simplesleeper

I was hoping someone would save me the searching and link me directly to relevant papers. I think the article should have done it itself, as the assumption is rather fundamental to the whole theory.

Similarly I didn't see any mention of intermediate evolutionary stages being found for either a case 1 or 2? If someone sees a paper that does that, it'd be cool

this story doesn't add up - it suggests the birds were there 10,000 years apart while it was submerged for 36,000 years?

what are you citing there? I cannot find any articles that suggest long periods of submersion - only that there WERE submersions

VSCode

Jungle Soldier - story of Freddie Spencer Chapman (like Lawrence of Arabia, but even better story)

Left to Tell - Immaculée Ilibagiza's life, story of survival of the Rwandan Genocide and a tale of how to live on after such tragedy and how to forgive the unforgiveable.

Longitude - essentially a biography of John Harrison, the man who solved the longitude problem (and probably thereby made the success of the British Empire)

X, Y & Z - a brilliant biography of all the French, English and Polish codebreakers of WW2

Agent Zigzag - the story of the man who betrayed everyone and could possibly have killed Hitler if he was allowed

William Pitt the Younger (Robin Reilly) - possibly one of the most difficult periods in British History saw one of the best British Prime Ministers to date

Kukuczka - the story of how he became one of the world's most impressive climbers despite communist oppression

The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History - a highly interesting book that brings the necessary documents to the table to help understand a topic that is often treated in a very facile way

Ivan III and the Unification of Russia - a great book for understanding the basis on which Russia was built

Xenophon's Anabasis - what a load of fun. How to lead a failed army back home and gorge on mad honey

Reds should be used instead of neon colours, to preserve night vision

Yes - this page is not just a blog post. It contains a graphic that is a "timetable of truth" for London buses 1-50, so can certainly be tried out.

It certainly depends where, some parts of Outer London can be "Hail and Ride" sections, where any part of the street essentially counts as a station

The schedule is not necessarily padded. The point of the piece is making it clear that London bus timetables are not in any way a source of truth, but a contract that operators have to work towards achieving. It is doubtless that they would have some input into what times are accepted as the contract and would only accept one they think they could manage to operate - so greater times than would generally be achievable.

As a londoner, if you wanted a timetable more based on truth, it would look more like the attached graphic on the page - an analysis of the spread of waiting times.

It does indeed have much shorter distances between stops than I've seen elsewhere in europe. The stops are however all optional - if noone flags the bus down and a passenger doesn't press a stop button, the bus won't stop. The buses are pretty frequent, but the amount of bus stops probably means that journey times are sacrificed for the convenience of quick and easy boarding

Author here, you can AMA

reforestation has been ongoing at a massive scale for quite a while now - I drove on a motorway for days across Brazil, for example, and only saw forests of trees lined in perfect rows by the road.

Congestion does not necessarily mean a shortage of roads. Sometimes roads make congestion worse. Braess' Paradox has shown to occur as often as not.

I do apologise. For a moment I thought I was talking to Alasdair. Having now checked your name properly, everything you wrote previously is seen in a new light and my post is the twaddle in this instance.

Agreed that things can always improve.

What makes you think they'll be toxic and counterproductive? If, as you seem to think, whiteboarding is a test for this, then everyone should have whiteboarding tests where the good whiteboarders don't get a job.

And how do you propose a removal of all stress? Shall we hire everyone and fire them if they turn out to be dreadful after a week? That would ensure EVERYONE is under pressure all the time...

+ we don't set a hard time limit in the interviews. The whiteboarding piece is last and the candidate can spend as much time as he would like to. Often candidates have shown something we are happy with in just 5 minutes or so.

The assumption you seem to be making is that anyone with a whiteboard is also an evil villain that wants to interrogate you violently you and pick on any mistakes that you might make. In reality, it is a higher level check to see if you can communicate at all.

... You are making a load of assumptions that are wrong.

