cubano

Hiring, by definition, is mostly discrimination.

Otherwise, people would just hire the first person you received a resume from who had the solid qualifications and experience you needed.

But no...of course that's not what happens. Managers go through the Kabuki dance with the potential employee just trying to find a small "chink in the armor" to quickly disqualify them.

It's called the "initial screen" of course, and the whole point is to find something to "discriminate" against and eliminate the candidate. Please PLEASE do NOT reply to this message saying "oh discriminating is the wrong term I'm simply EVALUATING blah blah blah" Yes whatever you like to call it the end result is exactly the same.

Then, of course, the whole team does the same sort of "don't call it discrimination but if we notice some trait we don't like, we don't hire them" thing again.

Maybe it's their age, or hair, or the clothes they wear, or the way they talked, or didn't talk. Maybe even sometimes, because the person is broke and hungry and they came off wrong, because of course, they don't have any income, or took a risk in their lives that didn't pan out, or perhaps even had to take care of a dying parent for a while, and now have to struggle to come up with an explanation on why they weren't working for that time.

Maybe they even had a felony 20 years ago when they were totally different people...heaven forbid they did THAT because, of course, NO ONE in our amazing Foobar company EVER did anything illegal and didn't get caught!

So that's really just only a matter of bad luck, but yet it's an absolute KoD with getting hired these days.

What rarely ever happens, oddly enough, is to ask candidates to prove their programming skills with either a sample project or a trial period. This would seem like a very logical thing to do and it confounds me why it's not used more...and even if it is and the person aces the tests, if anything is found, well, discriminating about the candidate, well, we just cannot even take a chance on hiring them.

And even though almost 25% of all "sure-fire" hires won't work out and will be gone in a year[0], and there are literally a million tech jobs[1] that need to be filled this year, we just cannot even take a chance on hiring them rings over and over in the offices of the hiring managers. THAT...of all things to rant about, is the thing that baffles and frustrates me more than anything...

How can anyone ever prove they they can become a valuable part of the team if no one will ever give them a chance?

[0] https://www.techrepublic.com/article/software-had-the-highes...

[1] https://blog.hackerrank.com/unlocking-trapped-engineers/

Your straw-man argument hardly settles our debate.

If I decided that I could profitably use toxic-waste laden land, then yes of course I would still buy it and, yes of course, still not care because that's what due diligence is about.

Your liquor store sells alcohol that kills more people under the age of 30 than any other way...why aren't you standing in front of it demanding it shut down?

Are you really comparing baby lobsters to key-pairs?

Private property right go back to the Magna Carta and form the basis of the US Constitution and it's Bill of Rights.

If you believe it's governments duty to control all property rights than your a Marxist and to be honest, I have no interest in debating you.

> If you consider that the government is always the enemy and it can't be fixed and should instead be thoroughly destroyed, then and only then do cryptocurrencies make sense. It's not about good vs. bad government, it's about no government.

Certainly not. As I keep telling people here, cryptos are property, not currency. Why should governments be in the business of telling people what type of property they can and can't own?

A coin is nothing but a couple of large numbers that are easy to multiply together but very difficult to factor...that's it. If the people of earth want to assign large fiat currency values to complicated key-pairs, then why shouldn't they have the right to do that?

Of course crypto-traders need government...like we need libraries and schools and police and all that, just like everyone else, right?

So in a way...who cares who mines it?

Do you care who owns your real estate before you buy it? Or who mines your gold before you wear it? Probably not.

Yes I suppose there is some political aspect to that side of it, but the crypto itself...it's about as apolitical as it gets.

BTC has already been legally ruled as property, not currency, I believe if I read the ruling correctly.

Not digital gold, but pharmaceutical grade gold as Saylor put it in a recent Odd Lots pod, and it's hard to argue that...also quoted from the same pod..[not a perfect transcript]

"...so that took us to cryptos and we looked at 6500 cryptos and we found that BTC is the dominant network. its 25x bigger than the next closest thing that looks like it, and has more than $200bil monetary energy in it. it is basically Facebook or Google for money.

and this is the nuance that most people haven't realized yet..what you have is a dominant digital network that has been engineered to host a safe haven treasury reserve asset superior to gold in all respects.

it's pharmaceutical grade gold [love this line]. if God [blurb] gold as a treasury reserve asset to hold for 100 years, he would create 21mil gold coins, he'd make it impossible to make any more, he would make it possible to audit it from anywhere on earth from any node every 10 minutes, make it unhackable and make it an open architecture where you could build it into an iphone or into Square or paypal or any other exchange without permission, and he would distribute it everywhere on earth with these crypto SHA256 miners so hat no company controls it, no CEO controls it, no country controls it, and no regulators control it..."[0]

[0] https://play.acast.com/s/oddlots/6b8b72d0-455c-11eb-b9ed-377...

Did you really just say that one frame can be in the TB range??

Didn't you guys get the memo from B. Gates that no one will ever need more than 640k?

Even though I know I must be violating like half the conversational bylaws here on HN I gotta throw in...

"It's not a bug, it's a feature" I've heard since the late 80's and still works magic if you ask me.

I really like this comment because your calling this exactly what it is...fascism.

Cancel culture should be perhaps be renamed cancer culture, because history has shown that these things never end well.

