I keep hearing two contradictory theories:

(1) There aren’t enough STEM graduates for the jobs available. Crisis for the tech industry!
(2) There are too few job openings for the massive numbers of STEM graduates. Crisis for unemployment!

Are these things really contradictory? Or are both true? For both of them to be true, then what we really have is an education crisis, where we’re putting too many losers on the job market. Businesses get lots of applicants, but most of them are fundamentally unhirable, because they’re morons. So although the number of applicants may well exceed the number of openings, only a small fraction are worth hiring.

There seems to be plenty of hiring for low-pay code monkey and short-term contract jobs, and those seem to dominate the tech industry. So any engineering student who can think his or her way out of a paper bag complains they can’t find work because the jobs that are available are utter shit. So perhaps on that basis, we can rewrite the two hypotheses above:

(1) There aren’t enough REALLY GOOD STEM graduates. In fact, businesses are forced to assume (on the weight of massive statistics) that ALL of them are idiots.
(2) There aren’t enough good-paying tech jobs, because most of the jobs are parceled out to code monkeys by businesses structured around that kind of employee.

I don’t know why this is so hard for people to understand. Facebook’s primary source of revenue is ads. Just like Google. They increases the probability that you’ll click on one by examining every last bit of your data that goes through their system. That’s the whole thing in a nutshell.

It amazes me that people are surprised by this.

Don’t put anything on the internet that you don’t want Facebook, Google, the NSA, and every one else looking at. If you store something encrypted on the internet, there’s a chance someone will hack it and get your data anyway. NOTHING IS PRIVATE ON THE INTERNET. Yes, I have a Facebook account, which I use rarely to connect with friends and family. I don’t talk about anything sensitive, and I don’t publish any information that isn’t the sort of thing I would be embarrassed to appear on my LinkedIn profile, which is something I WANT people to see.

The key here isn’t to to complain about Facebook’s policies. That isn’t going to change because 99% of people just accept them anyway. The key is to avoid those services if you object to them. There are many other things in life that make you become publically visible, not limited by any means fo Facebook. Perhaps you want to avoid those too. Good. If ultimately the majority of people decide they don’t like being probed like this, perhaps Facebook will chance. But probably not because they’ll still have a billion users.

Some really stupid picture of you getting drunk from 5 years ago is still on the Internet somewhere, and employers WILL find it. I think this is awesome. In this economic environment, I’m very glad to have more ways that people remove themselves from competition with me when I’m looking for a job. Some people just don’t do really stupid things, while others are forward-looking enough to keep them from getting published. Either way, those are the sorts of people I want to hire in preference to jackasses who think it’s funny to show everyone how stupid they are.

The Republicans do something I agree with? Woah. I’m going to have to switch to being pro-surveilance! I’m in a conundrum!

Isn’t it the republicans who are usually in favor of this sort of stuff? They’re usually the morallity police who think it’s okay to spy into your house to make sure you’re not doing something gay or smoking pot.

Oh, wait. I get it. The republicans, who support big businesses rich people taking over the world, are afraid that surveilance will uncover their dirty dealings.

I am by no means a global warming denier. It seems straightforward that human use of carbon-based fuels has massively increased CO2 in the atmosphere, a known greenhouse gas. This isn’t rocket science. Additionally, there are numerous other impacts we have on the environment, polluting natural resources, where we need to clean up our act.

But the sappy, apocalyptic dogma is getting really old.

My family and I went to Disney recently, and we spent one day at EPCOT. Tomorrowland isn’t what it was when I was a kid. Back then, it was cool stuff about how great technology will be in the future. Now, they appear to have run out forward-looking ideas, and the whole experience is up-your-nose enviromentalist brainwashing. We went there to have fun and instead got lectured. And this lecturing is happening everywhere, and it’s annoying. OK, I GET IT. I recycle, I professionally do research in areas involving improving energy efficiency, and I donate money to organizations that work on envronmental protection and political activism.

This reminds me of this “common core” education program, which its original creators won’t sign off on, because it’s all become a load of crap. Instead of teaching kids math, science, language, and critical thinking, it’s all about instilling certain specific attitudes. And both the liberals and conservatives are trying to get their bullshit in there. Enviromental awareness is never about the environment. It’s about two warrning political parties trying to brainwash people into two different dogmas that further their agendas, most of which is to keep big businesses and the politicians themselves in power.

The price fell because of a surplus that probably wasn’t being fully consumed. I wonder what kind of energy storage solutions they have. Batteries have substantial energy loss between charge and discharge, and supercapacitors aren’t cheap or super enough.

