I get very tired of comments like this that imply that working at a start-up or software company is somehow "better" than working at other jobs, especially those that require a reasonable level of skill.
Please don't look down on people.
EDIT: Hmm, I suppose the point is that a hairdresser doesn't have the range of skills a start-up should be interested in. But still, it reads poorly.
I think you're mis-reading the intent of my comment
Of course skills matter (I'm unlikely to hire a hair-dresser who has never done anything other than cut hair for a development role - but I have hired "career changers" like this for other roles - like support / sales).
HOWEVER if I'm judging two candidates with suitable (define as you will) skill sets then the one with the better attitude will always get the role
TBH this is even more important when it comes to internal promotions than for initial hiring (but now we're going slightly off topic)
Attitude criteria are often proxies for culture fitting; you are basically making a call on whether they are extroverted/emphatic or not, vs. checking skills or anything.
For internal promotions, it's called "being visible" and "managing up", where again, appearance is more important than capability.
Oona's work is always amazing. Loads of interesting hardware stuff in her blog. I wish I would be better at some mechanical engineering/electrical engineering stuff, my work is mostly web-related or big data stuff, never really get my hands dirty :(
London and Berlin have a lot of people in general, from different fields (finance and government as much as tech). Is the number of programmers/capita higher in those two cities than average? I think Silicon Valley is the highest you can get (that's my guess at least).
EDIT: IMHO, the closest thing Europe has to these is actually Zurich: it has top universities, money and big companies all in a small geographical area.
Zurich is a tenth the size of silicon valley by population though, and it is a big financial centre too. There are other comparable tech-specific places, like Sophia Antipolis, Toulouse.
By github usage, which seems a decent proxy [1], London is second after San Francisco, followed by Paris, and Berlin is only 7 (much smaller city though, so density could be higher).
Unfortunately, London and Berlin are national capitals. Silicon Vally (even if you extend it to San Francisco) isn't even a state capital.
National capitals have defence contracts and government IT, which so lucrative it sucks a lot of talent away from industry. London is also a financial centre, so that's even more competition.
London does not have defence contracts, thats largely out west, Reading way. It does have a fair amount of government IT, but that is more dispersed too (uk.gov is a new exception, but historically things like tax collection were moved out of London back in the 1970s).
That's the point! Using the algebra from the article:
(1 - 1 + 1 - 1 ...) = 0 + (1 - 1 + 1 - 1 ...)
and therefore:
(1 - 1 + 1 - 1 ...) = (0 + 1 - 1 + 1 - 1 ...)
And as they're mathematically the same (again, in the article's algebra), why not replace one with the other?
The problem is that when you do, and you sum the two infinite series using the "zipping" method (as in the numberphile video) the two equations equate to different results.
I am a fan of python.
when developing python and needing a breakpoint I just write
>> import pdb;pdb.set_trace()
in the respective line and can then execute the code till that point and have all the current variables available in the console.
This was missing for me when I started doing stuff in scala, so I hacked something to be able to do the same in Scala and jump straight to the REPL(unfortunately variables need to be passed explicitly here, but most of the REPL functionality works:
I always wonder why more languages don't have this, which I call repl at point, or repl with context. Not sure if there is a more standard name. Even clojure with its generally awesome repl support doesn't have it.
It avoided having to pass in variables explicitly by using groovy's AST transform ability (macros) to examine the code for which variables would be in scope and pass those into the repl automatically. I wonder if something similar would be possible in scala?
No I think they are related but different. For instance with pdb or the clojure repl I"ll add entire new functions or classes and try them out.
With gdb or jdb that might be theoretically possible but it certainly is not convenient or commonly done. Typically your stretching things with a complicated one liner expression.
But you are right concepts are pretty close, its just that I find a lot of things that call themselves "debuggers" don't have the ability to add new code. Things that call themselves "repls" dont' have the ability to stop at a point or context like a debugger. pdb being the exception. Why can't we have tools that do both things well.
Any decent Java IDEs can do this for you. I'm not sure if that capability covers Scala.
You can set a breakpoint (conditional or not), and have every thing within that context available for you. The next step is to launch an "Evaluation window" where you can execute Java code.
If you were to set the breakpoint at the web-application level (as opposed to plain Java process/class/console-app), you can get information of the Threads and Frames as well.
This techniques have been available for quite some time in the IDEs... that is provided you're not allergic to IntelliJ/NetBeans/Eclipse.
Best part: no code change.
I have no comment for those who prefer VIM/Emacs and bemoaned the lack of powerful stuff they got from other environments.
Yes, if you have an IDE you don't have this problem at all.
I am more with the VIM/Emacs crowd though I guess.
I didn't know though that you could create an "evaluation window" in Eclipse. I really liked the refactoring features in Eclipse though and miss them sometimes.
- You can set "Step Filtering" to avoid JDK standard classes (or libraries that you know won't cause the bugs)
- The Expression Evaluation also supports code-assist/code-completion
It's really tough to beat IDEs like Eclipse and IntelliJ these days with plenty contributors and strong companies behind them churning new features everyday.
by what? that there are people who are stupid like that, or that enterprising individuals or companies would capitalize on their stupidity? i feel like both of those things are well documented in humanity by now...
Exactly my opinion. And even though I normally lean towards free market related views when it comes to regulation and government, I think a high inheritance tax would be justified in western countries. With it universities & infrastructure could be funded and possibly enable more people to get a university degree.
