justin_vanw

There is remarkably low value to be extracted from hn comments. Very rarely there is something wonderful! But like 99/100 comments are some combination of showing off, punching down, pushing a crackpot agenda or cryptotrolling. Why do you care if you get downvoted in such an environment? Perhaps, and this isn't meant to be nasty at all, you need some social activities in your life?

And we elected Richard Nixon multiple times (governor, vice president, president!).

I suggest you don't get caught up in the hype. The current period is actually extremely placid compared to many in the course of our history. Just because Trump is really dumb, and that people voted for someone really dumb, doesn't make things 'unstable'.

If anything Trump's term so far has been a case study in what a stable system looks like. He can barely implement any policy and has yet to get any legislation passed. In the meantime the government seems to be functioning, checks are being mailed on time and the military is still under civilian control and is 100% loyal.

I mean what sort of scenario do you have in mind (if any) of how this 'instability' would play itself out? Generally the biggest threat to democracy isn't "electing someone that everyone thinks is stupid and has negative charisma, during a peaceful time with few major problems" it's the opposite, someone super charismatic during a time of extreme danger.

I would say that electing Clinton would have been a far greater symptom of something deeply wrong. Not because of her personally, but because it would have been the second time in 12 years that we elected someone who was in the nuclear family of a previous president. Oligarchy destroys democracy, an incompetent leader is just someone we put up with for awhile (and we have had plenty far worse).

I think Trump would have lost by double digits if Biden had run, and he would have lost handily if Bernie had won the primary. It almost goes without saying that a hypothetical Trump vs Obama election would have been a bloodbath. There are probably half a dozen establishment democrats that would have beaten him easily. However, they didn't run because the Clinton machine was actively threatening anyone who didn't get in line for years ahead of the election. THIS is what destroys democracy, the ability of powerful families to perpetuate their power and influence. That Bernie did so well says very little about him, and a lot about how well anyone would do running against Hillary Clinton, a candidate that a sizable majority of people dislike and believe to be a liar. Frankly, Clinton is probably one of the only people in the country that Trump would have won against.

Anyway, the point of all that is to say that Trump didn't win because of discontent or something that made him popular, he won because the Democrats nominated someone who is not electable. Trump was never popular, even on the day he 'won' the election.

What political instability in the US? Please define what you mean by instability, the US has been the most stable national government since it was founded, with a big exception of the Civil War of course. Even then, compare it to the governments of any continental European or Asian or African nation that isn't part of the British Commonwealth, and we have had a stable democracy while basically every single non-commonwealth government has gone through collapse, been reformed, and collapsed again in the meantime.

I mean it's easy to say 'inequality' as some kind of Marxist trump card that you think automatically ends all possible debate, but meanwhile things in the US are fine. Fine != Perfect, of course, but it is yet to be demonstrated that you can have a socialist/market capitalist welfare state that functions outside of the Nordic countries. Every other attempt at it has been a complete disaster.

Leonard Susskind said in his book that "the universe is the inside of a black hole" is the #1 theory of cranks that reach out to contact him. The stuff written to popularize physics really has almost no correlation to the real thing, it's all analogies and stuff, so I would be careful.

This is great! The #1 feature of this that other stock screeners (ameritrade, etrade esp.) lack is performance! Like the minimalist interface as well.

I can't agree, comparing two languages purely by a superficial "this one lets me write code like this out of the box" ignores everything that matters.

Lets say I wanted to write a web blog server. One language has "import blog; blog.run()" and I am up and running instantly. Another language makes me install a blog library and some other side stuff, and choose a webserver. The point is it isn't just built right in. Which language is better for writing web blog software? The answer is, you have literally no idea from what I just told you. My analysis is insanely superficial and meaningless. Presumably, if I am going to spend hundreds or thousands of hours in some coding environment, what is 'built in with no effort' matters somewhat on hour 0, but virtually not at all by hour 200. Professional scientists presumably spend thousands of hours on this stuff, it's really not too much to ask that they become somewhat competent with the tools they are using.

Actually for C++ you are almost perfectly wrong. It's specifically a design goal of the language to not have the builtins be 'superior' to what you can implement yourself (well the builtins are built by world class experts, but the point is there is no bias in the language).

It's not that you must do side projects or else there is no possible way you are a great software developer. It's that lots of people are just as good as you are and also do side projects. Given the choice, why would you choose someone who is equally skilled but is less interested in the field?

When you are hiring people, you really have insufficient information to know how good they are. You can't see any larger projects they have done or get a feel for how they solve problems that aren't toy scenarios by a whiteboard. Having side projects too look at dramatically reduces the uncertainty in your estimation of their skill level.

