wgerard

> Teens in subsaharan Africa can own stock, so can most Americans

is that true? I thought most states had age requirements for trading securities, usually the age of majority.

Unless you're not trying to say that "most american teens can own stock".

> is that they tend to still focus on the "trick", quiz or algorithms parts of engineering.

FWIW, this was exactly what we were against at Headlight, as is Woven and (presumably) Byteboard as well.

There are plenty of practical interview questions to ask candidates, but it requires a lot more thought and preparation than I think most companies want to do.

The reason (imo) that quiz/trick/etc. type questions are popular is that there's a clear "right answer" most of the time. No nuance required. Introducing nuance requires humans to reason about things, and that takes up time (and thus money).

So many feelings on this. My co-founder and I worked on this problem for awhile (https://www.headlightlabs.com) before pivoting to something else.

Truthfully, I came away a bit jaded about the whole culture around technical interviews and whether most companies actually have a genuine desire to change their interview process.

Still, we both really want to see something like this succeed. My current bet is still on https://www.woventeams.com/ but very interested to follow this as well.

I don't work at a cloud provider, but I think the reasoning is:

It's a common pattern in malicious actors to immediately spin up several droplets and immediately peg the CPU on each one.

There are, obviously, non-malicious actors who do the same, but it's a bit like wearing a balaclava in public: Likely to raise some suspicion just because it's associated with malicious actors.

I think that's exactly the controversy, no? It appears they removed the game from all regions despite only violating a trademark in China.

You can plan around it, but that doesn't make it any less stressful necessarily during an activity that's already of varying degrees of stressful (traveling).

If I lose all my clothes in my luggage that isn't really a huge deal (I can buy new clothes), but it certainly puts a major damper on the trip.

> But I'll just add another casual observation that people travel with way too much shit.

One thing I started doing after trips is doing a "post-mortem" of sorts, basically:

1) How much did I use this item I packed?

2) Would it have changed my trip significantly without this item?

If the answer is "rarely" and "not really", I don't pack it next time.

> I suppose that makes me an outlier, but the ~$25 is worth taking all the stress out of queueing at the gate and trying to get on as quickly as possible. Your time/value equation might be different.

I think the math just starts changing when you're not traveling by yourself. If it's even a small family of 3, traveling with checked luggage is suddenly $150 roundtrip. Sure, largely insignificant compared to the cost of the tickets themselves, but still enough to make you think twice about it.

Another interesting wrench I've noticed: People who've lost their checked bags at some point.

I know a few people who had their checked luggage lost by the airline, and the aftermath was so painful that they basically refuse to check luggage ever again.

I am curious whether the boarding process has gotten significantly longer over time, and whether that costs airlines more money than they receive in baggage fees. I'm sure the answer is "not by a longshot", but still curious nonetheless.

> These characters are tiny and cartoon like but the voices of them suffering in this made me feel so bad and similar to stuff happening the real world I thought we should take the mission out of the game - I think they toned it down a bit but it was in the final version.

I definitely see your point. Though, I also think that mission was extremely memorable and effective in illustrating Arthas's "win at all costs" mentality, probably in part because of how brutal and potentially similar to real events it was.

That mission was definitely the turning point where I (and likely many other players) realized "oh, maybe Arthas isn't really a good person" and the whole descent into madness made a lot more sense.

> An entire generation has been romanticized that if you "do what you love" you'll end up a billionaire.

She's 56, so... which generation is that?

Don't take this as a tacit defense of whichever son it was by any means, but: There are plenty of situations where the interaction between the government <-> constituents is very much like a business <-> customer relationship, and it's not totally insane to think that it could be a better/friendlier/more efficient one.

Example: Interactions with TSA, IRS, DMVs (state government obviously but a government nonetheless), etc.

I get what you're saying, but I think you also have to understand what Andrew Yang is implying (not particularly interested in looking up the quote from whichever son).

The places where you're promised total comp like that (e.g. FAANG) are not the places laying people off in this article.

> We've already had a look inside his head, because he joked with his friends about how naive the people giving their information to him were for trusting, and how they were dumb fucks that he looked forward to fucking in the ear.

You're reading a lot into a (admittedly stupid) quip/jab/whatever-you-want-to-call it by a 19 year old.

I don't even disagree with your fundamental assertion here, just that this is incredibly weak evidence.

> What the CN government is doing is far creepier. Individual personal entries.

Yes, thankfully there are no systems in place for the US government to verify/track someone's age (and thus infer their ability to bear children).

Here you go: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/cspan/childbearing/20120817_...

Took 5 seconds to find on google. Unless you're going to move the goalposts.

TLDR; First-class is disappearing in favor of business-class (which is good enough for many of the previous first-class fliers) or private flights (which are becoming more affordable).

