> I downvoted you for the lack of details.
Have you heard of... asking?
4,776 karma · joined May 23, 2020
Have you heard of... asking?
Haha, that's only because Apple controls the App Store and the OS. The first time you launch Xcode, it wants your admin privileges so it can install a bunch of stuff outside the sandbox. I shouldn't even say sandbox, because I think Xcode is not actually sandboxed?
What's a "normal application"? How would you classify Xcode?
The complexity comes from the nature of the work. Nobody wants complexity for its own sake, but sometimes you need it, otherwise you can't accomplish anything. That's what the "power" part of the power user means. The power to accomplish your goals. I would contrast "power user" with "powerless user". ;-)
Computers are becoming more and more essential to our lives, so deliberately dumbing them down is a disservice to everyone, who should be learning more not less about how computers work.
My dad was in sales. My first exposure to computers was when he bought an Apple II way back in the day. He used VisiCalc, naturally, the "killer app" for the Apple II. Was he a "power user" or a "normal person"? I'd say both!
The IRS itself is mainly just following the directions of the politicians. These directions may or may not include looking for fraud, depending on who is currently in power.
Exactly. You can fulfill a desire, but you can't fill a void.
Has it? In my experience, the Swift rewrite of Xcode source editing has made it vastly more buggy. I forget exactly when this happened, Xcode 8? 9?
That's great, for the small percentage of people who quit smoking. But for the majority who continue smoking after higher taxes, it is indeed as I said, "This ends up just penalizing poor people." It's blatantly obvious if you go to any convenience store that smoking has not been stopped by higher cigarette taxes, and thus a lot of people are simply paying more in taxes while continuing to smoke.
It's interesting that the article talks about the effect of cigarette taxes on youth, because currently in the US, retailers are forbidden to sell any nicotine product to anyone under age 21. If anything, it seems that the issue is not taxes but rather our extremely lax enforcement of the law against selling cigarettes to minors.
Yes, the vast majority of Xcode's size comes from inside the folder Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms
There are 2 issues here:
1) Higher taxes are a very strange and indirect way of stopping something that's considered unacceptable. Suppose we made murder legal and simply taxed "hit" contracts with a very high rate. That would be crazy, right? But that seems to be our policy with cigarettes. If we're serious about stopping smoking, then we'd make it illegal, and put the tobacco companies out of business entirely.
2) Tobacco companies specifically target children, who aren't mature enough to make good choices, and then the kids get hooked on nicotine for life. So that needs to be addressed specifically. I'm amenable to protecting kids, but much less so about paternalism for adults. Again, though, I don't see tax policy as the answer here.
If you consider nicotine addiction to be a moral issue, which it might be, then there are very perverse incentives involved in taxing cigarettes, because the government is making money from something it considers immoral. I would also mention the addiction that many state governments have to lottery ticket revenue.
I did. I argued:
1) The goal of incentivizing/deincentivizing behavior comes into conflict with the goal of raising revenue for government services. For example, people have suggested high taxes on cigarettes and gasoline. But if you significantly reduce consumption of products, then you limit the ability of the government to raise revenue from sales of those products.
2) It's a free country, and thus the government has no business trying to do Skinnerean behavior modification on the populace. IMO that's a pretty disgusting idea and reeks of totalitarianism.
3) Income taxes do not actually stop people in any way from trying to better themselves financially. There is simply no empirical evidence of this.
> "fair" has a philosophical answer, not an objective one.
Yes, so?
Possibly. But neither the article author nor anybody else is suggesting a 500% sales tax.
Moreover, super high sales tax that significantly reduces consumption directly conflicts with the original goal of taxes: to raise revenue for government services.
This ends up just penalizing poor people. Cigarettes are addictive. Higher taxes don't magically cure addictions. Anyway, lots of things in the world are bad for you. But it's a free country. If someone wants to smoke and drink and eat a bunch of junk and never exercise, they have that right. There are a ton of "bad" things you could tax, it's an endless futile exercise.