We ask the candidate to describe a system they have recently built. Therefore they should have product context, they are not being tested on inventing whatsoever (unless they are actually doing an impressive con, in which case, they'll have to be extra skillfull). As mentioned below, we give candidates the benefit of the doubt, but quite a lot of candidates are unable to give even a simple explanation of what they've worked on.

As for the amount of pressure - all of the pressure is circumstantial. We try as hard as possible to put candidates at ease. Obviously it's not entirely possible, but we try our best. Secondly, scenarios like that happen all the time. Maybe I won't get fired, but if there is a pressing issue, for example, I often need to draw diagrams to explain what is happening to a part of a distributed system. It is impossible to do without diagrams. And communicating these issues clearly and concisely often leads to quicker resolution times and happier clients/stakeholders

"it's not hard to imagine that A" does not mean that A is happening. It doesn't even mean that P(A) is high.

Your first paragraph also goes directly against what you are trying to prove. If their success relies on good hiring, then they would pick the best methods. If they haven't, they wouldn't be successful and would be replaced.

What a load of twaddle .

What are you basing this opinion on?

Of course the candidate is under more pressure than they would be at work - that's why we don't expect them to create a Leonardo masterpiece in front of us and we give the candidate the benefit of the doubt.

You would be surprised at how poor some of the candidates are at this. Candidates who are unable to draw a few squares on a board to describe the last thing they worked on, and candidates who have never questioned any of the work they were assigned or don't understand that there are often multiple options for a solution, each with pros and cons.

If someone can't even draw a simple diagram on a board, I don't want to have to plan and come up with highly complex solutions over whole months with them.

I interview a lot of candidates and we do whiteboarding - to see how candidates can communicate architecture designs and decisions.

The interviews have made me realise that countless candidates are unable to:

1. Give a high level overview of a product

2. Critique design choices and suggest improvements

3. Communicate well as to what the value of components are to the broader business.

Many of the developers can explain a particular piece of logic very well, others can't even do that. But in an enterprise scenario, we need excellent communicators.

I know the subdivisions of most of the countries I've been to, which includes most of Europe, Australia and USA...

The US spends a lot of money exporting its media, so it can't be surprising that everyone follows its movies and songs or that in London we occasionally have to endure a temporary hysteria about hand-egg (american football)

I've been wondering for ages why we don't continue activally domesticating other species - what better way to protect them than to ensure we can integrate? It may take a while, bit we've managed it in the past with a fragment of our scientific knowledge

we got a yellow pages phonebook this year. Thinner than a standard paperback now

I don't think the author understands what "emergence" is. The concept of emergence is that a complex system might have properties that CANNOT be explained by studying the parts.

I don't know of any comprehensive writeups - even the internal wiki is lacking

I've found functions apps have a slow startup time, but once they are going, they perform pretty fast.

I think we currently don't have any functions in time-sensitive streams (they're rather new, so they are used for new features such as Oyster automated refunds, which can be applied a few days later if need be), so when I say we haven't had any performance issues with them, it has to be taken with a pinch of salt.

I think if we were using microservices, they would have substantially more logic in them than the individual functions have, so they would have a lower network overhead. They wouldn't scale automatically, so we'd have to have quite a few machines on all the time, which would cost a bit more.

The main benefit we enjoy from functions is the ability to change code with zero downtime, low risk and minimum disruptions to the whole service.

We've found the interfaces in Azure also to be great - we can write end-to-end tests that can poll service bus to check when all messages are delivered to assert against any final case.

Software developer at Transport for London here.

A substantial part of a few of our systems use Azure Functions.

We've actually found them excellent to work with, fairly cheap and scaling very efficiently.

The main issues we've had are internal disagreements about how to pass app settings in efficiently. Originally we put all the app settings in the ARM templates used to deploy them. Then we put them as variables in VSTS. And then finally we decided to put them inti variable groups, which are within task groups, which are used by releases. It's a bit of a weird chain of dependencies, but now all of our parameters are located in one place

I started using my planner to also write notes on what I did that day and any thoughts I had. I now feel more like I know myself and my organisational skills have improved.