chadash

But chargebacks have nothing to do with return policies [1]. In theory, when you issue a chargeback you are basically saying "I didn't authorize this purchase". How do you have a general policy that says "you won't get charged for fraudulent charges, unless those fraudulent charges are porn"?

[1] If I buy a sandwich with my credit card, I can't then return it if I decide I'm not hungry 15 minutes later. But I can dispute the charge (dishonestly) and say that I never bought a sandwich in the first place.

I'm not in any way saying insulin prices aren't an issue, but at the same time, I don't think misleading headlines are helpful either.

This smelled fishy to me so I looked a little further into the numbers. The page linking to the study says that it involved 1,000 insured participants and 1,000 uninsured. So right off the bat, unless exactly 50% of the population is insured/uninsured, you can't really extrapolate exact numbers from this survey, unless they gave you results broken down by insurance status.

According to https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/data/statistics-report/diagnose..., about 46% of diagnosed diabetes cases are in people >65, meaning covered by medicare. I'd assume that at least a good chunk of people <65 have insurance, meaning this survey is completely unrepresentative from the start.

Don't take any of this to mean that I don't think the price of insulin is too high. It certainly is. But this survey is misleading at best.

I see this claim thrown around frequently as if finding great managers or building a great management culture is an easy thing to do. A great manager in engineering needs to be good at engineering and good at management. It's hard enough to hire for one or the other, let alone both.

Smoking marijuana and big gulps are very different from paper straws. Rules around smoking and soda sizes are the government legislating freedoms. I personally don't mind regulations here, but I agree it's taking away your liberty to some extent. Paper straws are mandated for a completely different reason: because they impose an externality that the user doesn't adequately pay for. Philosophically these bans are for the same reason we don't allow you to leave garbage on a public bench or dump toxic waste in a river. Again, you can debate the merits of single-use plastic legislation, but I wouldn't lump it together with smoking and soda bans at all.

The evidence that the Moderna vaccine lowers the risk of death due to COVID is conclusive in the sense that a controlled, double blind study was performed and we have determined with some degree of certainty (>99.9%) that the vaccine is effective. But it's relatively easy to design an experiment.

How would you even go about designing an experiment for organic food. Giving a vaccine is binary... it was given on two occasions or it wasn't. With organic food, if there are benefits to it, they are most likely over a much longer term. So you'd need to police a participant's eating habits for years or maybe even decades to test your hypothesis. It's not a practical experiment to perform. At best we can say "there's no scientific evidence that organic food is better for you than non-organic", but that's not the same as saying "we have concluded with 99.9% certainty that organic food is no better for you than non-organic food".

Certain things just can't be tested effectively, especially things as complicated as diet. This is why dietary recommendations change so frequently. Still, not everything requires conclusive science. There's never been a controlled experiment showing that parachutes save skydivers' lives. But sometimes common sense trumps the need for scientific inquiry.

EDIT: Please don't read this as anti-science. On the contrary, science is great for answering certain questions, but has limitations for other questions.

Analogies aside, hashmaps (in one implementation or another), arrays, vectors/lists, strings and arguably sets are very very common data structures in most modern languages. I don’t expect someone to be able to build a hashmap from scratch but I do expect an experienced engineer to have some basic idea of the pieces that go into building it as well as it’s properties (not necessarily ordered, O(1)ish sets/gets, collisions, etc). Knowing this kind of thing helps you understand when to use an object in JavaScript vs a map. Or how dictionaries differ between python 2 and 3. If you understand the underlying data structure, then you know what questions to ask.

* in python 2, a dictionary’s keys are not guaranteed to have consistent order. In more recent versions of python 3, they ARE guaranteed to have consistent ordering. This has ramifications for the code you write, and it’s especially confusing if you don’t understand hashmaps because 99% of the time, the order will be maintained in python 2 even though it isn’t guaranteed. But relying on things that are true most of the time is a very bad way to write production code :)

Because a hash map is:

1) a pretty basic concept in data structures

2) Variations on hash maps are used all the time in the real world. If you use objects in javascript, dictionaries in python, or maps in C++, then you are using things that essentially implement hash maps.

Point number 1 is like if I went to an orthopedic surgeon and they couldn't tell me what the liver does. You can say "well the liver has nothing to do with my finger that got smashed in a car crash, so what do I care." Or you can say, "that seems like a red flag. Maybe I'd be safer choosing a different doctor."

* Note: I have no idea how often the liver comes up in orthopedic finger surgery and for all I know it's a lot. But I think you get the point.

If you can point me to extensive open-source experience on projects that roughly approximate professional coding, then fine, I'd be happy to walk through your code with you instead of doing an algorithmic problem. The issue is that that's a minority of developers... most people don't have the time or desire to do extensive open-source work outside of work hours and I don't blame them for it [2]! But given that resumes are unreliable, I need to test you somehow.

