Do you always look both ways before entering the street? I always try to do that, both because that's what I was taught to do as a child, and because it seems like the best way to ensure my safety when walking. The only times as a pedestrian when I've been nearly hit by a car is when I've failed to do that.
Here are 2 scenarios that might explain OP's point of view.
You are walking up to an intersection and the crosswalk sign is green. You look right and across the intersection all the traffic is stopped. You look left and there is a car coming, but it is clearly slowing down for the red light. You step into the intersection, but the car doesn't actually stop. They turn right at the intersection. You have to jump away. The problem here is not that you didn't look, but that you misinterpreted what the car was doing. It would be best to wait until all approaching cars are actually stopped before entering the intersection, but next time you are crossing a street I challenge you to see if you always do that. It's surprisingly uncommon because the car is "obviously" stopping.
The second is more of a clear cut problem. Bicycles often travel at speeds much faster than people expect. It's not unusual for a road bike to be going over 30 km/h (just under 20 mph). Cars should wait for you to clear the intersection, but often they aren't looking for bikes and will make a right hand turn, cutting off the cyclist. It happened to me many times in Canada. I'm very happy that the turn-on-red rule is not allowed in Japan where I live now.
California has a little-known law that tries to protect bicyclists from the "right hook" accident you mention. If there is a bike lane, drivers are required to merge into the bike lane before turning right, instead of turning from the car lane and cutting across the bike lane.
This is why bike lane stripes have a dotted section when approaching an intersection, to give drivers a hint about what they are supposed to do. Unfortunately, only a minority of drivers understand and follow the hint.
Last time I was there (California DMV) it was to pick up a custom license plate. I made an appointment and was in and out in less than 5 minutes. I spent more time in the parking lot removing my old plates and installing the new ones.
>Social Security Administration?
Had to get my Social Security replaced a few years ago. Was in an out in a reasonable time (comparable to a doctor appointment)
>The Post Office
USPS works fine for me.
Also had no problems getting a business license from either the City of Mountain View, or San Francisco. The staff at Mountain View City Hall were also very helpful in verifying that local zoning permitted me to run my software consultancy out of my home (it does).
The thing is, there are actual parts of government that are terrible. Caltrans (aka California Department of Transportation) is quite incompetent. Apparently, if there's a big transportation project in California, often the first goal is to try to figure out how to get someone other than Caltrans to run it. When that fails, you get messes like the new Bay Bridge.
The VTA (who runs public transportation in Santa Clara County), also seems quite inept, with light rail lines that are little used and obviously dumb ideas like a BRT lane on El Camino Real.
It would be nice if people who are skeptical of government would direct their skepticism at the parts that are the most broken, rather than just pulling out Stereotypical Examples of Government Incompetence (DMV, Post Office) that actually work fairly well most of the time.
Or they are planning to downsize the accelerator program and are looking to start making the workspaces self sustaining so they don’t have to close them down.
with an investor conference call on the morning of Thursday, July 27.
Any public company I've worked at has had a trading window that opened a day or two after an earnings report came out, with most people who want to trade trading early in that window. Admittedly I've never been an executive and I don't know how the rules differ for execs, but the dates when these trades took place are when I would expect Equifax employees to execute options and sell stock.
It also strikes me as possible that information about a security breach discovered on the weekend might not make its way up the company hierarchy for a few days, and that execs might not have been aware of it when they traded.
I do think this should be investigated by the SEC, but I'm a little disappointed at the rush-to-judgement in this thread.
Right. I also seem to recall the internet hive mind researching this when the story broke, and those same executives had been selling for months on a particular schedule and these trades were right in line with that schedule, and they still held significant stock in the company. Can't seem to find ATM though...
In many companies, if they don't have a CTO, the IT division reports to the CFO. Is that the case here? If so, hard to believe he didn't know about the breach very soon after discovery.
> Does anyone seriously doubt FB's commitment to RN? When they themselves dogfood it?
After the shutdown of Parse, I don't see how anyone could avoid having doubt about Facebook's commitment to React Native, or to anything else outside of their core business.
To me, Parse instils confidence of Facebook's ability to handle (open source) projects. The shutdown of Parse would have to be one of the best sunsettings that I've ever seen.
They announced it in Jan 2016 and gave one years warning and shut it down in Jan 2017. Parse open sourced many of its components and provided an easy migration path for applications depending on it.
React Native, IMHO, is a fundamental part of their core business. Among many things, it lets them ship updates and more efficiently A/B test features more frequently. If Facebook gets sick of RN, at least it's a completely open source library that's able to be transitioned to fully community supported.
Parse was never used internally at Facebook I don't think. React Native is used for major parts of the main app and in parts of Instagram. I don't think it's an apples to apples comparison.
Push Notifications, Edit Profile, Photos Of view, Post Promote, Comment Moderation, Lead Gen Ads, SMS Captcha...and that was in February. They are ramping up their usage all the time.
They are gradually transitioning their code base to RN. Instagram has been in production for quite a few years now, it can't be an easy task to rewrite everything in RN. I think the above examples are significant, and they claim in the article that it's working well for them, so I expect them to continue to expand usage of it.
I'm still using Parse today, and it's still great. They shut down the Parse servers, but all the code is open source. Other hosting companies have popped up, and you can host it yourself. React Native doesn't have any servers to shut down. If Facebook stops maintaining it, the community will pick it up.
There is a core truth that there are "programmers" out there who cannot program, and the only way to filter them out is to have them implement some algorithm live.