So true. I just yesterday, on a lark, took a win10 SSD from a new Dell and stuck it in a 10 year old HP, and within about a minute it booted much to my surprise.

It didn't even need to connect to the internet.

Maybe there should just be a movement to "cancel" cancel culture?

Sometimes you just have to fight fire with fire.

A heartfelt thanks for your kind words...

Yeah the more I think about it, it's probably just a cultural thing and not a "whole humanity" thing.

As it's been discussed here, in some cultures crickets are sold as a snack on streetcorners and people grow up eating them.

And I think the whole "piss-poor people" thing might just be eating unhealthy garbage because, just maybe, the cheap high-sugar high-carb stuff releases endorphins in most humans, and they are just trying to get a small reprieve in their desperate lives.

I can't help wondering when reading this...just how many "free brain cycles" do people have in the world?

By "free brain cycles", I mean like one's not used for work and your family and perhaps one hobby...

I cannot even imagine how many people worked so hard and used their cycles to figure this puzzle out, and like I can barely remember what to buy from the store whenever I go.

Don't get me wrong, it's a hell of an achievement for everyone involved, but I just have such a hard time understanding the absolute motivation behind it.

If your idea of "privilege" is fighting heroin addiction [and currently very much winning that battle, thankfully] and living on the streets of West Palm Beach because due to felony drug possession charges over 15 years ago I can't get hired anywhere, than yes, "you and I" are most definitely that.

You mean like this article from the UN World Food Programme[0] that states due to overzealous lockdowns, that up to 80 children "elsewhere" are at very high risk of starvation for every over-70 US citizen it perhaps saves?

Yes...mentioning things like this sure gets in the way of all the virtue-signalling that's going on these days.

[0] https://www.wfp.org/news/wfp-chief-warns-grave-dangers-econo...

Corewars is a great introduction to getting your ass kicked by other programmers who are both way smarter and way more into the game than you are.

Reminds me of when I tried dipping my toes into the online Starcraft world many years ago...

I can't help but think of this line from "The Joy of Clojure"...

Go to any open source project hosting site, and perform a search for the term Lisp Interpreter. You'll likely get a cyclopean mountain of results from this seemingly innocuous term.

So I made the huge mistake of replying after only reading a few panels, so all your criticisms are totally valid and I feel kind of silly now.

I think an alternate reading of the well-written story perhaps is how much of what we do is driven by dumb luck, and those just as smart and driven as we are here commenting are, through very little fault of their own, homeless and addicted because they just were not "in the right place at the right time" once or twice, or met the wrong person at a bad time in their life?

You talk about lives "warped by externalities" and man, ain't that the truth.

So wouldn't the obvious thing be that this asteroids composition would be almost identical to the earth's since, of course, our planet was formed by billions of these things crashing into it?

Now maybe that makes them incredibly valuable, and of course I am sure there must be some statistical distribution of asteroids with valuable minerals and those without hardly any, but I feel there is currently this idea that all asteroids are a hugely valuable to be mined no matter.

Is this true?

So your saying that I have to decide that all of a sudden I can't wait to eat crickets because they are more efficient?

That just seems to me like a choice that very few humans are actually going to make.

So in some ways, I feel that maybe the youngster in the comic wasn't totally wrong.

Well, our cars didn't shoot around the world in hamster-tubes, but our thoughts and ideas sure did and you know, I think in the end that was probably a lot smarter.

The "hedonism" stuff? Well don't know about you guys but I sure lived that thru the bands and the all the raves and shit I managed to find myself at in the late 80's and 90's.

Yes..of course life almost always smashes our childhood dreams. Big deal get over it, but I think it's important to always remember the positive along with the crap.

I really love the pushback here. Yes how awesome it is you are privileged enough to always be able to acquire the best of the best and look down on other "inferior" devices.

But 99% of the rest of us just need things that work and allow us access to good performance.

Check out La Villa Strangiato next...it contains, in my quite humble opinion, the best solo Alex ever composed and performed.

I immediately jumped to the Rush Hemispheres [ my favorite album by the boys, btw ] Cygnus-X1 reference, and I feel my instincts were correct when I noticed the guitar amps in the background of the thrust-vectoring video.

https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipOiNJAihxhEA67VCx54dzVX...

If only.

I'd love more, judge less.

Laugh more, perhaps even cry more, but yell less.

I'd listen more, speak less.

And finally, I'd be so much less selfish, and so much more giving.

If I could do it all over.

Thank you for this...your outstanding example has finally cleared the air for me with this issue.

And even more than that...I am seeing how old assumptions I've made don't hold up the way I've always thought they did.

Which is why exactly I call his writing brillant...he seems to be able to express a consevatism that also has a soul.

Don't we use statistics exactly like that in, say, sports to prove one team has a better offense or defense than another?

Or even statistics like that to show what cloud hosting company overall has the best uptime?

I guess your saying that for any group, statistics are "not useful for anything"

I'm genuinely somewhat dumbfounded by this apparent difference.

> Yes, things like "Asians are good at math" is racist, even if it's a positive stereotype.

So what would be the proper way to describe an ethnic group that, when examined purely statistically, really has performed well above average in mathamatics?

Do we simple never acknowledge that such differences exist, as some people have signalled?

The brillant writings of F.A. Hayak could very well interest those with an open mind to such things.