josephorjoe

Creative writing teacher.

copy editors and proof readers are the people trained to catch those types of errors but are seen more and more as an unnecessary expense.

peer reviewers assess scientific interest and quality.

edit: also, the abstract was almost certainly written after peer review.

Most of NYC does not have the physical space for dumpsters or the roadway access for dumpster lifting garbage trucks.

There are some large buildings where it would be practical, but much of the residential housing consists of buildings with <10 apartments and no alleyways (let alone driveways).

first, i'd just read The Death of Ivan Ilyich which is much much shorter.

after reading that if you feel like reading tolstoy is something you want to do a whole lot more of, then pick up Anna Karenina or War and Peace. I've read both, because i enjoy reading Tolstoy, but i would not recommend reading them if you do not enjoy the process. there are plenty of other great literary works out there (and most of them are shorter).

I've seen the coding questions we ask candidates... whether or not i would pass would depend 100% on which question(s) I was asked.

Something relevant to the work I do all the time? yes, I'd probably pass.

Something about some data structure or algorithm I haven't needed to use in four years that i now have 30 minutes to implement in code? I'd likely fail.

When something comes up in my actual job where i need to solve a problem i'm not familiar with, i first do some research on the problem and learn/remember what i need to know about it and related algorithms/data structures before doing any actual coding.

i certainly do not "immediately write code as fast as possible" when presented w an unfamiliar problem.

if you must ask candidates to work on coding problems, i believe that you should give them 3 or more problems and let them pick which one to work on for the actual "coding test" part of it.

Then maybe have a conversation about the other problems to get a sense of how they would think about/approach them w/o actually making them write code.

"Clean computer files as needed"

?!

Whatever it is that is needed to clean their computer files, it sounds more achievable than:

"Ensure all computers remain connected and on at all times"

what is it then? pro-prolonging-the-pandemic

i think if someone finds themself on Team Keep the Pandemic Going, they should reconsider what brought them there.

Depends on whether or not the boss can be trusted.

I've had bosses where the only thing they ever heard from me were optimistic status updates on work in flight.

I considered them completely untrustworthy -- one for lack of competency and one for being a clumsy power seeker.

But in general I would only talk to my boss about issues that (1) I'm OK with my boss telling other team members that I said what I said about it, (2) I'm OK with my boss having input on what course of action to take on the topic, and (3) I trust that the conversation is unlikely to be interpreted in some negative way for me.

I think it is basically this. Amplifying dangerous messages has a liability.

Screaming "FIRE! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!" in a crowded theater when there is no fire or evidence of fire is not protected speech under any sane "freedom of speech" doctrine.

Giving the person screaming that a megaphone makes you complicit in the crime.

Giving people the "freedom" to trick other people into causing harm to each other is not giving people freedom. It is supporting abuse.

There are lines, of course... fine or otherwise, and it is a messy process to draw them. And mistakes are often made and should be called out.

But it is not a weak argument to claim that supporting the spread of disinformation about public health measures during a pandemic is supporting abuse.

And the problem with social media is that instead of there being 200-500 people who can hear the megaphone there are hundreds of million. Scale matters. What can be tolerated in the local pub a half hour before closing may not be tolerable on a billboard in Times Square.

Robbery of delivery workers has long been a problem in the city complicated by the fact that many of them don't trust/don't feel safe going to the police.

My first time on jury duty in nyc the case was armed robbery of a delivery worker to steal his cell phone - this was pre smart phone era, so let's say the phone's value was <$200.

Was a very depressing case tbh. One person at risk of death and another at risk of a long prison term for what was really petty theft (armed robbery makes the punishment much much worse than just petty theft would be).

Are they the first big company to start adding insurance surcharges rather than attempting to make vaccination a requirement for employment?

Seems like it will be a fairly good motivation for anyone who hasn't decided outright that they will never get the vaccine. And it makes sense from a business perspective.

But I'm not sure this is a great precedent. I don't really want companies to have the ability to decide that certain employee health conditions (vaccinated vs unvaccinated, smoker vs non smoker, fit vs unfit) should affect the employee contribution to the insurance plan.

serious question: are you a bot?

nice use of the oxford comma btw.

Yes, i would expect a lot of announcements this week.

Looks like NYC Public Schools are going to mandate all staff be vaccinated (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/23/nyregion/nyc-schools-empl...). I would expect most hospitals/health care organizations to pretty quickly mandate it as well.

There is very little incentive for a large organization to take on the added costs of allowing a large percent of their staff/members to remain unvaccinated now.

And despite all the stories/articles about the desperate, angry anti-vax people, they are really just a small minority who are good at being noisy, and the rest of us are becoming increasingly impatient with them.

i bought a car from them three years ago and was very pleasantly surprised w how smoothly everything went (fwiw i did not get financing from them).

it was definitely not about price for me. it was about selection and minimizing hassle. i’m still reluctant to buy a guitar online but had no problem w buying a car that costs 15x as much online.

i’ll definitely buy my next car online too.

