Test0129 · HackerTrans

Stay mad imo. Bicyclists should be licensed and insured just like cars. They pose a danger to everyone around them just like cars, and should have to be able to make anyone they harm whole. Anti-car rhetoric is absolute top tier nonsense. It's harder to get access to a 2000 pound vehicle than it is to get access to a projectile on two wheels that can easily flatten someone.

Test0129

4 年前議論

Test0129

4 年前議論

> Studies in Delaware and Idaho have shown significant decreases in crashes at stop-controlled intersections.

Seems like the introduction of the law got people to think about cyclists because lunatics will fly through stop signs and ignore yields. Now that they can do it legally, you have to be more mindful, leading to less accidents.

These laws are asinine. Cyclists are such a problem where I live. They believe they are entitled to the road like a 3000 pound car, they slow traffic down, they create jams at intersections, they don't pay attention and fly through cross walks, etc.

You should need to be licensed to use a bicycle. There are far too many stupid people. My favorite example of this from recent history was pulling out to take a right turn, stopping, and right as I'm rolling out to commence the turn a bicyclist FLIES past me such that 1" in any direction would've probably killed him.

Test0129

4 年前議論

> I think part of the problem for current graduate students (well, for the last generation or so) is that while the past idea / lore of graduate school modeled by mentors (professors, parents) was built on a growing post-war pyramid of faculty jobs and research opportunities, now it has become a saturated pyramid in many fields. So then students find themselves not competing easily for a growing number of jobs, but waiting to see which senior professor retires or dies and opens up a spot. Or else leave for industry. And woe to those who go into fields where there is not a lot of industry to exit to.

I was basically told I would not graduate my PhD program if I didn't do my dissertation in a machine learning application of my field of interest.

The intersection existed but after a year of trying to motivate myself I could not. I ended up quitting. It's more politics than it's worth and I was in competition with students from other countries who had infinitely more funding, infinitely more time, and infinitely more energy than me. I was doing night classes and spending every other waking hour I wasn't working pushing my research.

Test0129

4 年前議論

You missed the point of hiring PhDs. You don't usually need them unless you are on the literal bleeding edge of a very minute subfield-of-a-subfield.

You hire PhDs as a value signal. "We have 6 PhDs from ivies working on solving X, Y, and Z". It doesn't even matter what X, Y, and Z are. People will THROW, THROW money at you.

The only PhDs who, by my estimation, enjoy themselves are in their late 60s to mid 70s, have had tenure for 25+ years, and just do whatever they want in the fields they enjoy. It's equivalent to earning something like an Engineer in Research position. The utility you bring to industry as a PhD is almost nothing - except those 3 letters. Who would've thought 3 letters could net you so much damn money from stupid investors.

Test0129

4 年前議論

Similarly, the delusion of the "house poor" hoping for another 2008 is frankly hilarious.

The difference is, if you picked up a house at 2.7% you will be winning for a long time. There are fewer ARMs, which means a small more protracted "collapse". Housing supply is still non-existent and will be into the near future. Wages will need to keep pace with housing costs in order to provide anyone a chance to succeed. Even after a so-called "recession" in housing they'll still be too expensive. For example, if my house dropped 50% in value, it'd still be way over what I bought it for.

The only deluded people are the ones not holding property. Make no mistake, if you didn't buy/refinance in 2020 you lost out on a literal once in a lifetime opportunity to lock a massive short against the fed.

Test0129

4 年前議論

The worst offender when I was in school was a physics textbook for a 2 semester introductory physics series. The textbook was about 400-500 pages with an online code. The total cost was $380, and even in graduate school this physics textbook remained the most expensive textbook I was forced to purchase.

Of course, the other worst offender is schools that get their own copy and sell you a printed version (so you can't resell it after).

Entire business is corrupt all the way down. Piracy would be unnecessary if a single semester didn't require almost $1000 in books. Textbook trading was commonplace when I was in school. To the point the CS lab was a veritable copy-factory because one kid would get a textbook and the rest of us would use our monthly credits (something like 2000 pages/semester) to copy it.

Test0129

4 年前議論

> How do the people putting up the seizure notice not know who they work for? Does the US government contract this out?

Because they US Gov. troglodytes. These are people chasing after some nobodies harming the extortative textbook business instead of going after drug dealers or something. Assuming they even possess two fully functioning brain cells to rub together, the USG never sends it's best.

Test0129

4 年前議論

At least this somewhat makes sense with satellite.

I have a 1gbps down connection and 1 TB cap because my ISP has a monopoly. I pay an arm and leg for this connection. The nearest competitor is basically a town over.