My underlying reasoning: Every new generation is a giant possiblity for mankind. Now who do we want to command the most resources? If we had kings, it would be the kings heir, no matter if he is clever or not. Thats bad obviously. If we have capitalism without a high inheritance tax, we might have people like Paris Hilton commanding massive fortunes even though some poor kids might have done a lot better with it if they had a chance of acquiring wealth in the first place.
By having a high inheritance tax one would avoid unbelievable fortunes being handed down to people that are not qualified at all.
Another aspect is obviously that the state needs to motivate people to work better than their peers. If - like in communism - it doesn't matter anymore if I work harder than my peers, so I don't work hard. Assuming that most people work for personal gain, wealth, and so that they children have it better than themselves, you need to leave them their wealth during their lifetime and enable them to hand down some part of their income to their kids, and not give all back to the public. If they would have to give everything to the public, the really bright people might stop working at 35 when they accumulated enough wealth for themselves, knowing their children won't benefit from it anyways.
Though I'm attracted to the idea, inheritance tax was always a concept that I see (probably due to ignorance) as extremely vulnerable to "an extra layer of indirection". You see, I'm not actually transferring the company to my son, I'm transferring it to a trust in Switzerland that is controlled by my daughter-in-law.
Well, true, somebody that wants to game the system will find a way.
However, you could still say that everything up to 20 Million* has a lower tax on it and you can give that to your kids in legal ways. I think Warren Buffett and Bill Gates want to give most of their wealth away with a similar reasoning anyways.
That amount of money is still enough to buy a Ferrari and never work again while taking loads of drugs in Monaco every day.
The extra layer of indirection might be enough to guide people in the right direction. I am not sure many people would bet their fortune on their son/daughter in law being good to their kids indefinitely. That would probably provoke some very annoying lawsuits between your kids and their spouses sooner or later.
*= With some correction for inflation over the years, but lets say 20 Million of todays Dollars for example.
That's certainly a possibility, and it certainly is done by the wealthy all the time. At least in the US it is very difficult to transfer large sums of money out of the country without accounting for it, so these end-arounds of taxation are quite difficult to pull off.
Inheritance taxes are better because they force the rich out of a hording mentality - either leave your family with sustaining businesses, which help the middle class by providing jobs, or lose half and have that reallocated. Right now, without an inheritance tax, there's no appeal to take risks on building anything. Just invest at moderate returns and the family fortune will never run out (except in extreme circumstances).
I certainly feel your sentiment, werner38 (Re: Paris Hilton - right?), but I disagree with your conclusions.
And I agree with you that it is not necessarily a positive outcome that a king's heir would assume the wealth of the king. However, I think the trade-off of using law to essentially plunder property (again, assuming the property was acquired through no act of injustice), undermines the purpose of law - to defend against injustice.
Property (acquired or created justly) is typically an outcome of liberty, and often fate (birth, luck, etc). I don't believe we can alter either of these conditions through tax law (force) without undermining the justice of law itself.
Furthermore, in my view, I don't believe an individual's property is something that anyone else has a claim to dispense with, especially a political organ such as the 'the state' (an entity which bears very little responsibility for the outcome of it's economic and financial actions).
That doesn't mean I necessarily like the idea of people amassing or acquiring resources without work. But the reason I work hard is to benefit the things which I choose to value: my family, my community, the erasing of Star Wars Ep. 1-3 from history, etc.
I want to give my kids a better shot at life than myself. Property may be a component, but is far down the list from things like values, and work ethic. But these are my choices for my life. That to me, is the American Dream - to be free live how I choose - not wealth and things. Whether I am very rich at some point, or not - I don't believe force should be employed to negate or alter my choices, nor do I wish to use force to alter your's or someone else's.
Maybe I'm way out of my gourd, but the fact that Paris Hilton has a huge amount of wealth, and no values is a total failure of her parents - not the inheritance itself.
The idea of property as legitimate is pretty much arbitrary - others have indeed come out on the other side of the fence: Considering the enforcement of property rights to land akin to theft (e.g. Proudhon) or illegitimate use of force, on the simple premise that it deprives others of use of a shared resource.
The libertarian fetish for accepting the use of force to protect one arbitrary artificial construct as somehow critical to liberty, while rejecting the use of force to protect other artificial constructs strikes me at the same time as deeply comical, and ridiculously hypocritical on the other.
Well, I believe that people should be left alone as often as possible and should only be interfered with when urgently needed.
But I also believe that commanding wealth comes with responsibilities, and if some people are not willing to act responsible, they might need someone(the public) to remember them and take some of that wealth to build schools, universities or the like.
I am not saying that Mr. Hiltons wealth should be seized and randomly given to people on the streets. I am certainly not of the opinion that todays western governments are super effective either. But if I have the choice of having Paris spend that massive fortune or the government, I would opt for the government I am afraid.
If Larry Ellison decides to build himself a big pink bouncy castle the size of Oklahoma with his Oracle money he is free to do so and thats fine by me. He earned that money, he is free to do with it what he likes, I don't have to like his choices, but I won't interfere(not that I could anyways).
If someone earns his money by being born and decides to spend it on the big bouncy castle I am not fine with it. If most of what he would have inherited was taken by the public and he still manages to amass a fortune that is enough to build himself that bouncy castle, he is free to do so, and I won't interfere. He made the money,its his choice, not mine.
