Wow, this looks great! My older 9 and 8 year-old girls will love this. I agree with the comments below about variables and conditional logic, which might be tough for kids in the 3-4th grade range. Anyway, good luck. Looking forward to the release.
I would even go one step further. Certainly less than felons. For some reason in Chicago, I at least feel "safer" in a taxi because of the screaming decals and colors of the car.
I had an Uber from the southside to Midway, and I felt like just getting into his car I was being set up in a sting operation. I (white guy) shrunk down in the back seat the entire time. The dude was nice, but holy shit what does CPD think when white guys get in the backs of gangbanger's cars (yes, my driver was nice but sketchy, and his car was exactly the mid-90s low-riding Pontiac you see around here getting busted all the time). I felt like I was his "ride" while he circled the southside between drug pickups. It gave him an "out."
On the flip side, had an awesome middle aged white woman take us from A to B on the northside of Chicago. She was doing it as a part-timer and super nice.
I guess my point is that maybe with taxi companies you at least could/should have a hiring/interview process? I'll plead ignorance to the Uber/Lyft process, but is there even an interview? It's just hit or miss in Chicago.
The personal attacks were bad but you already know that. The racial comments are a problem because whether you mean them that way or not, people are certain to read them as slurs. It's hard to conceive of a comment like yours not throwing an HN thread off the rails.
Congratulations on your blatant racism. You go to southside, and you object that the person that is working in that neighborhood fits "the stereotype".
Yuri, after seeing these comments, we're going to have to agree to disagree. I'm not sorry for being angry, but I'm sorry for getting personal. I'm sure you're needing some help with something local to your community, unless you want to start a thread of how to help kids on the south side of Chicago get into this community.
Apology accepted, as well as the agreement to disagree as well. FWIW, I've lived in some very choice parts of Oakland and Brooklyn throughout my life, so I am familiar with the environment, and the need for safety. The hard work in normalizing relations is exactly that: giving people that set off your spidey sense an opportunity for honest work.
Give me your honest opinion: to what degree am I racist if :
1) the Uber pulling up is an obvious gangbanger
2) If I refuse the driver for whatever reasons Uber lists when drivers pull up.
I'm going to assume your objection is to #1. If so, do you have any fucking idea how institutionalized racism is in Chicago, especially with CPD? Even sane white folks know this. There are mostly good apples, but some bad ones, and we don't need to be a part of any dragnet.
Here's my honest opinion on how I read your latest statement: "Racism is institutionalized in Chicago by CPD, so the correct thing to do is to follow the procedures established by the racist institution because otherwise I am going to be ensnared in the dragnet."
Are you really that naive to think gangbangers and drug dealers don't use ride-sharing programs and exploit it to their advantage? Every system will be exploited. If you dare live in the environment, you might experience it.
I am objecting to the "Fuck you" part, not his (perceived by me) racial insensitivity, which I think we can continue discussing without appealing to mods.
Yes, I was out of line in this context to drop the f-bomb on you. I apologize. Also, it was not done re: racial insensitivity. It's more of a local thing, and it won't translate to this forum. I'm sorry.
This article doesn't support the argument upthread:
Illinois’ error rate, from either overspending on food stamps or not spending enough, is 1.74 percent, according to Januari Smith, a spokeswoman for the state’s Department of Human Services.
So (a) it's a tiny fraction, (b) it's an error metric, meaning some of it is money we didn't spend, and (c) nowhere is any of it categorized as "fraud".
This is awesome! Kudos to you and the team (I assume you had help?). Yeah, I'm sure the tie breaking procedures drove you crazy. Imagine the rules committee meetings when they discussed all of them. :) How did you manage the complexity of the rules in your mind? I'm curious as to how you went from rules => mental model/entities => code. Did you use a formal process?
Thanks, and yes, this was a collaboration with Kevin Quealy and Shan Carter.
The development process was incremental: first create a simple representation of the league (conferences, divisions, teams) and schedule (games, outcomes), then implement the necessary metrics (win percentage, strength-of-victory, etc.) and filters (e.g., head-to-head, common games), then finally the tie-breaking algorithm itself.
The incremental approach let me test the parts independently and reduce the amount of hair-pulling debugging unlikely scenarios. Though, there was still plenty of that… Fortunately the NFL has an official playoff computer I could use to test my implementation (for a single, complete scenario).
I can see the point of not wanting your coders to totally bail out of a customer job when your firm needs to make a milestone, or when your client needs a deliverable so _they_ can pay their bills.
There should be some way to structure and budget at least _some_ employee time that does not go directly towards client deliverables. Consider that my compressor was used in many subsequent projects for clients; we were also able to bid on jobs that would otherwise have required too many assets.
So in reality, my three weeks of work ultimately resulted in billable hours to clients, but not at the time I performed the work.
One more thing - these days it is quite rare to perform on the job training. That's a huge mistake.
At the very least, purchase a corporate technical library, like the O'Reilly and Addison-Wesley books for each of the technologies you use. Also encourage the employees to actually read them.
Consider that I once worked for a hedge fund that had at least one hundred man-years of C++ source code. However their real-time online trading system was always falling on the floor, thereby costing them tens of millions of dollars per year. When I hired on, they emphasized the importance of reliability.
But when I visited to integrate my code - I worked remotely - their head coder pointed at something in my source then asked "What's that?"
"It's a C++ initialization list."
This led to me spending a couple hours teaching the guy who ran their entire development shop, some of the very most-basic concepts in C++. For him not to know what a C++ initialization list was, was like it would be for a Perl coder not to know what a regular expression is.
Lots of coders are able to get jobs, and even produce acceptable code without knowing a whole lot about their craft. That is to be expected, I wasn't born with my degree in Physics. Encourage your people to learn. They will be happier, and your firm will prosper.
I'll clarify that my question is more related to a team of consultants, not necessarily a microISV. Also, what benefits have you seen from this effort? Could be direct financial gains, employee morale boost, anything!
I don't have any objection to basic assessment tests, such as the Iowa Basic Skills test. It's been used around the USA since the 1930s (my mother grew up in Iowa in the 1940s and took the test every year!). It's useful for gauging general progress, but I would definitely object to using it as a "final exam" used for determining future advancement. I don't think the article even hints at that.
Regarding the VRBO research, how does this help you vs. plain ole' Google streetmap? Or is she using streetmap in a non-traditional way? We've been renting a property sourced from VRBO for the past 6 years, so I'm curious how you're researching properties.
Some VRBO properties only have vague generalities about their ___location and not street address - "3 minute walk from the beach", "Close to wineries" etc etc...
I've done this before as well - most of the time you find out the description is entirely accurate, but I'd hate to find out they exaggerated upon arrival for a week long vacation.
