bearmf

A real estate market separated into 60% government-owned cheap housing and 40% privately owned expensive housing strangely reminds me of NYC with its rent control/stabilization policies. Most of the current problems will not go away with government owning buildings instead of landlords. If the prevailing rate is low enough, a black rental market will soon form for government-owned units in desirable locations.

What I agree with is that somebody must build new housing. If private developers cannot/would not do it, then its a market failure and government should step in.

Surely rich people in Manhattan never travel?

The irony is that it is not only impossible to crack, it is now impossible to play as well. Unplayable games are impossible to crack, but this does not make them any less absurd. DRM has come to its logical and absurd conclusion, it seems.

> If you have kids, your bosses will ask where they go to school and it will affect your promotion chances.

How can your kids' school affect promotion chances? I can understand buying expensive clothes, cleaning, expensive apartments etc. Although IMHO all this stuff does not really start to kick in before $150-200k.

What if it is a $1.5mil house?

I also do not buy the whole "shopping around" thing, even if it worked. The idea that patient should know almost nothing about costs is a right one. The current implementation of this idea suffers from various problems, but as more people get health insurance under Obamacare, things will get better. Ideally, under single payer system, patient gets no bills at all, because all of the providers are "in network", as there is only one network.

Not long ago there was an article here which reached an opposite conclusion, for hospital costs. It is just unwise not to have health insurance in this country. Hospitals can charge you arbitrary amounts. If you pay cash and have not agreed on everything in advance it is not a good deal. Paying cash probably makes sense for some routine procedures in case you have a high deductible health plan.

I don't know much about Solyndra. But you are right that people getting the money for research need to be honest and motivated. In my opinion, this applies to most people working in science. It is just that research is hard (and possibly getting even harder [1],[2]) and motivation alone is not enough. If you have a "serious problem" to solve, you will most probably need to throw tons of money and people at it.

[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2011/02/07/the-difficulty-...

[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/6694932/Have-we-discovere...

But you also get Sputnik, Gagarin, Apollo, Voyager. You get microprocessors and Internet. You get nuclear energy (though you will be right to mention industrial fusion reactors which are always 20 years or so away :))

> We are all very similar genetically and we all have very > similar with our potential for greatness.

Unfortunately, this is one of the biggest misconceptions in modern discourse. There is a whole "underground" (mostly online) current of thought called HBD (Human BioDiversity) which means to address this misconception. Google it, but with your attitude you will probably discard it right away.

It depends entirely on the person asking the question. Some people probably don't care, but there are some fans of the most efficient possible solution.

Napping on balconies is indeed popular. But few people would leave a stroller with a baby on the street in a Russian city.

'select the second highest number in this list' is actually O(n) and does not require sorting.

Yes, you need a little logic. But for those puzzles it is (arguably more) important to know some key facts about the world which form a basis for your reasoning. I don't know, maybe reasoning based on wrong facts will satisfy some interviewers. Say, I can assume that half the stars in the universe are visible from earth and that there is only one galaxy and reason from that. The basis is clearly false, but I will be able to show off my "logic".

The question is not hard if you are allowed to use extra memory: just tokenize into words, put them into array and reverse, then join them back into a new string.

It is harder to do it in place. I actually did not believe it was possible until looking up the answer on StackExchange. That solution involves a "trick" which one might not figure out under pressure.

I really don't understand why manhole covers or stars in the universe puzzles are considered "logic puzzles". Logic questions are not of the form "why?" and "how?". Their structure boils down to "is this statement true or not?"

Your argument seems to be that if someone is paying you for what you are doing then you are useful to that someone. Which is of course true. But then if you are really intent on figuring out what is going on, the next question is who is paying your employer and what is your employer actually doing to earn their money. Many people conveniently forget about this step.

Many of your points are spot on in that many of us had similar experiences. However, I would disagree that being able to program can be a disadvantage in any of good jobs you might be looking for. There is necessary communication between members of the team and there are times when writing/reading code results in much clearer and faster communication, even if you are discussing some statistical approach.

In general you are right about pigeonholing/specialization in large companies. But it usually happens after you are hired, not before. Right now, without industry experience your skillset is very broad and it is hard to pigeonhole you.

As for the interviews, if they are like an exam where you know questions in advance you certainly should prepare. Sadly, this is usually not the case. As you mentioned in your point (4), sometimes you have no idea what the role is about. And there is no way to know because your recruiter doesn't want to get specific or maybe has no idea herself.

Which brings me to an important point which you might be missing. If you are applying for jobs through websites or by any other well-publicized way, you will inevitably subjected to a vetting process. The interviewers do not know anything about you and are basically looking for reasons not to hire you. If you are very good technically, it increases your chances but it is no guarantee of passing. Good communication skills are just as valuable.

It is different when you know someone inside the company, say your friend recommends you. You will have more meaningful interviews from the start. Most startup/small company hiring is done this way.

That said, with your background you should have little problems finding a job, if current Big Data hype is to believe. But of course it depends on your school, where you are looking etc.

Well, they definitely had to have it checked by someone senior at Google. Usually they are very careful about disclosing what they do and employees have strict NDAs.

I work in finance. The vast majority of what quants do is meaningless work which is only (maybe) useful to their employer. Most of them, if you ask about usefulness of their work, will probably conjure some bs argument about "providing liquidity", "making markets efficient" or "controlling risk".

The reality is that people do it for the money and prefer not to think about deeper matters. Some of the work is also really interesting and cutting-edge. But if you start rationally thinking about your contribution to society, the only answer is that there is none. If you want to do something useful, you leave finance.

If you look at the data in article [0] carefully, it becomes clear that the problem in US is not movement in/out of the highest quintile, but movement in/out of the lowest quintile. Middle quintiles to highest quintile and vice versa mobility in US looks similar to other countries.

Btw, they do not have much data for US or UK, only around 2000 parent-offspring pairs. And the conclusion that UK is on the same mobility level as Nordic countries is highly doubtful. UK mobility level is usually considered to be about the same as US mobility level.

Why is it on first page? This is probably the dumbest post I've seen on HN.

Does it have Stalin, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, Eltsin, Putin dolls? :)

The page states explicitly that he is not really looking for a new job :)

200k would be reasonable for a senior guy in one of the best data science teams. Actually 106k seems low.

Does it only include H-1B wage data? What about PERM (green card labor certification) data?

Also, what years are included?

An interesting question is if Google itself would consider "google skills" an advantage!

No, it is because you consider him a jerk, a liar or incompetent. That really does not mean he/she is any of those. Especially considering your attitude, which comes across as dismissive and self-assured.

And what about "incompetent can't improve"? This is plainly wrong. We all were incompetent at some point.

Public education quality depends very heavily on demographics, doesn't it?

Correction: most recruiters are terrible at their job. It is much worse than any other industry except maybe real estate brokers in New York :)

In finance, it seems fake jobs are posted by every recruiting firm. And no, this is not the same as a company advertising positions all the time at their website. In the latter case the probability of hiring someone for the position is at least greater than zero.