bronbron

Hah! I've been thinking about this a lot lately ever since watching a documentary on a pretty internet-famous guy with autism (I'm not going to name him, but you probably know who I'm talking about if you've spent any time around the trollier parts of the internet).

I was thinking about what the ideal solution is for a guy like that. I actually thought he should be moved to a group home, for both his sake and the sake of others. Jail is a really horrible place for well-adjusted adults, let alone those who aren't.

Can this be changed?

I dunno. How would you change it? I think group homes are the right idea, though maybe not the right implementation. Unfortunately it's not straightforward unless you're interested in proffering platitudes that never seem to really go anywhere: E.g. "We should spend more on mental health." Many of us agree with that, but when it comes time to pull out our checkbook most of us show how much of a priority it really is.

And that's not just because we're all dicks - there's just a shitload of terrible things going on in the world, and maybe mental health is priority #5 for us behind third-world poverty, or cancer research, or maybe we're just scraping to get by ourselves.

Typically we count on family to be the support system for people like Scooter, and that works if the family's capable of that level of care. But sometimes it ends up that either the parents can't care for them and admit it, or more frustrating, can't care for them and don't admit it. Group homes are probably the best option for adults with special needs that fall into those two categories.

Alternatively you could have a caregiver who acts like a family support system (checks in regularly, schedules appts, etc.) but that could be even more isolating - finding a peer group can be really hard even for more "well-adjusted" adults, and maybe a caregiver who treats you like family is actually really inappropriate if said caregiver has no intention of sticking around for the long-term.

If the solution is "let's all just be accepting and mindful of people with different wants and needs than our own", well shit, yeah, let me know when that happens. History is pretty much summed up as the antithesis of that statement.

Anyway, rambling over. It's a weird issue. I'm glad we moved away from sanitariums but I think we all agree we haven't come close to anything even good yet.

Eh, way in the future though. It's a classic tragedy of the commons. Each individual company is better off discriminating, but ultimately it causes a depletion in resources (i.e. employees) long-term.

simply because it is so far remove from the actual engineering workflow.

Err, what? Fizzbuzz is NOT a riddle. It's intentionally meant to be a stupid simple test, and everyone has written stupid simple code at some point. Even as a "senior engineer" you'll have to write dumb business logic code, even if it's only occasional.

If you really struggle with fizzbuzz it would almost assuredly be a sign that you would really struggle to write quality software in a timely manner. It's also a sign that you really aren't familiar with even the basic control flow of your chosen language, which is similarly worrying.

The only part of fizzbuzz that's "removed from the actual engineering workflow" is MAYBE the modulus operation, which I'm willing to bet most interviewers probably won't give a shit if you goof on the syntax a little and write "%" when you should've written "%%".

And even then, a perfectly acceptable fizzbuzz can be written without using mod if you're not familiar with that basic arithmetic operation.

Eh, he's not wrong (even if he's being a Walter about it).

HR is not a union for employees. HR is there to protect the company: It just turns out that the company's theoretical (keyword there) interests and the employee's interests align frequently (e.g. keeping the workplace free of discrimination, keeping employee morale up).

That means always out looking for great people who are also a cultural fit and bringing them in regardless of whether there is an open position.

I speculate that there is a type of HR role that could fill this need

We have this at my company (not going to name, just to remain semi-anonymous). There's a whole group dedicated just to finding people who seem like good fits for the company. They're employees the same as any engineer would be.

I don't think it's that uncommon at bigger (i.e. > 100 employees) companies.

Isn't this just eerily reminiscent of what happened with depression babies?

Widespread, extended, negative macroeconomic event happens. Those experiencing these events at crucial development points in their lives (childhood, early adulthood) adjust their livelihoods to compensate. Even when the negative effects disappear, behavioral patterns have been set in stone.

Sure, there are obvious differences, e.g. we sometimes still fritter away our money on electronics we probably don't really need. Still, I think the similarities are pretty striking. We're a lot more like our grandparents than our parents.