So there you go, all else being equal of course you want someone who is 'more into' their field, and all else being equal side projects dramatically improve your confidence in their skill level. So to a competent hiring manager the author of this looks like he has less passion than his competition, and even his skill level is very poorly understood in comparison.

I think this just shows how scientists don't understand programming. Pretty much every 'advantage' listed for Fortran over C++ could be added to C++ in an afternoon. C++ is an extensible language, you can define your own types and operators, so all the examples can be easily implemented. For some of the examples it's just sad that they were brought up. For example, 'you have to write a loop to allocate an array' should say 'you have to write a function one time to allocate arrays and never write this loop again'.

Its possible but there is a lot of indirect evidence for dark matter, it fits observation well even if we cant prove it. When gravity calculations give an answer that conflicts with observation, sometimes the equation for gravity ends up being wrong (orbit of mercury) and sometimes you find missing mass (discovery of neptune). I don't know what more probable means in this context, the experts are at least as smart as you and me, they favor some kind of missing mass.

Friction, and really any kind of 'contact' between things is just electrons repelling. Some ideas for dark matter don't interact in any way other than gravity, so your idea is pretty mainstream on that, but there's basically no evidence that dark matter exists in some specific form, and in fact every experiment seems to constrain the possible forms it could have more and more. It's still possible it exists, but I would suspect that whatever the explanation is for the 'missing' matter will be pretty revolutionary.

No, this has nothing to do with dark matter. Dark matter has to be in galaxies because the reason we think it exists at all is because galaxies spin 'too fast', so there is more mass in them and therefore more gravity than can be accounted for. This article is talking about gas between galaxies.

Agree with most of what you say.

Right now China/Russia are in a position where they have very little to lose and can just sit back and watch the US embarrass itself. They can't be seen as enabling NK, but beyond that they win by default in that we are distracted by it and look weak.

Russia has very little to gain or lose in this whole situation, but they benefit so long as it isn't resolved. As long as Russia holds a veto in the security council, nobody will be trying to take action on Ukraine, since they can start vetoing NK sanctions to make a point. Maybe more importantly, while the US tries to build an alliance to invade NK (possibly inevitable), Russia can sit back and call for calm and peace and de-escalation. This doesn't undo their Ukraine grab, but it creates an equivalency between Russian and US policy.

If I were China I would wait until I could horse trade. They want mineral rights in the south china sea, and Japan/SK/US (who are the primary states who can resist their island grabs) want to regime change NK. I predict they will do the minimum required by the UN and passively resist any other attempts to defuse the situation (in fact I think the more they pressure NK the more they make war inevitable. NK is now going to start starving and it's leadership may have to become hyper-aggressive) until they are paid out. Even then they will insist on concessions such as 'no US troops in the former NK'. If I were China I would participate in korean unification, but only with the condition that the US pull 100% of all military assets from the unified korea (since what can the US claim is the reason to keep them there if NK doesn't exist?), and that the US/SK/Japan concede that china owns the claimed undersea minerals.

It's not a slippery slope argument at all.. My point is that there is some optimal amount of investment in disaster preparedness, and if you make that optimal investment, and despite that a disaster overwhelms you, you still acted rationally and optimally. Investing more than is optimal is stupid.

I just learned that the ND license exists. It probably shouldn't.

Yes, we should make sure everything is totally proof from any possible disaster, no matter how unlikely or how little economic sense it makes. For example, we should make sure cities can survive not only 500 year floods, like in Houston, but 1 million year floods and direct asteroid strikes up to 1km in diameter. However, I think even when we do this, eventually a city will be hit by a 2km diameter asteroid, and qz.com will blame developers.

There is no reason to think we will be using grossly non-directional broadcast EM waves in 50 years for communication, and certainly not in 100 years. It's far more likely we will have extremely high bandwidth over very low distances, since that allows for far more bandwidth in aggregate (since you aren't interfering with other users on the same spectrum).

Or we might have moved on to laser (highly directional) or something nobody has thought of yet. I promise you we won't be using some kind of nondirectional, multi trillion watt carrier-based radio contraption that we would have to be using to be spotted by something like SETI on alien world.

Yes, so much this!

This is why things like SETI (and arecibo for finding ETs) make no sense. I compare it to using a telescope in 1850 to look for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_semaphore in space. The technology we have to send signals today will look completely pathetic to us when we look back on them in 50 years. Why would we expect ETs to use technology that we ourselves will abandon completely in the relative blink of an eye?

I was just using your technique of putting words in someone else's mouth, with a question mark at the end. See GP post.

