RookyNumbas

The crack vs. cocaine comparison is no good, we should stop using it. Free base is a very different drug than cocaine. An equivalent "white" version of crack would be crystal meth, which has had similar sentencing guidelines to crack.

I am not convinced that you have ever worked at the average startup. Your points are incredibly divorced from the reality most face.

Years worth of runway is not the norm. Having your choice of senior engineers to hire right away is not the norm. Most startups exist as sinking ships.

It sounds like you lucked in to a company that raised a shitload early on and so had the luxury to make these decisions.

Doc may have been a weirdo, but he was also the most popular and liked person in the entire town. The plot revolves around people trying to throw parties for him because they think he's so great.

Today, no matter your weirdness, it's likely been productized and advertised to the masses in some way.

Sure, that's all correct. But before showing it is dead it would be useful to have empirical evidence that it was ever alive. And the evidence is very mixed at best. The history of the EMH is a battle between those showing where it breaks from reality, followed by increasingly desperate attempts to save it with some additional explanatory factors.

It's a nice model. But like most economic and financial models shouldn't be held as gospel.

Yes, 99th percentile quant compensation is significantly higher. But it's a bad comparison. Google alone hire mores more people into these positions than all quant firms combined. 99.9% at FANG might be more comparable.

Will Durant has an interesting quote that has stuck with me, something along the lines of: Out of every 100 new ideas, 99 of them will be bad, and inferior to what was replaced.

My impression is that "It's better now than before" is used to protect the effort that got us here, not cancel it. It's used to protect us against the 99 bad ideas.

I think that someone in your position could shift a dial a few degrees. And the resulting consequences, compounded over time, would be absolutely staggering. I'm guessing you did shift a few dials while working there, and probably in a good direction.

It seems like you are painting a picture where Amazon was destined from the beginning to be dealing with the issues it is now. Were there no other possible futures? Were there not individuals who had a massive impact?

I'm related to someone who runs very fairly large warehousing operations across north america. His decisions have certainly been influenced by employees. Hell, I think I've changed his mind on an issue or two over dinner conversations.

Companies like Amazon were not always in the position you've described. It took decades to get there. And there would have been numerous opportunities along the way where a single engineer could have had a massive impact.

A single engineer at Facebook will not make a difference today. 10 or 12 years ago they absolutely could have changed the course of the company.

Almost all collective change is spearheaded by the ideas and leadership of a few individuals.

I'm not sure that is actually a counterpoint. It think they are somewhat in agreement. The blog states that there is very little evidence that people of the ancient and medieval world experienced PTSD from combat the way modern soldiers do.

The askshistorians poster focuses on two points:

- Combat and violence were normalized, and there was little moral or ethical ambiguity surrounding it. Unlike today.

- PTSD seemed to come from public perception of the acts and the resulting shame, rather than the acts themselves. Also unlike today.

When I think of the very successful people I know, all have gone through life events that would absolutely flatten most people. The loss of a child, a partner committing suicide, 6 businesses failing, 2 weeks in an induced comma.

And yet a stranger looks at their accomplishments and thinks that they just didn't have bad luck.

I have no visual imagery in dreams either. I still have spatial awareness and can move about unimpeded, but there is no visual element to it. Other dream senses are uninhibited.

While conscious I can play back long complex pieces of music in my head, and can imagine fairly vivid tastes and touches. But I can't picture my wife's face.

> Don't know why you think my emails are spam!

Remember, we don't know anything about your site yet. We haven't read any of your content yet. How would we possibly know that your emails might be worthwhile?

It's like when an app asks you to rate it the first time you've opened it. Maybe it is a good app, and maybe it deserves a great rating after a week of use. But it's a very bad first impression.

Wii was the third best seller, and the only non-portable in the top 5.

That insight happened 30 years ago. Nintendo's best selling consoles and games have always been portable systems.

