dls2016

the soupy sales "little green pieces of paper" trick

I got a job at AWS/EFS from a post here on hacker news. Stayed there almost 2 years until RTO took its toll (left early 2024). If not for that, I'd still be there... and I went in with full knowledge of all the horror stories. Perhaps the EFS org was just a diamond in the rough, but it was honestly one of the best jobs I've had. Even the on call wasn't so bad, with management taking an extremely hands-on and proactive approach to reducing operational burden. Extremely high technical bar which taught me a ton about building and operating large distributed systems. I do wonder if EFS is still run so well.

I've since been at Oracle/OCI (absolute dog shit with the worst on call I've ever seen, and I've been in the military lol), and now at Microsoft/Azure, which so far seems like a decent workplace.

I made $10.50/hr washing dishes in 1998 lol it's not a fair wage for anything today, really.

IOW, they're being underpaid relative to market, in exchange for ownership, expecting to get more later when they sell the shares. So far so good, but how does this look when the business has a rough patch, even one that's not their fault?

Uhm, do you have a 401k?

$4k is a slap in the face for someone who wants to keep their job.

Cobham!

I've been saying this for years: climate science isn't science (in the falsifiable sense), climate is nonlinear and humans don't like to rock the boat. This is especially true with a big, cross-disciplinary project like the IPCC report.

(Yes, I understand parts of climate science are falsifiable... I'm at least semi-educated as a former meteorologist and former PDE guy. But the conclusions of the IPCC report are not testable.)

There was measurable temperature change in the days after 9/11.

I think "transformative use" is the term you're looking for.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_use

I live in one of four US states where you must be 18 to get married. Most other states have "parental consent" laws that allow you to get married at age 16.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/11/01/child-mar...

Not to mention like every big rocker had a teenage girlfriend in the 1970s.

Then we can combine AD and numerical solvers like is found in modern weather and climate models. I don't quite understand but it has something to do with sensitivity analysis and improving data assimilation. (Google "4dvar ecmwf" for more details... eg: https://www2.atmos.umd.edu/~dkleist/docs/da/ECMWF_DA_TUTORIA...)

I think the idea is to use the "tangent linear model" to decide how much importance to give to a particular observation of the initial state.

This seems to be changing a bit. I have two children in a US public elementary school. The teachers use various apps to have children review mathematics facts. The apps allow children to move at their own pace and also incorporates some spaced repetition. (Though teachers seem to pick whatever app they like and the apps are of varying quality.)

Agreed, I've also been waiting to see a system with spaced repetition (to help memorize and retain) + dependency graph (to choose what new topics to present). Not sure what the AI value add would be?

I have two children and I was glad that teachers are willing to use new tools (I never asked if they were forced to use them, but I assume not because each teacher seems to use different websites). I'm sure some kids still get bored, but they can let the ones who enjoy math practice at their own pace and provide special guidance to them while still spending the majority of their time helping those who need it.

Yeah, the whole aspect of teaching C++ to beginners is fraught with tooling issues. That school is moving to Python (years after main campus switched)... but I'm not sure how I feel about that since I spent a lot of time talking about memory layout.

I ended up suggesting those who don't know how to setup a tool chain use VS Code. Not out of any particular affinity for it, but because of the good documentation covering Windows, Linux and macOS.

I also told them this, to encourage searching.

Though I hate Chegg and the like with a passion, since this sort of thing takes a lot of work (over the course of teaching same class a few times) and then w/ Chegg you immediately find the answers.

Thank you for making the point about accreditation, it's sort of a pet peeve of mine. I taught "intro to C++" last year at the Harrisburg campus of PSU. The students were a mix of non-CS majors who didn't know what a file was, a handful of students who already knew how to program and a bunch in the middle.

Re: accreditation... the admin is very reluctant to change anything about the courses. Even specific textbooks had to be recommended (I was warned for suggesting in the syllabus that the textbook wasn't needed). Seemed a little more strict than teaching mathematics, which I did in graduate school.

Re: kids these days... a significant portion didn't understand the concept of a file. I blame apps and the cloud (funny because I now work in cloud storage). I ended up writing my own pre-cursor doc to the "missing semester". It was challenge to get a student from not understanding the filesystem to having some sort of understanding of linear search and pointers. (If you're interested: https://www.dropbox.com/s/jar1r0l5vdgspcl/basics.pdf?dl=0)

I tried to stress, especially to the non-majors, that this "missing" stuff was perhaps the most important thing they could learn. That, and how to properly google/search for things. I would experiment and try to re-word homework questions so that interesting StackOverflow answers appeared in search results.

Supposed to break 70 tomorrow in central PA. But chaos? Nah... simply an intense frontal system (ie. big temperature gradients).

I don't know, I've worked countless 60-70 hour weeks at a restaurant... some days both opening and closing the place... and food service just doesn't seem comparable.

Perhaps fishing or working on a boat is similar, but many of those jobs allow for weeks or even months off at a time.

"The rise of precision scheduled railroading has resulted in resource and staffing cuts; to compensate railroad companies have enacted strict attendance policies for employees. These policies eliminate any free time which workers have, requiring them to be effectively on-call for weeks at a time. Workers have complained of increased levels of stress and fatigue."

My brother went to a recruiting drive last year for railroad engineer job openings (coincidentally along the Pittsburgh-Harrisburg corridor). He said they started the meeting by kicking out anyone who was even ten seconds late. The job description only got worse from there. I could see how the pay and benefits would be worth it for some small slice of the population... but you have zero outside life.

for example software engineers in San Francisco

Uhm... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

I can't believe I'm saying this, but it's hard to even watch old episodes of The Simpsons without explaining to my children why the multitude of lazy "gay jokes" aren't funny.

users get a subscription to binge / burn thru several things in a single month and then cancel their subscription

Surprisingly similar to the old days of bugging my parents for the Disney channel (of course, didn't have on-demand selection back then).

WAY cheaper than games used to be, when you look at inflation.

I recall $60 NES games in Toys R Us and a quick google shows that to be correct (for the top tier games). That's $130 these days!

And re: cars, they are so much more reliable and safe than previous decades.

I would disagree that there's a problem here. As mentioned much better in other replies, there's a global supply chain and these are commodity parts. This is on the order of jaywalking or going 2mph the speed limit on the highway.

Rules are made to cause trouble for the average law-abiding citizen, but have almost no effect on actual criminals.

I'll bite, how do you think the justice system should work?

Laws and their corresponding punishments are deterrents. And judges have flexibility in applying them to handle issues of accidental vs. intentional rule violation.

Big Pharma vs. Big Ag! Fight! Fight! Fight!

Not in the same vein as the link, but I had an Iranian colleague tell me his wife was working occasionally as a babysitter, in technical violation of her visa... but he couldn't think of how to say this in English. He moved his finger back and forth under his nose and said in Iran he'd say she's working "under the mustache". I thought this was hilarious and told him how we'd say she's working "under the table".

I have never independently confirmed if this was an actual saying in Iran or not. (Google is not helpful.)

As if the CIA could ever have a "clean slate".

I have to admit, it would take a lot to convince me the CIA wasn't involved.

In 1920, a newspaper publication or a public speech needed to be really outrageously beyond the frames of the Overton window to end up in mass protests, boycotts, etc. It took a serious effort to coordinate the outrage, so it only happened when people felt really deeply about it.

Uhm, are you familiar with the material Henry Ford was publishing in 1920? Specifically to increase sales?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_International_Jew

Perhaps this wasn't "beyond the frames of the Overton window" at the time, I don't know. But cancel culture ain't all bad!