Of course all kinds of people can land in these remedial classes if they are not prepared.

Now, I ask you, which schools do a better job of preparing students for college level work, the schools white kids get to go to or the schools black kids have to go to? If you are wondering, look at the AP classes offered at say Palo Alto high school vs Crenshaw high school:

http://schools.latimes.com/school/los-angeles/crenshaw-senio...

http://schools.latimes.com/school/palo-alto/palo-alto-high/

Highlights:

Proficient in Math: PA: 76% Crenshaw: 2.5% (not a typo)

Proficient in English: PA: 84% Crenshaw: 18%

Now, are you saying we shouldn't let bright kids from bad schools get into college?

Deleting because apparently you can get brigaded and fired for any slightly dissenting opinion.

You must be very smart!

Yea, when faced with an impending apocalypse you should be trolling internet forums!

Nah, why even give an inch? Yes, if you properly deal with passwords, the artifact you store gives virtually no information to an attacker, but on the other hand, why give them even almost nothing?

I don't have too much useful advice. I don't think there are any positive outcomes for you here, so find another employer ASAP. If you had been at this job for a long time, or you were worried about vesting options or something then it would make sense to consult with a lawyer and defend yourself a bit, but as it is it seems like management at this company is scared and trying to hide you until your internship is up.

I think it's totally bizarre that they would restrict you from talking to any female co-workers. If I were to guess at this situation with no more information than you have given, there is probably some consensus from many employees that you are 'creepy', and since they aren't willing to fire you for 'creepiness' they are just going to put you in the basement until your contract is up.

Good luck, consider whether you are generally creeping people out (maybe privately ask some male co-workers that you know if this might be the case), make sure your personal hygiene is good (shower every day, wear clean clothes everyday), etc. Maybe you do all this already and you are just a regular guy getting a bad deal, I don't know obviously, but you wouldn't be the first stinky guy in tech if that happens to be the issue.

Sad, grey, big company people can't imagine that anyone could ever be any other way.

Restaurants may fail less often than other startups, but the potential upside is microscopic compared to other startup type businesses. Restaurants are the opposite of scalable: costs scale basically linearly with revenue, but worse complexity of managing the business scales not linearly, but still very poorly with revenue.

Wow, this is like a how to guide on how to not run a business.

Raise a bunch of cash, go into a location that has so much wrong with it, blow literally all the cash plus $1k just setting up furniture and permits...

Why wouldn't you find a restaurant that just went under and buy out the lease? Take over the kitchen in place (buying the equipment from the bankrupt owner who just wants out), do a revamp on the sitting area, and spend pennies on the dollar compared to this? Added advantage that all the zoning and permits are already complete?

Yes, these inflammatory stories surface on here from time to time. Everyone jumps from 'someone was inconvenienced' to 'totalitarianism' in 1 second with 0 information. People start calling for boycotts of the US.

Later, 9 times out of 10 it ends up being nothing, but there's not a story with thousands of posts with people saying 'oh, I jumped to conclusions'. In fact people don't ever hear about the resolution, and they probably don't care to hear stories that contradict the worldview they choose to reinforce for themselves.

It's very hard (if not impossible) to avoid being biased when reading resumes.

Personally I would strongly prefer that resume's I review were anonymized and all hints that might bias me were removed before any decisionmaker see's them or they are filtered. This could help more women and minorities get a foothold at that step in the process (I mean generally, not with me specifically).

However, while relatively simple censoring of resumes would remove some bias from review, such as race (can often be hinted at by the name or university attended), gender, etc, and it would prevent googling of the person's name, age is extremely hard to hide. You can see a person's job history, which is generally will tell you their age within +-5 years. One partial solution might be to only list job history for the previous 10 years and remove the year a degree was earned, but relative seniority at the beginning of that 10 year work history will still be a very effective proxy for determining age.

So, unfortunately I think we can't hide age in an effective way without removing critical information from a resume (removing everything else we can that can be removed should be removed or hidden), but I think it's interesting to speculate on why older workers will be filtered out. I suspect it is a belief (or intuition aka unconscious belief) that someone applying for junior or entry level positions when they are > 40yo is correlated with 'something being wrong', since if there is nothing wrong you would have expected them to have reached a point in their career that they no longer have to blindly submit resumes for these kinds of positions.

I wonder what would happen in a study like this if the resume's representing older hypothetical candidates included some kind of cover letter explaining the situation. For example, saying that they started out working at a bank for 15 years but they found a passion for cooking and that is why they only have 5 years of experience as a chef. My guess would be that not only would this undo the bias against them, but you would find a strong bias towards them (just a guess).