If you like interactive posts with lots of play, check out Bret Victor's work (if you haven't already). Good start here: http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/
Batteries. If no one buys Tesla cars but all the car makers buy Tesla batteries, Tesla still wins. Gigafactory 1 at full production will be making about as many batteries as the entire planet produced in 2016. They're already working on Gigafactory 2. This is why they released all their patents - Tesla wins if electric cars win in general. Doesn't need to be Tesla cars.
(Disclaimer: I own a moderate amount of TSLA, specifically because I think investors missed this point)
Daimler held a significant amount of Tesla stock for this reason, but dropped it when they discovered that there's no magic behind the smoke and mirrors.
While it isn't technically a game about programming, I'd add an honorable mention for Factorio - a game that, at its core, is about software engineering. In it, you build an ever-growing and ever-more-complex factory. You can choose to throw something together quickly because you need steel NOW (and pay for the technical debt later) or take your time to orchestrate the perfect layout only to discover that's not what you wanted in the first place.
It's worth noting that 3 million more people voted for Hillary. I wouldn't chalk this one up to a design issue, rather implementation (in this case, weighting votes by geographic region).
Campaign trails are also designed with the electoral vote in mind. Saying Hillary would have won if the election was based on popular vote, is not necessarily true.
This is a good point. If it was known to be a popular vote from the beginning, the strategy of the campaigns would have been different, so it's difficult to tell what would have happened. It seems common sense, but thanks for this input because it pulled my brain out of a bubble for a moment.
It's also worth noting the first past the post system encourages duopolistic government (Almost China and NK's monopolistic government ;) ) People vote against their sincere choice by voting for one of the two most popular candidates instead.
That's one of the most perniciously false equivalence I've seen in a while, and that's saying something. The US has elected congressmen, elected senators, elected governors and an elected president. Even the top two presidential candidates are chosen from a wide field in primary elections. Portraying that as a stark choice between only two options and saying it's practically the same as China and North Korea, which provide no choice whatsoever, is really pretty disgusting.
And the US has primaries. Last year there were 17 Republicans all trying to win their party's nomination in a series of open votes; out of those, the eventual winner, Donald Trump, was perhaps the candidate least liked by the party establishment.
If anything, the problem was too many candidates, combined with a first-past-the-post system. The majority of primary voters disliked Trump, but were split between several preferred candidates (who I group because they were far more similar to each other than to Trump). Trump got a certain segment of the vote all to himself.
Joke or not, the comparison to China or North Korea is awful, and not at all close to accurate. For example, when the BBC went to report on an independent candidate in China, plainclothes policemen blocked them from entering the building[0]. North Korea is at least an order of magnitude worse off.
I was pointing out that China and North Korea are monopolistic. Of course they don't allow more than one party with the system they set up.
Look at USA, it's duopolistic due to the system set up. There's only republicans and democrats.
What's funny is that China (Don't know about NK) brags that anyone can run for government but people only vote for one party. Just like USA brags that anyone can run for government but it ends up becoming republican/democrat.
Do you see the monopolistic/duopolistic point I was making?
More likely it might make it worse. In US political scene, people are divided strongly and therefore moderates gets to chose in the end. This is better and keeps extremist grabbing the power (well, most of the time). With range voting, power of moderates would diminish and it would be matter of which side has slightly higher number of extremists.
I think what would improve US elections is rather this:
Publish results in real time. Most people don't seem to realize consequence of not voting . If results comes in real time then people who are lazy might get extra prode. If 95% of the population votes, there is less likelyhood of nasty surprises as opposed to say only 60%.
The electoral college is not the problem. If we remove that, than states that lose representation they were promised when they joined should have the right to secede.
The electoral college is antiquated and premised on an idea that didn't pan out. Specifically that people would have a primary allegiance to their state and not the federation. This was true since World War I at the latest, and Reconstruction at the earliest.
Quite frankly it's asinine that my town has more population and less representation than 6 states.
As a non-American, I have to ask why the large, liberal states don't embrace States' Rights? I know that historically, "States' Rights" has been a codeword for racism, but times change.
