rnd33

The problem is separating the great recessions from less dramatic recessions. Was 2008/2009 a once in a decade recession or once in a century recession? In a normal recession you'll never get Ford for $1, and most stocks will never feel that cheap.

Are all bear markets the same? If there's a clear signal when to start buying why isn't everyone doing it?

To me technical analysis of the stock market is the modern equivalent of a shaman predicting next year's harvest. It sounds very convincing but there's little scientific evidence that it can predict anything accurately.

The number of confirmed cases in South Korea is flattening out at around 8,200 people out of a population of 52 million (0,016 %), China is flattening out at 81,000 cases (0,006 % of the whole population). Is it really reasonable to assume the number of infected people in the the US will be 3,000 to 8,000 times higher?? If these are the calculations Wall Street are doing then I'm not surprised the stock market is falling...

One thing I can't shake, and it appears already in the second sentence of the quoted letters by Seneca:

"Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested."

What are "great things" and what is the definition of a "well-invested life"? Most of us will live rather unremarkable lives, most likely forgotten in a hundred years or so (at best!). Who says a "good life" means being remembered as long as possible by future humans? Who says the point of living is not to live in luxury and carelessness?

It just seems to me that Seneca assumes the stoic world-view to be the norm. Can anyone help me understand?

Honestly, I'm more concerned that people are blinded by an ignorance of history. If people truly think the average human life was better or 'not that bad' 200+ years ago I don't know what to say. Sure some things are getting worse, but proportionally the average quality of life has MASSIVELY increased in the last 100 years, and is still increasing especially for the poorest people in the world.

I think the main point I got from Factfullness was not that "the world is getting better stop being so pessimistic", but rather that we are biologically wired to seek bad news and we will automatically try to find the bad angle in everything. This is useful when you're living in a survival situation, not much so in modern society. If you zoom out a bit and look at history from a decade or even century perspective it is ludicrous to say that the world hasn't gotten better, or to say that the positive trend will somehow stop 2020.

The trend away from democracy is alarming yes, and we shouldn't ignore it, but there is no way of knowing if it will be a short blip in history (like the trend of Communism 50s-80s) or something more permanent.

On the coworker relationship question, why can't you just answer something like: "Anywhere from cordial professionalism to best friends who do everything together, it depends on who I 'click' with." I mean people are people, I'm happy spending free time with some coworkers, others I'm just ambivalent to, just like in all other parts of life.

This points out how bad that question really is, the interviewer wants you to mind-read how he/she sees wants the relationships at the company to be and answer accordingly.

> It ends exactly where you decide it does.

> Otherwise, you are simply doing an entrepreneur's job for an employee's salary...

Thank you... I'm beginning to realize this but it's still sort of a professional identity crisis for me. Of course employers want employees who think, and I'm happy to think in terms of revenue and profit, but at the end of the day it's not my responsibility.

> You are not paid to write code [...] The only thing that somebody cares about is how much does your software cost and how much revenue it generates.

I have a real trouble with this sentiment, and it is repeated often here on HackerNews due to this site's entrepreneurial focus.

As a developer and a professional, where does my responsibility end? I'm a developer, not a manger, and not a shareholder of the company.

Would you say it's a pilot's responsibility to point out and act in ways that reduces the cost of running the airline business or that increases its revenue? How about a surgeon or a medical doctor? At the end of the day most professionals work for a private company, a private company exists to generate profit.

Why must software developers have an entrepreneurial mindset while other professionals do not? Can someone help me understand?

> "Yes, it's just an API change, but it requires 50 new test cases and impacts 120 existing test cases",

"See, that's exactly why we shouldn't write any/so many tests!" - A product owner I know...

> I was referring to men coming up with the idea and colluding over a millennia.

How do you reconcile with the fact that there are hundreds of texts and stories that have selectively excluded by human hands to create what we today call the bible?

If my priest gives me a bible and tells me "This is the word of God", but admits that over the last 2000 years there have been several councils were certain texts and stories were added and removed, and that archaeologists have found previously unknown gospels not included in the bible, what am I supposed to think?

> The idea of an "Old Testament God" and "New Testament God" is rejected by all the Jews and Christians I know.

How many Jews and Christians do you know? How many theologians do you know?

I could just as easily state that it is abundantly clear that the Old Testament and the New Testament are written by completely different people at completely different points in time.

Are you saying that all acts of cruelty by God in the OT are acts of judgement? And what kind of judgement is that? The story about Sodom and Gomorrah basically tells us that:

A) Any kind of sin can be punishable by death. B) Collective punishment is OK, including innocent men, women and children.

Definitely agree, firing someone for performance reasons is so rare that unless the person is generally disliked, and generally thought to be really bad at his/her job morale will take a huge hit.

In many places the 'best sushi' is not even legal. For example, EU regulations state that fish to be consumed raw must have been deep frozen (-20 C or lower) for at least 24 hours prior to consumption, to kill any potential parasites.

This also means you can never eat 'fresh sushi'.

Yeah, it's almost as if the minicab drivers have neither the time (as in money to quit work for a year) or the skills to create something like Uber. I'm sure lots of them have had the idea, but an idea is worthless if you can't implement it.