But I think a lot of the grief around whiteboard interviews comes from all the additional crap that's grown up around that, including:
1. That ideally a candidate should code up solutions on a whiteboard, while standing. That it's unnecessary, or even bad, to try to replicate a working situation by having the candidate seated at a computer.
2. That there's a correlation between difficulty of question and quality of developer. So a candidate who can implement both fizzbuzz and quicksort at whiteboard from memory would be a better developer at your company than one that can do fizzbuzz, but not quicksort.
3. That the ideal programming question has some sort of "trick". So the ideal flow when a candidate is answering a question starts with the candidate implementing a naive solution. After which the interviewer says "it's possible to do better". Then the candidate ponders for, ideally 30-60 seconds, whereupon they realize the trick and code up the optimal solution.
My ideal interview process recognizes the need for a developer to demonstrate the ability to code while at the same time recognizing the above interview style for the cargo cult exercise that it is.
I see that you don't say you want immigration labor laws enforced. What you say is that you don't want illegal immigrants to get benefits.
This is sadly typical. There are plenty of people here in California who are fine with using illegal immigrant labor to save money getting crops picked or construction built, but if one of these laborers slices their hand open on piece of equipment and needs to go to the emergency room, then and only then does the hand-writing about "spending money on illegals" begin.
I have no patience for this sort of sadistic, extractive capitalism. Especially when it wraps itself in a faux mantle of concern about the law. If you don't want illegal immigrants in this country, then enforce the labor laws against the employers.
What's ironic of course is that most of the 14 California congresspeople who signed the letter represent districts who are heavily dependently upon illegal immigrant labor, and thus upon the very sort of lax enforcement of immigration laws that they claim to be against. At this point, I'd be more than happy to see ICE conduct a vigorous enforcement of immigration laws throughout the Central Valley. Perhaps staring in September?
Right. I have heard people make the literal argument that while we should go after illegal aliens, we should _NOT_ go after those who hire undocumented workers, as to punish or penalize them for doing so would be "unfair" to them, because it would make them noncompetitive against other employers doing the same.
And at the same time they stammer that the idea of a drug dealer telling a cop "It's unfair to me, because all these other people are out here selling drugs too!" is somehow in no way the same thing.
Capitalism writ large. It's perfectly acceptable to break the law to make a profit if you're a company, but not to be breaking the law to give yourself a livelihood.
I've worked for several big companies (though not Facebook, Google, Apple, or others in that class). None of them showed any interest in analyzing developer productivity, much less looking for ways to increase it. My gut instinct is that developer productivity is hard to measure, real estate costs are easy to measure, so you end up with 500 people in a noisy environment doing the work that 100 could do in a quiet environment.
I also suspect there's a status thing going on. People working on the floor are lower status than people with offices, and I suspect some execs find status signaling more desirable than productivity.
I think that hard to measure consequences vs easy to measure financial impacts are why so many companies go down the path of mediocrity one small change at a time. "If we make people jump through all of these hoops for software/hardware/whatever we save $X per year." HR, finance, corp IT and facility management in big companies rarely factor in employee happiness because you can't put that as a line item in the budget. Their priorities become aligned with their own interests.
HR is starting to wise up as evidenced by improving benefits packages and various industry publications. And while that's good that's probably a consequence of being held directly accountable for recruiting and retention which doesn't translate readily to other departments. There's still a dramatic disconnect between various departments and what benefits the company as a whole.
This isn't a problem of one office design or another. It's a problem of misaligned incentives between individual workers and the people making these decisions.
I've been told (including by current members of the Mtn View city council) that the lack of a grocery store in this neighborhood stems from city staff who are convinced that the neighborhood can't support one. Many people in the neighborhood are skeptical of this, and expressed a desire for a grocery store (along with restaurants and more retail) at a neighborhood planning meeting this past summer:
Why not let grocery store execs or entrepreneurs determine if the neighborhood can support a grocery store? I don't see why government would be concerned if a private entity is successful or not (and I'm about as far opposite of libertarian as one can go). Would they prohibit say a Senegalese restaurant for opening for fear there wasn't a large enough makrket?
I live in the suburbs of south bay, and near my house used to be a Mervyns -- a clothing store that had a relatively large building but went out of business nearly 10 years ago. A few stores came and went, but for the majority of those 10 years, it has been sitting vacant. It's too big for the average brick and mortar entrepreneur, but too small for a big chain. Someone should section it off into smaller units, but maybe the construction is not profitable. There's not that much foot traffic in the shopping center for most retail stores to stay in business either.
Makes sense for the government to intervene if the free market can't identify a sustainable business to utilize the space.
Or make them pay extra taxes for abandoned properties. If they can't afford the taxes the government gets the land and building, and can then auction it off to someone who can put it towards a better use.
I think the reason is that, at some level, Wadhwa believes that immigrants make better entrepreneurs than (native-born) Americans. He's never said that outright, but that's been a theme in his writing for a while. For example, from the article:
America has lost an entire generation of entrepreneurs and innovators and bolstered its global competition. That is also why the proportion of immigrant-founded start-ups in Silicon Valley fell from 52 percent in 2005 to 44 percent in 2012 and is probably even lower today.
It's possible that a lower proportion of startups are immigrant-founded because there are fewer immigrant founders, but it's also possible that there may be more native-born Americans becoming entrepreneurs. One can't tell from just this statistic. If the ratio has changed because of an increase in American entrepreneurship, then Wadhwa's argument becomes that it's bad for the U.S. if more Americans become entrepreneurs.
Which is weird. And being an American myself, something I find quite offensive.
If you don't look both ways, why not?