But how can you show how proactive you have been in your quarterly performance review without testing out various user funnel strategies, optimizing conversion rates and paying consultants for A/B tests?
You mention tactics. Instead, focus on metrics trends. Optimizing the customer experience may include the tactics you've mentioned, but if you walk into a review and show that your customers are happier (net promoter score, or clips from user testing, for example), conversion rates are up, and online revenues are up... that would be pretty darn good evidence of a job well done.
Go seems to be still a bit of a black box in terms of performance/memory profiling.
On one recent project, the go memory profiler was showing about 35MB allocated while top showed memory usage at 500MB to 1GB. In another instance the performance profiler would show microseconds elapsed while the user experienced tens of minutes with no response from the program.
I really think they should consider including a function level profiler instead of just a sampler, as well as provide more insight/control over all the goroutines that are generated.
Just saying golang is better than node.js may not be saying all that much.
Can you provide more details? Because i didn't encounter such problems. Was this 500 MB in top was RSS ?
What you describe should not happen, did you report a bug?
For me it seems like you probably leaked gorutines/not closed os resources or you encapsulated some data structures in themselves which then can't be garbage collected. It really looks like memory leak caused by app logic. But as i said you should report this if you are certain that is Go bug.
I would love to have a contact lens that projected information about the people around me onto my retina. Serious question - what's dystopian about that? I realize there's often a fine line between utopian and dystopian and for me, facial recognition (especially as my vision deteriorates) seems solidly on the utopian side of the line.
Even though I'd really like to have control over the information that concerns me, I also find it highly morally questionable to restrict others ability to see, know or remember, either naturally or technologically assisted[1]. Even for those who are unfriendly or outright malicious. That just feels unnatural to me.
And if someone shares their knowledge[2], while I fully reserve the right call them assholes if what they do caused me grief or worse, I'm also not sure it's still morally right to demand for me that they shut up.
Still, if I can apply this sort of logic to myself (i.e. I surely can decide for myself that I can't complain if my photo was published and is a part of some database), it would be plain wrong and even inhumane to apply this to anyone else. Can't impose this sort of thinking on others, especially given that the general expectation and attitude seems to be drastically different with all those "right to be forgotten" and other privacy laws and stuff (which - I'll be honest - feel just unnatural to me, but, heck, I guess I can't really argue with majority).
This damned dilemma sucks. /rant
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[1] And where to draw a line? Glasses for poor eyesight? Pen-and-paper notetaking? PDAs (phones or whatever)? PDAs with cameras? Networked PDAs? Those sci-fi brain implants concepts that don't exist but would probably happen in the future?
[2] Given that it's about valid true facts that literally anyone who sees me in public can obtain. So this is drastically different from the restricting what others say when what they say constitutes a defamation.
Where to draw the line? How about "people you have seen"? But the line is less important than the reason for the line being where it is -- and that is about things like the principle of least authority, stability against tyrrany, whether progress is held back even a little by chilling effects, etc.
It isn't necessary to restrict others ability to see, know or remember per se, but only to prohibit the application of those powers -- by means of large computer databases collected by many people -- to particular purposes. In exactly the same sense, it isn't necessary to constrain people's ability to move their arms and hands in order to prohibit strangulation.
Perhaps your dilemma is caused by something along the lines of a tacit incorrect assumption that moral principles are not constrained by other moral principles. Can you think of a moral principle about freedoms that is not restricted in any way by harm caused to others and to society?
I think you are right to say that "it just feels unnatural" is not a good argument, but I don't think that's because you are arguing with the majority: the majority are often wrong.
I don't begrudge you projecting information on your retina about people you have seen before. The issue at hand is people you have never seen before, but whose faces have been been captured in a large database.
What's dystopian?
Mass surveillance grants power, to the public and to institutions, to control individuals. One consequence is 'chilling effects': good actions are not taken because of possible future consequences. Planning is hindered, because any action may have unpredictable consequences because of side effects caused by surveillance 'global state' (state as in data, not as in country).
I think there is a negative psychological effect on some (most?) people of being at all times under observation, retroactively, by all people.
Today's governments and today's public often err in their ethical judgements, and "the doctrine that the truth is manifest is the root of all tyranny". Some future ones may be worse. Such large databases (and the social/legal/technical all-seeing surveillance systems we are building) would make it easier to allow bad governments to lock themselves into power more firmly, and once in power to use it in very bad ways: this is Snowden's "turnkey tyrrany".
This kind of information reduces the scope for experimentation, error, and the correction of mistakes. Because that is the source of all knowledge, that is a problem.
Of course some uses of such data will be good. But, power should be localized to prevent it being abused (the principle of least authority). Some good uses (like helping your bad vision) don't actually require the "sudo" superpower to recognize every person on the planet. All others are not worth the costs (this is a hypothesis, as are all statements I guess).
Radical transparency could be a tool for or against oppressors. If I could know as much about my government as they know about me, I think I would feel a lot safer.