Don't worry, I can pay an extra $150/mo for unlimited data on top of my already $300 connection. I'm not convinced networks should be public utilities but certainly ISPs should be pursued for de facto monopolies. These jerks even tanked my connection during COVID because of all the Netflix consuming the bandwidth at the trunk. Customers paying for 1 gbps down (< 1% of their customer base I'd imagine) should have priority access in times of increased usage. I shouldn't have to compete with a 20 mbps home connection for usage at the astronomical cost I pay for the privilege.

Test0129

4 年前議論

Dang dunno why I got downvoted. Guess people are upset at reality.

Test0129

4 年前議論

We don't actually know the situation. If he wants people to work 84 hour work weeks regularly - yeah that's a problem. I looked at it charitably. Twitter is in such bad shape the only choice is to burn out engineers in order to fix it. This points to terrible product management, which points to terrible engineering leadership, which points to a terrible C-suite. It sucks, but once you pass the point of no return you can't hire more people (they take months to ramp up), and you're gutting the low performers (they will slow you down), so unfortunately the work has to be foisted onto the rest. It's not a fun time, it will cause more people to quit, but it's also the only solution to fix a trainwreck if you notice the speeding freight train too late.

Test0129

4 年前議論

> Tech was a bastion of "treat your employees right, and they'll be productive".

I can't verify the veracity of this claim. Tech spans a wide spectrum of job conditions. I have worked in traditional suit and tie places, and show up with pizza stained sweat pants places.

Tech is a bastion of one thing in my opinion. It's a place where employees hold disproportionate power over the company. It's the one place where there is such a labor shortage, and enough smart people, that the companies will do what the employee wants in order to keep them happy. Make no mistake, no company tech or not wants to bend over backwards like tech companies have. Hence, all of the effort in outsourcing and getting code camps running.

Don't make the mistake of thinking tech is charitable. A lot of engineers I know are very soft because they think like this. Tech CEOs have a problem no other CEO has. A legion of smart, hard to replace, highly paid people that have enough power to demand more or less what they want.

The whining about Musk has to stop. He's being a dick about this because he has a personal vendetta against the old guard. When you look past the personal vendetta he is doing what anyone would do when a billion dollar turd is dropped on their desk. Dramatic, fast, often negatively viewed change.

Ask yourself, if Twitter was such an incredible company would the CEO have taken the offer? Probably not. The C-levels saw the ship sinking and rightfully jumped at the opportunity. Who is responsible for this lack of profitability? The old guard. So, task #1 is to get rid of them.

Test0129

4 年前議論

> The totality of the circumstances around the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 ought to give authorities probable cause to obtain additional information. While a laboratory accident is not malicious, accidents that result in the loss of human life may still be considered manslaughter. Manslaughter is a crime. There is probable cause to suspect a crime may have occurred in a laboratory accident leading to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, an accident that proceeded to kill 1 million Americans and over 18 million people worldwide in the COVID-19 pandemic. Additional injury exists in the persistent symptoms of “Long COVID” and the political, economic, educational, and other harms resulting from the pandemic.

This exemplifies the problem I've had with this whole thing. Followed by the deification of science, which is really the antithesis of science anyway.

There is an abundance of circumstances that point directly at a lab leak. During COVID the detractors of the zoonotic theory were canceled quickly and shamed publicly. Fast forward to today and we now have many researchers making the claim again. Yet, this time there is much less noise from the detractors. Recently, a new strain was synthesized here in the states which provides further evidence the technology is there and it can be done. An accident seems to be the most probable cause. Shit happens, the problem is this was a big, stinky one.

It is, at the very least, worth investigating. A lab leak is huge when it happens. A lab leak that leads to a global pandemic is possibly the worst case. We should close the lab if this the case and be very suspect of any "gain of function" research going forward. This article was well written I think.

However, my opinion is that this inquiry will never happen because of the consequences. If we were to prove, for example, that the Wuhan lab accidentally leaked the virus it would cause global economic chaos. In this case, perhaps it better people don't know. From a geopolitical standpoint that knowledge could very realistically start a war.

Test0129

4 年前議論

Vulture capitalism refers to a very specific practice. It's also known as LBO (leveraged buy out) or asset stripping. In particular, vulture capitalists prey on distressed firms in need of cash, engage in a takeover, and proceed to gut the company.

This is not the same as referring to all capitalists as vultures. Vulture capitalists are a very specific subset of people engaged in a very specific, usually highly dishonest, business. Whether or not capitalists are vultures in general is just like, your opinion, man.

