everdev

> companies like Google and Facebook can afford to miss out on those devs. But smaller companies should be looking for diamonds in the rough

I'd say it's the opposite. Big companies can afford to take a shot on someone and miss without materially impacting the business.

If I'm hiring developer #2 at my 5 person startup, I want someone confident and cool under pressure who has done something similar to what I'm building so many times in real life that the coding test is a cake walk.

A dev hire on a small engineering team (< 5 people) can make or break the business. I'm trying to de-risk that hire as much as possible. I want to design a test that 90% of people will fail so I can find that top 10% developer.

Once I get to 15-20+ devs, I'm much more likely to relax my criteria and look for a diamond in the rough.

This still falls into the "country X doesn't do anything" trap.

If France imposes a carbon duty but Britain doesn't, British companies will have access to cheaper goods. British citizens will have greater purchasing power and British companies will have an economic advantage.

France might say, "Britain doesn't do anything about climate change" as they're supporting the carbon emissions in other countries by importing their goods.

This would still only work if enough countries banded together to enforce it that it became too difficult to grow an international company without access to carbon duty countries.

Sorry for any confusion, but there absolutely should be serious compensation to the victims. The question is only how much. Some might consider $1B an insult to the value of a human life.

Since it's impossible to compensate someone fairly when looking at it from the value of a human life, I'm wondering if there isn't another way to calculate these settlements where the end goal is still the same: 1) provide a generous payment to the victims and 2) create a financial deterrent string enough for the offending company to stop and repair their actions and prevent any other companies from thinking of doing the same thing.

For #1, $10M, $100M, $1B, $10B, $100B, etc. are never enough for anyone that enjoys their life and their health. I just think it's worth considering how quickly we could create 2,000 lawsuit billionaires if the formula is $1B per terminal illness. Maybe that's a good thing for the 1% to be comprised of the descendants of victims who might spend their money in a conscious way, but I think $1B is such a rare, difficult thing to achieve and creates tremendous power that it's worth thinking about. Because why not give them $5B or $100B or make them the richest individuals on the planet? It still wouldn't be a fair deal for getting cancer.

For #2, I'm simply suggesting that we should consider paying some portion of the penalty to a hospital, charity, competitor, etc.

If you'd rather the $2B goes to the victim and another $2B goes to cancer research, ok. Or $2B to the victims and $2B to a competitor that could have sold more product had they not been undercut by cheap, cancer-causing products, that's fine too.

I just think society as a whole would benefit if we put some of the money into repairing the situation rather than only compensating the victim.

Unfortunately, equating a human life to dollars is always insulting. To that individual, their life could be worth an infinite amount and more than all the money in the world.

So, it's always a messy business trying to compensate someone for their health.

Yeah, but if the primary objective is working, it might be worth optimizing the secondary objective as well.

The other thing to consider is there are a reported ~2,200 billionaires in the world (https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/07/forbes-there-are-a-record-22...)

In the process of creating damages that dissuade companies from damaging behavior, we're also creating people with immense power (if they ever collect).

I could see a $2B amount making sense if the couple controlled a multi million dollar company that failed because they fell ill from cancer.

But otherwise, wouldn't it make sense to pay the victims some multiple of their average annual income for life plus health care costs and send the rest to a charity or hospital?

That would still generate a $2B verdict as a deterrent, but would also limit people from obtaining massive wealth without creating value.

> it arguably makes the general job market less efficient

I didn't understand this until I started my own business. I was desperately trying to find a job during the '08 crash to get health insurance for my family but was unable to find one.

As a last resort I started my own consultancy which turned out to be a fantastic opportunity.

Self paying for health care was a massive barrier to starting my own business.

Once I hired people health care benefits were frequently top of their list in interview questions.

Same. Not everything fits into a single category. Is dried fruit "fruit" or "snacks"?

Also, I don't find the bubbles easy to scan or read.

If I was going to redesign the receipt, it would have everything I bought in descending order by price. The biggest pain point is how did my bill get so high? Your high value items will explain that much faster than these arbitrary categories.

[Item 1]: $56.78

[Item 2]: $28.48

[Item 3]: $10.65

Etc.

If that wasn't enough, then maybe a small table at the bottom of items in price categories:

$0-$5: 15 items, $38.94

$5-$10: 1 item, $7.52

Etc.

Sure, that would be nice. Maybe I'm just not familiar with unions, but what are some examples of high performing / high quality companies with a unionized workforce?

My only experience is friends who have worked in unions and their stories make it sound like there's little to no chance for advancement besides waiting in line, so at best people skate by and do the bare minimum and at worst actively try to subvert management decisions.

Lol, didn't know that. We had to write it ourselves in high school.

Honestly, I'd rather fly with an airline where the mechanics aren't unionized.

I don't want someone to have a poor team attitude and not care about what they're doing because they know they can't get fired for less than 3 infractions or whatever else the union negotiates.

