anifow

This is not a revolutionary idea. Several professional programs (law, accounting, etc.) have certification exams that do just what you are describing. It seems to require a fairly healthy, non-profit professional body in order for this to work, and you can only ever assess a fairly slim chunk of the 4-year experience, so they end up pairing in a credit-hour requirement as well.

I work in large-scale assessment, and can attest that we should hold a fairly skeptical/conservative position in the power of tests to get to the "real" skill level of prospective practitioners. All of the measures currently available are fairly weak at predicting outcomes.

As a Mac user, I have to agree whole-heartedly!

I was a pretty heavy OpenFL devotee for a couple of years. It's an amazing project, although PixiJS is a very competent competitor when it comes to building HTML5 games. Pixi has a much smaller baseline footprint (~300kb unminified compared to 1300kb unminified).

Lately we've been working with Pixi with a webpack / TypeScript workflow. It's starting to feel a lot like HaXe / OpenFL again. We are winning big in terms of flexibility and good support of workflow. We are using VS Code as the IDE and we have a very smooth integration smoothly with an Angular-based asset and config management tool. The big thing we lost however is HaXe's ability to compile directly to C++. Even when we compiled to Adobe AIR, we got much better performance than something like Cordova or Ionic.

Also, HaXe is the only viable technology which enables a high-quality canvas-based applications which mirror native applications (while also permitting compilation to those native applications).

Words like "debt" can be tricky to pin down, which is why we have an accounting profession who's job it is to establish a cohesive and consistent language system with specific meanings.

Kickstarter money represents both revenue and a liability for the company that is doing the project. There are many types of liabilities which are not exactly debt in the sense that we think about a bank loan (which is also a liability). The thing that all liabilities have in common is that they represent an obligation of the company which could require them to spend money or other assets to fulfill. This does not mean they have to satisfy the liability, it just means that there is a financial justification for any work they do relating to that.

I am sure the accounting profession is continually being tested with new business models and trying to capture the financial reality for people who are playing very different games in the world of capital.

That's what it looks like

More appropriate to call it a questionnaire than an interview.

We have a perfect solution for the kind of publishing model which Brett is referring to, which operates in sharing and replication rather than central repositories which are historically prone to snuffing out. Just use Bittorrent.

Bittorrent was embraced for pirating music and movies, but it has major benefits if adopted as a back-end protocol for distribution of content on mobile devices. Bandwidth isn't an issue as long as everything is done on WiFi when plugged in, then it's just like a laptop. You are obviously looking at poorer seed ratios than the desktop-centric distribution we are used to, but it will be relatively cheaper for content distributors to support some of the seeding with their data centers than to absorb the entire responsibility. Granted, this is way less efficient than just doing central distribution from a data center, but you gain in resilience, and since you aren't depending on this for the navigation and basic UI, the user experience isn't dependent on real time network transfers which still are very from being dependable. This model might not work for everyone, but I think it is the ideal model for sharing data sets, academic papers, DRM videos and music (though I'd prefer non-DRM), public digital arts projects, and rich interactive news stories (with a collection of video, models, etc). The Web was great when bandwidth was expensive, but today it is cheap and unevenly distributed, and it is time for a new model.

Apps can serve as trackers which curate links (bonus points if Android / iOS bake the protocol into the OS so that your device can keep track of torrents without that information being locked into your app (can probably get some efficiencies in managing sharing if those settings are centralized in the OS). I also wonder if seed ratios can be shared between different distributors and bought and sold from data centers. It seems only fair. It does go against net neutrality though, as I can imagine a situation where people are given less bandwidth because they don't have a seed ratio of 100 or something (i.e., 100 GB of upload for every 1 GB of download). Nonetheless, this may be a fairly healthy way of having people with better means subsidize the content to those less fortunate. You can even run all monetization of this scheme by having the distribution networks downloading it to themselves, jacking up the seed ratios that are possible.

Someone else here mentioned the need for an app ecosystem that treats apps as adversarial. I think that is exactly what we have seen with Android and iOS. Want to use my camera? You need permission. Granted, there are some social engineering issues with people not really considering the rights they give up when they tap on the Install button,even when it is spelled out in simple language (I can say this because I know I don't care as much as I should, so it's not coming from a lack of technical knowledge). I think it's a short matter of time before Android becomes a serious competitor to Windows. iOS is more tricky as it would cannibalize the Mac ecosystem which is heavily built up. Things that would signal things moving in that direction are for example, Adobe releasing a complete version of photoshop on one of these mobile first OS. Also, Microsoft releasing their tools on Android (unless they keep that as a competitive advantage of the windows os, which is likely).

In either case, I think the death of the Web is near on mobile. The benefits include more safety, more functionality, a collection of trusted brands (unfortunately, innovation WILL be hampered by this move. People will accept toy apps that don't take permissions, but otherwise people will have a really hard time competing in the Web ghetto)

It seems the problem is that the author is trying to create a representation of knowledge, whereas research papers are more of a logging of work done.

His approach may be a perfect fit for an experiment in meta-research. You could run periodic reviews of articles released in specific topical areas and create summaries of the findings. Any time those findings change, its a git commit, and you can track this change over time. It's something like Wikipedia, but designed for research. I would not be surprised if this already exists.

I see a challenge in figuring out the document structure which will be the most conducive to distributed version control (pull requests, etc), and can provide some insights on a historicalbasis. For example, you could run these summaries retrospectively, say looking at DNA research in the 1960s, and do a separate commit for every key finding through the years. It seems to me that you would pretty much have to specify a specialized coding language for scientific knowledge for this structure to work.

I disagree.

An hourly wage is a very special payment system which requires some kind of foreman to be sustainable. Otherwise, the labour industry tends to drift towards inefficiencies that allow them to claim money for less work. This is classic agency risk, where the incentives are not aligned, and heading down this path often entails major bureaucracies to try and keep everyone honest (like time clocks and punch cards, a "boss" looking over you, etc).

Simply paying more within the existing structure makes perfect sense. It will actually have a disproportionate effect on recruitment when some of the most efficient drivers start bragging about making $160,000 a year driving trucks (this is one of the big drivers of immigration by the way. Compared to poorer nations, the streets are paved in gold in the USA, and some lucky immigrants find shovels to dig it up. Unfortunately, most people who come never get a shovel so it remains but a dream...).

Paying more by the mile absorbs the costs of refuelling and traffic, without giving any driver an incentive to waste time when, for example refuelling the truck. So rational truckers will go to gas stations that are more efficient and will get out of there as soon as they can.

Where the trucker has no agency, however, it could make sense to pay by the hour. For example, since loading is in the hands of another group as soon as the truck docks in, and since it can vary quite a bit based on warehouse, better that the driver is paid for time sitting around. You could argue that the driver's incentive is to rush the loaders, but I doubt they have any coercion in that process. So better that the shipping company have an incentive to make loadings as fast possible through influence over choice of warehouse, penalties to warehouses for slow loadings, etc.

I've never really thought about this industry before, but thinking about it now makes it sound very interesting!

Gentrification is happenning in Toronto outside of the downtown core, albeit very slowly.

The main effect is you have families cashing out and moving further and further away from the city to put the real estate price differentials to good use (bigger house, or cash in bank). In the current environment, it actually makes zero sense to buy residential property for the sake of renting it out, so the only ones who are long time owners. Over time, they too will cash out and it will be harder to find rentals until the neighbourhood either increases in status to command higher rates (like what happened in Kensington Market or in the Bellwood neighbourhood), or the property prices start falling to a low enough level that it makes sense to buy rental property again.

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