It's frankly a bit concerning that Corbyn doesn't realise this.

Well it's branding, and I get the feeling branding is pretty important to the HN crowd.

There's seems to be some kind of American myth that "at will"-employment is for the benefit of the employee, or in the very least of equal benefit to both parties.

That may be true for educated middle to upper class professionals, without children or other dependants, but I have a hard time seeing how it benefits the average worker.

Whether it's ridiculous or not is a matter of perspective. In Europe the minimum is 1-3 months, though there's often a trial period where the obligated notice is 1 week or less.

In practice though the employee/employer are free to upon termination sign an agreement reducing the dismissal period to whatever they feel is appropriate. Few employers wants to keep an employee that's decided to quit longer than strictly necessary.

True, but regardless of whether you think that is a good or bad thing it's part of the value of a college degree, and should be included in your calculation when you decide if college is worth it.

I've seen the insecurity of some of my colleges without degrees, almost like they think college is a mystical place where deep and unique knowledge is shared. That insecurity can really cripple your career.

Why does he specifically say "non-trivial" defects? The probability of any defect surely increases with code size?

It all depends on what they asked for. Did they ask for an example of how to structure "real"-sized web-application? Because otherwise this could have been seen as a bit of overkill for something where perhaps a hundred lines of Javascript, one sql table (or some other storage) and two backend routes (post score, get scores) would have been enough.

Then hopefully you would state that explicitly before-hand no? This guess work from the interviewee's side is what makes many of these interview code problems so completely arbitrary.

How is 50k lines of build declarations even possible?

Agreed, and what exactly is the baggage traditionally associated with functions and scope that you avoid by using a function expression?

> Are there any other subtle hoisting consequences to consider?

I can't think of any, other than consequences from the hoisting such as making the order of the variable declarations important (whereas it's not important if they were function declarations).

> I admit I don't understand at all how a function declaration changes the behaviour of its free variables. What is there about a function declaration that provides more control over its dependencies on its enclosing environment?

You are correct, it doesn't. I realise now that in my head I was not strictly comparing function declarations to function expressions, but rather top-level function declarations (like in C) versus function expressions defined at some inner scope.

Using function declarations at any other scope than the top-level is something I would consider an anti-pattern (if I had to use that word), since it's very confusing to programmers from other C-like languages.

> With respect to accidental/unintended closures, can you elaborate on this? Perhaps provide an example showing why a function assigned as an expression creates an accidental closure but a function that is declared does not?

So, as I said above I was referring to function expressions versus top-level function declarations, which probably makes this question obsolete. I should perhaps have said unnecessary closures, since if you capture 10 variables but only use one then perhaps you should rethink your design. Closures are super useful but they tend be abused (yay access to everything!) which leads to bad design (low separation of concerns and overall spaghetti code).

I suspect from your questions you already know all of this. I should have been more clear that I was not talking about any semantic differences between function declarations and function expresses, since you are correct in that there are none, but rather the design choice of using a function expression (and thereby capturing the variables in scope) versus breaking it out as a top-level function declaration thus making it necessary to explicitly state all input as arguments.

I think I've been unclear. When I say function definition I'm referring to this:

    function foo() {
      console.log('bar');
    }

And when referring to a function expression I'm talking about this:

    var foo = function () {
      console.log('bar');
    };

The latter needs to be terminated with a semicolon to prevent ambiguity (in some situations), while the former does not. This for example is valid JavaScript:

    function foo() {
      console.log('bar');
    }foo=5

Yes, a function definition is hoisted too but its implementation is always hoisted together with its declaration, preventing some bugs caused by variable hoisting.

I made an example here: http://pastebin.com/2nS9EDPb

(Please correct me if I'm wrong, I wasn't aware for example that function declarations were treated as variables, redefinable etc)

Sure, but the solution should not be "semicolon everywhere" but rather "semicolon where necessary", where necessary also includes places that can produce ambiguities depending on the code directly following (or after minification). Omitting a semicolon after a function declaration will never produce ambiguous code.

What I'm still arguing for is that "enforcing semicolon habits" is not a compelling argument for using function expressions over function declarations. (Perhaps you're talking about semicolons in general, which is something I would rather not get into :)

Regarding function declarations, it considers function declarations to be an antipattern and advises you to instead use function expressions at all times (https://github.com/shichuan/javascript-patterns/blob/master/...).

I'm really skeptical about this. Using function expressions has some quite subtle consequences (hoisting, accidental/unintended closures) which you automatically avoid when using function declarations. Function declarations are also very useful since they allow you to use the function before it is defined (in the code), which mean you can read the code (and use the function name as an abstraction) without having to scroll past all function implementations.

To expand a bit on the accidental closures part, a variable bound by a closure is an implicit dependency of that function. By breaking function expressions out as function declarations you can be more explicit about what kind of input that piece of code needs from the outside. I just think overuse (nesting etc.) of closures can lead to some quite messy code, it gets harder to reason about when a variable was actually bound and to what.

I don't understand this attitude. There must be lots of great companies to work at where the interview process is a bit flawed and the questions a bit unrealistic. Why let that stop you? Why handicap yourself when you can just learn it?