code_sardaukar

From this and other accounts, it is clear that a lot of the low cost in China is due to that fact that transaction costs (the cost of writing contracts, lawyers, specifications) are reduced by replacing formal contracts by interpersonal relations[0]. So if someone screws you[1], it will hurt their relationship with you and their reputation.

Of course there are other considerations like cheap labour and the ability to rip-off Western IP (though I don't think those goods make it to the West). But these can't explain why China in particular is so dominant in manufacturing.

[0] I'm told that the term "guanxi" has two meanings. First as a generic term for "connection" or "relationship" and second as a proper noun for the way people indirectly bribe government officials. Here only the first meaning would apply since I'm talking about B2B relationships. And since it's a generic term, there is no reason to use the Chinese word.

[1] Or screws you more than is considered fair game.

"months" sounds reasonable actually. "decades" and I would definitely agree with you.

The problem with this sort of discussion is that everyone thinks they are worth more than the market will pay, and that the market is somehow broken.

People will tell you that believing that it's possible that interest in tech is correlated with gender. However I would point out "Gender Gaps in Performance: Evidence from Young Lawyers"[0] which gives evidence that a different field (law) is a meritocracy and women's relatively poor outcomes in terms of promotion, are caused by their relatively lower focus on their careers.

[0] www.econ.upf.edu/~rferrer/files/PAPER.pdf

I wonder why it is that your legalese is only applied to people who say that illegal immigration is a bad thing.

Lots of people openly say that we should tolerate illegal immigration either for economic or humanitarian reasons, and I've never seen such an argument applied to them.

In the non-Bayesian updating of progressives, if 100% of Nobel laureates are immigrants, this is evidence that diversity is good, but if 100% of Nobel laureates are born in the US, this is evidence of discrimination.

Just fyi, while I'm sure you didn't intend it, I find comments that start with "Uh..." to be rude.

Regarding asceticism in Christianity, I also find its extremes to be disturbing. All I can say is that Christian culture as I understand it, especially Western Christianity, places relatively little emphasis on asceticism. And all these acts happened a long time ago when people took religion more seriously. And if you compare these to Buddhism (say in China) at the same time I think you'll find them relatively tame.

The genetic explanation doesn't even require a correlation between the traits of people who pair up.

Suppose your grandparents genetic "quality" is statistically independent, so you have four quantities g1, g2, g3, g4. Your parents quality is approximately (g1 + g2) / 2 and (g3 + g4) / 2 and yours is (g1 + g2 + g3 + g4) / 4.

Now if we assume that income is a noisy measure of your "g" then it will follow that your income is correlated with your grandparents' even after accounting for your parents' income.

Fair enough, atheist is probably technically the wrong term but it's a convenient shorthand for not believing the tenets of any particular religion.

Awesome, but please put the original energy somewhere. It's not clear whether the final configuration actually has a lower or higher energy that the original image, which would be interesting to know.

As someone who grew up in a Christian culture that cherishes life, I find this sort of thing deeply disturbing. But I don't want to dismiss Buddhism. Even though I'm an atheist, I admire Buddhism's focus on compassion, and I think it has a beneficial effect on Buddhist cultures.

First up, it's very hard to judge someone's experience from their resume. E.g. they might have participated in a project that seemed very difficult, but maybe their own personal contribution to the project was a net negative.

I know this is not PC, but coding is not a craft where once you reach a certain level, the rest is polish and experience. Good programming requires a certain virtuosity that not all programmers have (not implying this is genetic, please don't assume I am). People who lack this may produce ok code 90% of the time, but will invariably reach a point where the problem is too hard for them, and they come up with a bad solution.

This applies to working at a big tech company, where all sorts of interesting problems crop up. At an ordinary company or startup, I accept that this might not be so important and maybe these companies are copying the tech company's interviewing style for no good reason. Again, this may not be PC, but people at big tech companies get paid more (even given the location) so I think it's fair to assume their skillset is rarer.

When I interview candidates, I try to mix hard challenges with general coding, design and communications skills. My problems don't usually have a trick that you need to see, and sometimes, like fizzbuzz, they intentionally don't have a clean solution. But my problems are algorithmic in nature. You can see there are some interesting data structures lurking in the background even if they aren't directly applicable.

My reasoning in using these questions is that if a person can't solve a difficult, messy, but well defined problem, then when they encounter such a problem they will be stuck. I know there is a kind of dogma on HN that says that complex problems tend to be a result of programmers not doing the straightforward thing, but my experience is that 10% of the time the straightforward solutions don't work and you need something complex. That is, the flipside of "don't write clever code" is "be clever enough to write the code that is needed". If this sounds arrogant, please bear in mind that it's not usually considered arrogant to say that social skills are important and vary across individuals, so why should coding ability be different?