rverghes

Pre-regulation gambling was often for much higher stakes. Gambling in modern times is for fairly low stakes in comparison. Legalized casinos are supposed to control the amount that people lose and keep it to reasonable values.

Second, that was a time where households relied on a single male breadwinner. If that man became a gambling addict, it destroyed not only his future, but the future of his wife and children as well. So much the same as the Temperance movement, anti-gambling laws were aimed at protecting the entire family.

Yes, but right-to-work is generally a reaction to involuntary unionization, as in it came after the involuntary unionization phase.

It's generally to prevent free-riding. Let's say the union negotiates benefit X, and the company then provides benefit X to all employees including non-union employees. An example could be safety features that the union is pushing for. The non-union employees have benefited from the actions of the union without having to pay the cost.

To balance this, involuntary unionization usually requires a majority vote from the employees to unionize.

What would you want your boss to do?

Let's say this is a perfect, magical world where your boss will do everything possible to help you. What actions would she take? Would she switch you to another team? Reduce your workload? Allow you to work from home? Let you take a month off?

Basically your boss can't make your burnout magically go away. Figure out what you'd ideally want her to do. Then figure if that's even possible. If the concrete action you want is within your boss's power, then you may as well ask. But understand that your boss may say no, and you may end up quitting to get what you want.

I bet a modern common space would be filled by people looking at their cellphones.

Perhaps it would have worked before smartphones, but I don't think it will any longer.

Failure to understand Non-Profit 101. If you rely on unpaid volunteers, you can't afford to enrage them. It doesn't really matter if those volunteers are right or wrong.

Consider that each line in a conversation is a separate text. So if you have a 5 min conversation with a friend, each of you spends 15s on a reply, then you have 10 texts in that conversation. And that was just a short conversation.

If you phrase it as "the average teen says 94 sentences to his friends each day", that doesn't sound so extreme. And a good portion of those sentence will come in a few much longer conversations.

I wonder if Amazon actually A/B tested this, or just dropped it because of pressure from activists. If they did A/B test it, and found it increased sales or search efficiency, they should tout the finding.

But part of me wonders if they didn't just end up making their website worse for people actually trying to search for a present.

> So where does the obvious gender bias in the industry come from? It's actually gotten worse since the 1980s, not better. There are only two explanations for the obvious reality. One is that women simply aren't as good at programming as men are. The other is that there is a persistent and difficult cultural bias against women in this industry.

Option 3: Women see tech as a "risky" field compared to their other options, and choose not to go into it.

See: http://blessingofkings.blogspot.com/2014/10/women-in-compute...

I wonder if this is a way to get around backwards compatibility issues. If it's a new brand with a new name, maybe there won't be expectations that it will work like previous versions of IE.

Is that true though? Take a look at this: http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/

The number of tickets sold seems to be on a steady decline since the early 2000s. It's only because the average ticket price is increasing that the total gross is increasing, and even that has been relatively stagnant for the past five years.

Not really, because db is not static. In my example, that Database.write() method would itself be static, and thus you can't pass it in as an argument.

Basically, this concept means that it's static all the way down, from the top layer to the bottom layer.

He's assuming that the static method has a dependency on something. That it's not purely functional. For example,

  public static doSomething() {
    Database.write("Did something")
  }

Makes testing hard because Database is hardcoded.

You're right, my mistake. That "five higher" should have been "four higher".

The thing is that your solution is the algebraic solution. You're simplifying an equation by balancing both sides, when you subtract four. Just from our perspective, you simplify to a still difficult state, instead of the easiest possible state.

Algebra is just a way of formally stating what you did, and then offering some simplifications that speed up the process. Or offering more powerful methods that making solving more difficult problems easier.

You'd probably see something similar when looking at a C/C++ project. I would expect significant coupling between header and source files.

The solution there was for future languages to combine the two. Maybe we'll see a future language combine unit tests and source into the same file.

Heh, maybe such a language would refuse to compile if public functions did not have an associated test.

Are you saying that if the word problem was "2 consecutive numbers and a third number that was five higher than the second number" you'd be unable to solve it?

"Tricks" work for simple cases. Algebra works for all cases.

