iffybookmark

Isn't covid-19 the #1 cause of death in NYC right now? And not, like, starvation?

Saying the cure is worse than the disease shows a frightening lack of both empathy and objective reasoning. I don't want to construct a strawman, but I worry that what "reopen" people are really saying is "I don't care if X% of the US population dies - as long as I'm not one of them - if it means I can try to go back to normal."

And try is the key word there. I would argue the main thing keeping people at home is not stay-at-home orders, but fear. Correctly-calibrated, sensible fear of getting a disease that has better odds of killing you than lots of other sources of risk in modern life.

IIRC there's basically one payment processor, whose name I can't recall, that ~100% of NSFW sites use. And their fees are very high, given the risk of processing those payments.

Exactly. So, give breaks to companies that cannot pay dividends, because the ones that do are the ones who are obviously signaling that they are fine.

This isn't some slam against paying dividends, though. I do agree with you. I am fascinated at companies like Snapchat whose shares command no voting power and do not pay a dividend.

However, as far as signals go, "here, we are so well capitalized that we think you can invest this money better than we can" is pretty strongly saying your company is in good financial shape.

10-20% seems really low in my experience. Do you mainly hire out of the industry?

Hiring heavily from colleges results in 60%+ of applicants that somehow have a B.Sc. from a university that produces amazing applicants with great (3.5+) GPA's but stall at either fizzbuzz or (just in case they memorized fizzbuzz) i-can't-believe-it's-not-fizzbuzz.

Furthermore, some candidates (20ish percent?) can't even answer basic, non-trivia questions about their language they self-report to know best. e.g. Java programmers who either don't know or cannot articulate what the static keyword does.

I'm convinced there's a path through every university, no matter how good, where you can avoid all the good professors and only pick babysitter professors and squeak through your four years with a piece of paper and a well-tuned sensor for which profs actually grade homework instead of just giving 100's so people don't complain.

I'd be willing to bet that

{people who can look at a real world problem, choose an appropriate physics model, and apply the right equations, correctly}

and

{people who can look at a real world problem, choose an appropriate logical model, and apply the right language/frameworks/code, correctly}

are probably really quite similar sets.

I'll throw my voice in that "screen" 100% refers to GNU screen in my friend circle. Tmux and dtach still don't quite supplant the specific slot that screen has occupied for decades.

Weird to single out HFT's. Isn't everyone working from home right now?

Especially since, in times of market turmoil, HFT's are an important market participant. Someone needs to catch the knives.

Also they're probably having their most profitable periods since 2008, so I'd imagine there's a lot of incentive (for employees and owners) to keep trading whenever possible.

>Friends who had maxed out their investment in GPA [...] were in a relative bubble.

Yep 1000% agree

> Friends who had maxed out their investment in [...] personal projects were in a relative bubble.

-0% agree, I'm actually a bit baffled that you mention it in the same breath. I've found, in my own xp and in others', that personal projects on your own are almost the only way to learn how to be high-impact.

In many companies, they've already decided their db, their frameworks, etc. and you'll need a lot of political capital and technical trust to be able to start a real conversation about splitting the stack and so on. So, here, you'll learn about how to work on existing rails doing n+1 tasks and bugfixing.

In a personal project, you start with an empty dir and work from there. You end up knowing why you like pg over mysql. You know why it was worth it to use rails instead of rolling your own. etc etc.

I have some social friends who also do software who don't really have it as a hobby (just a job) and while that's totally fine, they're unable to answer questions like "what framework does your work use?" (answer I found later: Spring). To their credit, it's probably a good thing at some level that the company has managed to shield people from that much detail.

Obviously everyone's journey is different, but I've always found that individuals who can go "I want to build <thing>" and then google/IRC until it's built are generally pretty impactful people.