As for the article, I think the car/housing situation is probably a really simple one to explain: millenials know first-hand how crippling debt can be (in the form of student loan debt). Even those lucky enough to escape that can see how awful it's been for our cohort.

Most of us are insanely debt-averse now (wasn't there just an article published recently that people under 40 are the most likely to have their mortgage paid off in full?), and cars and homes are the two items you might typically accrue debt for.

The article doesn't say that.

As an aside, long-term (which is where we really care about "healthy" anyway), you would probably expect body builders to be healthier than some classes of athletes, with various circumstances obviously influencing that.

Professional sports are notoriously rough on the body (and mind) long-term. It's not a secret that athletes in certain sports (e.g. american football, boxing) often have debilitating health issues in their later years stemming from their career. I'd say Arnold is doing a hell of a lot better health-wise than Muhammad Ali, for example.

Hm, this article reads like kind of a puff piece for Amplio.

similar efforts to “grade” American schoolteachers, for instance, have perhaps generated more controversy than results.

Yes, for good reasons, namely...

It’s all about trust.

No, it's not. At all. The author even notes the problem with scoring systems, that happened in this exact field. When you start scoring people, they start gaming the system to increase that score. It's the same problem with "grading teachers". You give surgeons huge incentives to start "fudging the truth" about their patients' surgical risk.

"Oh blah blah blah it's private". Great. Hopefully everyone involved can see the obvious future problems (which 7 comments in, other HN posters have zeroed in on), but they haven't given any assurances that these fears will never come to fruition. Or any prevention plans.

It’s like Vickers said to me one night in early November, as we were discussing Amplio, “Having been in health research for twenty years, there’s always that great quote of Martin Luther King: The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.”

I actually laughed when I read this. How pretentious.

They're most likely thinking about it from the flipside: grand juries rarely (if ever) vote to indict police officers involved in fatal incidents.

Not that it changes the point of your argument, just guessing where the motivation for that statement comes from.

Unless I misread this, the reason he was incarcerated to begin with:

Asheem was charged with conspiracy in the third degree. The evidence was the gun charge to which he had already pled guilty, and photos, which he says dated back to the time when he was 14 and 15, showing him and other boys under the banner of Goodfellas.

Alethia says that in Asheem’s case, the judge told him he was looking at a possible sentence of 15 to 30 years. It was a frightening length of time that convinced Asheem to take a plea deal that could range from 16 months to 4 years instead.

The gun charge just upped his prison sentence to 6 years instead of 1-4.

That's seriously insane. Hypothetically (realizing there are numerous practical obstacles), could this be challenged in a federal court? It seems like an egregious violation of the sixth amendment.

Wow. Totally crazy. My takeaways:

1) Don't be born a poor urban youth

2) If #1 is unavoidable, don't have friends (and don't go anywhere because you might get jumped because you don't have friends)

3) Never be in any photos, even by accident

4) Never sign up for facebook/twitter/etc

5) Never talk to the police

6) Plea deals are mostly bullshit (these last two I knew already)

I'm not a lawyer, so maybe someone more well-versed can help me, but:

But the district attorney convinced a judge that most of the time Jelani spent in jail shouldn’t count towards that release. She argued that days spent gathering more evidence, delays in testimony by a police officer who was on vacation, or instances where she was unprepared to make her case did not figure into the six-month period

Would this not be a slam-dunk lawsuit for the Henrys that his sixth amendment rights were violated? Obviously not going to bring back lost time, but still, that seems insane.

Hm. While good advice, this seems like just general life advice not specific to programming.

If you're the kind of person who says things like "TextMate is for n00bs" (or some variation of such) you're probably just a super annoying person in general.

Hmm. Preface: I do not work at Google.

I would love to see one single company that isn’t dominating a market with no cash cow in-flow that can succeed without strict discipline, sharp focus, hard work, and hands-on management

I've worked for plenty. I'm not going to name them because it's tactless, but they were both huge monolithic corporations and small-ish companies that were pretty profitable. I'm sure others have too. Those companies that you think to yourself, "how the fuck are we making money when we're so fucked up?". I wouldn't say it's a rare scenario. The idea of companies as "hyper-efficient market machines" is pretty laughable.

