groaner

Not surprising, because computing mean is O(n) and median is O(n log n).

Lack of resources or pure laziness doesn't make it the right measure to use though.

Interactive Brokers already offers this, so I'm wondering what the actual innovation is here.

> What I did do: learned basic Mandarin, established a relationship that has lasted 20+ years, read many non CS / non-technical books, focused on getting healthier and fitter.

Would imposing a structure and setting goals for your time off have helped or interfered with these (admittedly admirable) results?

Pretty much every dating app would be on this list if in-app purchases were taken into account.

Blaming disease spread on density is kind of a cop out after how we saw the world respond to crisis. Singapore, Taipei, Hong Kong, and most Chinese cities are super dense places that, for most of 2020, I would have preferred to be living in compared to the US.

They also don't care about security, until one day it bites them in the ass.

You've just described requirements that belong to a service. Congratulations, you made the right (obvious) decision.

I'm talking about writing entire services that are just wrappers around ffmpeg, pdf2html, parquet-tools, Olson tzdata, or a 10-parameter logistic regression. No stateful behavior, storage, or authoritative source of truth involved. The worst case I've seen was a service that just enumerates a bunch of values of constants (that actually never change).

There may have been some future-proofing in mind at the time, but more likely it was a solution in search of a problem.

It doesn't even take oodles of money from a SaaS platform to motivate turning a library into a service.

Even in in-house development, developers are often motivated to build services and have internal customers take dependencies on them so that they can expand influence and demonstrate ownership in a way that gets noticed by senior leadership and put them in line for promo. It also opens up the possibility for stakeholders to build their own little fiefdoms with access controls, intake processes, and a justifiable source of funding.

Can't do that with a library.

To the extent that the parents chose to raise their children in an environment that taught them advanced emotional manipulation skills at an early age, sure.

This is basically how I feel about dating.

I would much rather have 75% pay for 13 weeks of PTO. Highly unlikely anyone will ever offer that.

Could be a Perl programmer, in which case it doesn't matter at all.

Who wants to work with me on my next startup, which sets up an innocuous-looking Facebook profile for privacy-conscious individuals, including friendships with other perfectly normal people and records of totally commonplace, unobjectionable activities? We can make sure that you'll never be rejected by a landlord, AirBnB host, or insurance company because of your online presence.

All for a low, low price of $9.99/month!

> I know a guy, a sales guy, who "worked from home" for a large multinational while earning six figures. He spent most of his time doing home improvement projects. He replaced his roof (himself), he built and installed new kitchen cabinets, he remodeled the entire house and painted it all.

You seem surprisingly judgmental about this given how upset you were about others not recognizing the effort you put into the business in your garage.