cipheredStones

Location: Portland, Oregon

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Primarily backend engineering - APIs, databases (SQL and NoSQL), making complex systems work together. Enough of a full-stack dev (React, etc) to build personal apps for myself and my loved ones, but it's not my specialty. I'm expert in Typescript / Javascript, conversant in Ruby and Python, happy to learn other languages.

Resume: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/3y2tf55v4zopivr4xze8w/Sam-Lie...

Email: samliebow [at] gmail [dot] com

I'm a backend engineer with ~7 years of experience, most recently in the Risk division at Stripe for 3.5 years. On my teams, I've been known for making myself an expert on complex code and data, for being an excellent debugger and reviewer, for improving efficiency (on my last team, I took our core cron job's runtime from 8 hours to 15 minutes), and for working to invest in technical foundations.

I'm especially interested in complex technical problems, working with data and databases, and gaining new skills.

Every guy named Gary is named after Gary, Indiana. Gary Cooper named himself after the town, and then got very, very popular.

Well, programming is a tool, right? There are clearly incorrect ways to program, but that doesn't mean there's one correct way to program - because it depends on what you're trying to make.

It's incorrect to make a bookshelf that can't hold the weight of books, but IKEA isn't incorrect to make a crappy-but-adequate bookshelf that will get given away when you move, and a master carpenter isn't incorrect to make an expensive-but-beautiful bookshelf that will be used for many decades.

A seed-stage startup trying to see if anyone cares about their product at all should probably accept it being 100x slower than it theoretically could be. And the Linux maintainers should be working hard to shave milliseconds.

100% land value tax will get rid of those too.

How many divisions does Henry George have?

It's not really relevant to bring in radical overhauls to our economic system when people are talking about what politically-possible changes might help improve the housing market.

Gen Z only voted democrat by a 4% margin

Yes, which is not remotely the same claim as

Gen Z were heavily supporting Trump in the recent election [and therefore Zuckerberg needed to change political course for his social media to stay relevant]

which is the false claim I was responding to.

If those numbers hold democrats have no path to winning national elections

Yes, it's certainly the case that if Democrats keep getting the same percentage of votes as in elections they lost badly, they'll keep losing elections.

Gen Z were heavily supporting Trump in the recent election

What on earth are you talking about? 18-29 year olds were the most Democratic age group, as usual. 18-29 year old men might have slightly favored Trump, but to a significantly lower degree than older men.

Did you just arrive from Mars to judge our discourse norms?

It's completely typical to expect someone who makes a surprising factual claim to back it up with evidence. You're talking to them because you think they might know something you don't, and be able to point to how they know it - or they might not, and them offering weak or non-existent evidence would show that.

Something being in a business's best interests is very far from a guarantee that it'll happen.

I've worked on a team in a household-name big tech company where our mission was almost exactly "make sure we're not blowing up our most important customers for no reason". It's not nearly as easy as it sounds: defining who's important is hard, and defining what should and shouldn't be allowed is hard, and then implementing that all correctly and avoiding drift over time is tricky too.

Is there a known mechanism by which that happens? Or was it just a weird idiosyncrasy of her body and her diseases?

"Doctors won't mention that losing weight and exercising more will make you healthier" is quite a take.

I've heard exactly the opposite from any number of people: that if you're overweight at all, many doctors will tell "lose weight and exercise" and then usher you out the door, rather than pay attention to the specifics of your medical problems - sometimes missing serious issues as a result.

The Cosmic Crisp is a cross between Honeycrisp and Enterprise apples.

So it's enterprise-ready. But is it webscale?

But it's also not appropriate to lump them together and say "Big Pharma's critics are in the wrong."

And accordingly, I didn't ever say that this was a good bill or all its critics were in the wrong. A lot of people in this thread seem to be reading that into my comments, but all I did was take issue with a misrepresentation of an article that argued against a specific negative claim about the bill.

Which I think is representative - it's very hard to make a narrow point about specific arguments without people assuming that you're taking a firm stance on one side or the other of a general issue.

As I said in a sibling comment, the fact that there are real concerns about something doesn't justify ignoring the truth value of inflammatory claims about that thing.

If one person is criticizing Big Pharma because they use shoddy trial methodology when they can get away with it and heavily market minor variations on existing drugs, and another person is criticizing Big Pharma because they're poisoning our blood with fluoride in service to the Illuminati, it's not appropriate to lump them together and say "Big Pharma's critics are in the right."