I have a PhD in engineering too. Computer Engineering. So I’m probably just as unqualified as the AC to comment on this. :)

BTW, you should look at the comments on the article. They’re more interesting than the article. Apparently this idea of ringless pistons has been known since the 1950’s.

When it comes to aeronautics, liability is a major concern, so the idea of putting in something really new like this is probably a bit conerning to some people, so this is a good way to introduce it: Start by making noncritical components like plastic shields that are mostly cosmetic as a way to test out the technology safely, and gradually expand to new things as the approach is proven.

He would probably never waste his time on this (and I don’t blame him), but Ken Miller wrote a very popular textbook on biology and was an expert witness in that trial a few years back about the school district in Dover, PA. Miller would whip Ham around like a noodle.

Large floods happen all the time. The story Atra-Hasis was probably based directly on a real flood or a version of an earlier story that was based on a real flood. That’s not the point. The Hebrews could have borrowed a different story and still incorporated the same message. The facts aren’t important; the philosophy is.

As for scientology, this makes me think of intelligent design. There is a historical chain of evidence that demonstrates clearly that ID evolved from Creationism after it was ruled unconstitutional to teach in science classes. ID proponents try to characterize ID as “scientific theory,” despite the fact that it makes no (or nearly no) testable claims. Really, it’s an attempt to use weasel language to make a fundamentally religious agenda appear as though it is scientific and brainwash school children into thinking that a negative argument (if you don’t yet have a naturalistic explanation for some minute detail. uh, I guess God must have done it [*]) can be considered an alternative to a solid scientific theory based on a huge body of evidence that makes mountains of testable claims.

Scientology is the complement of this idea. To the higher ups, Scientology is a BUSINESS designed to make money from ignorant people. They couch it in religious terms in order to get special legal treatment and make initiates think there must be some mystical truth in it. But even Hubbard referred to the rediculous mythology as a “space opera.” Like I said, self-parody.

[*] One of the main problems with ascribing unexplained phenomena to supernatural causes, in regards to being a scientific theory, is that while it may be an explanation (true or not, it is offered as an explanation), it’s definitely not a USEFUL explanation. One of the valuable functions of science is that it produces models of reality that have useful engineering application. With evolution, it has been useful in many kinds of research, such as medicine. We can rely on its claims to make predictions that guide successful experimentation and design. The problem with invoking a supernatural cause for anything is that engineers cannot do magic, so the ID explanation has no practical value. Even if it contained any truth (e.g. aliens have been tweaking our ancestors for billions of years), we need naturalistic explanations in order for humans to innovate. (BTW, you don’t have to see the engineering value in order for something to be a valuable scientific pursuit.)

I’ll start by saying that I like Mormonism (from a distance) because every single Mormon I’ve met was really really nice. Although, “saccharine” comes to mind for some of them. I’ve read things by former mormons who complained that mental illness like depression is verboten in Mormonism such that you basically have to pretend to be really really happy all the time, even if you need medical treatment. But that’s probably a biased source. I applied to work at Brigham Young (among countless other schools), and I had to swear to never have coffee, tea, or other “hot drinks.” I looked this up, and their rules make absolutely no sense.

Anyhow, the summary makes it look like this guy really really likes Mormonism. Is he a mormon? He loves Android and elaborates on how hard-working and sober they are.

What’s interesting about Mormonism is its relatively recent history and what we know about it. WIth other religions, the “facts” are lost to history such that it’s very difficult to prove those details to be false. Not so with Mormonism, which developed in recorded history. Basically, watch the relevant South Park episode. It tells you everything you need to know.

That being said, the “facts” of a religion aren’t necessarily a deal-breaker. If someone claims the details of their scriptures to be historical fact, I roll my eyes. But if you take it as allegory, you can get good philosophy (and some bad philosophy) out. (Think of religious scriptures and traditions as a product of cultural natural selection, where sometimes some of the bad ideas have been filtered out over time.) For instance, ancient Hebrews had a disctinct pattern of taking someone else’s legends and modifying them heavily to add a moral message (whether or not we agree with the message). So, the Genesis flood story was a rewrite of the earlier story of Atra-Hasis. Other religions do this just as heavily. With Mormonism, I can let it go because it seems to be mostly beneficial, while Scientology (I hesitate to mention Scientology as a religion, because it’s really a Ponzi scheme, but they want to call it a religion) is evil and obviously a self-parody.

A court can’t compel you to lie, but there’s nothing that says that your arrangement with the NSA can’t compel you to lie. It could very well be that RSA’s contract wiht the NSA states that if they are asked about this that they must categorically deny it.