We have many institutions that have evolved over centuries to correct the mistakes of governments (including ones that involve malice). Radical anything risks destabilising that most valuable knowledge: incremental change has worked remarkably well in this sphere, given time. There need to be very good reasons to throw everything up in the air - especially given radical transparency is just worse than its absence in many ways (see my earlier comments) -- really the idea has come about not because people thought it was a good idea, but because they thought it was inevitable, which it is not.
I think there are good reasons to expect the current ongoing disaster that is computer security will one day be fixed. Then, radical surveillance will still be with us, but radical transparency will operate in one direction: from those in power to everybody else.
Until then, especially in a society that is showing signs of starting to lose the means for criticism of bad ideas, extreme surveillance does not imply that the same data will be collected and stored about everybody or every institution. The UK government has already introduced data transparency laws. It makes special exceptions for... government. Even though they might eventually be caught, your local population of bureaucrats, with easy access to every detail of your life, will have an asymmetric information and legal power advantage over you, and adding information amplifies that asymmetry. Massive data leaks are still surprisingly infrequent. If we had regular Snowdens across government, what makes us think we know that would be a net good, a general purpose cure-all nostrum for government?
Meanwhile, the rest of population, given data, are happy to "know" the moral truth as they see it about other people and impose their own tyranny without due process (see e.g. Jon Ronson's "So you've been publicly shamed"). And corporations -- but they are discussed often enough that I don't want to add anything now.
Not to speak of progress, planning, and the morality of imposing "radical transparency" on other people.
Nothing is dystopian about the idea, it's the execution that will be the important part. What information are you imagining these contacts will display?
Dystopia is Russian past. In a lot of ways it is so much more free country than the US. Imagine no tax on private software development as a business. This is what Russia have!
This is plain incorrect. Software development (all-Russian classifier of types of economic activities code 72.20) is taxed here, just as any other business. /offtopic
It would be interesting if the common availability of spellcheck turned out to obviate such reform. Technology would be retarding progress and enabling ossification in this instance.
It seems to me that issues like this are far more pressing for languages like Japanese and Chinese, where the rise of fonts and IMEs makes it technically unfeasible to create or change the fundamental building blocks of words (kanji).
For Japanese, the current state is that most new words are loan words written with the non-kanji syllabaries. It makes you wonder if someday the loan words will overbalance the originals, causing kanji to die out from Japanese (as it has, to some extent, from Korean).
>It seems to me that issues like this are far more pressing for languages like Japanese and Chinese, where the rise of fonts and IMEs makes it technically unfeasible to create or change the fundamental building blocks of words (kanji).
This is not a technological issue, it's a social one. After the American conquest of Japan the American occupation forces were quite keen on the idea of language reform, whether using romaji or one of the native syllabaries. The idea died a death when they compared ease of decoding/reading speed. Japanese speakers, even not terribly well educated ones in terms of years of education were on a level with English speakers. Mao wanted to replace the hanzi with pinyin (the modern romanisation used in the PRC) but didn't feel it was worth the political cost. Replacing the hanzi/kanji would be a boon for foreigners but a massive and unnecessary disruption for Japanese and Chinese speakers.
>For Japanese, the current state is that most new words are loan words written with the non-kanji syllabaries. It makes you wonder if someday the loan words will overbalance the originals, causing kanji to die out from Japanese (as it has, to some extent, from Korean).
Korean is a very different case from Japanese or Chinese. If the Japanese hadn't conquered Korea they'd probably be using some combination of hanja (hanzi/kanji) and hangul (the syllabary used in modern Korea (North and South). To be fair that's the case nowadays but there are less than 300 hanja that every educated Korean would know. Any literate Japanese person knows over two thousand. The kanji aren't going anywhere in Japanese. They're the words that you use for educated, literate speech.
I wonder how relevant technology has been to the reduction in kanji. It seems like the technical difficulties in adding kanji pale in comparison to the social difficulties of teaching the new kanji to the public; especially when you realize that this is the language that gave us emojis.
Further, my lay understanding of Japanese history is that their have been many attempts to reduce or eliminate kanji usage.
>I wonder how relevant technology has been to the reduction in kanji.
Actually IMEs have led to a resurgence in kanji usage. A lot of words that normal people could not (and were not expected to) write in kanji are now used online every day, to the extent that grade schools now teach them as kanji to appear on reading tests but not to be graded in handwritten essays. The most famous example of these "read only" kanji is 鬱 ('utsu', depression or melancholy), introduced to the school system in 2013 (iirc).
Also words that can be written in either kanji or kana but with a preference for kana in modern edited text are often written in kanji online (like 或いは instead of あるいは).
Spellcheck more or less solves the needs of an educated native speaker who occasionally forgets weird spellings. But there's still a huge economic and educational burden to teaching spelling to kids and (especially) the millions of non-native learners.
People spelling things nonstandardly is not really a serious issue in the first place. It's the extra information that must be learned, raising the bar for non-native speakers and people with a learning disability.
While I agree that language policing like you see in France or the drive for culture preservation via language in various parts of the world is tragically misguided if not actively harmful, the one thing that gives pause is that we do not have a 'perfect' language in english by any means. Learning other languages and lingustic evolution gives hope that we can trend towards better options in the future. So lets not declare english as the winner just yet.
