Are staff engineers needed? The role seems like a relatively new invention. Senior and midlevel IC engineers do the heavy lifting, principals set strategy and define architecture, EMs manage engineers, PMs manage product. I'm not clear on what the role of the staff engineer is and why it's needed.
This. Documentation (comment blocks in code, as well as all other forms of documentation) tends to become outdated because it is not maintained in sync with every code change.
Solution: write clear, simple, modular code that is self-documenting and does not need extensive commenting.
While it would be in Amazon's interest to get the federal minimum wage increased after setting their internal minimum wage at $15/hr, why is this negative? Aligning business interests with the public good is brilliant IMO and I strongly feel a $15 minimum wage, plus regular increases, is for the public good. Kudos to Amazon for making the wage increase and aligning their business interests and lobbying efforts to a federal wage increase.
I think the demand side for single family housing will increase in Seattle over the near future. There has been a recent boom in tech company positions and equity (especially Amazon and Microsoft, but others as well such as Tableau, Facebook, etc.). There is a relatively (compared to SF) nascent startup and VC scene developing, and more tech companies are opening or expanding branch offices here as they observe the talent pool that's now well above critical mass. And many employees of these companies are young (in their 20s), recent transplants from around the country, or on temporary work visas and in the process of getting green cards / citizenship. Seattle is also a place people tend to want to plant roots (for the great career options, the natural beauty, and the culture).
As the young recent transplants build their savings and seek to plant roots and start families when they get into their 30s, they'll look at single family housing. But the natural beauty includes water on two sides of the city and there is basically no undeveloped land to add more single family houses. Combining these employment, demographic and geographic factors, I expect demand to continue surging forward and supply to remain constrained. Building up and new apartments coming online is starting to reduce pressure on soaring condo/apartment rent costs, and building up to increase supply is a valve that can continue to reduce rent pressure for those without families. But I don't see a way forward to increase single family housing inside the city limits - in fact supply will go down as more townhomes and apartment buildings go up.
It seems, as the article hints at but doesn't much explore, that American Millenial coastal urban dwellers will need to develop a new conception of family housing (that is not single family housing with a private yard). I think there are options here, and the conception of the American dream replete with single family housing around an urban core seems like a relatively recent post-war phenomenon. What does family housing in Tokyo look like? In dense European cities? Historically before the 20th century? What new forms could it take, especially as we build up and think about modern amenities? With new transportation options (ride sharing, better bike infra, soon self driving cars) garages are less necessary, with new meal delivery options kitchens are less necessary, and with the sharing economy we can cut down on storage space. I'd like to see some new creative approaches to modern US family housing.
I think capitalism is much simpler: capital begets capital. Those who have capital will accumulate more capital, almost infinitely, until the capital/income ratio reaches an equilibrium who knows how high (in the absence of major corrections like wars and hyper inflation). Add inherited wealth and low taxes. Capitalism's winners are those who already have capital. Thomas Pickety's book "Capital in the 21st Century" cogently illustrates this using massive tax return based data sets.
According to this article, the study found those who watch 5 or more hours of TV a day while sitting were 65% more likely to lose mobility in the period tested than those who watch < 2 hours per day, controlling for all other variables. I am skeptical the study was able to control for all other variables. Maybe those who watch 5 or more hours of TV a day are less likely to get activity during the day e.g. from taking the stairs, making dinner, chores, etc. To be frank, these sound like exceptionally lazy humans. They may be less likely to cook for themselves and eat healthy meals, or to take good care of themselves in other ways also. It's hard to control a study like this for all possible complicating factors. What is clear is that if you're sitting and watching TV with all your free time instead of being active, that's probably not healthy, but hey, it's your life.
"Edith looks up from a game of solitaire and casually mentions that she actually thinks the murder was committed by the accomplice, who was never found and is not on trial. But since the defendant’s lawyer did such a poor job exonerating him, she concludes, she’s going to deliver a guilty verdict. My jaw drops. No one questions her obviously flawed reasoning, because she’s on their side."
This, for me, was the most terrifying bit in the article. To convict a man of murder, and to send him to life in prison or perhaps to his own death, when you think he's innocent? It shocks me what people are capable of sometimes. But this article doesn't shock me, because I know what people are capable of. Kudos to the author for sticking to his moral compass in the face of adversity.
Applause to the Zuck for the public commitment to invest 99% of his fortune in charitable causes.
Providing cheap, reliable internet to underserved areas of the planet seems like an achievable goal. Much of the technology is present, and so this goal can be attacked now given available funding. The technology should improve further and become cheaper in the near horizon. Go for it Zuck. Make a dent.
"Curing disease", however, or "learning and experiencing 100x more than we do today" - these trite and nebulous platitudes seem line lines stolen from HBO's Silicon Valley script. "Eradicating polio" is a concrete, well-scoped, measurable, and realistic goal (regardless of whether its is the best apportioning of resources). "Curing disease" is not. Does someone who's married to a doctor really believe that all disease is eradicable in the next 100 years? Must we resort to impossible moonshots and unqualified invocations like "Make the world a better place!"? Something like "colonize space!" is not a helpful goal; "build a habitation on Mars which produces enough food, water, and O2 to sustain 5 people for a year" begins to be.
This pedestrian rallying cry is a chaotic amalgam of cliches. I hope Zuckerberg puts more thought, organization, and direction into how he will invest his billions for the betterment of posterity.
Windows has had this capability for at least 8 years with "time travel tracing" (or iDNA tracing), which produces a dump file that can be traversed back and forward in WinDBG or Visual Studio. Very useful for figuring out what caused unexpected state in complex integration scenarios with timing-dependent bugs. http://www.thewindowsclub.com/microsoft-time-travel-tracing-...
Consolidation of resources and broadness of ecosystem produces synergistic effects that advance tech. Google benefits in its pursuit of self-driving cars and drone delivery from existing investments in maps, AI, machine learning, and data centers. Plus, the ad revenue stream funds R&D.
As much as startups can "disrupt" by creating new businesses, big tech companies can also create entirely new products or businesses and when they attempt to do so they often succeed. Google has a good shot at eventually being successful with products like glass, self-driving cars, etc. Amazon is already succeeding with AWS and at some point will launch drone delivery. Even if you just own a small feature, it's fulfilling to work on large important products with high impact (legacy products too e.g. gmail). Plus, there is little risk and great payout guaranteed. Contrary to Thiel's comments, I think you're surrounded by brilliant people at a place like Google and will learn constantly and won't stagnate. The key is to not stay on the same team/product forever.
If you use contractions like don\'t inside of a string then you need to escape the apostrophe if you\'re using single quotes, which is annoying and can make the string a bit harder for humans to parse. I like the aesthetics of double-quotes better too, though that\'s not a compelling reason.
Sounds like a serious effort to allow you to develop native iOS apps in VS instead of xcode. You're right the motivation is heavily to minimize the cost of porting/releasing iOS apps to WP/Windows.
Microsoft Research is strongly expected to have an impact on the business side of things. It just so happens that Microsoft is willing to incubate projects like Midori* that have long runways (decade+) and may completely fail. The hope is that some new emerging tech long plays will become huge business boons (Cortana, Kinect, ..). There's lots of investment in NLP, vision, and OS research over at MSR.