8,806 karma · joined July 8, 2010
Likewise, people who only know relational DBs shouldn't assume they need an SQL solution. It's remarkably rare that you encounter engineers with real thoughtful experience with both and they have the experience to know which tool to pick up for different problems.
These days when I do architecture interviews, I always make sure the problem can be solved distributed or monolithic and when they do distributed, I asked them why and to explain the trade-offs. If they do monolithic, I ask them why not distributed. Etc. For senior engineers, it's such a good indicator of whether or not they've truly worked in distributed systems and understand the human side of the problem.
The big O stuff is great, but the human and organizational costs are easily as important to assess as the computational and memory costs.
For example, I'm in Seattle, but on the East side and I expect to be fully shielded from a surface detonation in downtown and to be mostly shielded from air detonation depending on the altitude.
Speaking of air detonations, what altitudes are most nuclear missiles designed to detonate at?
In the last 7.5 years in my current role, I have yet to apply much if anything I needed to study for the algos interview for this role. I get that some adjacent roles in the company might occasionally need this stuff, but it's used rarely enough that it's a better skillset to be able to find the algo you need when you need it then study to be able to conjure one on demand only to have that knowledge atrophy while on the job.
When you accept refugees you’re also accepting the pain of side effects from accepting those refugees. Refugees from some places come with fewer side effects depending on compatibility with the host country and skills and education of the refugees.
Most prisons exist in places that are economically depressed with few if any other jobs. In some cases, the entire existence of a town revolves around the prison. Quitting is hardly an option when it’s the only real option for putting food on your table and a shelter over your head.
What I don't get is why more people trapped by student loans don't just leave the country and set up life elsewhere. Debt is country specific. If you're in debt in country A, you can move to country B and start anew.
Undischargeable debt is only an encumbrance on income earned in the country in which you owe the debt.
My observation is that generally only people who complain about neither or both tend to care about statistics.
Curious to see if there’s a prediction that Scotland becomes a lot nicer weather wise as it is at the northern end of the UK.
Process is all about risk mitigation. You add process to mitigate the damage that can be done by a single individual. Sadly though when you can't have process that only neuters the liabilities. Processes also neuter your assets.
The only attractive thing about government jobs these days is the guaranteed pension. The guaranteed pension is also the exact kind of thing that causes many people to be overly zealous about not rocking the boat. It becomes all about staying in your job at all costs until you've put in your time and can retire worry free.
A proposal like hers for a government issued bank account falls right into the federal surveillance state insofar as everyone's finances are concerned.
There's no better way to erode 4th amendment protections for your finances than a federally issued bank account.
It's not an unreasonable slippery slope to imagine that such an account would eventually morph to the point (1) where many or most of your counter parties are using the federal bank account meaning that they know about most of the transactions occurring in private accounts, and (2) where merely using a non federal account they have access to could be maligned as suspicious.
There's no direction these proposals head that don't result in more tyranny from a federal government that we have increasingly less representation and oversight over.
Honestly, 1984 should be enough as it's not a big jump from 1984 telescreens to Google/Facebook.
For example, in the past 10 to 20 years or so we've seen both the ADL and ACLU morph into institutions that would be unrecognizable to ADL or ACLU staffers from 10 to 20 years ago. No one ever imagined that they would abandoned their classically liberal values and replace those values with the illiberal "liberal" values they practice today.
Travel around the country and you'll see more smoking in places where there's no lack of places you can smoke and where no one will side eye you for smoking.