Why don't liberal states push for a smaller federal government, and more power for their own governments? Mitt Romney introduced a law to that became a blueprint for Obamacare, when he was governor of Massachusetts..if Trump were to abolish Obamacare, why couldn't states introduce their own programs? Similarly, if Trump appoints a conservative who wants Roe v Wade overturned, states that want to maintain abortion could do so, right? States that value clean water could enact regulations protecting their water supplies, while those that value economic growth sacrifice the health of their residents a little. And citizens could vote with their feet. If a state like Kansas ended up gutting its government by cutting taxes (as it has), surely the problem would self-correct at some point, and set an example for other states?
Pollution is often a cross-border problem, but why couldn't states sue each other to enforce pollution controls? Why couldn't liberal states impose taxes and fund their own EPAs (perhaps with bigger budgets, since federal taxes would be cut), or do interstate compacts to fund agencies for basic science that would be too expensive to fund alone?
The constitution and Bill of Rights would still be in force, but it seems like the federal government's actions seem to lead to great unhappiness, from both sides, when the other party is in power. Why is there such opposition to cutting the power of the federal government, from liberal Americans?
I'm not an American, but I do follow US politics somewhat closely, and I'm genuinely perplexed by this.
American here, and I completely agree. I would love for my state to legalize marijuana and not be beholden to the whims of the current president (since it's still illegal at the federal level). Another thing I'd like to try would be a basic income guarantee with corresponding removal of minimum wage (but again, there's a federal minimum wage).
> Similarly, if Trump appoints a conservative who wants Roe v Wade overturned, states that want to maintain abortion could do so, right?
Yeah, but a lot of people aren't content with that. Some people want to force it to be legal everywhere, even in states that wouldn't otherwise want it.
>The electoral college is antiquated and premised on an idea that didn't pan out.
It absolutely panned out. Smaller states joined a union they would not otherwise have joined. To change the system requires 3/4ths of the states to sign on, too, so it's not going to change.
All the states admitted to the union with one notable exception were territories controlled by the United States, and all were dominated by American citizens. These populations had nowhere else to go. Do you honestly think that Idaho was going to join Canada, or strike out on its own? Of course not.
The idea that people would have a primary allegiance to their state absolutely did not pan out. No one puts South Dakotan at the center of their identity in 2017, but in the late 18th century they certainly did. For evidence look at how many signers and organizers of the revolution failed to bother to show up to the constitutional convention. There was no United States or national identity at the time. At best, it was like claiming to be a citizen of the European Union today.
>All the states admitted to the union with one notable exception were territories controlled by the United States, and all were dominated by American citizens. These populations had nowhere else to go. Do you honestly think that Idaho was going to join Canada, or strike out on its own? Of course not.
They could have created a different union, or struck out on their own. The idea they had no other options is, well, ahistorical.
>There was no United States or national identity at the time. At best, it was like claiming to be a citizen of the European Union today.
What US government? Prior to the constitution there was only the articles of confederation. There was no US.
What happened as new states got added was irrelevant - the constitution already existed by then. It was the smaller states of the original thirteen that had to be convinced, not territories. And yes, they had a number of options, and that's why the more populous states acceded to a bicameral legislature and the electoral college.
> It's worth noting that 3 million more people voted for Hillary.
She has, in many respects, just as many problems as Trump. If the US used the popular vote, we would just be screwed in a different manner.
This is not a "patchable" problem with some implementation detail. It's a fundamental problem with trying to force hundreds of millions of people with dozens of vastly different cultures to live under the same overburdened legal and regulatory system.
I was 4 when such a system collapsed around me in the Balkans. It was interesting, I don't remember much, but 25 years later a lot of the politics still revolve around it.
Arguably the US 2 party system is still better than the Yugoslav 1. And while the multiparty system common in much of EU is crazy inefficient, it sure makes This Current Problem high unlikely.
The situation in the EU is a lot better in many ways because the EU has much less purview than the US federal government. When you do less stuff, you're less likely to piss off people with irreconcilable cultural differences.
A true popular vote would be just as horrible... minority interest gets buried...
