halbermensch

...like the contortions I have to go through to get exception-safe asynchronous flow control.

OK, I'm game. Care to elaborate?

Why, that would have to be the very book I'm reading right now, in the moment, as we speak:

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Aufzeichnungen_des_Malte_L...

Yeah, man. We know, we know, we know. What's your replacement?

Have to admit I'm not exactly afraid... but kinda spooked out by those dried lotus seedpods

'sall good - both kinds of learning are useful and necessary, actually.

...or a notch under, for good measure.

You'll also be exposed to: near-stupendous degrees of waste, inefficiency, and general head-in-the-sand-i-tude.

Like: signing up for a $140k/year "consulting" gig, but having a secretary pick your sole "workstation", a 12-inch, low-memory Lenovo model normally given to sales people.

Or: going through an grueling process ostensibly designed to assure that you have truly l33t skills in analytic and quantitative thinking skills... only to be herded into a dungeon-like cubicle farm with crass overhead lightin, poor ventilation, non-stop chatter and blaring overhead TVs, making it impossible to think straight for more than 5 seconds... where you end up plugging away for 10-, 12-, 14-hour days.

Or: being hired ostensibly for your senior-level experience in platform X, only to have every decision "vetted" by utterly inexperienced H1-Bs, whose personal coding style reminds you, without irony, of something you last flinched at seeing on The Daily WTF (http://thedailywtf.com/).

Not to mention: not infrequent episodes of not just hot-headness, but outright bullying and borderline psychological violence.

And generally: a stifling atmosphere which makes it basically impossible to have an honest conversation with anyone in upper management about the day-to-day realities of the environment they ostensibly expect you to be delivering this supposedly highly valuable, mission-critical software under.

Granted, this was at "mid-tier" companies, and I (thought) I knew what I was getting into. Still, the reality was far ruder -- and far more weird and just plain absurd, at times-- than any of my worst expectations.

Seriously, your English is quite good, but there are a few grammar nits in your writeup, so it would pay to invest in a bit of proofreading (from a native speaker, if possible).

So everyone thinks they're hiring the top 0.5%, even though the same 199 losers are spamming their resumes to every job posting.

Yeah, when you think about it, this whole "we only hire the top 0.5%" condescension really amounts to a basic statistical reasoning fallacy.

To construct an alternate hypothesis: the "real" threshold for ranked competence[1] at "elite" companies might, just might, be more like "the top 5%". But we can safely assume that 95% of the available talent pool in this category will be employed (and not actively seeking), compared with say 70% in the bottom, or "sub-elite" category, at any given time.[2]

So for example in a "town" of 1000 putative developers, with skill levels ranging from god-like to "good enough" to mediocre to utterly bogus and self-deluding, let's say 50 (or 5%) of these are truly "elite", and 950 are "non-elite".

Further, of the elite category, 47.5 will be employed (and not actively looking), and only 2.5 will be in the job market -- versus, out of the 950 non-elite developers, we might have 665 (or 70%) employed, versus 285 (or 30%) on the market and actively looking.

Given this over-simplified (but arguably "less wrong") hypothesis, and assuming that a given opening draws applicants whose fitness ranking is evenly distributed across the pool of in-the-market candidates, it's easy to see that for any given opening, we'll have a ratio of 2.5:285 for elite:non-elite developers -- or a paltry 0.869%(!) of the candidate pool (2.5/287.5) will appear to be from the "elite" category.

That is, for every 1 "elite" resume in your inbox, you'll be seeing 114 "non-elite" resumes. And since tech geeks are, by and large, an insecure, envious lot, they like to brag and fudge a bit -- so that 114 easily becomes 199 in their minds (or the 1 a 0.6, whichever).

Which gives you the infamous "we only hire the top 0.5%" urban legend right there. Even though they're all really just angling over the... top 5% (ranked over the general pool of putative developers).

And since hot-shots like Joel Spolsky, not to mention nearly all of the investment bank / hedge fund types, and well, probably half or more of everyone in the monthly "Who's hiring?" thread just keeps repeating it, and repeating it, and repeating it... well, shucks, it must be true.

[1] As such a thing as generic competence exists can be objectively measured, etc, etc, but that's a separate issue.

[2] Which corresponds -- conservatively, for the purposes of this argument -- to another widely espoused, but never quantitatively substantiated belief out in startupland: that "all" of the good developers are "always" employed and "almost never" on the job market longer than 2 days.

Well and good, but it might be better to say "correlate with" rather than "predict." In the scheme of things, it's probably more accurate to say that pi(x) is self-generating, and it's the zeros of the zeta function that are tagging along for the ride.

...but not nearly as hard as learning to program well in any single one of them.

My wrists, presently. Need a job where I can think for a living, for a change.

Quite interesting though, as far as "useless" ideas go.

Except that the Free City concept wasn't dreamed up in a libertarian vacuum.

Except the way Thiel & Co mean it, it was. There's no way you can compare their schemes with historical examples with HK, Trieste, the Hanseatic League etc (if that's what you're thinking).

