bigpicture's comments

Prevailing winds bring relatively clean air to most any city east of the Mississippi River especially in the winter time. Without nearby mountains, temperature inversions are pretty rare.

In late summer, air quality drops quite a bit as the wind drops off.

I'm salaried, but it sure bought me a lot of goodwill.

A few years ago I had to update some FORTRAN code written in the 1980s that did bond valuations and some other financial stuff. It hadn't been touched since it was written and was now running out of space because the number of bonds keeps increasing year after year.

I'd never done anything with FORTRAN before, so I spent a couple days reading about it and looking into how it works, fearful that I'd muck everything up trying to fix it.

I open the code and find that it was the most elegantly written software you could wish for, with fantastic comments and structure. I changed two numbers and was done, buying us another 30 years or so of rock-solid service.

The longer I work in this industry, the more I am coming to believe that waterfall is nothing more than a strawman set up to make development process X look like the Holy Grail.

Has anyone seen it in real life - in the pure form?

I once worked at a place that "did waterfall", but a diagram of the process would have shown arrows in all directions (would we call these things salmon runs or something?) and if you needed to go backwards only that specific piece did so while everything else continued as normal. Unit testing, integration testing, system testing, etc was all present on day 1.

> 2x4s spaced every 16 inches is plenty robust

The current recommendation is 2x6 exterior framing with 24 inch spacing. This results in a durable and energy efficient home.

https://www.apawood.org/data/sites/1/documents/technicalrese...

> It's truly a shame that so much money is poured into such utterly wasteful possessions

When the yachts are idle, which is the majority of the time, they are typically plugged into shore power and are thus just consuming electricity from the grid. The electrical systems of these things are typically far more efficient than your home because they must generate their own electricity when at sea.

As for the wasting of money, you'll note that most of the cost of building a yacht is labor because they are mostly one-off builds and can't take advantage of automation. The article mentions that they cost 10% of the purchase price per month in upkeep. The vast majority of those costs are labor.

These things are among the most efficient devices for transferring wealth from the rich to the middle class. I wouldn't discourage their use at all.

This was a nice little review so I went to my local library website to reserve and found that they have two copies of this book published in 1967 from the Harvard University Press. The review's affiliate link to Amazon shows that this particular book is new and perhaps significant:

> “The Greek text of Characters is rather messy, with lots of sentences in dispute (or simply unintelligible) due to copyists’ errors in the transmission process. Only a few years ago, a new edition of the Greek text by James Diggle sorted out many of these problems. This new English version by Pamela Mensch takes advantage of that cleaned-up Greek text.”

> The crazy thing about this article is that it presents Chicago's solution (make the combined sewer bigger)

Except that Chicago's publicly stated position is that the Deep Tunnel system is not the solution. This is not a new thing, either. It's been that way for more than 2 decades.

For more than 10 years, they've had a stormwater management building ordinance and (with few exceptions) any project (new construction or renovation) that changes the amount of stormwater exiting a piece of property is subject to it. It limits the flow rate of stormwater leaving, the volume of stormwater leaving, and the amount of sediment that can leave a piece of property. It is entirely math-based, with published formulas and coefficients and makes determining compliance straightforward, objective and fast.

They've received international recognition for their incremental approach to stormwater management, which recognizes that the vast majority of property in the city is private property built long ago. As for public property, whenever the city rebuilds an alleyway, it is done with permeable pavement and is disconnected from the sewer. Whenever the city rebuilds a road, it is disconnected from the sewer to the extent that surrounding private property allows. Last year an entire block of a road near me was rebuilt and the side that was adjacent to a railroad embankment was built with swales every 50 feet or so to manage stormwater. It was actually visually attractive as well.

The S&P 500 publishes changes to the index in advance of the changes taking place, so all of the affected stocks have prices that reflect the change at the time of the change.

Most tracking indexes, especially the ones Vanguard uses, do not do that and thus do not allow the markets to front-run them. If you adopt the strategy of "do what Vanguard does" and you do it immediately after Vanguard says they did something, you are already too late to get the prices that Vanguard got and can kiss at least .05% goodbye just based on that. I would expect to under-perform by at least .25%, if not more.