> Minecarts get to be more useful when you want to travel long distances without having to touch the controls.

This and you can (and should) build roller coasters.

no sarcasm intended

i know that timing and luck really helped me out and i am grateful for it.

so when people say "wow, you taught yourself programming and now you work as a software engineer at Big Tech Co -- that's impressive" i don't think "it is because i'm awesome!".

i think "i did work hard to get here but i sure had some lucky breaks along the way and if the timing had been different i could be in a very different spot right now".

> I wish we as a culture/society, acknowledged the luck and timing factor more as a factor in career development.

How's this?

I'm a self taught programmer who did not start to learn programming til I was in my 40s. It was not super easy to get my first full time job.

One day, I went to a tech meet up. Got a t shirt.

Six months later, I wore that t shirt to a hiring fair. Someone recognized the t shirt because he was at that meet up too. We started talking. I end up joining the start up he worked for.

Two years later I'm looking to leave and start job hunting but completely fail on my first phone technical interview. Decide to study some more "interview questions" before applying to another job.

Find out the next month our start up is in acquisition discussions with Big Tech Co. Decide to stop job hunting.

The acquisition happens. I now work for Big Tech Co. They never would have hired me if I had applied cold for the job. I'm doing well there.

So, the secret to my success: a t shirt and flubbing an interview.

the first occurs if you haven't created __init__.py.

the second occurs if you want your test files outside of the package directory (e.g., project/src/foo_app/foo.py, project/test/test_foo.py)

> Bot armies don't work on Hacker News, but false flagging does. My assumption is that the threshold for taking action is low enough to be reached by an innocent-looking number of brigaded complaints.

I think it is this plus I believe hacker news penalizes 'controversial' discussions, so by ensuring that there are a large number of 'controversial' comments the trolls can kill off discussions they want suppressed.

yeah would love to see the history of actions on this post.

i suspect the goal is not to increase preference for a particular vaccine but to suppress vaccination rates in a region by creating confusion.

It seems someone really doesn't want this article discussed. I saw it posted last night and the comments were strange and it got killed fast.

But it is important and it is time we stopped pretending it isn't.

Anonymous entities paying to spread disinformation or even unnecessary confusion about vaccines should be viewed first and foremost as attempting to keep vaccination rates lower in the places where this is happening.

And then one should ask "who would want to do this? why?". And one likely won't be far wrong if one assumes the worst.

I have seen way too many `ModuleNotFoundError`s. It is moderately infuriating when the two files are in the same directory and python can't find the module.

Honestly that error is misnamed. It should be `ModuleImportRefusedError`.

And the frustration caused by getting PyTest to work in a project is likely responsible for a large percentage of the untested python projects in the world...

Yeah, I'd have zero trust in the recruiter at this point and want to work out details directly w the hiring manager or HR.

Agreed. Seems like the motivation was probably to make the candidate more willing to accept their offer as is without trying to negotiate.

The recruiter probably (rightly) thinks people who really want a job, think they lost it, then unexpectedly get the job offer back will be less likely to risk having the offer pulled because they negotiate too hard for a higher salary, remote work options, etc.

yeah, really kind of a weird attempt to put down a long dead author for having some luck with birth and some success with writing spy novels (and essentially defining the genre).

i guess it is an attempt to generate clicks by fabricating a controversy?

it would be one thing if it were a serious attempt to critique the values espoused by bond/fleming, but it is just a bland flattening of the truth with some uninspired spitting on it.

Completely agree.

The last warning I needed was one time >10 years ago while listening to a song I really liked I just posted one of the lines from the song on facebook.

A friend of mine saw it and assumed it was a commentary on a political event that had happened that day (it wasn't) and assumed that it meant I held a certain political opinion because of this (I didn't) and then was suspicious of my claims that posting the song lyric meant nothing more than i was enjoying the song and felt like sharing.

Since then I always assume anything I reveal online will be taken out of context and held against me, if not immediately, some day...

your first point (tweeting is as safe as talking) is entirely invalidated by your second (long searchable record helps find statements to criticize people for)

as for your third point, undocumented public speech (no audio or video recordings and no effective note taking) is vastly different from creating public documents (anything on the open internet).

management will never believe the deadlines are unrealistic if you keep working nights and weekends to get the work done.

I think if you just ask the question "should this task be done by a person with a loaded gun" about everything done by the police and put the "no"s in one pile and "yes"s in another you can start getting a good idea of the scope of the problem.

The goal should be to get to a process where the person with the loaded gun is not doing tasks in the "no" pile.

I don't care if the person doing those tasks is called a police officer or not as long as they don't have guns.