safog

Have to disagree almost entirely.

Any big tech co worth its salt acknowledges the outsized impact a single engineer can make and rewards them appropriately. The important thing here is defining "impact" and "influence". As a standard L4 / SDE-2 engineer, you can have enough impact to make a company like Amazon several 10s of millions of dollars year in and year out. Sure you can't change the strategy of a trillion dollar company, but very few people can claim to have such an outsized impact and still complain about it. It might be adding some prime badges here and some ads there, or improving a recommendations algorithm by 1% but given the scale at which they operate, a 0.25% win in conversion rate because of an idea you've had / executed is enough to drive 10s of millions of dollars in top-line revenue. In terms of technical impact, L4s generally have a fair share of interesting problems to work on - reducing latencies, saving fleet costs, solving recurring bugs are all well rewarded.

- As a Sr SWE (~5-6 years of experience) - you're expected to have an influence on the direction of an entire team. You have input into setting OKRs and idea generation is expected for this level (especially at Amazon, not as much at G from what I've seen).

- As a Principal Engineer - your influence has to stretch across an entire org.

You can vaguely say "oh but I don't care about making my employer gobs of money or solving somewhat interesting problems" but then you'd have to define impact in engineering terms.

$CRSR has been killing it this year as well.

It's been a pretty rough year for anyone trying to buy any sort of PC part this year (CPUs, GPUs even PSUs). Had to go stand in line to get one of the 3060 Tis like it was an Apple launch or something.

My other problem with N95 fitting argument (as I've seen it made during the early days of the pandemic) is that there is a level that is "good enough" for most people.

Yes, if you want absolute certainty in a highly infectious environment like the hospital, when you're doing bronchoscopies or taking care of COVID patients, you'd want to get the fit absolutely perfect (especially if it takes key resources like Nurses / docs out of commission for several weeks).

But if you're just worried about everyday scenarios like sharing an elevator in my apartment building or going to a grocery store where people still seem to turn up with out masks (or worse, pretend bandanas are masks) or get on public transit, then getting some protection is good enough.

Everyone's (EU, India etc.) super impressed by how China was able to homegrow a couple of tech giants and wants in on the action. This is more about having EU be competitive in the tech space than it is about really protecting the interests of ordinary Europeans.

They're well within their rights to do it of course, that's how trade works, but I expect the US to defend American companies from unfair sanctions like this one.

I'm pretty worried about this as well - esp. about heatwaves, but I don't think that would result in nuclear war in our lifetimes. Unless China messes around with rivers that originate in Tibet that is.

Possibly my biggest worry is water - providing water for 1bn+ people (and agriculture, and industries) is going to get harder and harder. I'm a techno optimist, so I'm hoping some variant of desalination tech will pull through if things get really bad.

The other big worry as you say is the heat waves. If we do get emissions under control, I think we'll also end up doing some form of carbon scrubbing and don't just sit around in a 2C warmer world. None of our current climate engineering approaches are enough to arrest global warming by themselves but I'm hoping we can eventually control the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

I think China themselves have targets to cut emissions and transition to clean energy [1]. They've been leading the charge on all clean energy tech so far.

It looked like some of the dirtier industries are being moved on from China to SE Asia (Vietnam etc.) but there's a general push across the world to transition to clean energy.

I'm pretty confident we'll get out of the doom and gloom existential threat to humanity scenarios, but still think large portions of the world's populations will be impacted by climate change.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/27/china-ca....

I wonder if there's ever a successful company that upsets the status-quo that does not have people vehemently against them.

It's also kind of strange for me to see this level of conviction against a company that rents out rooms while barely commenting on others that are involved in so much worse ranging from human trafficking and modern slavery to global warming, corruption and extreme waste.

Your employer isn't forcing you to do 70hr weeks, plenty of people put in their 40hrs and go home and do just fine if that's what you wish.

The people who work 70hrs a week are people who are ambitious and want to get ahead in their careers - this isn't limited to immigrants in any way, plenty of Americans do this as well and you see this in other high paying fields - Law, Finance, Consulting, Medicine - for some reason programmers are the ones that complain despite being paid equally well.

You really believe Google and Facebook are hiring SWEs and paying them 1/2 of what they pay Americans? Yes contractors are a thing, but the impact is being way overstated.

This is true, but this is literally right now under exceptional circumstances (hiring freezes, reduced head counts etc. while COVID progresses). The last time this was true was after '08 - '10 or so.

I don't think grandparent comment is talking about the situation now, it was a more general comment about H1Bs under normal circumstances being forced to work long hours by employers under threat of job loss.

This is just blaming immigrants for their work ethic. You can't keep up with people that work harder than you, don't disguise it as "un-due power employer has over employee".

The SWE market (where most H1s are employed) is so competitive that shmucks who run through 3 month bootcamps get 100k+ offers.

The threat of being fired is not as effective as you think it is.

