I'm torn. In my heart, I absolutely did not want Amazon here due to how it would obliterate any shred of culture we have left, decimate anyone who didn't work in tech, and paralyze the city's traffic completely.
On the other hand, as a developer and a home owner, it would have been amazing for my pocket book.
Except with property you have the utility value of having a place that keeps rain off of your head and with the S&P you have the utility value of.. getting to be obsessive about numbers on a screen every moment of every day. Whether that difference is worth the extra points is an individual call.
He does other stuff other than express opinions too. If I remember correctly he is leading privatized space exploration, bringing about the electric car revolution, and tunnel boring.
So idk, maybe someone who is focusing on quickly building tunnels might be helpful.
> Elon Musk is sending a team of engineers to Thailand to see if they can help authorities racing to save a dozen boys and their coach who are stranded in a cave there.
Sounds like he's sending a team to figure out if they can do anything to help. It's great he's trying to help, kinda sad that his main motivation is probably self promotion. I say let the guy have his attention if there's any chance it will help. It won't change my opinion of him anymore than Gates' recent philanthropy has changed my opinion of him.
Do you not think that once in 30 years one the ~50 rich, seemingly very intelligent people that live on that street didn't step out onto it and think, "Hey.. this is a nice private street we have here. The property taxes on it must be killer. Hmm.. I wonder who pays those.. maybe I'll bring it up at the next HOA meeting."
Why do I get the feeling that the same people defending the residents of this street wouldn't bat an eye at condemning a poor person whose electricity gets shut off because the bill was sent to their former address and they simply forgot abou tit?
I think you are confusing your animus for selfish rich people with what it fair. Property taxes on that street were $14 year per home I believe. When you depend on your HOA dues to pay them [and the HOA apparently hired an accountant to actually pay them], you probably aren't going to notice a discrepancy.
The three-month notice period is mandatory, because:
- if the employee leaves, it benefits the business:
-- the employee has the time to hand over their work
-- the employer has time to look for and find a replacement, or prepare for work without the employee
- if the employee is fired, it benefits the employee:
-- they have the time to look for a new job
-- they continue working, receiving salary, and don't have to worry about bills, rent etc.
In both cases the employer and the employee can agree on the actual time when the employee quits: it could be the next day, or next week, or after three months, at the end of the notice period.
My job doesn't offer full-time remote work, and as soon as you move to the outsides of Munich you pay the rent difference in transportation cost. No way.
Well, for at least a single year. I mean.. Work twice as hard for one year, and get paid close to what I can reasonably expect to make in 20.. yea, seems like a no brainer.
I actually don't think this is particularly heinous as long as they are completely transparent and open about it. Hell, if they wanted to be even more above board, they should provide a slider that allows you to allocate a percentage of CPU usage you are dedicating at a given time.
Now, whether it'll be worth it is the real question. But I'm hopeful. If we can find an alternative to obtrusive, obnoxious ads I'm all for it.
I enjoy them. It strikes me as extremely odd that the main complaint against open floor plans is that they kill productivity. This is such a complaint that there's people up and down this post moaning in agony as if it were literal torture that they're unable to be as productive as possible. Personally, I don't think that a company is entitled to me working at 100% productivity constantly, because I value my sanity too much. Yet, here are people begging, pleading for their employer to make them be able to produce more for their corporate overlord.
M'eh. I work at the efficiency that is comfortable for me. Occasionally I chat with my coworkers about stupid shit to keep my mind loose and give it a break. If I absolutely need to be in the zone for a couple hours, I put on headphones, find a private room, or work from home. I'm completely ok with open floor plans.
About the only things that would draw me to a private office job is, first, the prestige of having your own office, and second, the sense of ownership of space. I imagine it to be very comforting to go into work and have one little 8'x10' space which is "yours". If we're being honest, I think these two things are actually what the anti-open office people want. They just use productivity as a way of masking it and making it appear better to their employers.
Disclaimer: I'll tell you how it is in my case, so it may not reflect the feelings of other open-plan-haters.
It's not about wanting to "be able to produce more for my corporate overlord". It's precisely about preserving sanity. I simply can't focus well with people around me - not just when they're talking (in an open plan, at any given point in time, there is someone that has something interesting to say). The very presence of other people next to me is stressful to me, especially if they're paying attention to me and are within visual range of me. That stress destroys my focus, which leads to lack of productivity, which leads to more stress - a "vicious cycle".
