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CNSE class of 2017. The usual career progression of people I talked to was: get a phd, work 12 hour shifts (including nights), be underpaid because you “are not an expert yet”, be fired after 2 years because the company abruptly changed technologies and didn’t need you anymore. Repeat steps 2-4 until you eventually get frustrated enough to leave the field.

So yeah I do software now.

The last time I looked at marketplace plans (in my state ymv). I couldn’t find a single one that had good enough coverage for this to be worth it. The person I was looking for hits their out of pocket max every year though, so it just depends on your usage. The best I could find was like 1k a month + a 12k out of pocket max, so 24k a year total. But ymmv

I don’t think Meta or Google are doing that for the most part. Yes there is a small pay cut if you move away but if they said you could be fully remote then they have honored that. And I don’t think Tesla or Apple ever advertised that roles could be fully remote forever. That being said, you are absolutely right. Companies only care about employees to the extent they have to for retention. You always need a plan B, nothing is ever guaranteed.

Absolutely. You could just literally stop showing up one day, it is the company’s problem at that point. 2 weeks notice is expected, and giving less is considered a bit of a betrayal, but it’s perfectly legal. As much as like the idea of having the security of a contact, being forced to work honestly seems kind of strange to me.

It is arbitrary. But he worked really slow. And it stood out to me that someone who claimed to have been doing this for years wouldn’t have muscle memory yet. It was one of the things that made me think he had lied on his resume, but I didn’t judge him for it until he had undeniably proved that he wasn’t going to be productive.

That they legitimately have no idea how to write a computer program.

My first job was at a company which had a poor interview process. Hire fast fire fast right?

1. One programmer spent nine month trying to implement a simple Java app that read data from a message queue, called a library, then wrote data to a message queue. There was an example program available that did the same thing but reading/writing to files. When he was fired deleted his code, then I implemented the app in one week, I had only 6 months full time experience, he claimed to have 30 years.

2. Another programmer ignores all directions and spent 6 months implementing a library that did the EXACT opposite of what the customer asked for. When he was fired we had to rewrite his entire code base because it was so convoluted and poorly written. In the post-mortem we concluded it would have been better to have just deleted his code base as well when he left. He claimed to have over 10 years experience.

3. Several programmers were hired for C programming jobs and didn’t know how to use basic memory and string functions like malloc and free.

4. One programmer was so obsessed with functional programming that he verbally abused other staff members for writing C code (this was required by management and the customer). When he was forced to write C he wrote his code as if it were lisp through massive abuse of macros. When he was fired his code had to be deleted.

5. Many programmers required large amounts of help with simple tasks. Operating on a Linux servers, using make files, etc. this was not such a problem since they came it at a Junior level, but it took massive amounts of time.

6. A programmer who could not touch type, but typed keys one at a time with only his index fingers.

7. A programmer who came to design meetings asking the same questions every week, and talking about running into the same problem every stand up. We would work with him to unblock him, then he would come back and say he had the same problem again. It was maddening and when he was fired we had to delete his code.

Just some examples (in the US btw). I’m not a huge fan of fizz buzz either, but you need some sort of test or you will get a lot of people who have done some tutorials and think they can go be a programmer now.

Yes it is true. Basically the formula for your taxes are (appraised home value / total appraised value of all houses in the town) * budget of the town. The market does absolutely take it in effect, like I said, towns with lower taxes sometimes become wealthy enclaves were people will drop 2 mil on a house and then have basically no taxes. My only issue with the system is it winds up being regressive sometimes because the wealthier an area is the lower the taxes tend to be.

I hope that is what happens. So far only a few companies are giving up fully on pay being linked to COL. Even so, flexible work (1-2 days in office a week) is currently revitalizing parts of New York as people move twice as far from the office, drastically reducing housing payments, while keeping the same pay and same total commute time.

That is not true. Property taxes are based on relative property values within a region such as a county or school district. Here in NY, appraisals are done at the county level and then that determines the amount you pay to the school district, town, county, etc. If budgets don’t increase, then your property tax stays the same even if your house is worth more. There are towns in my area with 1 million dollar houses that pay half the tax of a 500k house the next town over, because the town/school district tax gets spilt among the very valuable houses in that district. Whereas the poorer folks next door have to shoulder their tax burden among their less valuable homes.