> All those consulting firms like Tata Consulting Services are gaming the H1B process, middle manning the employees, and in result Facebook, Home Depot, and others hire them for 1/3 or 1/2 less.

This tells me you have no clue what you're talking about

Not really, they wanted 3000 positions, they only found 2000 qualified Americans, so they hired the additional 1000 on a H1b.

Mass generic recruiting doesn't mean that the jobs being filled aren't highly specialized. They're not hiring cafeteria workers on a H1b.

SWE is a specialization and job descriptions typically ask for things like experience dealing with high QPS distributed systems which is a very specific skillset.

I don't know what you mean but to add additional context, the PERM process takes ~1 year and the employee is free to leave before / during / after the process. It is not exceptionally hard as an employee on a H1 to have an employer sponsor PERM for you, most (90+%?) employers do it, so it's not an added draw towards Facebook if they do sponsor the PERM / GC.

If they leave after the PERM + I-140 have been approved, companies have a limited period of time to revoke the I-140 but this is extremely rare and won't happen unless the employee has really burned their bridges. Six months (afaik) after the I-140 has been approved, the company can no longer do anything about it, the employee can leave without any immigration related ramifications.

It's a good time to write a crypto whitepaper and put up a fancy website. It's not alt-season yet .. when it starts is when you see the real shitcoin proliferation. Wouldn't be surprised if the number is in the 1000s.

I think BCH is a reasonable idea, block size is a problem with BTC and increasing it is fine even if it makes it less likely that normal users will run full nodes.

The scumminess of it comes from people like Roger Ver who peddle it as the "true" BTC. e.g., bitcoin.com is owned by the BCH folks and they have several intentionally misleading things there that try to re-brand BCH as BTC and BTC as BTC legacy or whatever.

Hey - this looks great. Couple of questions:

- Does re-balancing create a taxable event? If so, given a bunch of these cryptos trade in BTC pairs, do you generate all the documents necessary to file taxes?

- What do you feel about the top 10 currencies changing so rapidly over time? I think every month (or maybe two) the top 10 list significantly changes. Doesn't that accumulate a lot of trading activity and fees? Given the volatility, is there any point to holding the top 10 instead of just holding solid / consistent cryptos like BTC and ETH?

"Your margin is my opportunity."

- Jeff Bezos

Any sources for this? I've been trying to read up to understand how / when Binance decides to print USDT and what they do with it once it's on their exchange.

e.g., https://twitter.com/whale_alert/status/1333809716301094912

A govt ban on exchanges would do it as well, but the US response thankfully has been pretty moderate.

Tell that to the Iranians or to the people in Venezuela. Countries can be mis managed, currencies can be mis managed, people can be targeted (financial sanctions), traditional financial services are just not available in a lot of places.

To top it off, It's Gold vs BTC for store of value and Gold has many, many downsides as well that we just chose to ignore because it's a shiny metal and has been in use longer.

Used to be the case in 2017, but no longer true. You're more than welcome to get burned if you short into a hyped bull market.

Yes, free money inflates risky assets, but it's also just supply and demand. Mining rewards got halved, so miners can't sell as many BTC as used to do after mining a block, so the supply of BTC just went down significantly.

The more macro stuff like worries about inflation due to the Fed printing $$$, easy money (0% interest rates), and yes, some FOMO speculation is increasing demand.

As far as I'm concerned this is working as intended. This is not the first boom / bust and this won't be the last.

That link out to the China drone swarm video is pretty crazy. I hope we do live in boring times and don't have to deal with drone warfare wherever we live.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/37062/china-conducts-t...

Drones in the recent war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Some of the same Chinese suicide drones being used. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Nagorno-Karabakh_war

Slaughterbots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA

I've worked in the space for a few years and I'd discourage anyone from trying to build a career as a software dev in the Healthcare IT / EMR space. It's extremely sales driven (devs aren't valued at all), code quality is terrible and the systems you write are mostly for the benefit of insurance companies / compliance than doctors or patients.

I think there was a YC funded iPad EMR startup that tried to be cool / hip / provider first until they got smacked in the face by reality.

Hey - this is pretty amazing. I have learned a lot about AOE from watching L_clan (mostly L_Clan_Chris but others as well!) replays back in 2004-2008 when I was playing a lot of Age. Never had Zone access, so we lived in a little bubble in our university of LAN AoE players with outside ideas, build orders etc. coming from watching pro replays.

No twitch obviously and very few blogs going around for strategy as well. It's amazing to see how far gaming has come in 15 years.

You can usually tell from skimming the blog post / looking back at the author's history of posts - it's hard to put it into words.

I suspect quality means different things to different people and even changes based on context for the same person.

For instance, a blog describing some arcane linux command to run to fix the issue you're having does not need to be the same level of quality as something you're reading to learn + get in depth info about a topic you know at a very shallow level.

Tried a bunch of Indian (and not even Bollywood) songs, worked just fine. Seems to use YT / Google Music content as a reference.