Test0129

4 年前議論

RH was a joke from the start. To invoke a no true scotsman, I know literally zero actual traders using the platform. Value investors like Schwab for it's customer service. Sometimes they prefer other firms (Fidelity). Day traders, etc almost universally use Interactive Brokers. Having done some profitable trading in my day I can tell you that IB's platform is arguably the best if your capitalization is less than 500,000 (at these capitalizations you can often find more bespoke brokers with even better access than IB, especially in futures). Their "pro" tier allows direct exchange access, and their API is complete (though antiquated). I'm not sure if they still do it but I distinctly remember them offering a FIX API if you wanted as well. IB's pro features do take some money. You have to pay for exchange access, and you pay per leg. But, as the saying goes, if you aren't paying you are the product (pfof).

RH made it's money through pfof and capturing COVID relief checks.Their brilliant corner in the market was a frontend app so easy to use that you wouldn't even think about the money you're losing. Since RH's release, most brokers offer similar (if not equal) platform usability and RH's lunch has been completely eaten. I would be surprised if it survived a few more years before either going under or being cannibalized by actual brokers.

Test0129

4 年前議論

Twitter was also very bloated. Musk has an agenda, some of it is personal. I think from a business standpoint this was well overdue especially from some ex-twitter employees I've talked to.

It's also not the first time I have seen this type of layoff. I was a part of a few companies that got taken over by vulture capitalists and it's much the same. Everyone gets sorted into an arbitrary bucket based on metrics. Usually, these include commits, vacation taken, etc. Then the MBAs sort the list and fire the worst. Hostile takeovers are always, always bad for the employee. Twitter, however had other problems than a usual company. A dramatic lack of profitability, too many salaries to pay, etc. I'm not saying his methods are just but for Twitter to even have a chance at profit there needs to be some very, very dramatic changes.

If you were to believe the media Musk is literally destroying free speech (on a private platform?) and firing people for no reason. I doubt he would do this. He's a jerk, but he's not an idiot. It doesnt help twitter employees happen to be the most vocal, often whiniest, group of people so this is getting megaphoned to death in a way that wouldn't happen almost anywhere else.

Test0129

4 年前議論

That is a remarkably generous severance package. My COVID severance when my company's local office went under was 2 weeks pay for 8 years of service. Healthcare terminated at the end of the month and they were sure to lay me off in the middle of the last week of the month.

Well done stripe. Maybe others can follow your example.

Test0129

4 年前議論

> All of this together allowed me to build and sell already two startups. Develop and maintain easily many web sites and SaaS which creates me nice passive income

A successful entrepreneur, perhaps, but not necessarily a good programmer.

There's really nothing wrong with being dead average. The interview process is backwards in this industry anyway. No need to worry. It sounds like you're doing fine.

Test0129

4 年前議論

I think the worst one I've ever seen was a nurse I know was given a pen (of bic quality), a $10 giftcard to fast food, and a lanyard as a gift from the hospital during COVID. She was pulling double shifts and exposed to all sorts of hazards (the union didn't come to save them on PPE for a long time). This hospital, by the way, is insanely profitable.

I'm not sure how you could insult people more. Even no gift would be less insulting.

Test0129

4 年前議論

There is quite literally a difference between selling a cat to your friend and selling it to a business that makes money liquidating cats (this sentence is actually humorous if you dont know what cat is short for...).

I have no interest in stopping Joe from selling to Bob, or going on craigslist and selling his wares if he, for some reason, has figured out a way to manufacturer with rare earth metals in his garage. Though I think this is a bit of a stretch of the normal argument. First, because catalytic converters are exceedingly hard to create. Second, because the profit is not in arbitrage but rather theft. Making a catalytic converter is very expensive. There are only a dozen or so companies with the infrastructure to make them at a scale that is profitable. Hence, if we could magically wish away cat theft it would not be remotely profitable to do some kind of rare earth arbitrage by the books. So, ipso facto, it is a good place to enforce at the very least a minimum amount of KYC with associated punishments when third party sales to businesses who do this sort of thing is involved.

I understand the arguments from the other side are the same arguments made for the KYC surrounding the $10,000 withdrawal limit to "stop drug money". I disagree with that kind of KYC. When in 99% cases they are ill gotten gains there must be something done because the alternative is foisting the cost ($300-$XXXX dollars) onto the innocent and throwing your hands up. Worse yet, it's not a one time cost and these criminals, undeterred, will simply return to steal the new one as well. This is no way to treat law abiding citizens.

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