baskethead

I don't need a medal, the money I earned is good enough.

Everyone knew that the Macarena was a fad.

I'm up 40% since Jan 1 2022. I've been short the markets and shorted AMZN since November 2021. I've made roughly $100k on it and just closed my position today.

A PE ratio of 30 for a value stock? You have got to be kidding me. Average PE ratio for the SP500 was about 15 until the pandemic.

The PPP was precisely Bernanke's "Dropping money from helicopters" scenario.

I think the fear of a Depression was real, and the government was willing to pull the level on the most outrageous tool they had, which was drop money from the skies into the pockets of people who could spend it.

Of course I think that was wrong, but I know exactly where this came from, and it was a playbook that was broadcasted by Bernanke I believe decades ago to fight a Depression. At least we can all agree that it worked, although a little too well, which is why asset prices have skyrocketed and inflation has gone horribly wrong.

Can you not turn this into something like a libel or slander lawsuit? They are impugning your name by preventing your ability to sell on their platform by claiming you're fraudulent when you're not. Can that not be taken up by a lawyer?

Are they just optimizing for certain data sets? If you take that same AI and apply it to other tasks does it produce above-human results?

> I don’t think the leaker was an oppo­nent of the opinion, because there would be no tactical value in doing so.

This is terrible reasoning. Of course there's tactical value. It would create an outrage before the opinion was official and could potentially turn the tide if justices saw a huge reaction from Americans. The Justices aren't stupid. They know if they release a very unpopular opinion on abortion, it could completely destroy the faith in the Supreme Court. So there's a huge amount of tactical value. For the author to dismiss this is horrible reasoning.

Then we are in agreement. Even if it were the case they had to do 800 separate recoveries (which I vaguely remember reading they couldn't do it individually), it means they never tested a large scale recovery situation and had no idea that 800 recoveries would take 2 weeks. That's a significant issue that they should have tested.

I wish there were a pro bono or law-student organization that would take on cases like this. I actually don't know if there's a case here but it definitely sounds like legal bullying. Jump Trading suffered no loss by the person backing out of the deal so pushing forward is really obnoxious. Just to make a point against bad behavior like this, I would take up this case if I had the means.

What it means is that they never tested their disaster recovery system, because this would have been found right away. Or, someone would have reported it and an upper level exec would have signed off on it being okay to take 14 days to restore a small subset of users.

There's a time period before which you need to permanently delete the data. A soft delete will allow you to delete the data quickly and you can see what happens. If everything is okay you can then purge your database of all soft deleted data.

Oooof. Passing in Application IDs will delete applications and passing in site IDs will delete sites. That's a really really bad design. I'm bookmarking this so that I can use it as a showcase going forward.

Just this week, I changed a spec in one of our proposed endpoints that did exactly that. We passed in ids of various types of objects to perform actions, and I changed the api so that it would be forced to pass in a struct that contained an object type and object id. Explicitness is so much safer in the long run, especially in enterprise apps.

You are blessed to be surrounded by a great group of friends!

I have a friend who is short as well, probably 5'5" and he married a girl who is taller than him when she wears her heels. Neither of them care, which is great and I love both of them.

I have another friend who is around the same height or shorter and can't get past how short he is. I keep trying to help him find a girlfriend, but he resists all efforts and I think he's still a virgin at age 45. So the stigma is very real and can be extremely damaging.

I work at a fully remote company. To be honest, I don't like it very much. I like that I don't have to commute, but I pay for it in lost productivity waiting to hear back from my coworkers when I have questions. What would normally be a 5 mins conversation turns into pinging on chat, setting up a meeting, and then chatting at a further time. Collaboration is much harder and the rate of doing work is much slower.

If companies are okay with this, then it's the "new normal" I suppose, but I can understand why Apple and Google want people face to face. If I knew I could go into work twice a week and meet with my team, I would enjoy that, but my team is global so it will never happen. It's definitely a weird experience.

With supply chain issues, there's no point in advertising goods that you can't sell, so it makes sense.

When I worked at Yahoo at the turn of the century, whenever earnings were too low on our property, we would pump up the number of ads on our pages. It's a very common and might be a good way to see if an ad-based company like Google or Meta is close to missing earnings. And for the record, I noticed the increase in ads as well, at least 2 full ads without ability to skip per viewing.