> high fuel taxes to reduce pollution
Does this actually even work? My own driving behavior is completely unaffected by gas prices. People still need to go places. It seems to me that convenient public transportation would do better in affecting behavior. If public transport is crap/inconvenient/nonexistent, people won't use it.
This is the (first) fundamental mistake of the article. The purpose of taxes is to raise funds for necessary services, as stated in steps 1 - 5. The only question is how to raise those funds fairly.
As soon as you start thinking about incentives and changing behaviors, the tax system suddenly has two purposes rather than one, and those two purposes can be at odds. Really, in a free (as in freedom) country, the government has little or no purpose in trying to guide behavior, except to prevent people from illegally harming others.
"Individual income taxes are bad because: They penalize people's initiative, hard work, savings, investing, and attempts to better themselves."
It's not a penalty, it's simply a fair rate based on ability to pay. Even under progressive taxation, you still end up better off by making more money. There would only be a "penalty" if the tax rate were 100% or somehow >100% for additional income.
The only thing that prevents people from bettering themselves is means-testing some essential service, such as health care. In other words, losing your health care or having it priced out of reach when you get a better job or start your own business. This is why we need single-payer. (And arguably government-subsidized higher education.)
The irony is that the founders and initial employees of these companies were never interviewed in this way. They were mostly just school friends. So it's highly dubious whether these specific hiring practices were even crucial to the success of those companies. People are emulating the wrong things and just cargo culting.
Most professions have no licensing. Doctors and lawyers are the exception, not the norm. This is because doctors have your life in their hands, and lawyers have your freedom in their hands. But usually an App Store app won't kill you or send you to jail. Moreover, licensing is not actually standardized! Every state in the United States has its own different licensing requirements. There are no national or international standards. It's a local government issue. Every time people bring up licensing, they miss these basic facts.
> What if this is to be their first job?
Obviously entry-level jobs and/or internships would hire differently. The crazy thing about software engineering is that they have fresh college grads and 10 year veterans in the same applicant pool for the same jobs! This should never ever happen.
> selecting for people who are good at bullshitting/charming
We already do this to some extent, because "leetcode" tests are bullshit. Anyway, this is just the insane paranoia of the tech industry. Yes, there are liars out there, but it's ridiculous to treat every job candidate like a criminal, guilty until proven innocent. Even our legal system has more respect for people. Remember, hiring is a two-way street: you have to convince the candidate to agree to work for you. Treating the candidate like a liar is not a good first impression. Imagine if you tried that method with dating — you'd never get a second date! You know, there are a lot of bad bosses in the world. I would argue there are more bad bosses than there are bad programmers, because programmers get promoted to management without having any experience or training for management. How about we have job candidates grill the interviewer? If you think "whiteboarding" is bad, then the hiring manager can do a take-home test given by the candidate. ;-) Nothing worse than getting hired by a bad manager.
> they still clearly feel that it's worth the effort to be very selective in their hiring process
I never said companies shouldn't be selective in their hiring process. I actually think they're too unselective in their hiring process. It's a waste of everyone's time to do a whole bunch of "screening" interviews of basically everyone who applies. Instead, companies should only interview the top candidates based on experience and skills, and spend most of their time trying to evaluate those few top candidates.
I would have less objection to doing coding as part of the hiring process if coding tests weren't used so ruthlessly to screen out candidates. Maybe it could be the final step before hiring someone. (Even there, you wouldn't use a "FizzBuzz" test, those just dumb.) But hardly any company uses coding tests in that way. Mass testing of candidates is nothing more than a test of performance anxiety. Mass interviews are just begging for some trivial matter to decide who gets hired.
Let me put it this way: if hiring is based mainly on the interview process and not on the résumé, then it's precisely the bullshitters/charmers you were worried about who will get hired, because those are the kind of people who are best at interviews. And the ability to grind on LeetCode doesn't make you a good programmer.
