hagy

How can anyone look at the atrocities committed by every major government over the centuries of its existence and not see that large governments are orders of magnitude more sociopathic than the worst corporations? Its just a general feature of large and powerful organizations; shared by governments and corporations alike. Governments simply hold the power to commit larger atrocities.

Just look at how the city of Flint, MI poisoned their own citizens water while suppressing knowledge of their actions. [0] While in the grand scheme of government atrocities this actually appears relatively minor, this issue happened in very recent times.

One could fill pages listing government atrocities before even getting to basic incompetence and mismanagement. While inefficiencies happen in all bureaucratic organizations, governments hold singular power over their citizens in a way that no corporation could ever dream of.

This is not an argument against government. There are some services that only the government can provide. E.g., a strong military. Nor is this an argument against government playing some role in promoting general welfare.

I just personally would like the option to not be further dependent upon our government and would rather use my own economic agency to provide for my own unique needs. Many other people feel similarly and therefore reject this further intrusion of government in dictating our labor relations with employers.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_water_crisis

What if far more drivers want to work 10:00-16:00 than are needed? In the current situation, the spot price drops and some drivers leave while more riders enter.

As employees, Uber cannot dynamically vary the pay/minute rate, especially if it falls below minimum wage combined with vehicle/gas reimbursement.

Many employees will be assigned inconvenient hours regardless. That is a key difference between employees and gig workers.

When there are more people who prefer convenient hours than shifts available, some will only have the option to take inconvenient ones. As hourly employees, Uber can't use dynamic pay to manage supply and demand imbalances.

I dealt this as a teenager working at McDonald's. Most of us didn't want closing shift, and occasionally at 25 cent/hour incentive would be added. But more often than not, the demand for any hours was sufficient. Labor supply simply exceeded demand.

Still think Uber and likes should be regulated away until we have true self driving cars. That may take a decade or more.

Similarly, many of us don't want to be chained to a comparably sociopathic and unaccountable government entity. We'd instead prefer to independently manage our own unique needs using our own individual economic agency.

I agree. The CPSC graphic video [0], graphically demonstrates the "safety failure" of a Pelton treadmill with two young children playing on an active treadmill unsupervised. While I certainly agree Pelton and other manufactures should attempt to mitigate the dangers of such a negligent situation, I was astonished that parents would allow this to happen. Imagine the same video, but replace the treadmill with a loaded bench press.

Pelton highlights that there is a safety key required to operate the machine and that parents are instructed to store it in a secure location inaccessible to children. [1] No treadmill manufacturer can ever fully eliminate the dangers of an active treadmill to young children and pets, and therefore I think this safety key is the essential piece. I find this similar to locking power tools away from curious young hands.

I don't want this to lead to additional regulation and compliance. Such regulation could even mislead consumers as to the danger of a treadmill. E.g., requiring some autodetection of a stuck belt to stop the motor. A foolproof mechanism would be not only expensive, but require regular inspection and maintenance to guarantee it performs this function. One could trust this mechanism while neglecting maintenance and therefore be further negligent in not securing the safety key away from children.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onXNnlCYJ4Y

[1] https://www.consumerreports.org/product-safety/peloton-plus-...

I also strongly endorse the Boundaries talk and am re-watching it now, https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/boundaries

The core concept of immutable values as the boundaries between components now seems self evident, but I can recall not appreciating this concept earlier in my career. Further, I don't think one can fully appreciate the importance of this concept until they've had to develop, maintain, and operate code both before and after this principle is applied. Here’s my story of being educated in the importance of “Boundaries”.

I started my career at a relatively small company that grew rather quickly. In developing more robust and reliable systems, I experienced the importance of this principle first hand. Commonly, a system that started as a small, low-value prototype could grow into a substantially large and important engineering system. Initial functionality may have been implemented in brittle, mutating code and these quickly became a pain point, particularly in testing.

I can recall several times where one seemingly innocent Java static method that mutated inputs or static fields was repeatedly the source of production errors. Adding test cases for these situations got increasingly complicated and time consuming with more and more mocks, stubs, and inspection of mutated state. Further, changing and adding functionality of the code itself became a tribulation of mentally working through the complexity of code and existing tests.