But honestly, its the size of the nation thats the problem. People in the northeast have fundamentally different beliefs than those in, say, Alabama and california... and trying to rule over all of them as a single government is only going to cause pain...
That has nothing to do with size. When the system worked the federal government was really only concerned with national level things - war and trade, mostly. Over the years more and more power got transferred to the national level, and now we're at the point that states are pretty much satrapies of the federal government. Now the system doesn't work, because the Alabama voters have a big impact on California and vice versa.
That isn't the alternative. The alternative is to let the sum of each equal individual vote determine the outcome. Metro areas don't vote. Neither do farms. People vote. Just like most of us presumably agree that gender, ethnicity, etc. shouldn't affect the impact your vote has, I don't think that the amount of land you own or the population density of the area you live in should affect the impact of your vote.
This is how you get the Roman/Parisian mobs that were the downfall of the Roman and French Republics. All you have to do is promise the mob everything and they'll give you the support to suppress the provinces. The Founders had the Roman example to draw on, as well as Venice's devolution into an urban oligarchy.
With the electoral college al you have to do is appeal to the mob in the swing states. Then you give that select group of voting Americans the ability to suppress the rest of the population.
How is that any better?
These things aren't static- the South (and the major religions) used to be solidly Democrat, California gave us Reagan, etc. This changed in my lifetime and I'm not that old. You start taking your base for granted,you end up wondering how you lost.
You need to review your Constitutional history. The Constitution mandates that the president is elected by the states, via electors who are selected in each state "in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct." It's not a direct popular vote and never has been.
Because one person, one vote. I don't give two shits how many acres you own, you should get one vote (and that was the justification from the beginning -- a compromise so slaveholding scum would be overcounted). The country would have been so much better had Sherman executed the treasonous slavers, rather than burning the land. But alas, the story of the US is "well-meaning moderates" bending over themselves to placate backwater racist scum.
Slavery was added to the Articles and Constitution because South Carolina's support was deemed as critical to the rebellion against Britain.
The other colonies begrudgingly added this, opting for changes to the wording of the clause to enshrine slavery into the constitution, and did everything they could to violate their constitution until South Carolina wrote them back saying it is best if South Carolina exited.
"most of the rest of the country" by square miles, perhaps, but citizens are not square miles. Why should someone's vote count less because they happen to live in a more densely populated area?
Right now, the electoral college lets large metro areas override the preferences of rural voters in their state. The rural voter in Michigan gets outsized representation, the urban voter in California gets downsized representation, and the rural voter in California gets no representation at all.
This is a silly argument. Trump and Clinton competed for the electoral college, not the popular vote. Which means that Trump spent a lot of time campaigning for one electoral vote in Maine and almost none in courting millions of people in California and New York. It's impossible to say what the outcome would have been if the popular vote would have mattered, because both campaigns would be run totally differently.
Actually, no it's not. The electoral college was setup in 1787. What it has to do with politics two centuries later in the age of the internet seems out of date. Yet it's the rules we live by, not the rules we like.
Since 2000, it's clear that voter majorities have been underrepresented in presidential elections. And as we claim to be the world's largest democracy, we have been, in fact, the world's largest republic.
I'm highly amused that you start with "actually, no it's not", implying that you are going to disagree with my comment, because you don't actually address anything I said. Did you even read what I said?
The parties may of run entirely different candidates if it was a popular vote as well. They would likely hold entirely different policy positions as a party.
This article (like many) misses why people buy Teslas. Teslas are amazing cars that just happen to be electric - not the other way around. The large car companies think that "electric" is enough to sell a car, whereas Tesla knows they need luxury options, autopilot & the supercharger network.
I've got a Model 3 reservation myself and wouldn't even think of switching to the Bolt. I want a nice car, not just an electric one, and Tesla's got that in spades.
I don't doubt you're correct in summarising why many current Tesla owners buy Tesla cars. But if they want to be hugely, mass market successful they need to expand their client base beyond customers who "need" luxury options in a car. It's Tesla that would need to match GM's market proposition, not vice versa.
> I want a nice car, not just an electric one, and Tesla's got that in spades.