When people ask this question, they almost always mean, what's the alternative to one kind of testing that's still a test?
Nobody seems willing to accept the answer that interviews shouldn't be tests. The demand for testing assumes the idea, the self-fulfilling prophesy, that 99% of programmers can't program. If you start with that assumption, then you'll always end up wanting some kind of test. But it's such a bizarre idea that programmers are uniquely incompetent among all professions in the world.
We know that interviews, not just programmer interviews but interviews in general, are poor predictors of performance. The best predictor of future performance is past performance. In other words, experience.
Our industry is also insanely afraid of the proverbial "bad hire". It's a pervasive mental illness. There's a failure to recognize that perfection is unattainable, and mistakes are a fact of life. Look of professional sports: they spend vastly more time and money on talent evaluation than tech, and yet pro sports teams get talent evaluation totally wrong all the time! Bad draft picks, bad trades, bad contracts, etc. They just accept it, deal with it, and move on. Nobody has the perfect programmer hiring method, and nobody ever will. It's a crapshoot. And just because a programmer "can program" doesn't mean they're not a bad hire. They could still write buggy, overengineered code, they could be a bad teammate, they could be a sexual harasser, or have any number of other issues. Or they could leave for another jobs a few months after getting hired. There's no way to guarantee a good hire.
It's a mistake to turn hiring into an "algorithm". It's not a programming problem, it's a human problem. Programmers are humans, not robots, and they're not going to perform robotically in interviews. The only way to truly know is to give someone a chance. They may unpleasantly surprise you, but they may also pleasantly surprise you.
Programmers can program, but they usually aren't stage performers. Using auditions to evaluate non-performers is doomed to failure, predictably.
I had a very similar experience. Moreover, on the phone call there seemed to be some kind of soft ticking sound in the background, like a clock. It was very distracting. I wonder if the interviewer was actually timing me.
Or better, bury the article in an unmarked grave and never see it again. Few people have done more harm to hiring in the industry than Atwood and Spolsky.
ADN was a subscription service. The common expression is always true: if you're not the customer, you're the product.
It's been done. For example, app.net. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net I deleted my Twitter account and joined ADN. But not many followed that example. Most people stuck with Twitter, ADN never reached "critical mass", and it eventually shut down.
I don't think this is a technological problem. You could say it's a marketing problem. The critical mass is essential to a social network. ADN didn't get it. Mastodon hasn't got it. Twitter has it, Facebook has it, and it's just hard to compete with that.
I don't understand your reply.
> Twitter is a public place. I don't understand your analogy.
The point is that in order to meet other people, you have to go out into the public. But that doesn't mean you want to meet with and talk with anyone and everyone out in the public. It's a terrible tradeoff if the only way you can get pleasant social interaction with others is to also suffer unpleasant social interaction with strangers who want to argue with you.
None of us designed Twitter. We have to take it as it is. Twitter is public, yes, but that's not an excuse for you personally to debate with every stranger you happen to disagree with. That's not on Twitter, that's on you.
There are no ads in third party clients such as Tweetbot.
Are you using the reverse chronological timeline? That's the only way to fly.
I don't think this is necessary. A lot of people tweet about purely "professional" subjects and never tweet about social issues. If you stick to that, your followers will know what (and what not) to expect.
Who needs to be engaged with? On Twitter, you choose who to follow. Why in the world would you have an obligation to listen to random strangers who want to argue with you? Imagine if you were in a restaurant talking with your friends, some stranger sitting at another table overheard you, and then decided to come over and butt into the conversation? And when the stranger is told to go away, they complain "You're talking in a public place where people can hear you, what did you expect?" And somehow the stranger feels that they're wronged by that.
Which misinformation did I spread?
> Folks like you don't even care that the content of a tweet is factually incorrect
That's quite an interference.
Have you considered that the problem might be you, and "Someone is wrong on the internet" repliers are super tedious?