It's important to differentiate the general concept of "Good Enough" as in "that's good enough" from the software engineering approach that, while coined from the same term, is surprisingly more formalized around balancing risk/effort vs. achieving perfection
Agreed. I think scientists and software engineers can really teach each other quite a bit. So I'd love to see a day whereby the phrase is more often used in science to mean making defensible trade-offs rather than achieving basic competency.
If you're writing a lot of ad-hoc queries, I prefer to have keywords on their own line and also put commas at the start of the following line vs end of the previous. It lets you comment stuff out easier as you experiment. In a production query the only hard rule should be, "Please be consistent!"
Putting the comma before doesn't actually make commenting out columns easier - it just moves the problem to the other end of the list. Just try commenting out the first column in your SQL and you'll see what I mean.
ON second reading I think you are correct. I agree on this point then, as it helps when joining through a denormalized table that references multiple PK ids, ex: I think:
user_id = role_id
is more readable than the likely alternative:
u.id = r.id
The same public "government largesse" that Gates credits with the microchip and internet is what Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Google et al have constantly worked to erode with closed-source, walled-garden ecosystems. They all would have been unable to build their empires on top of the very ecosystem that today they try to cultivate.
Blue sky research should be open. Last mile product development and products themselves can be closed source. Else, how do you create profits and value for shareholders? So far, except Apple, the others have made the outputs of their research labs open: published papers, demos, packages like TensorFlow, etc. Besides, there is a division of labor: govt, with its altruistic mission does open blue-sky research. Companies, OTOH maximize profits and the good ones that can afford to, also do open basic research. I don't see his vision to be counter to this.
The problem is, what qualifies as a “last mile product”? AOL before 1991, and CompuServe before 1989 were complete packages, essentially entire Internets, provided by one company. Neither one of them probably liked the Internet to come into a position to replace a large part of their products. It’s the same everywhere – everybody want to commoditize their complements, but almost every product is a complement to somebody else’s product.
I wish there was a technical name for this cycle! The pattern seems to happen in every industry over time.
1. Someone sets out to change the world and make a lot of money by building a business around a new technology.
2. In order to grow the business, they build barriers around their technology / market. This takes the form of closed platforms, patents, safety regulations, etc. (This is a neutral point, I'm not trying to call anyone evil for doing this).
3. Once the entrepreneurs are prosperous, with good intentions, they lobby for the public to pay for essentially remaking their businesses in a more open way. There's the obvious irony in this stage, as they have to fight the very barriers they erected, and I think some people get mad here, because those barriers end up costing the public more.
I actually think this is a healthy cycle. There are a lot of entrepreneurs who are satisfied with 1 and 2, and never put the effort into 3. I think applauding the people who have the strength and drive to get to 3 is going to help the world become better, faster. I don't think there's a reason to hold malice against entrepreneurs for building those barriers, if we did, we will just have less people lobbying for the good things in the world.
I live in Calgary, Alberta which is pretty much the exact counterpoint to Norway with a very similar historical starting point (size, population, dynamics). It doesn't matter who's in power, all our governments spend like drunken sailors on shore-leave, no sales tax to even out the boom/bust (and counter low-ish taxes), A savings fund that is now empty going into an incredibly rough period.
I'm not says one is better than the other - Norway looks great right now, but didn't when I visited ~10 years ago and my Subway "value" meal cost over $25 CDN - just an interesting counterpoint.
I keep waiting for that manufacturing "bump" from Eastern Canada we were promised from a sinking dollar...
> I'm not says one is better than the other - Norway looks great right now, but didn't when I visited ~10 years ago and my Subway "value" meal cost over $25 CDN - just an interesting counterpoint.
Careful with such examples. Local prices are first of all adjusted for local wages, and second of all the NOK exchange rate is just nasty.
Alberta did spend most of the their oil money. Based on a Google search, it looks like the Heritage Trust Fund maxed out at ~$20B for a population of ~2.5M. So maybe 1/20th of what Norway has put away on a per capita basis?
The thing about both Buffett and Soros is that they get deals that the general investor, or even really good and kinda famous investor, would never get. For example, Buffet did 300 million in unsecured loans (but with front-of-line payback) with Harley Davidson in 2009 at 15 percent, essentially to cover customer financing (i.e. cashflow) not because the company was in any real trouble. You and I would be lucky to find that sort of return from the riskiest loan, let alone a profitable manufacturing company. AND, Buffet could have made more than a Billion extra if he'd bought stock instead of debt, so even when he's wrong he's still getting a sweetheart deal.
It's important to note that this discussion is about a massive sovereign wealth fund, not the average investor.
I absolutely agree that the average person should stick to passive index funds. But if you have nearly a trillion dollars to invest, you'd be a fool to stick to passive strategies.
Do you fly primarily in the US? Because I have noticed that most US airlines seem to be in a race to the bottom, but this is not the trend worldwide. I fly both Lufthansa and Turkish relatively frequently and everything about the experience with them, from the airports, to the customer service, to the food, is head-and-shoulders above every major US airline.
An even easier step would be Kayak allowing you to select how many checked bags you'll have, and baking those fees into the price. Less subjective than customer rating, but they still dont take even this minor step.
Enough passengers to fill every Jet Blue flight, apparently. The existence of airlines that are not awful budget ones proves that plenty of consumers are willing to pay more for quality.
It depends on how expensive. Airlines that lose my luggage, charge crazy fees and have incredibly narrow seats often get dismissed out of hand unless they have significant discounts. I usually just check southwest first because of this.
don't call it a tweak or nudge when the experiment's parameters were deliberately altered to avoid the outcome the data was indicating.
"We had an idea for figuring out where we'd spend our money. We didn't like what happened so we spent it based on other criteria."
So the experiment was maybe the voting / HN selection, but they don't get to paint it as the experiment was "let's see who HN selects, then compare their outcome with traditional participants" like we were led to believe...
don't forget - a true "growth hacker" only needs the thinnest veneer of ambiguity to really go to town.
I think the biggest shame is that under the guise of an experiment they had the opportunity to "really disrupt" themselves and "change the face of" ...money.. giving...
What hashtag should I use to support the twitter campaign to get Maciej into a program that he probably shouldn't be under which we're discussing on a message board... UGH! crashing under the meta-overload...
If you read Maciej's comments and interpret them as "entitled to what's mine" you are obviously unfamiliar with the general vein of his work. In support of my opinion I expect the man himself to reply refuting this completely, stating no, it is in fact about the money.
If anything I'd expect that he (and a lot of other people) are disappointed with not seeing what he was going to do with the cash, not the loss of the money itself.
If funding is rocket fuel, I was excited to see what could be done with it in the hands of a proven SV-venture arsonist.