In fact, I've met plenty of people who worked at IBM (the company he alludes to being one of these strict discipline companies) who said IBM was/is a complete mess.

why have the majority of initiatives at Google either failed or been financially inefficient and unprofitable

The majority of initiatives full stop are failures, or unprofitable. This is kind of pointless without comparing Google to other companies.

When interacting with sales people at Google, I am shocked to see how untrained and inefficient they are

This is admittedly one of Google's faults: they're awful at customer support and the like in general. Well known, but it seems to be working out fine for them.

If there are known companies with great sales cultures such as Oracle,

Google is doing considerably better than Oracle in most senses of the word. One possible conclusion is the author's, that Google succeeds in spite of this because of their search monopoly. The alternative is that maybe a strong sales culture doesn't mean as much as the author thinks for the bottom line.

everything else in the Google world, you get $5 billion or 10 percent of Google’s revenue. Peanuts!

Peanuts? Facebook's revenue last year was $8 billion.

Google is in a situation of monopoly with its search business

Why do they continue to be a monopoly? There are certainly competitors. One explanation is because they continually offer the best results, because they hire the best software engineers, because they have free food, and offer "20% time", and etc...

Yep! Not a cushy job by itself, by any means. Certainly requires two people working full time, all the time. This is in contrast to 30 years ago, where one working spouse was sufficient, though perhaps not comfortable.

This isn't even to mention the costs you're incurring by requiring two working spouses: now childcare becomes a recurring cost, maternity leave needs to be short (or non-existent in the case of paternity leave).

Doesn't bode well for blue-collar jobs if warehouse work is the average blue-collar job.

Compare this to what I would consider the remaining true "blue-collar" jobs - skilled trades. The median salary is roughly e.g. $52K for a plumber. That household could absorb the cost of only having one working spouse temporarily (or permanently) - the warehouse family really can't.

Working in an Amazon warehouse is a pretty average blue-collar job these days.

Eek, I hope not. That doesn't bode well for blue-collar work in America. Working at an amazon warehouse will net you roughly $13/hr according to Glassdoor, which will put you roughly $10k above the poverty line.

Unfortunately, outside of skilled trades, blue-collar work in America is slowly disappearing and being replaced with jobs like this. I had a really rough time surviving on $13/hr in college (granted I wasn't working full time), raising a family on that seems damn near impossible.

Interesting. The detour at the end about weed is also kind of weird. Not sure how I feel about it.

Sure, addiction of any kind is something we should probably investigate and help treat.

It's still weird to hear what amounts to a "Reefer Madness lite" scare at the end given that what I took from the article. That is, widespread drug abuse is almost assuredly a symptom of other problems (unemployment/dim prospects in the case of Georgia), and that banning harmless drugs (e.g. Subu) will just lead people to seek dangerous alternatives (e.g. Krokodil).

If the author's point is that we should look from a high level at why widespread drug usage occurs and how we can make beneficial steps towards reducing that (like increasing social mobility, as nebulous as that phrase is) then I'm on board. If it's that we should be concerned about legalized marijuana because it'll lead to glass pipes littering our parks, I'm less convinced.

Most companies provide better benefits than what is legally required

Cool, let's just bank on the generosity of companies.

Unlike something like cancer pregnancy is not an accident. If you can't afford to pay for children, don't have them.

Did you even read the article? These people can obviously afford to have children. They can't afford to become unemployed because they had children. Short of being independently wealthy or raiding your personal savings, no one can afford to become unemployed for an extended period of time because they're raising a child.

Let's not even get into the fact that this is obviously disproportionately affecting women. I don't need to take sick leave because my wife gave birth - I don't have anything to physically recover from.