I like to start by thinking about cache locality and ensuring linear layout. Next focus on one-time, or minimal memory allocation. Then there are a bunch of small, systemic things you need to get right. After that you can start worrying about worst case big O scenarios.

Of course this depends on your language. A c programmer will have a different mental model than a python one.

My partner has had a few airs over the years. Never once has she ever wanted to plug anything into any port, other than power. I think a lot of users are the same.

It's a very pretty facebook machine that she has never needed tech help for. I'll stick with my XPS 13 though.

> total abstinence isn't necessarily the goal that everyone who has a drinking problem is aiming for

I guess you're technically right. But statements like these make me chuckle. They are very common, and a dead giveaway that you are not very familiar with addiction. Switch out drinking for shooting heroine or smoking crack, and see if the statement still makes sense.

The rest of your comment is dead on though. The studies are very bad at making any sort of distinctions like you mentioned. They also ignore the astounding costs of some of these other programs, whether a person is there by choice or not, whether they are trying to quit for the first time or 20th, types and severity of relapses, and many other factors.

I'm positive you can find many therapies and other methods that end up working better than AA.

I went through some of those methods and they are very effective. It also cost me around $10k, and that's after very good insurance.

Many (most?) alcoholics are not in a position where they can spend 10k on treatment. So it's really a moot comparison. Further confounding many of the studies is that AA is filled with people who are there by court order or other reasons. It's not at all a fair comparison. In most of these studies, someone who slips up and has a single drink after 2 years of sobriety is bucketed in with someone who only has a week of sobriety total.

I've actually talked to my addictions therapist about this, and is his opinion, every single study done surrounding AA has been absolute garbage.

It's a tough balance. My partner teaches grade 2. They focus on play and exploratory based learning. Parents are furious that their kids aren't instead memorizing times-tables.

I wouldn't be too sure. The author, Jia Tolentino, has made a career exploring, and often ridiculing mass trends like these.

Yet by the end of the article she is admiring women who had the procedure done and avoids looking in the mirror as much herself.

There are a few steps to consider before you are loading data into ram.

Can you partition the data in any useful way? For example if queries use separate ranges of dates, then you can partition data so that queries only need to touch the relevant date range. Can you pre-process any computations? Sometimes tricky things done within the context of multiple joins can be done once and written to a table for later use. Can you materialize any views? Do you have the proper indexes set up for your joins and filters? Are you looking at execution plans for your queries? Sometimes small changes can speed up queries by many orders of magnitude.

Smart queries + properly structured data + a well tuned postgres DB is an incredibly powerful tool.

Definitely not simple. But the pill is probably the most important invention of the past century or two. Maybe the transistor comes close.

> iOS, ASP.NET Core, JSP and JSF (Java based frameworks), Ruby on Rails, and Django (Python) are all based on MVC.

Don't all of those have two-way data binding?

> Why is it that MVC works for all these other frameworks, but doesn't for React?

I think the point is that Facebook found it doesn't actually work well, at least for their use cases. They found a recurring set of bugs caused by two-way data flow, and built a framework to alleviate it.

Banks don't want to lend to startups because they actually like their loans to be repaid.

VCs don't want to lend to startups because you can't make 100x return on debt.

In the case of a go-playing AI, and maybe even things like self driving cars, then yes I agree.

But we are quickly moving beyond the types of applications where you can simply test in simulation. Self driving cars are probably right at the edge of this. It's what comes next that worries me. And I don't pretend to know what it will be.

I'm surprised he made the drug analogy. It takes decades and hundreds of millions dollars to be able to test a drug on humans. I'm curious if he thinks we need a similar safeguard for all AI-human interactions.

Do we know yet if it has it resulted in an decrease in the gender pay gap and other effects?

Heh, you do need a better descriptor. That is the media's idea of the autistic savant. A very small minority of people on the lesser end of the autism spectrum may have some of those traits. The reality for the other 99% is vastly different.

Hint: it's a joke.

It would be really nice to have a "start here" section. What are the 10 parameters I should look at and understand first?