(Also, I think the idea that they deliberately adopted a weak version of the criticism to argue against is rather conspiratorial - dumb unfounded nonsense gets very popular on the internet all the time! Valuable criticism that requires nuance is memetically disfavored by comparison!)

No. But "new cars will have mandatory automated controls to prevent drunk driving, which may be implemented insecurely in a way that creates major vulnerabilities" (very reasonable) is not the same claim as "Joe Biden signed a bill that would give law enforcement access to a ‘kill switch’ that will be attached to ALL new cars" (blatantly false).

The fact that there are real concerns about something doesn't justify ignoring the truth value of inflammatory claims about that thing.

You and afh1 seem to be reading both the article and my comment as focused on whether it's appropriate to characterize a device that prevents a car from starting as a "kill switch".

I didn't say anything at all about that term in my comment, and while the article says it's hyperbolic, arguing about that term is clearly not the focus of the article.

Just going to quote the whole opener here - it's about the claim that the law enables cops to monitor you and shut down your car, which is clearly false.

---------------

[Headline] Posts distort infrastructure law’s rule on impaired driving technology

CLAIM: President Joe Biden signed a bill that will give law enforcement access to a “kill switch” that will be attached to ALL new cars in 2026.

AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. While the bipartisan infrastructure bill Biden signed last year requires advanced drunk and impaired driving technology to become standard equipment in new cars, experts say that technology doesn’t amount to a “kill switch,” and nothing in the bill gives law enforcement access to those systems.

THE FACTS: In November 2021, Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, ushering into law a $1 trillion bipartisan deal to maintain and upgrade the country’s roads, bridges, ports and more.

One provision in the legislation aims to prevent drunk driving deaths by requiring all new vehicles to soon include “advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology” as “standard equipment.”

However, in the months since the law passed, some social media users have misrepresented the provision online, falsely claiming it will give police access to data collected by the technology or allow the government to shut down cars remotely.

“Joe Biden signed a bill that would give law enforcement access to a ‘kill switch’ that will be attached to ALL new cars in 2026,” read several posts shared widely on Twitter and Facebook.

Media rushed to say it's not really a kill switch, just "sensors or cameras to monitor the driver’s behaviors, head or eye movements" and "block the driver from operating the vehicle". So... a kill switch.

You're selectively quoting in a way that misrepresents the article.

The post the article quotes:

“Joe Biden signed a bill that would give law enforcement access to a ‘kill switch’ that will be attached to ALL new cars in 2026,” read several posts shared widely on Twitter and Facebook.

The actual functionality:

In either case, if a driver is found to be impaired [by automated monitoring within the car], the car might employ a warning message, block the driver from operating the vehicle, or if the vehicle is already in motion, direct it to a safe stop or automated ride home.

None of the technologies currently in development would notify law enforcement of the data collected inside vehicles or give government agencies remote control of vehicles, according to Jeffrey Michael, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Injury Research and Policy.

The car has an automatic system which can prevent the driver from operating it, but no one outside the car can trigger that system, which is clearly what the "kill switch" posts were claiming.

I really enjoyed this phrasing, from the comments on the post:

I suspect the careerization of Big Science and Big Academia has a lot to do with [unwillingness to plainly admit error]. Although I have no proof to that effect. And certainly man has been subject to failings since Adam and Eve chomped.

I wonder how long that site will be up, given his death. Hope someone mirrors it.

It's interesting to read the Nicholas Kristof op-ed from 2006 (https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/opinion/03kristof.html) which he links because it mentions the site (in its incarnation as "whydoesgodhateamputees.com") as "part of an increasingly assertive, often obnoxious atheist offensive", and essentially argues that the New Atheists should back off and stop being so mean.

While the New Atheists were definitely sharp-tongued (another page on the site asserts that there's no such thing as an 'atheist', for the same reason that someone who doesn't believe in leprechauns wouldn't be called an 'aleprechaunist', and atheists should instead call themselves 'rational people'), I think they had some excellent points about how the religious point of view is treated as the default in public discourse - and one of the ways that manifests is that arguments for religion (and more nebulous spirituality) are seen as expected and ordinary, while arguments against religion are seen as inherently aggressive and mean-spirited.

Sci-Hub complied with the order with the intent to actually argue their case (and possibly establish a legal justification for the site), rather than just defying the order and continuing to play cat-and-mouse with every authority.

