Without going into too much detail, I once encountered an Experian identity verification question on behalf of someone else. This person was an Uber driver making ~$20,000 per year.
The question was: "According to our records, you purchased or leased one of the following vehicles in the previous year. Which vehicle do you currently own?"
A. Maserati Granturismo
B. Ferrari 458 Italia
C. Aston Martin Lagonda
D. Honda Accord
So... 2 Italian supercars, another supercar with only 200 ever produced, or a mass market sedan.
Bonus - of the 4 questions, you only needed to answer 1 correctly to pass the check.
I think you nailed it. If the question were posed as "Two envelopes with $A and $(A+1)" then there would be no talk of ratios and no "paradox" would ever emerge.
The helicopter is already outside its original mission parameters. It was only supposed to make 5 flights - probably the engineering team didn't want to invest money or weight or complexity in something they knew wouldn't be an issue during their originally scheduled timeframe.
I think that's just Andy Weir at this point. I enjoyed The Martian, but Artemis was horrible. Characters were indistinguishable from one another, they were all just Andy trying to emulate the success of the cocky sarcastic hero from The Martian. After reading that I don't think I need to read any more of his work.
There's a song by one of my favorite artists, Peter Mulvey, which touches on this point. It's more of a spoken word poem, titled "Vlad the Astrophysicist". In the song, Peter asks Vlad if there are aliens, and if there are, why haven't they contacted us? Vlad answers basically that there almost certainly are aliens, but civilizations don't last for long enough compared to the size of the universe.
> "You see?" He said, "They never meet each other. Time is too long, space is too large.
I mean sure, maybe at one time, right next to each other at the same time, fss, fss -
Two civilizations sprang up and they had war, better yet they had peace,
They had arts exchanges, they had an intergalactic library... but they are all dead now, too.
In all likelihood, we are alone, and by the time the next civilization arises,
We'll have been gone for a long, long time."
I once worked at a tiny startup where we were trying to sell a dataset to GS. Before we could even send a sample, they sent over some boilerplate forms for us to sign. I remember two distinct stipulations - anything we sent them was immediately and forever their property, AND they had the right to drug test any of our employees. We ended up not signing so there was no deal. My boss said it was their way of getting rid of us.
Anecdotally I have a French acquaintance who dreads his trips back home because the food is so terrible. Paris might be famous for fine dining at the extreme top end, but that doesn't necessarily make for the best eating.
There's a climate science "gotcha" which is that the Earth's average temperature has been much higher in the past than it is now. No one disputes this. The problem is not so much the absolute level as the rate of change, which gives less time for everything to adapt.
For some reason this criticism reminded me of one of my favorite Heinlein quotes. I set out to google it so that I could reproduce it correctly. I searched for "Heinlein a man should be able to" and was pleasantly surprised to learn that the quote actually begins "a human being should be able to":
> A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects
My company takes a reasonable approach to this I think. The hackathon itself takes place Thursday and Friday, so it happens on work days. But the judging takes place Monday, so there's an obvious opportunity to continue to work over the weekend. No one has ever mentioned it though.
Also the whole C-suite takes part in the judging so it really is an opportunity to show off your work.
I think if I'd instead written "This is what people mean when they say 'Crime is a social construct'" it wouldn't have been downvoted from the outset. "X is a social construct" is heavily associated with a certain viewpoint that HN tends to reject. But I quite like the symbolism of being downvoted "superficially" until I edited to explain in more detail.
edit: A poor person who steals is charged. A rich person who steals behind the facade of a company is not. We call the poor person a criminal. It's entirely divorced from an actual moral framework, but simply constructed. I was agreeing with the commenter I replied to.
Agree that ugly is subjective. But adjusting spaces when things get refactored is bad, not because it's tedious but because it pollutes history. Changing whitespace on surrounding lines to my change makes eg `git blame` less informative. It's the same reason I believe in trailing commas.
You know the adage usually applied to Facebook, "If you're not paying for anything, you aren't the customer, you're the product" ? . Daytraders and WSBers and other small fish like you and me aren't Robinhood's customers. Robinhood's customers are Citadel and companies like them who pay Robinhood for order flow from the uninformed masses. Keeping that in mind, here is the simple answer to your question: