rm445

It doesn't seem to be all fakers. The situation as described by advocates of FizzBuzz and the like, is that large minority proportions of people who have already held down jobs in the software development field, actually can barely do things that we think of as basic programming, like implement a very straightforward function. The implication seems to be that there's just too many to all be actual liars; that they're doing some kind of cargo-cult, cut-and-paste, stack-overflow based work to keep themselves in a job, changing things by tweaking them but not actually capable of anything else.

It seems implausible. It's counter-intuitive. But the idea seems pretty persistent.

It's an interesting question for me personally. I'm a mechanical engineer who likes to program a little and I've sometimes wondered whether I could work as a programmer. I haven't got the right qualifications or experience with enough popular technologies, so moving fields would be tough. But I know I can implement basic things from scratch. It doesn't seem like much (and clearly it wouldn't be enough for the prestigious places with really tough computer science interviews) but it would be interesting to know if that actually was enough to clear a certain low bar of competence.

The linked site still works, the specific links are just dead. If you type the four-digit set number into the search box, the correct sets come right up.

It can be extremely useful when starting a project, and is part of accepted project management techniques (APM body of knowledge and similar). It genuinely helps to consider important people's level of interest, level of influence, and preferred communication styles. I can easily imagine it becoming so ingrained as to be used in all new situations.

I've also heard of it being used in situations with difficult colleagues or excessive office politics. Of course, by the time you are writing a stakeholder management plan just to deal with your own manager and peers, you probably need a new job, but it can be useful to keep you going for a while.

Given that multi-layer PCBs are effectively laminations of individual boards, hobbyists have already made their own multilayer boards [1]. I don't see anything particular about milling as a means of copper removal that would stop you layering up boards?

[1] https://www.instructables.com/id/Flexible-Double-Layer-OR-Mu...

Discussions of the Fermi paradox get swamped with people's individual hypotheses. It's nice to see an article that tries to develop a whole different kind of answer. The known possibilities seem to be:

1. We're alone (or very nearly so) due to an early filter. i.e. it was vanishingly unlikely for life to develop as far as it has here.

2. We're alone (or very nearly so) due to a late filter. i.e. life develops in lots of places but, terrifyingly, it becomes overwhelmingly likely to wipe itself out rather than spread.

3. Life develops frequently but there's some sort of interstellar ecology that makes species stay hidden or be wiped out.

4. Life develops frequently but is overwhelmingly likely to develop some other interest (becoming inward-looking, or exploring other dimensions) rather than colonising all of space.

This article's suggestion that Earth may be in a backwater wouldn't be sufficient by itself, so it is coupled with the idea, derived from observations on human colonisation of Micronesia, that expansion happens in waves and life on Earth happens to be in between waves. The problem is, advanced technological civilisations expanding across the galaxy isn't the same thing as Polynesian explorers eventually being followed by Europeans. Why would the waves die away? This is a late filter with extra steps.

Did they actually redo everything, or does it just look that way from starting from the Plan9 toolchain? Which could also be said to be re-doing everything, but from a much earlier starting point.

IIRC Go started out shipping with a port of the Plan9 C compiler and toolchain - it was bootstrapped by building the C compiler with your system C compiler, then building the Go compiler. Which, until re-written in Go circa-2013, was in Plan-9 style C. It all looks deeply idiosyncratic but it was a toolchain the initial implementors were highly familiar with.

Designing the layout of the PCB. Populating it with surface-mount components using home-made solder paste stencils and an oven. Selecting the MCU. Figuring out what kernel drivers are needed and what can be stripped out. Searching the web for datasheets and drivers that others have created/ported. Building the userland. Debugging and testing.

Like many pieces of technology, once you lay out the steps it starts to look as though each one, and therefore the whole, are achievable to a highly-motivated but somewhat typical person. And it's true! But even so, few people develop the whole set of skills to build something from start to finish, even notwithstanding the incredible help you can get nowadays from open-source software, consumer access to services such as PCB manufacturing, and online documentation. Even in a high-achieving community focused on building stuff, like this one, I doubt many posters here have completed as impressive an individual project.

Oh yeah, I see what you mean. I think the models in the article are deliberately simplified. At least some of those plots demonstrate a constant force, rather than a gravitational-type force. And the well-known weights-on-a-rubber-sheet analogy is notoriously unhelpful. I guess the real equations work for real curved spacetime.

They do! Gravity is an r-squared law.