Umm, the people he represents weren't protesting that "Free Cities" are being built near their property (their "backyard") -- rather, that outsiders are proposing to build them on their property.

Or not goofy, if you think of 'number' as an enum constant denoting that variable's type, rather than its value.

In this context, 'NaN' just happens to be another admissible value within the space of "number".

Are you really posting from Iran? Are you familiar with the Tor Project:

http://www.tor-project.org/

In any case, please be careful there, friend. Be very careful.

Nifty little app, but in no way comparable with a service the scale of Gmail.

So a better title might be, "Doh! What's above the hood != what's under the hood."

Basic Latin American history, guys. Do a bit of reading.

Because the whole "Free Cities" thing is part of the old Libertarian wet dream of establishing instant Utopias on whatever scrap of "unclaimed" land they salvage from somewhere (some rock or coral reef somewhere... or in this case, lands belonging to an indigenous group seen as too weak to defend itself). Where the world will finally see how efficient and truly egalitarian we can all live once the bane of Coercion has been abolished once and for all. And the sun will never stop shining, etc. You know, John Galt and his valley in Colorado, etc.

In any case, the current generation's de-facto "John Galt" (Peter Thiel) is one of the key backers of the Honduran project, so (despite the abuse of posting guidelinbes) that makes it very much a Libertarian topic.

I think the basic point you've failed to notice is that, not-so-paradoxically, it's the "Free Cities" entrepreneurs who are seeking to benefit from, i.e. are openly acting in direct collusion with, these very same forced expropriations.

Jeez. I'm all for ditching $9,000-a-month "internships" at staid glass-box financial companbies. But someone needs to break it to this kid that war is no place for Experience Junkies:

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

First-class Canadian-run legal systems, oh my! Sounds so wonderfully egalitarian and efficient, you almost want to move there... except that things aren't always what they seem:

The problem is there are no clean slates. Honduras does not have untouched expanses of territory awaiting homesteaders to lay claim. Trujillo, the site most often mentioned for the first Charter City, has long belonged to afro-indigenous Garifuna communities and campesino farmers, and suffers from a long history of attempted usurpation, from the Republic of Poyas to the United Fruit Company.

...

Trujillo’s Garifuna and campesino communities have, over the past 20 years, been preyed upon by violence unleashed as a consequence of a set of rules inspired by one of Michael Strong’s ideological cohorts, and co-author of a book promoting ‘entrepreneurial capitalism,’ Hernando de Soto.

In the heart of the region apparently now proposed as the future home of a Charter City, on August 27 the Garifuna community of Vallecito awaited government officials, who never came, to measure a small portion their land, to which they hold full legal title. The huge majority of their lands has been taken over by businessmen and drug traffickers, mostly, they explain, through violence and fraud. The measurement would be a first step in recovering possession of the land.

The Vallecito community was surrounded by armed bands firing off weapons through the night. A group of heavily armed paramilitaries snuck into the middle of a Garifuna drumming circle, made their presence known and left, the death threat established with clarity. The armed bands have continued to circle the community.

The scene was typical of the region since the 1992 Land Modernization Law unleashed paramilitaries against agrarian communities. The law altered the Agrarian Reform Law from the 1960s, which prohibited the resale of land acquired through the agrarian reform program. Businessmen and drug traffickers, with deep ties to the military intelligence death squads infamous for political killings in the 1980s, used armed bands and other forms of coercion to force Garifuna and campesino communities to sell their land, illegally, and used their political clout to maintain control of the land despite the illegal title transfers.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/privately-owned-charter-cities-...

One of the ways we gauge an applicant’s ability to handle unknown situations is with a Lego test. ... Top-tier applicants will stand out during surprising interview situations, like the Lego test, based on their ability to handle adversity, the method they use to create the solution and the amount of time it takes to complete the task. Particularly outstanding candidates will also ask questions and genuinely have fun with the challenge.

Umm, yeah. I'd like to see some evidence that performance on such gamed-up "tests" have any more hard correlation with actual, real, in-the-trenches job performance... than with, say, a candidate's sun sign, or the palm readings from a psychic down at the mall...

Developers must be able to work in collaborative, team-based environments. To test this skill, team up applicants with current employees. For example, we have applicants join Lextech developers in an Xbox game. This part of the interview isn’t about the candidate’s gaming chops –- it’s about measuring the candidates’ ability to work with others in a pressure-filled environment.

Unless of course the candidate is over the age of 25 or so, or similarly possessed with enough sense of self yo recognize that they have no time for such childishness... and correspondingly, find an appropriate, tactful excuse to cut the interview short, and ask for directions to the next elevator.

As for military spending, the US benefitted from that brief synapse in time in between the collapse of the Soviet Union/fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the emergence of another combatant 10 years later whose conflict with the US is almost as costly, and much more diffuse.

This is of course naive, if not disingenuous. It's as if he doesn't recall that our primary military engagement in the last 12 years has been in a country called Iraq. And that conflict did not "emerge" by any stretch of the imagination. It was invented out of whole cloth.