And I suspect many Bolt owners want an economical car, not a luxury one, and the Bolt's got that in spades.
Tesla has a lamentable number of luxury options. It has even fewer than Porsche has in its 911, and that is a car known more for its speed and handling than anything.
People looking for luxury would be better suited buying Mercedes, or BMW for that same price range.
Tesla is a luxury car, but not of the 'lovely interior' type. It's more like Porsche---luxury in terms of an extreme in high technology related to driving.
Certainly possible, but the Model 3 isn't available yet and (according to link in the article) is predicted by some to not be available until 2018. So it's difficult to compare the buying choices for customers when one car can be bought and the other cannot.
The federal tax rebate is likely to phase out over the course of the Model 3 introduction: it isn't a given that the effective pricing will be be similar. It's also premature to compare pricing without the Model 3 specifications.
It's an old, yellowed page out of the Microsoft book: "what we have in the pipeline is better than what you can buy today!"
We know nothing of the as-yet-unshipped Model 3. Let's hold off on those side-by-side comparisons. Because if you want to compare, we should weight the "can buy today" column quite heavily.
If you don't care about the electric drive, there are MUCH nicer cars available at the same price as a Tesla. It doesn't even compare. This is why I don't have a Tesla. I could afford one, but I have spent a lot of time in them, and they do not feel like a car in the price range that they are. The interior is fine, but not premium. The touch screen makes it feel like you're driving a computer, not a vehicle (not in a good way). The styling is obviously entirely subjective, but I think that most cars in the Model S's price range look nicer, and the Model X is downright ugly.
While it may sound like I'm anti-Tesla, I'm really not. I'm glad they're pushing this market forward, and I have many friends who have one and are very happy with it. I'm just saying that I don't buy the argument that it's a great car for the price if you ignore the fact that they "happen to be electric."
I think the missing piece that explains Tesla's success is that they got Prius owners to buy $90k cars. They aren't cannibalizing the 7-series owners, who know what to demand at that price point; they're getting people who would previously never dream of spending so much on a car, and never have.
In my opinion, it's easy to feel that way when you are used to gas cars. You are already comfortable with the downsides of gas cars and less comfortable with the downsides of the tesla. It would be easier if the tesla were strictly better than comparably priced gas cars, but it certainly isn't.
However, if you already had a tesla and the competitors were offering you better interior materials and longer range as long as you were ok stopping at a gas station every week or two and having service appointments at a dealer at least once a year (or more depending on model) and losing a lot of the satisfying low end torque you might not think it was a great deal. Oh and you have to stop getting software updates also! Your phone will continue to be better than your car's computer in every way and the car won't even try to mitigate that problem.
Anyway, I think the idea that some competing car is MUCH nicer is mostly about your prior assumptions or at best what particular aspects of vehicles you care most about.
I think Tesla's underappreciated marketing technique is the fact that they make buyers feel like they are not just buying a car but they are part of an historically unprecedented epic effort to use bleeding edge tech to save humanity from global warming, dirty fossil fuels and even from being stuck on earth.
It's not clear to me if the humanity saving efforts are 100% genuine on Musk's part or if part of them are intentionally conceived as marketing but it works either way.
and sex! The Prius' problem has always been that it looks like the healthy low-fat gluten-free quinoa kale almond milk salad of cars.
The best word I can come up with describe Toyota's car designs is "inoffensive". They aren't necessarily bad, and they are easy to drive and comfortable to ride in, but they are mainly generic and forgettable. Being mass market cars like they are I guess that is kind of the point.
There's been a plug-in version of it since 2012. Sure it has only 25 miles range on batteries, but that's enough for most people's commute, and they won't have to get out the slide rule when they visit grandma over the weekend.
(Also, 99% of electric cars also mostly burn fossil fuels - the exception being the ones deployed in Iceland, Norway and France, where fossil fuels are being phased out.)
The Model 3 starts at $35k, the Bolt at $37.5k. If you're in the market for the Bolt post-Model 3 launch, then there's not much difference in price - why not go for the classier car?