Absolutely, but at the same time it depends on what you value in a language. That is kind of what this whole conversation is about, after all. English is garbage from any compative measure of language quality, its grammar is irrational, it has thousands of edge cases, it does not even use the entire range of human auditory sounds. But that constitutes a linguists evaluation of it - for probably 99.9999% of human beings, language is there to facilitate communication, in which case all the grammar breaks and eccentricities go out the window for the singular overriding and essential value of - do you and the other person speak the same language?
That is why English is so important now, since about half the world knows it, and the difference between knowing it or not could be the difference between perpetual poverty and improving standards of living.
In the same way, the cultural aspect cannot be considered relevant as much as the grammar cannot be, because the importance of having a language to communicate is overwhelming. There will always be people that like languages and learn them, language diversity will never die, but I also would wonder how you could ever hope to replace English with something better. It is the kind of thing that logically should seem obvious - a university department of smart people, or a global consortium, could come together and try to architect a language optimized for everyone, that has firm grammar rules and uses all the auditory notes of the human voice range, and prioritizes making common words short and such. But once you make that language, how do you teach it to the world? And in between, are you proposing people learn English and Earthish at the same time?
Well english has replaced itself many times, just compare old english, middle english, Shakespeare vs now. It is evolution and english is good at adapting, but even so, in Roman times no one would have predicted English to dominate society. These things can change quite rapidly and history is not at an end by any means. And with the internet, I think the changes/evolution could be quite dramatic.
What I would like to see is a language that is much more succinct, less bound in grammar rules/syntax but also less irregularities and ambiguities. English could evolve into this. Latin could have too but currently it is dead. Change happens.
But again, what language? We are not talking about computer languages. This is not a theoretical exercise in an ideal software world where you can start all over again. It's going to be one of the mainstream languages. Which one? Russian? Chinese?
Yes, currently Chinese is the main alternative with the most population and has some of the features I mentioned. It is also great for business with many people learning it to attract some of the chinese money floating around and lots of foreigners there to make their fortunes. But just a couple of decades ago it was russian. A major war between the US and China and it might be Hindi next. Never safe to predict the future.
They really should have stuck with int main. What's unfortunate is the quantum leaps they've been taking in terms of complexity to just get an app up and running on their platform. But I guess that's the only way their engineers can justify their salaries/bonuses. Same as with that horrific nightmare of an app Facebook puts out.
What would staying with the main entry point solve, aside from being familiar?
Your application would still have to directly manage binder callbacks and register for lifecycle events. Re-using the old Java/POSIX entry point actually increases the complexity significantly.
It's the principle of "first, do no harm". Almost nobody follows it, but there are good reasons it is the first and in many circumstances the only real piece of advice that can be given. Look up 'via negativa' as well and daoist wu wei philosophy if inclined.
Lack of clean air to breathe and rampant corruption and authoritarianism seem not very conducive to a successful startup culture. There is a huge churn of chinese money trying to find places to go and get a good roi. It is not clear that this will last though.
Also, I find it unlikely that without a free/open software ecosystem like linux or bsd they will get very far. Building a startup culture on a general computing foundation of massively pirated windows os is just not going to work.
I've been proselytizing linux over here. Ubuntu Kylin is pretty cool to set up for people, but the wifi cards on a lot of laptops don't take too well to it.
The difference between Ubuntu and the two variants you mentioned is solely on the application layer and as long as they don't use the buggy KDE5 connection manager applet, WiFi won't be affected by Xubuntu or Lubuntu. So this boils down to preferences of desktop environments. I've always wondered why, instead of full distros, these variants weren't just supported more officially as flavors to choose or change to. Yes, you can install lubuntu-desktop from inside a stock Ubuntu install, but there's always some configuration and setup that's missing.
Well, the OS I'm running is Ubuntu, and Kylin is "Ubuntu for China", with fcitx set up for Chinese already, and a separate Software Center that has a delightful page that shows Linux alternatives for Windows software. Haven't quite gotten around to playing with other linux distros to be honest.
Interesting. The Chinese devs I work with hate Kylin (probably because it's approved by the Party) and seem to really prefer other Chinese-created variants, particularly Lubuntu and Xubuntu. I've got no experience with Kylin, so it's interesting to hear these points.
> I find it unlikely that without a free/open software ecosystem like linux or bsd
In Taiwan and China, it's common to use Linux in university and to work on Open Source projects (see OpenWebmail and Linux Virtual Server projects, for impressive successes.)
The Chinese government was pushing their Red Flag linux, but I'm not sure where that is now. Certainly Linux would be used in their home-grown CPU and superconductor efforts.
However, once students graduate, their employers are less likely to understand making Open Source contributions at the business level.
The internet really should come with a warning, anything you say or do can and will be tracked and stored and used against you in a court of law (or guantanamo)
This used to be the case, particularly when submitting forms on non-HTTPS sites. Well, not the court-of-law and Gitmo bits, but that the information could be intercepted. Old Netscape browsers and such.