My understanding is that some stablecoin projects do that. The issue is greed, it’s too tempting to invest the money in something riskier and keep all of the returns. When you lose the money you have nothing to defend the peg with.

They usually run down to the floor in my experience, and are generally much nicer in general. I wish NYC would do paid bathrooms instead of just having no public bathrooms.

The other thing that is wrong about this post, that I haven’t seen anyone mention, is that jobs like be a plumber also require constant upskilling to remain competitive. My plumber learned how to install ductless heat pumps, and now that is a huge part of his business. New types of boilers and other systems also require him to get certified. He listens to plumbing/building podcasts, reads different sources, and regularly has to do more training. On top of that he is on a 2-3 person oncall rotation —- where being oncall means being woken in the middle of the night by an outraged or panicking customer, driving to their house, crawling or climbing into whatever hellhole their pipes reside in, and doing a hard, dirty, and sometimes disgusting job.

There is no getting away from updating your skills, or sometimes doing work outside of the 9-5 if you want to stay competitive in ANY profession. Especially if you want the 200k+ comp so easy to get in software.

400A is an absurd number. I live in the northeast have a heated pool, electric water heater, and am putting in heat pumps and it all runs off a 200A. 100A is the standard hookup in my area. I have no idea what this person is doing (are they heating the pool in winter??) but those numbers are absurd. Also a propane pool heater is far cheaper then electric, converting propane to electricity is really crazy when you could just have propane heat, hot water, and pool heater.

Stocks also don’t have a “true” value. Their price is driven entirely by supply and demand, which in turn is weakly anchored by investors doing fundamental valuations on the stock (there is more demand for an underpriced stock). The issue is that market manipulation is outright theft, usually from retail investors.

Think of it like playing blackjack. When I hit, I make a bet and I know roughly what the odds are that the bet will pay out. If the house was to manipulate the cards in the deck so that the odds are different, I would lose much more often then I should, and it would be theft. Similarly, if someone uses artificial demand to drive up the price of btc above the natural demand and I overpay, then they are selling to me at an unfair price. Eventually the price with fall to the natural price and I will lose money. Btc is weird because people keep buying more, but the principle is still the same. If the price is going to go from 40k and 50k over the next few months, and the price is artificially raised to 45k (which is when I buy in this example) then even if I get out at 50k I’ve lost 5k of profits I would get if the market was fair.

So the short answer is that in any case of any market manipulation, it is theft from other investors. Usually (but not always) small retail investors.

Now the argument some crypto folks make is that market manipulation is part of this market, so take that how you will.

I seem to remember that you can’t even pump hydrogen through existing natural gas infrastructure because the smaller hydrogen molecules are more prone to leaking. I would imagine the equipment at a plant has a similar problem and combine that with lower efficiency from burning a fuel that the plant wasn’t designed for, and the abysmal efficiency from converting electric energy to hydrogen and it seems like pure snake oil.

Edit: the problem I am remembering is that hydrogen actually degrades the metals used in pipelines (https://www.hollandsentinel.com/story/opinion/columns/2021/0...) so I don’t see how any of this infrastructure is useful at all for hydrogen.

The Alexas were for my elderly mother in law. If she fell or was having some sort of problem, she could call us with just her voice.

Also she and my partner both like the convenience, so who am I to say that they shouldn’t have such a device? The device does have hardware switches for the camera (it was off) and the microphone but you can’t switch off the microphone without effectively disabling the device.

When I she bought these devices they didn’t have this feature. None of us knew that the feature was deployed and enabled by default. To your point, it is a huge issue that we have no control over these devices anymore since the software can be changed at any time and can lie to you (lies of omission usually).

The Alexa goes above and beyond imo because when this person gained access to my mother in law’s other accounts, it took about 30 minutes to permanently lock him out, despite him bypassing text based tfa by having compromised her phone. Alexa wouldn’t even tell me this problem existed, and I can’t document what happened unlike with literally every other service.