(If you're confused about constant acceleration due to gravity, Galileo's experiment and all that, well different masses fall to earth with the same acceleration from the same height, but g decreases with distance from the Earth. It takes the familiar 9.81 m/s value as an agreed averaged value at the surface).

Headline writers using 'dated' to mean a release date (of say a film or game) has been announced, I can't help reading as judgement that the unreleased item is already passé.

Even further from being an auto-antonym, but positive and negative meanings both related to time.

I feel like 90% of this advice to authors comes down to: your advance is just that, an advance on sales royalties. Non-recoupable, but if you're 'lucky' enough to win a bigger advance than your eventual sales, it's not a great sign for your career anyway.

In the somewhat-related space of fitness trackers, there are alternatives to watches: keyfobs, ankle bracelets, rings. You get heart rate, sleep tracking, alarm clocks; I don't know if any do notification buzzes as well.

I think companies will continue to explore this space because there's potential to find a big winner. But they're contending with the difficulty of miniaturisation on top of the challenge of usability.

p.s. an idea that just crossed my mind was a smartwatch in a pen. Sure, pens are too easy to lose, but it could do some interesting things with input.

Nicely put, but then why need your example even be a pair of fancy glasses? It could be an energy generating device, or a transportation method, or a cure-all pharmaceutical or something.

I think the answer is partly that you're right and that technology in the more general broad sense has particular tendency to keep improving in value; partly that the OP is right and your example has some unstated implications (these non-upgradeable devices might well be prone to competition and hence generate surprisingly low shareholder returns); and partly that there are some other factors beyond OP's, to do with how the goods are produced.

Yeah, the number of words in the language doesn't prove the author's point at all.

That said, the difference in lexicon size isn't a trick about authorities or dictionaries, it's a real obvious thing. In English one can usually reach for an obscure word to find a near-synonym with a subtle change in meaning - as well as walking, say, one can trudge or plod or amble, whereas in French you'd be reaching for phrases instead. It doesn't limit anyone's ability to express themselves.

Using 'so', as in, 'I do so!' seems to carry almost the identical meaning to me, but it's hardly as universal and idiomatic as the French 'si'.

Robert Zubrin is a visionary, who I'm sure wouldn't compromise his credibility to churn out some paid-propaganda.

I guess your objections are otherwise pretty reasonable, except the metal hydrides part is unfair for a 2007 article. The Toyota Mirai and other extant hydrogen vehicles store hydrogen, not metal hydrides.

That's the same confusion the article rails against. Methanol and ethanol are no more a source of energy than (terrestrial) hydrogen is. They just might be more convenient fuels, energy carriers.

But the article is partly about a film documentary. Presumably the difference is the time for editing and release and he was/claimed to be 119 when it was filmed.

Parent poster's claim seems to be that Boeing is incentivised to make safe planes, and is likely to have better aeronautical engineers than the regulator. In that scenario, it wouldn't matter if the regulators were corrupt or Boeing certified itself.

Unfortunately there's a massive hole in that argument, which is that (i) Boeing might be incentivised to do things which aren't in the public interest, such as take risks to make a great deal more money, and (ii) it might suffer a decline in competence due to contingent or management factors.

Perhaps in a perfect world incentives could be so perfectly aligned that no industry would need regulating. But that's not the world we live in.

Yes, if you measure inflation as a basket of consumer goods, you can pat yourself on the back doubly for having an asset bubble at the same time as "low" inflation. Nice that the population can still afford bread and eggs, not so nice that the prices of property, artwork and the like disappear into the stratosphere far beyond their reach.

It's how people count things. If you want to know how many sheep or apples are in front of you, you start counting at one, and the number you get up to is the number that there are. If there are i elements of a set, the first element is the 1st element and the last element is the ith element. Doing it otherwise risks fencepost errors.

(There are perfectly reasonable arguments why computer languages might be zero-indexed, whereby objects start at the zeroth offset. But counting from 1 upwards is definitely more natural for counting, it's disingenuous to pretend otherwise).

The "No (regular) internet" thing is tough - the global public Internet is kinda the only game in town. But otherwise, there are so many cheap laptops that can run Linux. We're in a golden age.

I wondered about that as well - but there's a reasonable chance it's just a sticker on a generic tablet-keyboard combo.