And what do you know, our recent changes reintroduced an old bug despite all of the tests passing. Turns out our existing tests to catch that bug only handled a specific manifestation of the fault, but didn't capture other cases. So of course, let us add some more test cases, each with their own menagerie of mocks, stubs, and inspection of mutated state.

Eventually, an experienced engineer would guide me to refactoring this functionality into isolated components. A single static method could be replaced by several Java classes; some classes to hold immutable state and others to perform state transformation. We may even introduce an interface so that different functionality could be provided through polymorphism. Tests became simpler and more robust such that fewer faults were discovered in production.

From the outside this may appear to be the classic Java Architecture Astronauts menace with a single static method replaced by a collection of classes and interfaces. We may have even had some XFactoryProvider interfaces. Yet the end result was easier to reason about and test, with the tangible benefit of fewer errors in production.

And I tell this story only so that I can say that I now appreciate this talk even more after living through the application of the “Boundaries” principle.

I think we'll all reading too much into this. Without knowing the details of what specifically the CEO, CTO, and others did, I don't think any of us can express much judgement.

This anonymous poster stayed on topic and told us about a leadership challenges and the personal trials and tribulations of dealing with the challenge. Personally, I'm glad to have read this tidbit and thankful they shared it. They likely can't provide more details for legal reasons and they certainly don't want to bring attention to this part of their career.

The compensation progression for a manager generally consists of a slow (if any growth) in base salary and most compensation increases come from stock and bonus. I believe this is generally the same for high level ICs. Some companies make it explicit that there is an IC level that corresponds to each manager level and both have the same compensation structure.

Cash App uses Kotlin Multiplatform, including server-side code, https://kotlinlang.org/lp/mobile/case-studies/cash-app

I've read through PEP 563 several times now and I just don't find the motivation particularly strong. The PEP itself outline two high level goals:

1. simply forward refs in types

2. reduce the runtime costs of type defs

While I can respect both goals, I haven't found either problematic enough to break backwards compatibility, including functionality used in several mainstream libraries.

Further, I have yet to see the runtime costs quantified. So I'm not even convinced this will have a tangible benefit. This PEP rejects the alternative option to just disable typedefs with opt-in __future__ imports or command line optimization args. Yet, they rejected this because it would break existing functionality for code that relies on runtime typedefs. And the proposed solution also breaks existing functionality.

In terms of forward refs, the deferred evaluation just feels like a kludge. Every Python programmer is already familiar with how Python evaluates module code at runtime and understands how this prevents forward refs. If anything, this kludge adds a special case for typedefs.

I really feel its time for Python 3 to freeze language features. This PEP and the previous walrus operator fiasco feel like people trying to morph Python into something that it isn't with one kludge after another. This will not lead to a robust language, but instead another Perl 5 monstrosity of complexity.

Instead, I feel programmers looking for more robust, performant, and expressive languages should start exploring new languages. Let Python be the best possible Python and other language features can be explored in languages that incorporate those features in a holistic design.

I've found jOOQ to provide the right tradeoffs and flexibilities for ORM vs. SQL. First, it can generate object models of tables from the database in development and therefore doesn't rely on any specific migration tool. These model classes can be used in a conventional ORM fashion, but you also have the option to use jOOQ to build SQL queries.

You can even fetch the results of arbitrary SQL expressions into a model class, which can handle partial population of columns. This allows combining ORM and SQL approaches with some code operating on models where that is natural, but this code can be applied to models which are fetched in alternative fashions when that is more preformat. E.g., fetching records using criteria that involves joins and only selecting relevant columns for the subsequent processing of fetched results.

The jOOQ "DSL" (i.e., Java interfaces and static methods) gives you essentially the full power of SQL without having to rely on external SQL files or stored procedures. (Or even worse strings.) You can even programmatically build these queries. E.g., optionally including different WHERE/HAVING criteria. The jOOQ "DSL" provides a fair amount of compile-time type safety, which isn't possible with external SQL.

As a former DS hiring manager who phone screened over 200 candidates, Insight is the only DS bootcamp that I've found to be positively correlated with capability.The other programs had candidates that were weaker than the generic new grad pipeline. Eventually we just made a PhD a hard requirement to filter down the ridiculous application volume.