Not being familiar with the term XNU, I did a little clicking around and hopefully I understand a bit better:

This file is evidence that Apple has been running iOS/MacOS on the Raspberry Pi 3?

The next thing I want Apple to do: If an app will request location services, it must: 1. Have a specific publicly available URL that contains all "location data" terms, conditions, and privacy information. 2. Monitor that URL and reset the permission dialog if the URL ever changes. 3. Immediately disable location services for that app if the URL disappears.

> Yes and parking in the loop is blissfully expensive, encouraging suburbanites to take the train in.

At least they have the option of using a functioning train system!

You can see the locations in which street parking is meter-based and how much it costs [1]. It is very much a demand-based scheme and I think that many people see it as ideal.

The map doesn't show how parking is handled in residential areas though [2]. If demand exceeds supply, a numbered residential parking zone is implemented and only those who prove that the live inside the zone can buy the number sticker that goes in the window of your car and allows you to park on the street in that zone ($25 per year). Those residents are also the only people that can buy 24-hour visitor parking passes for guests ($0.53 per pass).

[1] http://map.chicagometers.com/

[2] http://smartchicago.github.io/zone-parking/

> I understand that Apple does everything in its power to make the life of developers miserable

All XCode projects are automatically code signed on every build. If you have a developer membership with Apple, it uses a certificate issued by Apple. If not, it's just a locally-generated certificate.

If you use make or call Clang directly, obviously there is no signing process, but there is a command-line tool that you can use and integrate into your non-Xcode build process just fine.

> his Chicago tower hotel;

Coincidence? The lawyer that handles tax matters for this property had his office raided by the FBI today:

https://cltv.com/2018/11/29/federal-agents-raid-office-of-po...

In my area, it is very common for parents of boys that will be "young" when starting kindergarten to hold them back a year. They call it redshirting (a reference to US college athletics).

Our local school district prohibits the practice, but really can only enforce it at the kindergarten level. So many parents continue to enroll their boys in private preschool for two additional years and then enroll them in first grade when the school district can't say no. It is very rare for girls because of the assumption that emotional and behavioral development is far ahead of boys at that age.

> Here in Spain, everyone born in the same year goes to the same class, is it different in USA?

So Spain has a cut date of 1 Jan while the USA is 1 Sept. The overall effect is exactly the same: When a school term begins, some of the students will be nearly 1 year older than some of the others.

My local elementary school has 3 classrooms per grade. If we broke the year into quarters and made each student attend 3 out of 4 quarters, what you'd end up with is more efficient use of school facilities making up for a slightly higher teacher cost. Probably.

> So, why do it? Should a razor thin majority in a public vote 2 years ago decide the UK's policy forever?

Why do it? That question ceased being relevant a long time ago, when the process was irreversibly started. The linked article is suggesting a least-bad path forward. People may or may not agree with their assessment.

> Steel is the best frame material for 95% of people due to its durability. Quality steel frames (not Schwinn travellers) are quite light.

I have a bike made with True Temper OX Platinum steel and it is my favorite bike by far. It is a very light frame, but that is not what I like about it. Steel (and titanium) frames can be made with tubing of a much smaller diameter than that of aluminum or carbon. I believe that the tube diameter (and associated stiffness) is what people are feeling when they talk about the difference between bikes.

If you make a steel bike with tubing that is indistinguishable from aluminum or carbon, I am not surprised that nobody can tell the difference!

> Frank Lloyd Wright was around 67 years old when Falling Water was built

As a teenager in rural Wisconsin, Frank Lloyd Wright worked for a graduate of MIT school of architecture and then went to Madison to work for a civil engineering professor at UW Madison. His big break was to run away from home and go to Chicago, which was in the midst of the largest building boom in the history of the world up to then, where he was hired within a day of arriving by the firm owned by the MIT grad he worked for years before.

The guy started very early and then never stopped working.