"In computing, we mostly stand on each other's feet."
-Richard Hamming
2,161 karma · joined April 7, 2013
-Richard Hamming
The charm of the subreddit is that it's hard to figure out who's who.
We don't have as much climbing where I live, but we have a lot of cyclists, and yes, they're vocal.
Chocolate diamonds are a direct contradiction of regular diamond marketing. If you go to great lengths to talk about how important clarity is when justifying your diamonds' prices, it's particularly silly when you start selling the least clear diamonds possible.
The last time I flew a kite was in elementary school. I guess I knew in the abstract that people actually put thought and engineering into kites, but I never actually thought about it. Posts like this remind me of the enormous breadth of human hobbies, and they're really interesting.
As always, there's a relevant xkcd[1], and today, I'm one of the lucky 10,000.
The problem is that even their basic offerings have drastically declined in quality. If you make plain oatmeal, you'd better be really, really good at it, or else you have absolutely nothing going for you.
We don't have any pity for auto manufacturers who make garbage and lose badly. Why would anyone have pity for gun manufacturers who do the same?
I grew up in an affluent suburb of Massachusetts, where guns were really uncommon.
I got stationed in Yuma, Arizona, where pretty much everyone owned guns.
Here in a suburb of Portland, OR, it's somewhere in the middle. Oregon is an interesting state.
It's actually a really neat collection, but I wince at how much it had to cost and how much use he actually gets out of them.
The result is that time controls have shortened accordingly. It's a lot harder to cheat convincingly when you're playing bullet chess, whereas it might be easier to do so when you're playing 10 or 15-minute time controls.
Currently, his hobby appears to be posting wingnut craziness on his website.
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Worrying about 64-bit time overflow is like worrying about IPv6 address exhaustion.
"Ship to us, and here's how to get automatic email notifications of when your package is here!"
Head over to Portland, and the cops are so overloaded with dealing with more serious crimes that they won't even respond to auto theft.
I would definitely call the police for package theft in my town, and I'd have a good expectation that they'd assign an officer to watch for crime patterns and get the guys.
In Portland, I'd be duplicating this guy's glitter bomb.
In general, Americans see this protection as none of the government's business. If the business wants to provide it, or unions want to demand it, that's fine, but it's not going to be applied as a blanket policy.
Many businesses do apply some sort of lengthy process for firing people, for the simple reason that experienced talent is valuable and removing it capriciously is a terrible idea, but it's not required.
In my experience, however, even these processes are just drawn-out kabuki dances. By the time that you've been formally notified that your performance is deficient, the decision has already been made to fire you and nothing will change their minds.
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As for whether this attitude is a good idea, I'm mixed. On the one hand, it allows businesses to take a risk and hire inexperienced or otherwise dubious prospects without fear that they'll be stuck paying a useless body for months after it's been found that they're a bad fit. On the other hand, it allows shitty managers to be thundering assholes and capriciously fuck with people's livelihoods.
However, I'd assert that the American attitude toward employment is critical to startups. A BigCo can be indifferent to keeping a shitty employee around for months. A startup has much, much less margin for error.
Startups are quick to hire and fire because hiring exactly the right person is important, and hiring the wrong person can cripple the company. Everyone who applies for a position at a startup knows how this works, and I'd argue that if you aren't okay with this atmosphere, you need to avoid the startup scene and go work for a big company with some decent HR policies.
The bullshit shows up when a startup succeeds, and the company tries to preserve its startup culture because they want to keep growing like a startup. You then get BigCo politics with startup arbitrariness, and that's a recipe for disaster. Similarly, sometimes the Good Idea Fairy whispers in the ear of a high-up executive, and he tries to institute startup attitudes toward hiring and firing at a BigCo. This also goes poorly.
My guess is that "Thank God HR was on top of that problem" is not a common phrase in meetings. Neither is "Wow, HR did a fantastic job creating that job posting, and every single candidate that they've brought in has been at least plausible." If they aren't braindead, you just take them for granted.
Systems like that tend to get neglected.
I worried about a lot of things during my time in, but getting fired was not one of them.
The problem with fixed-supply currencies is that if the economy is growing, and the supply of currency stays constant, currency is worth more.
If your debt is measured in that currency, your debt just increased, and you might no longer be able to pay it. Large numbers of foreclosures are bad.
Incidentally, one of the biggest political movements in response to these panics was a push to put the US onto the silver standard. Silver is more common, so it's easier for the supply of currency to increase (read: inflation) as the economy increases. A guy named William Jennings Bryan made a rather famous speech[1] about it.
Today, we eschew a metallic standard entirely and just focus on achieving a constant rate of inflation. Zero inflation would be fine, but it's hard to achieve, and any missteps might lead to deflation. So, the Fed aims for 2% inflation - low enough for the value of the dollar to be pretty stable, but high enough that if the economy does something weird, we don't enter a deflationary state.
I'd rather get a cheap piece of shit than an expensive piece of shit.
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The best classes that I've taken have been "Feel free to collaborate, but turn in your own work." It allows people to work together on hard problems, but the slackers still fail.
As always, you need to be smart, but people are willing to take the risk of complications if it means the difference between a modest expense and facing a medical bankruptcy.
The same thing applies with dental work. All of my wife's root canals were done in Mexico.
I'd read it as "Lambda x maps to x - 3."
In Python, you can rewrite lambdas as regular functions if you want.
lambda x : x - 3
def f(x):
return x - 3
>>> f = lambda x : x - 3
>>> def g(x):
... return x - 3
...
>>> f(0)
-3
>>> g(0)
-3
>>> (lambda x : x - 3)(0)
-3