I want underperforming mechanics out ASAP and the best ones rewarded.

Or know how to quick sort in C?

I've hired dozens of programmers and never once looked at what college they went to or if they went to college (or where they live, just what time zone they're in).

In web/app coding, all that matters is what you've done in the last 1-4 years. Anything beyond that is too dated to be relevant.

It's been a highly successful recruiting practice. There are so many brilliant self taught developers that would get overlooked if I only looked at college graduates.

Same goes for JavaScript. It's so ubiquitous that it's worth putting up with the downsides.

It'll take several unicorns and Fortune 100s hiring thousands of engineers to code in an SQL-alternative to create an ecosystem large enough to eventually overtake SQL.

> It's all deleted.

They deleted 12 years of music uploads, not everything. Username, email, bio, friends, etc. still exists somewhere, but who owns it? What do they intend to do with it?

True, but I doubt EU courts could take up a case involving non-EU consumers. So, even though Google compiles in Europe, they don't have to afford the same protection to non-EU users.

Even in the Bay Area with a large family $500k/year is more than enough to live very comfortably. Maybe not a billionaire lifestyle, but certainly well above average.

$200k/year is middle class in the most expensive areas.

Yeah, it feels like getting a "second wind" when exercising.

Getting there can be brutal though as my mind and body feel weak and it's hard for me to do any highly cognitive tasks. But after my body accepts it I feel "in the zone" and I don't want to eat and disrupt the feeling.

I've never gone longer than 18hrs though.

It would probably be more useful to study primitive tribes and see how long they sit per day to see what our bodies might be adapted to.

I also find it hard to believe that people can sit for less than 3 hours per day consistently, given commute times as well.

You'd have to be doing manual labor on your property from sun up to sun down and only sit from sun down until bedtime to get close to 3hrs.

Sorry, 90% was a bit of an exaggeration, but 60-70% might not be unrealistic if someone came out and said they respect both sides of a controversial issue and want to find common ground.

I think both sides are competent. Electors at getting elected and voters at voting against what they don't want. We're pretty efficient at voting people out of office when they mess up egregiously.

The two parties and winner take all system probably create what we see now where you want to have extreme positions to get elected, but only extreme enough to still win 50% + 1.

It's like we're optimizing for agreement among the smallest majority possible.

There's no incentive to win 90% of the vote.

If your power as an elected official somehow increased in proportion to what % of the vote you got I think we'd see a lot more unique solutions to common problems rather than blaming the other side.

I've been developing for clients for 20+ years and 9 times out of 10 they do under estimate, but I think it has to do with lack of knowledge rather than anything malicious.

I found myself doing it when I get quotes for home repair or construction. My mind immediately goes to "I don't think it should take that long" even though I have no idea how to estimate those types of projects.

I wonder if it's because with something I'm not knowledgeable about I'm only estimating what I can see, but there are 5-10 tasks that have to happen in the background to make that thing I can see work properly. I just have no idea what those background tasks are to begin with or how many.

> Using that 74 figure means the universe is somewhere between 12.5 billion and 13 billion years old. That’s much younger than the established estimates of 13.6 billion to 13.8 billion.

If true, would that mean that the observable universe is smaller than we thought? And that the distances to distant galaxies might be off as well?

Thanks, I think it was a relevant anecdote.

That's an interesting example of information being stored in parts of our body besides our brain which is a theory gaining more popularity. I wouldn't be surprised if further study confirmed this.

A soul usually implies a religious / supernatural energy that survives our death. It's an inherently non-testable theory.

I think the question if "do humans have souls?" is just an example of how the question "do elephants have souls?" can have no testable answer, just personal opinion based on your belief system.

Any blanket criticism of millions or billions of people is bound to be highly inaccurate and also have some non zero degree of accuracy just due to the sheer numbers of people and how common these traits are in any population.

Racism is taking the non-zero existence of a complaint and extrapolating it to the broader population without caring to get to know the individual people.

Unfortunately, it was probably an evolutionary survival technique that worked thousands of years ago but has pretty disastrous consequences today.

Same. It was a hard pill to swallow because I took a lot of pride in being "informed". But, at the end of the day you're along for the ride. I figured it makes the most sense to stay current about news that is relevant to my career and hobbies and skip the rest.

True, but the reference is to Riker's island which is a public prison.

Hyatt with an ankle bracelet?

/s

I'd imagine the cost of arrests and incarceration are sunk costs though.

It's not like we pay the police $2,000 for each arrest, or pay the prison $500/night per inmate.

Does anyone know if these numbers were taken by adding up the costs of running a prison and police department and dividing by the number of arrests and inmates?

If so, it's a little disingenuous to make this argument.

Also, these cases are not about a 1:1 relationship of harm to society vs. cost of justice. If you let the crimes go, you'll have more people doing it because "everybody does it".

60 days in jail does seem pretty excessive though. If imagine tons of young kids or people in a rush would make a silly mistake.