What bugs me the most about this is that there isn’t any sort of grass-roots push to vote out congress representatives who have supported this unconstitutional spying. Of course, there are no guarantees about their replacements (all of which will really be selected by their political parties, not really the people). But this would (a) probably reduce the concentration of supporters of these laws, and (b) send a message that this garbage isn’t supported by the people. Eventually, repeated voting selection will, after many years, filter out politicians who advocate spying.

Also, don’t make REAL bomb threats either. And don’t set off bombs to kill innocent people.

I think that’s good advice too.

It’s not about “green idiots.” It’s about the fact that chips will melt (burn? fry?) if you don’t keep them cool, and you can only dissipate so much heat from air cooling. Water cooling is used in HPC systems, but that too only goes so far. What’s next? Everyone needs a supply of liquid nitrogen to run their desktop PCs?

The “power wall” is a real, practical problem, which we reached somewhere around 2001, where power dissipation hit ~150 Watts in high-end systems. And the challenges go beyond cooling. Did you know that half the pins (around 1000) on a modern CPU are used just for power and ground? Do the math on trying to get 150 Watts at 1 Volt through a single pair if wires.

Oh, and what about mobile computers? Current battery technology can only old so much charge. Do you want your cell phone to get only an hour of useful life before recharging?

Paul Graham liked to blog about how awesome Lisp is. Apparently, he did some web back-ends in Lisp and was able to stay ahead of the competition. Now, Lisp has some awesome features. The two that stick out to me are (a) Lisp macros, which are arbitrary Lisp code run at compile time that emits arbitrary Lisp code that gets compiled, allowing some seriouly powerful constructs to be created very concisely and (b) massive libraries. That being said, I suspect that Paul Graham and his cohorts were more successful at using Lisp compared to another back-end language because they were both very skilled at the language and also super smart. The language they chose is actually MUCH less important. If they’d chosen another language, they would have done probably just about as well.

If you’re not a super smart programmer, I recommend Java (among other languages). Pass-by-reference and garbage collection obviate a lot of coding mistakes. And with Jit compilation, you get pretty darn fast code. Under 99% of circumstances Java performance is way better than adequate and makes MUCH better use of programmer engineering time.

But if what you want is super fast performance, a super smart C++ programmer will beat a super smart Java programmer. It’s a lot HARDER to get better results from C++, but the ceiling is higher. Some reasons for this:

- In memory-constrained environments, garbage collection imposes some overhead. I’ve worked on huge programs near the VM size limit whose performance was limited by GC performance. Most of the time, incremental GC in another thread is a win, but it can be a huge liability in memory constrainted environments. Instead, manual memory management in C++ allows you to make tighter use of the memory space and performs better in a memory-constranied environment.
- In a CPU-constrained environment, background GC steals cycles away from computation.
- Just like how macros are a huge win in Lisp, C++ templates generate customized code at compile time that can have huge perfrormance benefits. This is why C++ sort is faster than the C library qsort: The C++ sort is a template that inlines the comparison function for the type you’re sorting, rather than making a method call. In Java, you MIGHT get some of this from a fabulous JIT compiler.
- Compiling to bytecode is a huge information loss. If you used gcj to compile Java to native code, there’s the potential to have less information loss and therefore optimize better based on the programmer intent. But normally, Java uses bytecode as an intermediate. With more programmer intent knowledge, the C++ compiler can make smarter optimizations.

I could add more things, but I have other real work to do. Before I go, I’ll cap this off with two practical thoughts. You CAN get better performance from C++ than Java. Do you WANT to?

- Java has massive libraries too, where the critical parts are written in optimized native code, so if you make heavy use of Java libraries, you’ll see almost no difference in performance with regard to CPU throughput (GC being a separate issue). With no perceptible impact on peformance, less code to write, fewer common programming errors, and better use of engineering time, Java is quite often just an all-around practical win over C++. I say this as a programmer who prefers C++.
- If you’re REALLY REALLY concerned about performance, use Fortran. The language is more restrictive, providing the compiler with even more freedom to optimize. (For instance, no aliasing, no recursion.)

Your resume is examined first by a totally nontechnical HR person. To them, the job position requires that you have 10 years of experience in Blurg and 5 in Blarg. They see 1000 resumes a week and therefore must filter them quickly by selecting checkboxes. There is no room whatsoever for fuzzy logic here. Either you list the skills and pass to the next round, or you don’t list the skills, and your resume gets thrown in the can. The technical people writing the job descriptions are often marginally technical themselves, so they don’t necessarily know if the combo of skills they compiled by committee is even reasonable.

And I don’t know a way around this. You simply cannot have all the technical people filtering the resumes. They have other work to do. I think at Google, the technical people get involved at a lower level of the process, and I get the impression it’s a burden.