the worst thing ever or how patent trolling is horrible. I don't disagree with either class of posts, but they are, strictly speaking, quite political.

I think making "no politics ever" a rule can hamper discussions quite a lot. I can understand why it's not productive to talk about, say, the merits of Obama's health care bill, which evokes really partisan gut reactions and makes people more likely to start posting pithy political slogans that sound good and make for horrible discussion. But talking about a reduced crime rate without crediting/blaming any particular politician or party can be pretty interesting to talk about.

On the other hand, I don't think any of the anti-DRM or anti-anti-piracy posts are very productive. But everyone here seems to agree on them, so even though the discussions are often quite vapid, they tend to be less nasty than, say, discussions about the merits of single-payer healthcare.

I think decentralizing the story so that it comes from a bunch of noninstitutional observers is a pretty good way to get rid of bias. I think it also helps make news more accurate, in the sense that, in the very short term, the accuracy of a story is inversely proportional to the time since it occurred, because people need time to piece information together, and Twitter and such make distributing all of the relevant facts happen that much faster.

Not to pick nits, but this is off by one. If you need the n most common elements, you should use

  c.most_common()[:-n-1:-1]

because the element at

  c.most_common()[-n]

is actually the n-1th most common element.

If they make cool things so that they can sell overpriced energy drinks, aren't they still making cool things? Isn't that still a good thing?

And Native Americans.

I think an online form would be nice if there were a way to ensure we weren't getting duplicate applications. Unfortunately, there is no unique identifier, so we would need to go by heuristics, which complicates things enormously.

If you do online-only and only 75% of people are online, you have to hand-count 25% of the population, which means you'd need about a 70% response rate with the people online to match what you have with paper forms. That's not realistic, I don't think. Plus, the people who aren't online tend to be in remote areas, which are much more expensive to hand-count.

The Census is inefficient in a whole lot of ways, but one thing that makes it really efficient is standardization. Every one of the ~700k enumerators gets the same exact kit, every manager gets the same boxes, and everything is basically made so an idiot can do it. There are two reasons for this: the first is that it's cheaper, but the second, more important reason is that the data is consistent from place to place. If people in NY respond online and people in North Dakota respond by mail, you'll get lots of little statistical differences that make the data less easy to work with. This the big reason they need to homogenize everything.

As the other commenter said, the social security number only works for people who are citizens, but the intent of the census is to count everyone who is regularly living in the area at the time. It's a tricky thing to define, and I think a silly one, but it's what the constitution says to do so we do it.