It's a link to people I know from real life, by their real names. Family and friends. People I have some level of emotional connection to such that I have some level of interest in seeing pictures of what they do in their leisure time, how their kids are growing up and so on. Staying in touch with them by the many other forms of communication available would be such a pain, just because there are so many.

I've spent a lot of time on pseudonymous online communities - slashdot, reddit, hacker news and others - and although there is always interesting discussion, I don't feel anything like the same interest in other posters as I do in say my housemate from 2003-2005.

Don't get me wrong, Facebook-the-company and Facebook-the-algorithmically-generated-feed are fairly vile, but the USP, the network effect is something that has emotional worth to a lot of people.

'Engineer of mathematics' and the like make sense given that academia has been fairly effective in making society believe 'science' means scientific research, rather than all of the scientific pursuits including engineering and manufacturing.

(Talking about language here, not state regulation of professions).

There are employees at the company I work with great job titles like 'mathematician' and 'physicist'. But if the physicist is applying known principles (obscure ones about photon behaviour, but well-understood principles) to product development rather than blue-sky R&D, what is their actual job? - Given many people would think a physicist is a researcher. There's an argument that the job in question is actually 'physics engineer'.

In the historic world of high-stakes rubber bridge, you're right - players would cut for partners after each 'rubber' game so your partner in crime might soon be your opponent. I'm sure there were occasional big-money scams like all situations involving gamblers and money generally. Roald Dahl wrote an amusing short story about one possibility.

In the modern world of competitive duplicate bridge, there are occasional collusion-based cheating scandals - the most recent one I'm aware of involved a communication system via position of the pencils with which the pair involved kept track of their score. By far the most famous scandal was a pair of English players back in the sixties communicating the number of hearts in their hand (enough to give a winning edge) with hand signals.

Nowadays good records are kept and cheating tends to come to light eventually. The apparatus used in top tournaments is different from a casual game and meant to prevent collusion, and also, with the diagonal screen, make it harder to tell whether any hesitation came from your partner (reducing deliberate or unintentional inferences).

In big tournaments with lots of players, because hands are duplicated to be played lots of times, it's not uncommon for players to be on a 'wire' i.e. deliberately or by overhearing learn some features of a hand they haven't played yet. It causes a lot of outrage and controversy but it doesn't ultimately matter that much. The most important matches are between two teams and things are arranged to reduce the opportunity for the pairs in a team to communicate with one another.

Since I'm writing a pretty long post here, I'll also mention that computers still don't play bridge especially well, so the problem of players getting computer assistance, such a concern in chess, doesn't feature.

All in all, preventing cheating in bridge is kind of an ongoing but not particularly high-profile activity. There's an obvious solution to make cheating even harder - keep players physically separate and make them do everything from a monitored computer terminal, which could also do things like introduce delays to make everything happen in tempo. But the administrators obviously think that would be pretty unpopular and prefer to keep it a card game.

It's a decentralized, federated, network. So choosing an instance I guess is more like choosing an IRC server.

Or picking between Gmail and Hotmail, or any other e-mail service. Livejournal or Blogger. It's no coincidence the examples I can think of seem slightly old hat, because these things have been out of fashion for a while. They need to involve the blockchain somehow if they want it to seem modern.

It's a nice thought, but I recall reading elsewhere that integration was developed separately to differentiation (to find areas and volumes) until they were found to be related.

I think that did happen. Banks and utility companies started to offer chat-like interfaces (without a human responder) for services and help. The number of end-users could probably have been graphed as a steeply rising curve for a while. It just didn't justify the breathless expectations of the companies trying to sell chat interfaces at the time.

Ribbon UI is very discoverable. I bet most people would have a better chance of picking up a feature-rich program such as AutoCAD nowadays than back in the time of menus and toolbars.

CAD packages are a good example, really. They tend to have tons of features, which are fairly easy to find with a ribbon, but also have lots of configurability (hideable toolbars) and speed features (radial menus) for power users. But the balance is hard to strike - if anything they tend to have too many ways of doing things, and not good enough defaults.

The current incarnation of Microsoft Office products' UI is a mess too. Buttons and search bars all over the chrome of the windows (what used to be the title bar), most of the old Alt+letter codes still working, and ribbon 'tabs' that bring up full-page menus (the File menu). My answer to your probably-rhetorical question is yes, you should use a ribbon design in a windowed app, to provide a baseline level of making the features easy-to-find. The difficult part is adding more powerful power-user features or most-used features without turning the interface into a big mess.