I agree with you in general, but this part is off:

which is low since that 500k isn't cash comp and you wait for long term capital gains to kick in

Stock that a company gives you as compensation is treated as ordinary income at the time it vests, based on the value when it vests. If your total comp is $250k salary + $1M in stock over four years, and the stock value stays flat, your taxes are the same as if you got $500k in salary each year (a bit worse, actually, because of the first year vesting all at once making your income $250k and then $750k); if it doubles the day after your grant and stays flat after that, your taxes are the same as if you got $750k in salary each year. Long-term capital gains only apply to increases in stock value after it vests - not any different than if you sold your company stock immediately and bought another stock.

"Galaxy" is from "galakt", "milk" in Greek - so, arguably all of them?

This is the entirety of the post's description of the interviewer and the interview itself:

He introduced himself and we settled into the usual ritual of a phone screen. ... He gave me a coderpad link. ... It presented a simple data structure and asked me to do some filtering based on a set of constraints. ... He kindly ended the interview and asked if I had any questions.

Everything else is about the author struggling and being anxious. Where do you get "stereotypical brogrammer hazing"?

Nope, you're correct: he runs a startup and apparently has been running startups since his early 20s.

Please tell us briefly about your background.

I grew up in the Netherlands, and I was interested in technology from a young age. I started a gaming website when I was 13. Later, I attended Erasmus University Rotterdam before founding Fashiolista, my first startup and an early social network similar to Pinterest. It grew to millions of users...

What a bizarre response from Google, a couple hours after this was posted:

@Reporter: As we are not very clear about the issue being faced by you, could you please elaborate on the same by providing detailed manual repro steps to reproduce the issue from our end.

Also requesting you to share the expected, actual behaviours along with screen-cast for better understanding of the issue.

*Note: Requesting you to copy-paste the entire content of "chrome://version/?show-variations-cmd" details to a .txt file format and attach it.

Thanks..!

What could possibly be unclear about this bug report?

Yes, he was capturing value for his clients, and getting paid some of that. That isn't the same thing as doing something that increases the amount of wealth in the economy, which was my point.

Taking money away from mismanaged companies, and giving it to well-managed ones, is a net positive of stock trading.

Where "well-managed" means "good at delivering money to its shareholders", which is at best obliquely related to a positive impact on the world. (Also, I'm skeptical that the stock price in itself makes that much of a difference to what the company is able to do.)

Another net positive of stock trading is making buyers and sellers available all day, for anything on the market. Yet another benefit of stock trading is to make it more difficult to manipulate the market - there's a reason why pump and dump scams only occur with assets that see very little attention (i.e. are low-volume).

In other words, the benefit-to-the-world of stock trading is that it makes it easier to trade stocks? And both of these are the result of unprofitable trading as much as profitable trading, so they can't be the proof that the money comes from the value delivered!

The article says that he made it by stock trading. It is, at best, difficult to articulate how that could be creating value rather than capturing it. Many of the world's billionaires made their money that way.

Doing something positive-sum is a way to become a billionaire, but many people are very handsomely paid to ensure that their clients are on the good side of zero-sum transactions.

The one-letter omission of "k" in "$20k/student/year" really makes a difference here.

My current phone, a Pixel 6 Pro, is becoming unusable due to screen flickering.* I have an unopened Pixel 8 Pro on my desk that I got for ~$700 after cashback during Prime Day last month, and I've been waiting for this launch so I could consider the possibility of returning it and getting the new model.

So far, looking at this, I can't find any differences between the 8 Pro and the 9 Pro XL that I think I'd actually notice. It would be kind of nice to get the smaller 9 Pro for the sake of my wrists, but not enough to pay an extra $400 for.

Am I missing anything? Or is this just a heavily hyped release of a tiny incremental upgrade?

*I'd be more inclined to hold this against Google and not get another Pixel if my previous phone, a Samsung flagship, hadn't died in approximately the same way after approximately the same lifespan.

Do most places pass the Joel Test? He says that if you answer no to two or more of these, "you have serious problems", and I count about seven that I would say no to at my current big-name (and well-reputed) tech company:

4. Do you have a bug database? ["an organized database listing all known bugs in the code"]

No, each team has one or several poorly organized Jira boards that contain some fraction of the known bugs.

5. Do you fix bugs before writing new code?

Lol? Does any major company do this?

6. Do you have an up-to-date schedule?

No, we have weekly sprints and the vaguest idea of when bigger projects will land.

7. Do you have a spec?

I haven't seen a real spec in years.

8. Do programmers have quiet working conditions?

Well, I work from home, but all the fancy offices are open-plan.

10. Do you have testers?

Not for any of the stuff I work on, and I don't know if we have them at all.

11. Do you do hallway usability testing?

Absolutely not.

So that's 5/12. How many companies you know would get 11 or 12?