I live in the outer provinces (New York), whose franchise laws are incompatible with Teslas business model. I also don't feel like driving 150 miles to buy a car from a company that basically doesn't allow 3rd party service.
A friend had one that had problems. Getting it towed to Jersey a few times was not fun. When he got into a fender bender, getting it towed to a certified body shop on Long Island was extra not fun.
Or I can pop into the local Chevy dealer about a half mile away.
... all of whom pay kickbacks. Meaning you get less car for your money. And even if you're one of the ones who plays the dealerships against each other, that's just to reach a reasonable price, not get a deal.
It's not like Tesla is trying to put the indie repairman out of business, they're trying to sidestep the big car companies' control of the industry even in the distribution side.
Well dealer distribution is one point. You don't have to go far to find mechanics that can service your Chevy. If you live outside a major city it's a pia to get your tesla serviced.
Additionally Chevy allows people to buy parts for their cars and you can service it yourself or at an independent shop.
Be careful though, the dealership might be able to order and sell it, but if they don't sell many in your area, I can guarantee they won't be good at fixing issues.
I have to believe when there are millions of Teslas on the road you'll be able to find Tesla mechanics locally. The danger is the Model 3 flops and you're forever stuck going to the closest Tesla service station.
Yes, and those totally do not get resold on eBay... ;-)
Electric AC induction motors have very few breaking parts. The things that can break are more along the inverter/controller (capacitors, FET avalanche wear, etc) and auxiliary systems (A/C, etc.)
One great thing about electric cars is that you don't need oil changes, belt replacements, or spark plug tune ups!
In my experience, post-2000 engines are pretty reliable too. I have a 03 Honda Pilot with 225k miles and an 05 Odyessy with 130k.
No real issues with engines other than maintenance. I think I had a bad EGR valve on the Pilot 10 years ago. Know what breaks? Electronic crap. Doorlock servos ($400), side door motors and rails ($800), various little modules, AC sensors, airbag crap not covered by recall, defective key cylinders, etc.
One great thing about electric cars is that you don't need oil changes, belt replacements, or spark plug tune ups!
Name two of those three things I haven't done to our Scion (Toyota) xB in 12 years and 80K miles.
Happy Leaf owner here, but the reality is that, other than oil changes, modern cars are just as maintenance-free as an electric. Okay, I take that back, I did have to do a pads/rotors/calipers brake job on the Scion, whereas I expect the pads on the Leaf to last the life of our ownership (or maybe I'll have to do the same job due to minimal use).
Good point, and one I have posed myself. However, if you see GM's dealerships as marketing channels, then there's simply a lot more people who would even know about the Bolt vs. the Tesla Model3 (using the logic). If you don't know an alternative exists, maybe what's in front of you is your best rational choice?
> I've got a Model 3 reservation myself and wouldn't even think of switching to the Bolt. I want a nice car,
What makes the Model 3 "nice" in a way that the Bolt isn't?
The Model 3 is just cashing in on the fact that it's cool to drive a Telsa. If the same exact car came from Toyota, then the response would be exactly as it is for the Bolt: "eh, it's not a Telsa." And probably mention of how awful the interior looks.
Toyota doesn't have a supercharger network or autopilot. The Model 3 is a pretty nice looking car, at least on the exterior. The interior leaves some things to be desired, but the extra features offered by Tesla seal the deal. The one thing that bothers me about Tesla is how much control they have over your car that you bought.
> This article (like many) misses why people buy Teslas.
Does it? TFA talks about Tesla quite a bit, e.g.
> It's unlikely the Bolt will crush Tesla’s nascent Model 3. It has made essentially the anti-Tesla, a vehicle long on utility and short on sexy. What the Bolt will do is lure thousands of buyers who would otherwise buy a conventional car
Hey there. I'm certified to the hilt: IC3, CompTia A+/Net+/Security+ & Microsoft Certified Professional. All before I left high school.
These certifications were absolutely useless when it came to getting me a job whenever I interviewed somewhere where they knew what they were doing. All they proved was that I was particularly good at studying and taking tests. This may be a useful skill in another career but in IT (the area of the certs) and even more in software (where I work now) memorizing rote knowledge is nigh-useless in the era of StackOverflow and Google.