So Ubisoft is also paying off the French politicians complaining about this? There are numerous links in the article.

(If they are, that's pretty impressive work by the Ubisoft PR department.)

The simpler explanation that someone at the Atlantic pays attention to French politics, saw these complaints, and spun it into an article for their American audience.

Let's say we have a small town of 1000 people. How exactly will "the technology behind Bitcoin" run this town? Deal with garbage, water, police?

I would guess that it's to keep underage girls out of the stripping business.

Probably previously the onus was on the owner to avoid hiring underage girls. But a couple scandals later, the government responded by requiring licensing.

I saw this title and immediately thought of the Alpha Centauri wonder, The Self-Aware Colony:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwqN3Ur-wP0

Probably not the connotations the author wanted.

Looking at the raw data, there's a boom in computer science degrees in the mid-80s, for both men and women. Then there's a significant drop-off, again for both men and women. However, in percentage terms the drop-off for women is larger.

To me, that suggests a narrative where the "bust" painted computer science as a less reliable, more risky field. As a result women were less likely to go back into it.

A similar boom/bust happens in the early 2000s. Again, the female share drops more and recovers slower.

Mathematically, isn't this a guaranteed result?

The article said that the share of women in other programs kept rising. So doesn't the share of women in different programs need fall to balance? If more women become lawyers, aren't there fewer women left for other programs?

I really wish these types of articles would show absolute numbers. Percentages can be so misleading.

I think they should put a 10-20 year waiting limit on the Peace price. Give history some time to see what actually happened. Not to denigrate Malala, she sounds like an amazing young women. But I don't see that she has actually accomplished anything yet. Maybe in 20 years the quality of life and education for women in Islamic countries will have gone up notably, and she will have been identified as the catalyst for that. Then she will definitely deserve the prize.

But right now it sounds like feel-good wishful thinking.

I think that giving the prize to the people who contributed the most for peace in 1994 or earlier would give us some perspective, some confirmation that what they actually did worked and led to a better, more peaceful world.

The problem here is that the first 40 hours of work--which the author believes has low utility--are the hours which generate the money to pay for the author's job. The author places higher utility on the next 20 hours, but those hours don't generate money, but prestige and scientific advancement.

The situation is similar to an artist who cannot (yet) make money off her "artistic" work. Instead she has to do commercial work to support her "artistic" ambitions.

Utility seems to have several dimensions. It's easy to say that the first 40 hours of commercial work have low utility, but without those first hours, you would not able to survive to do the rest of the work that you are more interested in.

At the end of the day, you have to pay your bills. The work that pays your bills is not automatically lower utility than the work that you do for fun/prestige/skill/art/etc.

5 days ago Paul Krugman said the problem was that our rich were flaunting their wealth.[1] Barely a week later, the problem is that the rich are invisible.

[1] http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/24/having-it-and-fl...

I disagree. If the death is in any way related to work, they will get sued or fined and lose a lot more money that way.

The company is just playing the odds. If they have thousands of employees, some of them will die naturally every year. The entire scheme is just to gain the tax advantages of life insurance from those natural deaths.

The price of this might be the destruction of comic book stores. It's often hard for companies to bypass retailers, because the retailers will get mad at them, and the retailers are the majority of their (direct) customers.

This way, Amazon does Marvel/DCs dirty work, but Marvel/DC still gets paid.

I bet half the audience sees this as an indictment of tuition increases, and the the other half sees this as an indictment of the lack of minimum wage increases.

I know what the author is trying to convey, but I'm not sure he has the best metric.

I worked for a small real estate company for a couple years, developing a software solution for them.

The biggest problem is that real estate is very "exception-based". I.e. There are no "absolute" rules. Every rule you can think of will have an exception somewhere that you have to account for. Some of these exceptions may even contradict each other. 99% of properties will follow any given rule, but 1% of properties will not.

In some respects, this is why Excel is perfect for real estate. You can pick a specific row, and adjust that row for that specific property's exceptions without altering the other deals above and below.

Out of curiosity, why only have one string type? We don't do the same for numbers. Many languages don't have "number", they have int, float, long, etc.

Instead of just String, maybe we should have ASCIIString, UTF8String, and UTF16String.