When I can ensure that nobody can walk behind my back, I can survive an open-plan office with just headphones and loud music (to cut off audio distractions). Still, in some cases, the very presence of other people in the same room will make me unable to concentrate hard enough to solve some tough problems - at which point I'll either go to the conference room, do the work out of office, or just come in late so that I get ~2 - 3 hours alone in the room in the evening.
Some time ago I managed to persuade my employer to give me 2 days/week of working from home; this alone did wonders to my sanity. 3 days between people is just about enough direct human interaction for me. 5 days tends to take a toll on my psyche.
And again, it's not about productivity for the sake of pleasing the boss. It's just that I feel really bad when I feel I'm continuously underperforming (compared to my performance in proper conditions, i.e. not having other people around).
This is exactly how it is for me. Even when I actively thought my job was stupid bullshit and that no amount of work from me or anyone else would ever make the thing we were working on profitable or useful to anyone, feeling like I could be getting more done if it wasn't for all these distractions was a huge source of stress for me. The fact that there was no material difference to me or anyone else was ultimately sort of irrelevant.
If you subscribe to extro/intro vertedness, I am squarely an extrovert, have great time at random party, will literally walk up and talk to anyone. And feel exactly as you do. When I need to concentrate, it requires solitude.
> Occasionally I chat with my coworkers about stupid shit to keep my mind loose and give it a break. If I absolutely need to be in the zone for a couple hours, I put on headphones, find a private room, or work from home. I'm completely ok with open floor plans.
What if your coworkers don't want to chat about stupid shit? Or what if some of them do, but your other coworkers who are trying to get something done under a deadline have to now endure your conversation about stupid shit? What if putting on headphones, finding a private room, or working from home isn't an option for them? What if it isn't about "working at 100% productivity constantly" but just about getting something done that needs to be done?
Having worked in solo offices, shared offices, in cube farms, and (once, briefly) in an open office plan, the main problem with interruptions is that the person being interrupted cannot choose when those occur. It might be just at the moment when some series of thoughts was converging on a conclusion that would produce a real solution with big effects. But meanwhile, some dumbass coworker decides it's time for his mental break, and in the process decides it's also time for everyone else's break.
That's the problem. It has nothing to do with prestige or ownership. It has everything to do with getting shit done. Otherwise, why work at all?
>Yet, here are people begging, pleading for their employer to make them be able to produce more for their corporate overlord.
That's not the point. Let's say I need to produce 80 UP (utility points) per day to be considered an average value producer. If I produce significantly less than that, I'm fired. Now let's assume I can do 10 UP per hour in open office plan, and 20 UP when left alone. In an open office plan I need to completely devote every single hour of my work day to producing UP. In a private office, I can only work for 4 hours per day to meet my daily quota. I can do whatever I want the rest of the time. More productivity = work less! That's what we want.
If writing code paid no better than flipping burgers, I would still do it, because I enjoy efficiently solving challenging algorithm problems. I don't enjoy failing to solve them because I'm continually being prevented from remembering something clever I just thought of. If I only get to spend a couple of hours in the zone where I belong, either I'm in the wrong role or the wrong industry.
I used to work at a bank service center. It was a cube farm filled with mostly 30 to 60-year-old women. There was occasional chatter, but it was so perfectly quiet all the time. And that's with people talking to bankers on phones.
Now I work with a bunch of 20 and 30-something men and it's like I'm back in college. Sorry, but I don't needn't to hear you not be able to control the volume of your voice for two hours on Google Hangouts. Sorry, I don't need to hear you sing to yourself while I try to desperately glue back together the thoughts in my head after you shattered them with your noise.
It's not about wringing every last drop of productivity out for your employer, it's about getting anything productive done at all. And I don't think it's asking too much for a quiet, peaceful office environment to be the default. If you want to screw around and talk at a volume that is inappropriately high, take it to the pub.
This. I had a problem where I needed to scrape roughly 20,000 html documents daily, which is normally a pretty slow task. You have to open the file, load it into memory, parse the DOM, and then run all of your selection methods. Sequentially, it took about 60 minutes daily. Multithreading slowed it down because it was CPU bound. Multiprocessing allowed me to run 12 processes across 8 cores. That took the total processing time down to about 4 minutes or so. And I was able to write the code in a day. Writing something similar in Java or C++ would have taken me a week.
By blazingly fast you mean 100x slower than C++ equivalent and only 20x slower is you're very careful to avoid accidental copies.