Naked short selling is allowed by market neutral market makers, but it does not function as convention short seller. Under current regulation, a naked short seller is not looking to make a profit from a future decrease in price, but instead ensuring market availability of the stock. E.g., if there is a sudden increase in buyers market makers continue to make good on their obligation to always be willing to buy and sell a certain stock. Market makers are required to buy a share back from the market sometime in the future to replace the phantom share that they sold.

When person A lends their share to person B, they no longer own a share, they own the right to receive a share from person B sometime in the future, interest payments on the lending, and collateral to ensure the borrower can make good on their obligations.

This website seems to mainly be talking about naked short selling, which is selling a stock without first owning or borrowing it. This not necessarily illegal, although can be under some conditions, including aggressive short selling. Wikipedia has a fair amount of info on the practice, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_short_selling

The practice of a selling a share that one does not own is supposed to be used by market neutral market makers to ensure their is always liquidity. They must then at some point in the future buy a share from the market to replace the phantom (i.e., counterfeit) share that they sold.

This practice is useful when there are suddenly more buyers than sellers and the market maker exhausts their standard supply of shares. Otherwise there may not be any bids on the stock at any price for sometime. Other argue that this is no longer necessary with many participants beyond market makers that also employ algo trading and can quickly adjust to increasing demand. Further, if lack of supply becomes a regular occurrence, investors may start regularly setting high, possibly even ridiculously high, standing sell limit orders such that there will always be bids at some price points.

I believe it's more complicated. Per Wikipedia [0],

> Failing to deliver shares is legal under certain circumstances, and naked short selling is not per se illegal.

There are arguments for why phantom (i.e., counterfeit) shares benefit the market. E.g., providing liquidity. Others contend that this practice is used in the aggressive short selling of companies, which is illegal, and there is insufficient transparency and accountability of this practice.

There's a great story of supposed illegal naked short selling in the Global Links fiasco. [1] In this case, one investor was able to purchase 100% of outstanding shares while trading continued unaffected. This post's website also cover's that story and I don't recall how this mess was ever resolved. Briefly searching through sec.gov that didn't turn up anything relevant.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_short_selling [1] https://www.forbes.com/2006/08/25/naked-shorts-global-links-...

There numerous retail equity brokers that now offer free trades, mobile apps, and every other feature provided by RobinHood. Unlike Facebook, there is no network effect and unlike Google vs other search engines, different brokers are largely fungible.

It's not that there is an expiration date, but instead that there is a collateral requirement for holding short positions in addition to the interest. As the shorted stock increases in value, the borrower must post additional collateral or close out their position. If the collateral requirements exceed the fund's capital then they'll be forced to close.

Further, all hedge funds have internal risk limits, which include limits of their exposure to a single equity. Should the collateral requirements exceed this limit, then their internal risk compliance team will ensure that the short position be at least partially closed to keep them within their limits.

I think it's disingenuous to compare those two numbers. The mass majority of that trading is alogos trading within short time spans, not entities entering or exiting long positions. This includes all the market makers that have to hedge options under the insane stock volatility by exiting and enter both short and long positions as the stock moves. It further includes every flavor of HFT that can potentially syphon some value from high volatility combined with momentum.

This volume doesn't tell us anything about the actual change in stock held by various entities nor how easily 70MM shares could be obtained from entities.

It's after hours trading, which is very low volume and generally not available to most retail investors. Probably just another hedge fund getting in their shorts at these high prices. The FUD spread due to the plunge in after hours is just a bonus for their new short position.

Further, I think everyone is drastically over estimating the impact of r/wsb and retail investors in general on the GME action. This is hedge fund vs. hedge fund in an opportunity for unusually outsized gains on both the long and short positions over relatively short time frames. Good for them to keep the narrative focused on retail investors rather than capitalist titans in a financial blood bath.

There is already a substantial inequality in consumption across different income bands. E.g., 2018 data shows that the "Bottom 40% of US income distribution account for no more than 22% of total consumption. Top 20% account for almost 40%." [0]

I could see the capitalistic economy continuing to function despite a shrinking middle class if this consumption inequality grows.