> TBH, those vendors sound seriously sketchy absent some credible explanation for why they think they need to charge more for a wedding.

I mean, you can just ask why if you're curious. Most of them are sole proprietorships. It's not like you're dealing with a large corporation where pricing is set by a corporate office.

Re: bailing, honestly I think most of them just react negatively to being lied to because there's some element of a personal relationship involved in this kind of service. I'd similarly be pretty pissed if my boss lied to me intentionally about what I was working on.

> I think it's up to the customer to decide how the use the purchased product or service, since when do you owe an explanation to a vendor where or how their product will be used?

It goes both ways. The vendor can also decide they don't want to deal with a customer who's being intentionally dishonest with them.

It's quite simple for them to just refund your deposit/money and leave you without a florist a week before your wedding, especially since you didn't sign the type of two-way "binding" (I'm using that term loosely here) agreement that you do with a wedding.

I spoke to several vendors in the course of my research who handled situations like that in exactly that manner, for what it's worth. In one case the vendor arrived at the venue on the day-of, realized it was a wedding, and straight up just turned around and went home. Another basically required a "security deposit" that would be returned once the vendor confirmed the event wasn't actually a wedding.

Yeah, I think my point was more: If you're being price conscious and aren't willing to have a more non-traditional (e.g. no/minimal flowers) wedding in June, your best bet is to have your large traditional wedding in November.

Truthfully, the part the guests largely enjoy is the reception (which is often indoors anyway), so it's really not a bad idea at all.

I don't think the two industries are at all comparable.

People don't haggle on prices because largely in western culture we just assume the price is the price and we can either pay it or go somewhere else.

I imagine a fair amount of haggling goes on in cultures where that's a standard affair.

Also a very fair point.

I still don't think this follows.

You can go to a specialized cake vendor and still get a 2 9s cake - many people do, in fact, for special non-wedding events (for, say, a 60th birthday). That cake will still be significantly less expensive than if you tell the specialized cake vendor it's for a wedding.

Enterprise cake comes in many flavors :).

> The point is not perfection; the point is that a wedding is supposed to show affluence

I would argue strongly that these two things are highly related.

Nobody attaches a physical price tag to their cake at the wedding - it looks immaculate, so you just assume it probably cost a lot.

Also likely why people get upset when it's NOT immaculate - it looks cheaper.

Hmm, I don't feel like your conclusion follows from your premises.

> I don't know if I believe the price goes up that much because of the fear of [an overly zealous wedding party member]

> But for a wedding cake, people want 5 9's. They want enterprise Cake, that's always available and exactly as they expected.

I see those two things as related, I guess. Nobody knows the difference between 2 9's and 5 9's until the service goes down or something goes unexpectedly.

> If I was working with a vendor, a plain-old regular cake with 2 9's availability would be fine for me.

Unfortunately for the vendor, since you're not ever going to be a repeat customer they have no idea which type of customer you are and have to assume you want 5 9's even if you're saying otherwise - or that you want 5 9's for the 2 9's price. The opposite of a lemon market, I suppose (a peach market?).

Look at it from their perspective: The worst case scenario is they give you the 2 9's price but you expect the 5 9's and complain loudly when you don't get that.

Yeah, to me this is the biggest pro-tip if you want to save a ton of money but still want a big traditional wedding: Get married in the winter.

That can be a really dangerous game to play, fwiw. If a vendor figures out you're lying to them ("gee, I wonder why this birthday party wants boutonnieres and corsages") they can (and probably will) just bail on you and leave you scrambling.

You usually sign pretty tight contracts/agreements for a wedding, less-so for a birthday party.

I spent some time researching this mostly because I was curious, but basically the answer to "why are weddings so expensive" and also "why is it so hard to disrupt the wedding industry" are largely the same in my opinion:

Because people have extremely high expectations for the major expenses of a wedding (venue, flowers, band, etc.).

The joke (and I even see it here) is that you can go to a baker and say "I want a cake" and they'll say "$20" but if you say "it's for a wedding" the price becomes $100. Why? Because if one iota of that cake is decorated incorrectly, the baker will hear hell about it - maybe not from your wedding party, but for every reasonable wedding party there are 99 expecting perfection.

So, it's not a huge surprise to me that wedding vendors have been hard to disrupt - it seems logical to assume that mass market usually comes with a reduction in quality compared to bespoke (or at least a bespoke-like experience), and people mostly refuse that and are willing to pay a huge premium for weddings (begrudgingly, admittedly).

Eh, while that's theoretically true, nobody's gonna invest the kind of resources you're talking about to catch someone accused of e.g. petty larceny.

Though I get your point is more about crimes that would, well, be worth trying to disappear over, still worth pointing out that you can effectively "disappear" across state/country lines depending on the severity of your crime.