For reference, MATLAB is about 30x slower with no special care.
Pure Java on Hotspot was 5x slower except it dies on big data input due to very slow GC and goes to 50x slow.
Source: handled big audio data from hdf5 database, gigabytes sized. C++ equivalent had no vectorization or magic BLAS or anything.
As I'll often say to these comments, then you're doing things wrong. Numpy code can be written to never leave the numpy sandbox, and at that point it should be as fast or faster than naive c++ (because you'll be getting SSE and stuff for free).
There's a reason almost all deep learning is done in python.
The first time you have to return into python all the gains evaporate.
As I said, we improved python code a few times and it never even got near.
What it did was a bunch of convolutions, dot products, multiplications, fft, gamma probability equations. Even vector comparisons used numpy. Used direct hdf5 interface numpy has and fast view interface for overlaps.
Numba choked on the code by the way and crashed unless views were removed. And then it produced much worse performance.
Not all data is a good fit for Numpy: some data is non-numeric or not a homogenous array.
> There's a reason almost all deep learning is done in python.
The heavy-lifting in e.g. TensorFlow is done in C++. Bindings to Python make sense because it is one of the few sanctioned languages inside Google, and it is widely used outside of Google and easy to pick up.
>The heavy-lifting in e.g. TensorFlow is done in C++. Bindings to Python make sense because it is one of the few sanctioned languages inside Google, and it is widely used outside of Google and easy to pick up.
That's exactly the same as with numpy. I'm not sure what your point is. C++ is also one of the few sanctioned languages inside google, as is Java.
>Not all data is a good fit for Numpy: some data is non-numeric or not a homogenous array.
I'm curious what kind of data you're working with that can't be represented and effectively transformed in a tensor (numpy array).
> That's exactly the same as with numpy. I'm not sure what your point is.
I was replying to "there's a reason why...". You didn't specify that reason, so from the rest of your comment I took it to mean that Python (with numpy) was fast and good enough to write deep learning stuff. That doesn't seem to be the case for TensorFlow.
> I'm curious what kind of data you're working with that can't be represented and effectively transformed in a tensor (numpy array).
I'm not intimately familiar with the internals of numpy, but my understanding is that the basic data structure is a (multi-dimensional) array of values (not pointers). That leads to a number of questions.
If you have an array of records (dtype objects), and one of the fields is a string, am I correct that each element needs to allocate memory to hold the longest possible value that can occur for that field? What if that is not known beforehand?
How do you deal with optional fields (e.g. int or null)? Do you need to add a separate boolean to indicate null?
How do you deal with union types, e.g. each record can be one of x types, do you make a record that has a field for each of the fields of those x types? Do those fields take up space?
>You didn't specify that reason, so from the rest of your comment I took it to mean that Python (with numpy) was fast and good enough to write deep learning stuff. That doesn't seem to be the case for TensorFlow.
Tensorflow tensors are numpy arrays, or are transparently viewable as such.
>If you have an array of records (dtype objects), and one of the fields is a string, am I correct that each element needs to allocate memory to hold the longest possible value that can occur for that field? What if that is not known beforehand?
Yes, although you can also store numpy arrays of pyobjects, which are arrays of pointers. You'll be able to vectorize the code, but you won't get the same performance improvements as with a normal numpy array, because that same level of performance isn't possible with an array of pointers.
Note that for most machine learning applications, you'd preprocess your string into a vector of some kind.
>How do you deal with optional fields (e.g. int or null)? Do you need to add a separate boolean to indicate null?
Yes, but I'm not sure when you'd do that. That is, again in most machine learning applications you'd be representing things as one-hot arrays or as some kind of compressed high dimensional position vector, where 0 would represent a lack of presence of some thing.
> Python is insanely fast at data processing and analysis because it has very fast libraries.
It doesn't have fast libraries for everything. E.g. for the use case I brought up, it doesn't (or at least none that I could find at the time). Not all data are homogenous arrays that fit in numpy.
And are those libraries written in Python? Or in C because Python is too slow?
If you take your reasoning, any language that can bind to C (which is pretty much any language) is as fast as C. That is not very helpful when comparing the speed of languages. A slower language will force you to drop into C sooner than a faster one.
> As a matter of fact, don't know if you've heard, but data processing it kind of like.. Python's thing...
Things like audio and video codecs, or crypto code aren't written in Python.
On the other hand, as a developer and a home owner, it would have been amazing for my pocket book.