johan_larson

Ending the Selective Service System is certainly an option. It's unlikely the US will need a mass draft any time soon, and if it did need to draft young people (or just men) in large numbers, it wouldn't be all that difficult to assemble lists of them through other records. Just use high-school records, or drivers licenses or census lists.

I'd say the obvious comparison is to Brazil. The upper end of Brazilian society lives in first-world conditions. Some of them a really rich. But the bottom end lives in the third world, in gang-run unregulated slums that have dodgy water and power.

The US isn't there yet, but that's where things seem to be headed.

It doesn't matter. Are the Indians and Chinese going to stop pounding on the doors because the American government makes the rules marginally more strict? No, probably not.

"Senior" in this industry typically means "not a beginner". You should not be right out of school if you are applying for these positions. And "experience required" is certainly a useful concept.

But "senior" isn't really a good name for it, because people with only a few years of experience are not trusted to make big decisions and build (or lead) big things, which is what "senior" tends to mean in other contexts. The title is therefore a bit deceptive. But I'm not sure what to replace it with.

And finally, to be fair, there are a few places where "senior" is fairly senior. At Google, it's two promotions up from entry level, and I seem to recall Amazon listing it with seven years of required experience, which is getting up there.

Shrug. Seems ok to me. Maybe I'm a robot.

Mandatory nudity from ankles to eyebrows, sunrise to sunset.

Maybe it's time to contract out the entire operation of the California state government to some more trustworthy entity. Someone who can actually build public infrastructure. Someone like France. Or possibly Singapore.

A phenomenon like Burning Man needs to be somewhat inaccessible to actually work. If it's too easy, it fills up with people who aren't committed enough. In the beginning, that inaccessibility was provided by the sheer obscurity and a somewhat remote and hostile location. But now Burning Man is famous and some tourists are willing to make the effort. But tourists just aren't committed.

That means it's time to raise the stakes. Start holding the event in some even more remote and inaccessible place, like the top of Denali. Those who are willing to go that far will be a smaller but more committed group.

"That's the door. The only way in. Small and extremely uncomfortable. And anyone who wants to know us has to find out how to get through that door. Brother cardinals, we need to go back to being prohibited. Inaccessible and mysterious. That's the only way we can once again become desirable." -- The Young Pope

QZ: Oregon has more legal cannabis than they can consume in six years.

OREGON: Challenge accepted.

My impression is that stack ranking with forced attrition can, if applied for a short period, shake a sleepy low-performing organization out of its lethargy. But if you try to run things that way long-term you get problems. People stop thinking of the team and start acting too selfishly.

Forced attrition messed up Microsoft pretty hard before they stopped the practice. Getting rid of mediocrities is a good thing, but if you mandate getting rid of X% per year, people stop cooperating with their coworkers, because those coworkers are also competitors.

Could Amazon really be falling into the same trap so soon?

Yes, if someone set up a honeypot to catch egomaniacs it would look just like that page.

Is this term sheet descriptive or prescriptive? Are you telling us what standard straight-forward terms are right now, or what they should be right now (and would be, in a slightly better world)?

Bloomberg covered this phenomenon back in 2018. The article generated 446 comments on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17566164

I have to wonder who the target audience for this article is. The advice just doesn't seem particularly actionable. A statement like, "I think the biggest competitive advantage in business—either for a company or for an individual’s career—is long-term thinking with a broad view of how different systems in the world are going to come together," sounds great in a TED talk, but what the heck is anyone supposed to do about it? It's shallow.

I think the article could be improved by considering more carefully who the advice is intended for, and tailoring the advice to them. The advice for a bright young college graduate should be different from the advice for a five-time failed entrepreneur or someone who has plateaued in middle management at 50.

"I'm reading an article on HN about Japanese rail workers pointing at things." "Done."

"I'm composing a snarky comment about Japanese rail workers pointing at things." "Done."

"I'm pressing 'add comment' to post a snarky comment about Japanese rail workers pointing at things." Wait, what? No. I know better than that. Abort.

I have to believe scholars who study pop music did this research decades ago, though probably by hand.

It is useful to consider the audience the book was written for: first-year students at MIT in the 1980s. That was a formidably bright and meticulously prepared group. Many of them already had some programming experience from high school.

It's not too surprising that a book tailored to such a crowd's particular needs is not particularly suited to other students, whether less bright, less prepared, or simply true beginners to programming.

I thought "Big Swinging Dicks" was a purely figurative term.

It's amazing how much time and effort some people are willing to spend on make-believe. At least in pro sports and entertainment there's big money on the line.

(Don't get me wrong. I admire cleverness, devotion, and capacity to organize. And this event demonstrates all three on the part of those who made it happen. But you'd think they could turn these skills toward more useful ends.)

"If you keep getting in fights with your white buddies, you won't have the energy to push around brown people." Now there's a message for our time.

I don't remember being offered a package or template or anything like that. This was in 1995; I expect things have improved.

I wrote one thesis in LaTeX and one in Word. There were some challenges each way, but all in all, doing it in Word was easier. WYSIWYG helped a lot, Word had good documentation, and LaTeX was hard to customize to meet the university's formatting rules.

I will admit, however, that LaTeX run on default settings looks good. Whoever designed that bit had taste.

I've been coding for 37 years now, counting what I did in childhood. I can remember getting a real charge out of doing it. It was a real thrill to be able to tell the machine what to do and see things happen on the screen.

But I don't feel that thrill any more. I know I can build things; I've done so many times before. And frankly, figuring out how to fit new functionality into messy legacy systems isn't much fun. Occasionally, when I manage something very clever, I feel a glimmer of the old thrill of creation, but that's a rare thing.

These days, I'd prefer to do higher-level design and leadership work.

Facebook was started in 2004, so it's a good 15 years old now. It also has 30,000 employees. That's way to big and way too old to be a startup in any meaningful sense. It's a big and powerful, but young, company.

Science isn't short of brains. It's short of money. There's an overabundance of clever and highly trained people chasing too little funding, which is why you find so many young scientists in their thirties grinding through second and third postdocs for crap money.

I suspect you could do more good for science by working a lifetime in some well-paid career and donating a hefty portion of your profit to some science-funding organization than by trying to do science yourself.

Science needs your money far more than it needs your brains.

The world is not short of people who want to work in healthcare. Because of high barriers to entry, professionals in the field are very well paid and young people are desperate to enter it. Given this vast army of the aspiring, you can be confident that nothing that really needed doing went undone because you chose to do something else with your life.

Probably the sheer amount of time and effort legal campaign has consumed. No government agency has infinite money and staff.

I wonder why the government fought this tooth and nail. Do they just really hate to lose, so they double down time and again? Or are they worried that losing once will open the floodgates to a torrent of litigation?

Well, at least he didn't try to order a pizza.

"Jaa, I vaant too laage pies vit pepperuuni. Let me give yoo die oobital parametaas."