The reason why forward guidance matters is because of valuations. Google PE is over 20 as of close of day. Entire S&P 500 PE is 15 and even that is traditionally high. If Google's PE reverts to the S&P500, you're talking a 20% cut just from here. Forward guidance and consistent growth is what mutual funds will pay a premium for. Lots of companies have a ton of room to drop if PE ratios drop.

> - shares down slightly, but negligible.

As of right now, shares are down $120, after being down $80 during the trading session so it's pretty huge.

Because the charge that this is indoctrinating young children to be anti-conservative would be valid. This isn't a free speech issue, it's a question of appropriateness. Having a graph showing about oranges vs lemons is appropriate for a math textbook. Making an comment about how conservatives are more racist than liberals is not appropriate for a math textbook.

How would you feel if that graph instead showed "56% of all crimes are committed by African Americans"? That statistic is true, but is that appropriate for a math textbook without a deeper conversation about underlying causes?

> And Florida recently rejected math textbooks claiming they push critical race theory.

It wasn't just a claim. One example shown was a math textbook that showed a graph saying that conservatives were more racist than liberals. I'm a staunch liberal but I found that to be pretty shocking. I would love to see more examples from the other textbooks, but for that particular textbook, I myself would have no qualms telling the published to change that graph to something less divisive.

You will never show impact for the purposes of a promotion with this feature, therefore no one will work on it. That's how anything is being driven at Google now.

Look at Nest. Barely any useful new features at all in years. They could easily add more useful features like car detection, etc, but it hasn't changed in several years now. Google has become a graveyard where ideas go to die because no one cares there.

Indians and Asians tend to vote Republican. Indians are the riches ethnic demographic in the US, almost 3X the average wage of white people.

There's only 1 real answer to hiring.

Make sure the candidate's personality is a good fit for the team, have them do a fair coding question, and then hire them quickly. Give them 3 months to become productive and if not, fire them quickly and give a 3 month severance package.

You can probably analyze the data and figure out which of the employees are good at spotting good candidates and lean on them to make the decisions, but overall fast-hire-fast-fire is the best for everyone, except for fake candidates.

This also gives you the opportunity to take chances on borderline candidates or candidates with less experience.

I fully believe in the climate crisis but this sort of talk is religious extremism. This is what religious extremists say and if you dare to disobey oir question them, you are considered a heretic and should be essentially punished or killed. The New Left has turned into religious extremists.

The climate crisis ISN'T the only thing we should be talking about. We also have problems with straight up pollution, and other things like countries like China that fish until extinction. There are 1000+ Chinese fishing boats parked in international waters off the coast of South America that are fishing until the point of extinction and then bringing the fish back to China, leaving nothing for the South Americans.

There are companies like Nestle whose CEO doesn't believe water is a fundamental right, and places like California and Canada that let it bottle water for essentially free and then sell it for more than gasoline. We have runoff of PFAS polluting water, we have so much pollution from microplastics, we have plastics polluting the Pacific Ocean, microplastics in our blood, etc.

So, NO. Climate crisis is NOT the only thing we should be talking about. That is utterly crazy, and sounds like something ISIS would say.

1) Talk with recruiter

2) Phone Screen

3) 4 tech interviews (2 coding, 2 systems design)

4) 1 behavioral interview, sometimes.

To be honest, this isn't egregious. Given how much we are paid this doesn't seem so bad. Whether or not the coding and systems design questions actually provide signal is a different question though.

What if we all started clicking on every ad on every spam page? Would they eventually get kicked off all the ad platforms for fraud?

The only reason why Google and Facebook work is because their algorithms believe that we only click on the ads that we're interested in. If we click on every single ad, we will completely break their system within 3-6 months.

Once a country's central bank creates their own digital currency, you can be 100% sure that Bitcoin in that country will be rendered illegal immediately.

I think only lesser people would think all Russians support Putin. Every Russian I know in Silicon Valley that are sickened by Putin.

Eric Stalwall, the House Representative in East Bay (of the SF Bay Area) proposed to kick all Russian students out of the US. That sickened me and I won't forget this going forward (he ran for Democratic nominee for President in 2020). How can you blame citizens of the country for the country's actions? That's like Japanese internment camps all over again. I can't believe in 2021 someone would propose such a stupid and horrifying thing, especially in the Bay Area.

I'm glad you were able to escape safely.

No. This is actually my friend, who actually lost out on $10M. His other friends that stayed (he was working directly for Marisa Mayer) made at least that much.