sankyo

I ride a motorcycle in SF daily and frequently "split lanes". I saw one of the Ubers all decked out with spinning radar and wondered how it would react as I passed through at 10-15mph. There was a person at the steering wheel, I am not sure who was in control. Thankfully it was uneventful. I thought the car might brake or veer away from me.

My pet theory is that we are isolated and there are less ways to feel connected to society (suburbs, too much TV) and the over importance of image, wealth, and status. Too many McJobs and lonely suburbs and people start to get depressed and other forms of mental illness. Naturally these people self medicate when their needs are not met anywhere else.

Corporations used to feel more obligated to the society that they were in. Churches used to be more popular. Even if the Catholic church did evil things and controlled people, it did/does provide a place for people to feel like they belonged somewhere.

I also concluded Dell XPS 13 or Thinkpad Carbon, but never did a writeup. Still have not bought anything.

I want: 16GB, no touch bar, good keyboard, retina screen. I want a stripped down OS X, there are so many processes on El Capitain that just take up memory, distract me, and clutter my screen. I want zfs, not apfs.

I do not want to lose weekends trying to get the webcam or the fans working in Ubuntu. I'll miss homebrew if I use Ubuntu.

I feel like a person with no country. Somebody please pick up the torch that Apple dropped and make a laptop for developers.

This is not true in all cases, but H1B workers show up to work hard, show strong understanding that they are being paid to do a job as opposed to being entitled for some lifestyle, and have more respect for the hierarchy of the org. They will tend to stick around for a while too, and not be job hoppers. It is saddening to see them exploited as basically indentured servants.

On the flip side, they do not challenge authority when they know a better way to do something, their educational foundation is not as solid because of too much focus on rote memorization, and tend to let interpersonal problems fester instead of escalating because they cannot imagine speaking out of their place in the hierarchy.

The top tier of Home country employees are great, but once you get to the lower part of tier 2 and tier 3, they tend to have an attitude of "what can the company do for me?" , Instead of "What can I do for the company?" And they start feeling like dead weight.

Of course these are all generalizations and there are exceptions everywhere to what I have said.

A meeting that does not result in 1) a decision 2) action items or 3) information distribution is a waste of time. As a team, meetings are necessary to get "on the same page". It is true, sometimes in a meeting we think, "This could have been done with email". And other times when there is an email thread with 20+ responses, we think "A meeting would have solved this faster" It is not always easy to plumb the depths of a topic to decide beforehand.

in Clojure we use EDN (Extensible Data Notation) for config files and a data transfer format. https://github.com/edn-format/edn

It is really a pleasure to use compared to JSON and XML. While it may not be as compact as ProtoBuffers, Thrift, or Avro, it is human readable and also valid Clojure code. Libraries are ready available to convert it to JSON.

It is not simply a matter of providing homes. Most of the street people in San Francisco have serious mental illness and drug addiction problems. They cannot take care of themselves. Giving those people a home will not solve their problems.

Nope. I read it and laughed. I love the New Yorker. It just got me thinking about if my father owned a rubber empire in South America and I did have a trust fund, how long could I really travel, and where would I go. Then it got me thinking about my own travels.

One thing from my travels is this: I hardly have any decent stories about fancy places we stayed. All the memorable stories happened in hostels, sketchy hotels, or plain resorts. We met interesting people and workers and they tended to be in interesting neighborhoods. All the fancy stuff is good for R&R, but it is mostly boring and forgettable.

Good question. It is possible, I think, especially if you can incorporate some craft or skill - like playing an instrument, writing, photography along the way. You have a chance to practice your craft in so many settings, any of which may "push you beyond a local minima", because you are lonely, homesick, inspired by kindness or natural beauty.

On the flip side, every day life keeps you so busy - figuring out how and where to do laundry, what time something opens, where can eyeglasses get fixed, is there a better, cheaper place to stay than the current one, etc. If there is a will there is a way.

Traveling around the world for 6-?? months is really eye opening and gives you a lot to think about. Solving puzzles about getting money, how to get to places, crossing language barriers, trying to tap into the underground, cool scene, not being limited to the tourist kitsch, learning how things are done in ways you had never thought of, these all require creativity and are rewarding. There are also many hardships on the road too, and sometimes you wish you could teleport home, if there is such a place.