[1] No, I don't ever have to reverse strings at work. But I do have to write efficient code. And if you can't conceptualize how to reverse a string then you probably won't stand a chance at more difficult algorithmic issues I often come across.

[2] I don't recall who it was, but I once heard a very well-regarded chef say that he's tired after work and so he doesn't like to cook much at home. I have zero problem with a developer doing the same with coding! Go home and work on a hobby, spend time with your family, or smoke pot and watch netflix... I care about what you are capable of at work, not what you do with your free time.

So would Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and Sergey Brin not count as bosses, visionaries or founders?

There's a whole lot of bloat in our college experience. I personally loved all the stuff that was included with my tuition. But you know what I don't love? That college is our society's key to upward mobility, but instead it creates crushing debt for many, because it includes lots of unnecessary stuff.

These numbers are a bit high, but definitely in the ballpark [1]. BUT, I think that framing it as total interest + principal is also misleading. Let's say you locked in an interest rate of 2.75% in 2020-21. Your total interest payments on a 300k house (with 20% down) would be $112k, so total P&I would be $412k. Someone might look at this simplistically and think, wow, I'm overpaying by 37% if I take out a mortgage. But at a 2.75% rate, anyone who is financially savvy is going to recognize that as a steal. It's almost like free money, because it's being paid off over 30 years. Your $1500 monthly payment might seem like a lot now, but even with relatively low inflation, your payment in years 15-30 are going to seem like a bargain when they come around. But it's hard for many people to think in those terms.

[1] Mortgage rates right now are around 4.75% on a 30 year. Assuming 20% down on a 300k house (60k), you would take out a loan for $240k, and over 30 years you would pay $210k in interest, or a total of 510k in principal + interest. Your monthly P&I would be about $1,530.

1) Good luck suing poor individuals to get your money back 2) It's hard to fathom what kind of asshole you'd have to be to walk into an ER, record a video of you offering people money to help pay their hospital bill and then demand that money back off-camera.

- In 2000, people were talking about the future being about outsourcing engineering work to lower cost-of-living countries. To some extent that's happened, but companies also see tech as integral to their survival and have realized that their core engineering teams need to be in the same time-zone. - In 2000, tech was for tech companies. Now, every large bank has a huge technology team. Every company in logistics has a large tech team. Every retailer needs good engineers. In 2000, there were a few niche websites online. Now, a strong online presence is essential even for stores like Home Depot.

There's no question that the market was overheated, but it's too early to call doom here. The NASDAQ is still up about 50% from where it was 3 years ago, before COVID, even after the recent drop. That's a 14% yearly average return... still a crazy amount. At it's peak, it was up over 100% from May 24, 2019... a level that just wasn't sustainable.

Yes, I can look into other options, but this is targeting people like me, who are already in the logitech ecosystem and are happy there. I can try my luck with another brand that I may or may not like more, or I can go with this and hope that it's of similar quality to other devices in the MX sub-brand.

Eh, I've seen people like this and maybe they get paid well, but the company also can't afford to promote them or move them around. One person I know was an expert in Fortran and worked at a large Wall Street bank doing processing of very large transactions (systems that process trillions of dollars yearly). Technically, there were "backups" who could do parts of his role, but realistically he was the only person who really understood the whole system. He would threaten to leave every so often and they'd bump his pay to an absurd level that made it hard to leave. But there was also no path the promotion for him and he got bored. At a certain point, he ended up leaving anyway.

His view was that revenue can soar 100%, 200%, 1,000%, 10,000% or however high. Cost savings, on the other hand, can only go down to a maximum of 100% (but obviously much lower in practice). So in his mind, a business-wide focus on growing revenue is always better than a focus on cutting costs. If you are in the second boat, it means the company is struggling and maybe it's time to get out.

Obviously, a rational CEO would see $1m cost savings the same as a $1m gain in profits, but CEO's are not rational beings (nor is any human) and understanding that they usually prefer higher revenue to lower costs is fundamental to understanding how they value different parts of the company. It's not fair, it's just truth (at least in many companies).

There's something refreshing about some hedge funds where portfolio managers are rewarded exclusively on their own performance. For example, if the fund loses money, but you continue to bring in great revenue, you can bet that any sane hedge fund will pay you a lot to stay around, regardless of how they are doing overall. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), profit in most companies isn't directly attributable in the way it is at hedge funds. But the same truth holds. If you are bringing in good profit, it's hard to get rid of you (or not pay you well) regardless of how the company is doing overall. Try to be in one of those profit centers, if you can.