It was truly a bizarre experience. First we noticed a random intermittent ringing noise in the house and couldn’t figure out what it was. We tracked it down to the Alexa but since there are no logs or notifications we didn’t know what had just happened. It seems the person hung up when they heard us looking around so we never saw any visible indication that anything was happening.

Once we figured it out, we then had to spend half a day going through the Alexa documentation (useless) and random threads on Reddit to figure out how the access control for this feature and Alexa in general works. Like I said, certain changes to your account cannot be made without contacting support and being escalated to a certain team. By the end of it I still could not be certain we had locked this person out because of the number of changes they had made to the account and how much of a mess the app is.

The thing I really don’t understand is that this feature has been deployed for over a year and has received negative attention in the press. It’s just unbelievable that they would ship a feature that can turn your Alexa into a listening device and not think through what could go wrong, and never revisit it in a year.

I’m also very interested in an answer. We use Alexa a lot, but this week I had to unplug every Alexa in the house because a distant family member had gained access to the family Amazon account and was trying to use the “drop in” feature to listen to our conversations. In the course of our investigation I found out that Alexa does not log privacy related events at all (there is no record of a drop in stored anywhere), and the UI for locking down which profiles and contacts have access to which feature is unbelievably bad. At this point I can’t prove that this person doesn’t still have access somehow (every single contact taken from your phone has unique permissions to drop in) and I can’t delete the profile this person created without contacting customer support. So the devices are going to stay unplugged until I have time to nuke the Amazon account and create a new one.

To be clear, I’m not concerned about cloud processing or even mining my data. Just something I can have a reasonable amount of control over and that doesn’t constantly enable features I don’t want on its own.

Libraries can get you a physical copy of pretty much any paper or book for completely free. But somehow getting a digital copy is not on the table? It’s just insane, I would happily pay for a service that did this even if it included drm or something. The journals would never go for it though because they live off of the insane rates research institutions pay to subscribe.

I really hope sci-hub survives this. Sci-hub and libgen are like an entirely different internet, one allowing you to dive as deep as you wish into any technical subject. There’s really no comparison I have found anywhere for the depth of material available. People always point to Wikipedia, but all of that is surface level. If you to build something, research something, or just really delve into it, there’s no substitute for having access to all of the latest textbooks, manuals, and papers. I’ve never found any source paid or otherwise that comes even close.

The most shocking one to me is always going to be penicillin. There are still people alive who were born before it was discovered. 90 years ago you could die from an infected scratch and now we have the whole arsenal of modern medicine available.

According to Wikipedia 54-74 white farmers have been killed in South Africa in the past 5 years. Compared to the annual murder rate of 20,000 per year that seems negligible. How is this comparable to apartheid at all? Also I would hardly call 10 people being killed a year en mass. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_farm_attacks?wpr...

In general if a material is shearing along crystal plains the material is breaking apart. Also I am pretty sure that diamonds are polycrystalline meaning that the a diamond is composed of many crystals with different orientations, so it is generally going to break on the boundaries between those crystals not the crystalline bonds themselves. For an example think of a polycrystal like steel (which I’m a little more familiar with), the atoms in the crystal lattice can be displaced a little (elastic deformation) or the crystalline grains can move or change shape (plastic deformation). Once the crystals (grains) themselves shear that means you’ve applied enough stress to break the crystal’s bonds and the material is going to break. Some materials are different though, and sometimes crystals can slip across grain boundaries. But the bonds between the crystals are generally weaker and more prone to move/change, generally polychrystals break along those boundaries first, before the crystals themselves break apart. This is probably very brittle (and hard) not because there are no shear plains, but because there are no mechanisms for the atoms to move around without breaking chemical bonds.

I mean 1860 is when the civil war happened, possibly the worst time in American history. And the 70s were the end of Vietnam, another terrible time. Cynical elites have been apart of American history at every point between those two dates. I don’t think you can pick a time where America was really great or perfect. The only real example I can think of is the end of WW2 where American industry accounted for a staggering 50% of the world’s industrial output.