But after a while, the places all start looking the same, and every place gives you the same experiences, more or less. There are buses or subways, hotels, or hostels, interesting people who like meeting foreigners, museums, parks, points of interest, foods, drinks, restaurants, bars. Something starts growing inside you saying "I want to build something, I want to belong to something." That something could be a tech company, a school, a network of friends, a business, a non-profit, a family, or anything else.

When you get to that point, your traveling days are limited, and you start making plans for how satiate your new appetite. You will probably travel again someday, but with a new objective, and with more experience guiding where you go and how you spend your time in the places.

Next we can expect an article about how giving someone the title "Engineer" can give them some dignity and increase retention rates.

"sanitation engineers" should only refer to themselves as Waste collectors http://www.thesaurus.com/browse/sanitation+engineer

A "property engineer" was sent up to my sister in law's hotel room to unclog the toilet after my nephew finished his business there. http://www.maintenanceresources.com/referencelibrary/ezine/h...

Point of clarification: there is no such thing as an "ex" con. The conviction stays even if the person never breaks the law again.

"While the homeless may always be with us, we need to ensure that we are helping them in the most effective ways possible. For the city named after Francis of Assisi, a nobleman who gave away everything he had when he saw a poor man on the street, nothing less is acceptable."

The article seems to imply that creating more housing will solve this problem. Such is not the case. "Homeless" is a euphemism. There are two types of street people: 1. Those who cannot take care of themselves. 2. Those who will not take care of themselves.

As a society, we should take care of the people who are unable to take care of themselves. I do not know how to define "take care", but it definitely should not include having schizophrenic episodes on the corner, intimidating panhandling, drug fueled benders, and shitting like animals on the city sidewalks.

One idea is to lock them up in an institution. This is expensive, arguably unfair, and creates an opportunity for abuse and corruption (one flew over the cuckoo's nest), and sets up a big liability - How long before violence or abuse causes a huge payout from the government?

For the others who _can_ take care of themselves but will not, they seem to me to be some combination of really bad choices and really bad luck, it is less clear to me what our responsibility to them is, and I wonder how much they can be helped. Consider Tap from the article. If he just wants to tap dance and get drunk all day, sleeping and shitting on the streets in my neighborhood, I am completely unsupportive. I will call the cops every time I find him passed out. Hopefully they will run him out of town. As much as he wants this lifestyle, it cannot make ends meet. He seems like a likable fellow during his stable periods, but I do not want to subsidize him.

If you don't want to make an honest living, you are going to have to break laws: dealing drugs, breaking car windows and stealing from them, stealing and selling bicycles. I have no tolerance for these layabouts and I cannot see why anyone else should either.

With 30-40k LOC, could you please share the extent to which you feel protected when refactoring given that Clojure is dynamically typed? Some of my colleagues argue that often times a static compiler is the only thing keeping the ship upright in a large org with a big codebase, and unless your team is small and very smart, it would be foolish to use a dynamically typed language.

My experience can't help me much, but I sure want to try it.

Whatever it is, it is the beginning of something really great and thanks to flyingmachine for creating it and sharing his knowledge. If it is a course, article, or tutorial, either way it is something that get more people familiar with Clojure.

The comments that he shows are pretty worthless. However, comments are often necessary to explain WHY we are doing something.

oven.setTemp(350) // 400 will burn them, 300 they will be mushy

fluxCapacitor.setOption(THRESHOLD, 1.21E9) // lower thresholds will prevent return from time travel. Please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeLorean_time_machine to review the physics

By the time most people could afford any of this equipment their hearing has probably degraded to such a point that they can only hear 12kHz to 14kHz anyway.

Although unscientific, I played some tones on youtube in the office and the twenty somethings could hear almost 20kHz and the forty somethings couldn't hear anything by the time the frequency sweep was just below 15kHz.

I split lanes (San Francisco) to avoid being rear ended by an inattentive driver. The safest place to be is between 2 cars at a red light. Of course I like going faster than all the cars around me and I can get a block or two ahead of everyone by cruising up to the front of the queue. There is a safe way to split lanes - do not go more than 5-10 MPH faster than the cars, and watch for gaps because a car will change lanes unexpectedly to fill those gaps.

I like the idea of the vehicle in the article mainly for these reasons: more throughput on the roads (every car has only one passenger) and fuel efficiency. I would like to see a world where people commuted in these and only used the SUV for bigger trips.