Sorry, just going through I just saw your comment, but I thought you deserved a reply.

apparently the medical system even under such physiologically unhealthy conditions still has all the MD's it needs

Interns will agree to work 100 hour weeks because they have no alternatives, but I don't think that it's necessarily efficient from an economic standpoint. They have all the MDs they need, sure, but it's highly arguable about whether it's efficient from an economic standpoint. We'd have to compare the cost of medical errors (which is non-negligible) from interns due to fatigue vs. the cost of hiring another intern.

I was just worried the problem was that students were not aware of what awaited them after 6+ years of bank breaking schooling...

We're talking about basically a decade between when you make the decision to become a doctor and when you receive a MD. Even if you start out on the path to be a MD with perfect intentions, people change heavily over the course of a decade (and especially so at that age).

The grim reality is that even after undergrad (halfway in), if you chose a typical "med school" major you're still in a bit of a bad spot unless you decide to go into research in the life sciences. After graduating med school, your MD qualifies you for 1 thing and comes with the heavy cost of crippling debt. Deciding you don't really like medicine in your 3rd year of med school is incredibly costly and practically unfeasible for most people going through school.

I'm not sure I find this article all that compelling because I think it's founded on a faulty premise:

Email is the "dumb pipe" version of communication technology, which is why it remains popular.

Email might be a dumb pipe. Gmail is anything but that.

Data mining personal emails is an advertiser's dream. The second I start sending emails to my spouse about purchasing a house, lo and behold Google can show me an ad for homeowner's insurance. Given correct semantic analysis, it's incredibly persuasive and highly targeted advertising.

It's arguably akin to wiretapping or spying on my text messages - and lest we forget, there was a huge class-action lawsuit against Google that argued just that.

Carriers resist becoming "dumb pipes" because there's no money in it

There's a boatload of money to be made in email, even as a 'dumb pipe', if you're an advertiser targeting ads at people based on the contents of those e-mails.

Further, and this I could easily be wrong about, isn't the whole American telecom industry the complete antithesis to the argument "there's no money to be made as a dumb pipe"? Even if net neutrality is maintained, I don't see anyone realistically arguing that Comcast will become nigh-unprofitable in the near future.

Maybe there's no money to be made as a newcomer onto the scene, and competition can be fierce at the lower tiers, but Gmail is certainly an established player in the e-mail game.

then potential MDs would stop going through the program seeing that on the other side you are just abused.

Not necessarily, for the same reason that people join fraternities/sororities even knowing that 'hazing' happens: they think the rewards are worth the temporary punishment.

Which just goes back to my "don't care about the money" stance

I don't think that's a conclusion you can draw from the circumstances, because there's a big payoff for sticking it out through 4-5 years of abuse. Especially in fields like dermatology, the payoff for 4-5 years of abuse could easily be a 7 figure salary.

I would wager a large sum that medical students and interns are well-versed in delayed gratification (I mean, that's sort of how they get to become interns to begin with), so putting up with a few years of hell for a big payoff is something they're quite used to already.

In many ways it's similar to other high-pressure fields with insane initiation periods like investment banking, though deciding to quit in your 2nd year of investment banking involves a lot less risk than deciding to quit in your 2nd year of residency (because of both debt and alternatives).

Is this just one of those cases where, if you made it through medical school for an obscene number of years, you "don't care about the money"

I think it's more like "holy shit I have $300k in medical school loans, I better put up with whatever I have to in order to become an attending."

makes market forces impossible to act on it

I believe (though I could certainly be wrong) that market forces are actually mostly responsible. Because a medical intern's negotiating position is pretty weak (they're saddled with medical school debt, they still require a great deal of on-the-job training), hospitals are well aware that they can torture interns because the alternative is pretty grim - even if you went off and became a software developer at Google, $300K in student loan debts will eat up pretty much all of your salary.

It seems like the major gripe is against passwords like "p@assword", not against passwords like "correcthorsebatterystaple".

If you truly choose 4 words randomly, the number of possibilities is > 1e24 (at least 1 million words in english language, likely not including slang or names).

You didn't answer any of my questions.