Any sort of programming certification test would be gameable. A test that can be gamed isn't useful for hiring - once again, you're not proving they're a competent programmer, just that they're good at taking tests. No company you want to get hired at will use such a metric.
If it was possible to prove the quality of a coder via a certification test, we'd be out of a job. One of the key signs of a good programmer is their ability to expertly handle problems & situations they've never encountered before, which is (by definition) impossible via some sort of standardized test.
A certification might prove that I've memorized the parameters that get passed into the function in Array.prototype.map but it'll never tell me if someone can build software solutions to real-life problems.
No offense, but those certifications are pretty low value. The A+, etc solely exist because the federal government requires them for contractors.
Code bootcamps do provide some usefulness, and you could problably look at that syllabus and come up with a more portable ciriculum that you could teach to people with aptitude but without credentials.
It would be great to use something like this in civil service and other areas to give disadvantaged folks a way to get into the industry without a four year degree in CS.
It's bizarre though. Companies won't even look at CS graduates from state schools, but will hire someone who went through a glorified training class.
None taken, the IC3 in particular exists so that people can say they're "certified". The qualifications are things like "Make some text bold in MS Word". Ridiculous.
How would you feel if one of the certification point consisted of:
Able to read, manipulate, and emit the contents of a file.
And the test point given by one proctor consisted of:
Write a program which accepts this file and translates all 'c' characters to 'C' characters, and puts the modified contents of the file to stdout.
Nothing too fancy, but a useful starting point (feel free to come up with a better test question than the one I devised in under 15 seconds).
Could it be gamed? Of course. But then so can a University course. As can an interview. As can a coding school.
> memorizing rote knowledge is nigh-useless
I used to think this, but accessing data in your brain is faster than accessing it on Stack Overflow. And sometimes it's impossible to find the right answer without at least having the right terminology.
"remove an item from a list where each item in the list has a reference to the next item in that list" doesn't return a meaningful Stack Overflow result, and the notes from a CS course show up below the fold in a google search; yet the use of the rote-learned phrase "linked list" yields not only a page full of meaningful google results, but the suggestions include every language which uses linked lists.
That certification sounds a lot like the job interviews HN constantly complains about - lots of minor Googleable trivia, no hard problem solving. I don't see how it'd be useful beyond possibly skipping the phone screen.
> Could it be gamed? Of course. But then so can a University course. As can an interview. As can a coding school.
It's a lot harder to game those things than it is a certification test.
What about a project based approach with testing similar to the AP exams (multiple graders, on a curve, with deviance from the mean singled out and examined)? I.E. implement a 12 factor web application using the python standard library that can handle x volume of traffic on n cores with y gb of ram where n and y are somewhat excessive? Could be interesting IMO.
That's literally a bootcamp (at least, the good ones). I taught at a bootcamp myself a while back and the entire curriculum was project-based. We wanted the students to imagine something and build it. Most of the bootcamp was about teaching new tools/techniques and providing support to our students as they built things.
I could be wrong, IANAL, but isn't the bar association test based on memorizing a tonne of stuff? A certification based on how much of on API someone can remember would be worth nothing.
Interesting idea, though explaining the complications of licensing may cause problems when it comes to marketing.
I've had a related idea for a while, setting up SaaS for FOSS maintainers to charge for a SLA (license/source is still open, corps essentially have some security that the project won't be abandoned). Is there anything out there like that?
The Pebble 2 Kickstarter was early in the summer and didn't start shipping until October. Since the graph mentions shipped units, I'm not surprised they're down. Anyone who was interested in getting a Pebble either pledged to the Kickstarter or waited for the 2 to come out in stores.
Annoyingly, the folks who waited for the store version will be getting theirs before the Kickstarter backers do. The community took a big hit when they prioritized WalMart over the folks who helped them get off the ground. Pebble's community has always been a strong point for the company - not sure if that'll keep being true, so their blip might turn into a bigger slide.
Disclaimer: Backer of Pebble 2 who won't be getting his watch until at least mid-November.
