anomie

This feels very disingenuous - seems reasonably clear that the activity apple is concerned about is encouraging people to agree to meet strangers while committing in advance to bringing large amounts of cash.

Went out for a meal with my 77-year old father last week and as always he brings a magnifying glass and flashlight as the restaurant lighting is too dim and menus too small almost universally for people with poor eyesight. He’s pretty tech capable and has a big bright phone with large text though so seems to me there’s a potentially huge accessibility opportunity here if they were done well.

(Sounds like they’re not well done in practice although don’t have much personal experience- maybe haven’t hit the UK as much yet)

Are they being humiliated though? Feels like they get lots of press when announcing this kind of stuff which sits well with some target part of the electorate, then when the whole thing gets abandoned it happens with almost no attention. The current government seems to be well aware that most of the time announcing a policy has a much higher ROI than actually implementing one (cf all the times pre-existing spending commitments get recycled in new announcements)

The Uk is making decent progress on this already. I live in a London suburb and there’s been a huge rollout of charging points already - within a few hundred meters of my flat there are at least 6 high voltage charging points. There’s also a big rollout of charging points built into existing lampposts - by tapping existing power lines these are very cheap to install. The chargers are run by a few different networks but you pay for usage so it’s quite possible to just sign up to them all and carry 2 or 3 cables.

> I'm somewhat indifferent on the issue; I reckon leaving will send a signal about reforming the EU ... Do I think that's worth the hassle of actually leaving? Pretty marginal.

It's this which upsets me as someone in favour of remaining. I know a large number of people who are personally concerned for the immediate safety of their jobs following an exit vote (working in the finance sector in London, working for research institutions currently funded by the EU, or Brits working outside the UK) and also have friends (and a sister-in-law) who have come to the UK thanks to the freedoms afforded by the EU, and who are worried about their futures now.

I have great sympathy with the desire to send politicians a message, and with a desire to make the EU a more transparent, more efficient organisation, but you can surely understand the frustration of people who are facing very real fears for their own livelihoods, when someone in favour of exiting tells us they are doing so not because they believe that leaving is the best thing for the UK, but rather because they want to "send a message". This message comes at a great potential cost, and the people sending the message are in many cases not the ones paying the price

I've found the authors proposed approach at the end of the article to be a very useful one, even if you're not using TDD. A very regular piece of advice I give to new developers is "breadth-first not depth-first" - i.e. write a whole function at a consistent level of abstraction before you dive into writing the other classes etc. you need to support those few lines of high level code.

I find that most new developers instinct is to do exactly the opposite - i.e. write the first line of their main function, then realise it needs, say, an argument-parsing class, so start writing that, then realise that needs a logging class, so start writing that, etc. which means you have to keep much more stuff in your head at once, you end up writing much more code in each commit than you should, and the distinction between bits of code at different levels of abstraction often ends up much blurrier which leads to messier design.

This seems to be quite easily countered though - just pointing out to people the difference between breadth-first and depth-first styles can have quite an immediate effect

Speaking personally, I voted lib dem in 2010 on the basis that they were a party broadly of the left, but distinct from the Labour party of the time in a number of positive ways. To then form a coalition with the party of the right and support a number of measures that I think were quite regressive did not match with the party I thought I voted for.

Of course after seeing 10 days of government without the lib dems to moderate I'm starting to re-evaluate how positive an influence they likely were...

When my grandparents died and we sold their house (in the uk) we had some builders in to tidy up some stuff and they discovered that in a big part of the house the earth was actually wired to live in the sockets. They'd lived with it for 40 years or something. Guess not many devices actually use the earth.

(The wiring was originally done by my grandad'a brother - use a professional people...)

When I read the title I assumed it was an article about the unfairness of the education system, and the whole-life impact of an assessment carried out at an arbitrary point in your 18th year. Perhaps that's an even more pernicious example of the problem.

I used to worry about this too, but finally concluded that me not understanding it was in and of itself grounds for rejecting that review. 90% of the time well structured code (and tests, and good comments, etc etc) should be enough on their own to make it easy for me to understand. In the rare cases when the nature of the change means that's not enough then people ideally provide any additional explanation in a note accompanying the review (or in a crucible comment). (In practice I reckon most of the time these explanatory notes probably belong in code comments anyway.)

We have a very strong culture of constructive code review though - I guess you might have some work to do to get those more experience coders to get into the mindset that would accept this sort of feedback in a positive way

My father was a surveyor in the city of London who worked on new office construction. He used to tell me how back in the days of nationalised phone service the first thing you did when you were building a new office building, before you'd even laid the foundations, was to order the phone lines, otherwise they wouldn't be ready in time for opening the building