I categorically reject the notion that any city which has the longest commute times in the entire country as having a good transportation system

By how much? What's the variance like compared to other cities? Are we comparing NYC commute times to cities that don't have public transportation systems used en masse? If I live in Houston and drive 15 minutes to work, is it really fair to compare it to spending 30 minutes on a subway?

"Average commute time" isn't extremely relevant if we're including cities where most people don't commute by public transportation, given the subject of the article.

I had a friend who was born and raised in the New York City area...

I spend 15 minutes commuting to work each day in NYC, compared to 45 when I was in SF. Based on that fact, I can conclusively say that SF's transportation system is 3x worse than NYC's based on my personal anecdote.

They cut some low-hanging fruit (and route 47)

They cut 20+ regular routes. Even if they're "low-hanging fruit", that's a lot.

Seattle is even holding a vote in November to buy service for expansion.

I wish for the best. Seriously. I think Metro is doomed to live in a constant state of limbo, where only serious service cuts will spur Seattleites to do anything about it. I think it's a greatly under-appreciated service in the city.

As for being notoriously unreliable, I suppose we'll have to chalk it up to different circumstances.

That's fine, but again, OBA serves as solid proof that I'm not the only one who was frustrated by Metro's unreliability (otherwise timetables would be perfectly adequate).

EDIT: This has gotten off-track. Even if you disagree about how bad it is, Seattle public transit absolutely pales in comparison to NYC's public transportation system. I don't think that's really up for debate, and anyone suggesting otherwise I posit is delusional.

Unless it's changed DRASTICALLY in the last couple years, yes it's a shit show.

I would frequently walk home from Fremont to Ravenna because it was 2 AM and there was no way to get home aside from getting in a cab (and good luck competing with the million other people trying to get a cab that time of night), or waiting maybe an hour for a bus to maybe come by when it was supposed to. At least in SF there was no illusion of public transportation to get me anywhere very far after midnight.

As to why it's a "shit show" as compared to other cities, Metro is constantly in limbo and notoriously unreliable. Didn't they just cut a bunch of routes because of budget shortfalls? http://metro.kingcounty.gov/am/future/service-cuts.html

EDIT: The whole reason OBA is/was even remotely popular is because of how notoriously unreliable buses are in Seattle.

Having lived in Boston, SF, Seattle, and now NYC (and having visited LA on numerous occasions), not at all surprised to see this. Even considering the population differences, NYC wins by a large margin if the goal is 'best public transportation', and by proxy 'best metro area for commuters'.

NYC has (by far) the best public transportation system in the US. Nothing even comes close, though obviously MTA is not perfect. The BART stops running at midnight and doesn't go everywhere, the T is basically an east coast version of the BART, and King County Metro is just a shit show in general.

Granted, NYC obviously has the population to support such a great transportation system. But I wonder if it's a self-fulfilling prophecy: NYC public transit is good, and so more people are willing to live in the metro area and commute. Commuting from Westport, CT to NYC daily isn't a huge deal. Commuting from Brentwood to SF every day would be a nightmare.

I think that even if we implement basic income, I think after a little while we'll all be back to work.

The point of a basic income is that people will go back to work on things they're truly passionate about, without fear of becoming homeless.

e.g. a mailroom worker might be really passionate about woodworking, but isn't skilled enough (or confident enough) to make it his profession. With a basic income, he might decide that he can make a go at woodworking without starving to death.

It could be a much faster, nicer way to answer the question 'where are you?'

This is obviously anecdotal, but I've had to call 911 a couple times (I live in NYC, things happen on the subway). Explaining where I am took up 75% of those calls. They want very precise details and it's sometimes hard to answer to the level of detail they want.

Example: I once had to call 911 when a woman fainted in the middle of the platform. I spent (seriously) several minutes explaining my location to the 911 operator. I was waiting for a train that only has one platform - the train goes east/west, and eastbound stops on the opposite side of the same platform as the westbound. The 911 operator couldn't process this and kept asking me whether I was on the westbound or the eastbound platform.

We wasted a few minutes going back and forth on this - which could've been critical if the woman was in need of urgent medical care.