Going with the jeans example, the 500 middle class families buying 5,000 pairs of jeans at $40 each ($200,000 total) may be replaced by 50 upper middle class families buying 1,000 pairs of jeans at $200 a pair.

I'm certainly not endorsing nor condoning such growing inequalities.

[0] https://twitter.com/adam_tooze/status/1308013103855087618

I strongly agree with this narrative and it matches my own experience. I spent 9 years of college and then grad school using exclusively either vi or emacs because I believed IDEs were a crutch that weak engineers relied upon. It wasn't until I got a real job that I found myself forced to learn a proper IDE (IntelliJ).

It blew my mind just how powerful the IDE was and how it massively increased my productivity. Putting aside code completion and code generate, I found it much easier to navigate a codebase using a proper IDE that fully understood the language. When I contrast that to my previous solution, a highly customized emacs configuration with lots of packages and my own functions, the two just don't compare.

I've found Jet Brains' CLion to do a solid job of code navigation, but I don't currently work in C/C++ and only use it occasionally for reading code bases.

I do use Jet Brains other editors and Intellij has flawless Java code navigation (among other amazing features). Further, I've found PyCharm provides Python code navigation that is about as good as possible for such a dynamic language. Therefore I'd expect CLion to provide top notch code navigation for C/C++.

Exactly! Every time someone brings up discarding standardized testing for college admissions, they ignore how the remaining admission criteria can be even better gamed by the wealthy and upper middle class. Standardized testing may be imperfect, but its one of the few ways an exceptional student from a less well off background can distinguish themselves.

Durational-residence requirements still exists. E.g., paying in state vs. out of state tuition at a state university, which commonly requires a year of residency. [0, 1] State-provided healthcare could be provided in a similar fashion through state-administrated health insurance that has different rates for in state and out of state. There could be a durational-residence requirements for in state pricing.

[0] https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol104/iss3/5/ [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/amendment-14/...

I think the best approach is for the US to move more concerns to the state level. E.g., it would be great if states would start implementing their own universal healthcare for their residents.

States commonly have more internally aligned political goals and therefore can move quicker. It also has the benefit of allowing different states to experiment with different solutions and all states can learn from the results.

Lastly, inter-state mobility is much higher than inter-country and this will allow residents to congregate in a state that matches their political desires. E.g., if someone doesn't like the tax burden of states that provide more services then they can move to a state that provides fewer.

Since there is a higher incidence of smoking among poorer folks[0], couldn't the same argument apply to the massive sin tax on cigarettes? We justify such sin taxes as being to the benefit of discouraging a harmful health behavior and personally I see the same link with higher sugar consumption.

[0] https://truthinitiative.org/research-resources/targeted-comm...

Agreed. Further, in most instances master/slave terminology is quite misleading with the master and slave doing similar work and commonly the master doing even more work. Leader/follower and primary/replica are much better terminology from a purely technical perspective. Its a plus that we also get to remove these two awful words.

I haven't used FB much in the last decade, but I have yet to see any news articles the few times I check my timeline each year. Don't you have to follow sources that provide news articles, including friends that post the articles? Or does FB decide to sprinkle in news articles based on algorithmically ascertained preferences if you regularly engage with the platform?

I don't believe that moderating away content and discussion of climate denial would actually result in climate change deniers changing their views. They'd simple disengage with the social networks that institute such moderation and instead seek out alternative mediums. They are plenty of other venues online and offline for climate change denying and other questionable content.

This could even create a business opportunity for new social networks with different moderation policies. That could backfire and create even stronger echo chambers. Imagine a social network that prohibits content in support of prochoice for abortion. The site administrators could simply argue that the issue has been settled and prolife is the only moral stance.

The similar battle in newspaper and television included heavy moderation and legislation to limit this. E.g., do you think the Wall Street Journal was regularly publishing letters to the editor that focused on the arguments for abolishing private property?

The only legal question unique to social media is the 230 provision that protects a platform from legal action from third parties due to hosting user-generated content. That is still an open question. Social media companies always have the option to apply stringent moderation and declare themselves a publisher. They could even do this selectively. E.g., a newspaper with an online presence still receives 230 protection for user generated comments on an article when there is a clear denotation differentiating what is published by the site and what is user generated.