My six year old son and I attended the maker faire. It was nonstop fascination and engagement for both of us all day. He loved the Lego Jeep, building squishy circuits with play-doh, 10mm LEDs and DC motors, building switches with aluminum, foam core, and alligator clips. When he asked, "Dad, can we build circuits and a robot too?" I got a huge smile on my face and felt really great.

The Arduino controlled fire breathing machines scared the hell out of him and he wouldn't go anywhere near them no matter how much I tried to convince him that they were safe (you could feel a heat blast from them and they were loud).

We watched the future engineers of America compete with their TETRIX robots, moving bowling balls and picking up racquet balls.

Overall the Maker Faire gave me confidence that in the U.S. there are still a lot of smart inventors shaping the future. Not everyone is tapped out watching "American Idle" blaming red states and blue states.

3D printers were everywhere and fun to watch. I have no use for one, but suddenly I want to build one. Luckily the price tags north of $1500 brought me back to reality.

We bought a few inexpensive electronic projects that we look forward to building and plan on attending both days next year. It was crowded, but the people running the booths were so nice and knowledgable, there was so much there to spark the imagination that it was worth it.

It is a cool tool, but to me it means that people in the SF bay area use the web for housing; other areas not so much.

When someone asks me for an estimate I like to pose this question: You just realized that you lost your keys. How long will it take you to find them? You've lost your keys before so you should be able to estimate how long it will take, right?

Well, maybe. Probably you can retrace your steps and figure out where you set them down while you were on the phone, or maybe they fell into the couch. There is also a possibility that it is going to take you a long time to find those keys.

The software estimate often depends on environments being available, other people finishing the piece you interact with on time and working the way that you expected, and you may have tricky defects that you really can't estimate how long it will take to fix them or how many there will be.

A clear specification is only one piece of the puzzle. To switch metaphors, pretend it is 1812 and try to give an estimate of how long it will take to get from Chicago to San Francisco. Yes, you have a map with routes, but there is also weather, broken wagon wheels, dysentery, bandits, you name it. (just ask the Donner party). Let's just estimate it at 90 days and probably we'll lose some people along the way and pick up a few more.

At best I try to give the suitcase estimate: I can estimate that you will need one suitcase for a weekend trip, you most likely will not need two.

in 2011 we do not know phone numbers anymore, but those braincells now store passwords.

I never saw one in the wild, neither in SF nor Seattle. I think it died because from the beginning the perception was like getting the Dodge Neon instead of the Honda Civic. Also with iTunes in the national lexicon, who wanted to be left out? "Thanks for the iTunes gift card, Grandma. Maybe we can spend it at the Zune Marketplace."

If you are unable to take care of yourself, then the state has a responsibility to take care of you.

However, with freedom comes responsibility, so if you cannot be responsible to take care of yourself then it follows that you should lose some freedoms too. They should not be free to mill around corners drinking and doing drugs, using the sidewalk and street as a toilet.

Here in San Francisco we have many street people and most of them are not capable of taking care of themselves. Most have mental illness, drinking and/or drug problems. It would be nice if someone could triage the ones who have potential to be rehabilitated. As for the ones who cannot be rehabilitated, they should be warehoused somewhere where they are not a danger to themselves or others. As of today, they are warehoused in the streets, and it is lose-lose for everyone. Everyone seems to blame Reagan for shutting down most of the mental hospitals. I do not know to what extent that is true.

Overall I fear that there are now too many people in the wagon and not enough pulling it.

I have been digging into the pyramid docs and writing some toy apps with it trying to learn it, and I think that you will not be disappointed. I am confident that turbogears / tosca widgets will be integrated in such a way that it is loosely coupled and will not get in your way if you do not want to use it.

Spend some time reading the pyramid docs - it it totally agnostic for template engines, authentication/authorization, http session implementation, etc. very pluggable.

I will say though, that at this point 1.0alpha8, a noob will probably get frustrated, but someone who has worked with pylons / repoze / sqlalchemy can connect the dots.

Also, with every alpha release, you can also see the changes to the documentation, which is looking more like django docs (i.e. good)

Django fills a certain niche and if it matches your problem, it is a no brainer. If you need a more flexible web framework, look at pyramid.

It seemed to me that a lot of the reviews were from people who worked in the call center, not developers, network engineers, etc. No doubt that it is quite a different experience between the two groups.

if you want to get people to buy into your idea, you often have to convince them that the idea was their own.

way to "gear up" steve. no helmet, no gloves, no jacket. But I guess he didn't have to worry about so many people talking on mobile phones and texting while driving.