pw0ncakes

I don't mean to be hating on the people. I hate the culture of casual sex. The culture is disgusting. The people are mostly not disgusting, just misguided. I don't mean to imply that they're morally depraved people for participating in something stupid; I've certainly done my share of idiotic and embarrassing things and don't consider myself immoral for it.

Really, though, I don't care what people do, as long as it's not in my face and doesn't affect me. I'm five years out of college, so I don't really care that much. I think it's a shame what a farce college has become for most American students, but that problem comes from a lot of factors, most of which have nothing to do with sex.

I like to believe that sex is an expression of romantic love and not just a commodity to be exchanged for social status.

And some people wouldn't date a woman who isn't Catholic/Jewish/Hindu/whatever. You're within your rights to choose whom you date, but it doesn't really reflect anything about the people you're refusing as much as about yourself.

I didn't say it does.

Having a one-night-stand is stupid. Does it make someone a whore who should be ostracized? No. Is it a behavior that, in my estimation, a rational person would be ashamed of? Yes. Is it worse than the worst or stupidest thing I've done? Probably not.

Arranged marriage and misogyny vs. meaningless casual sex.

False dichotomy much?

Right, I know. I wouldn't date a woman who entered into a non-monogamous sexual relationship.

Literal: I would never date someone who was someone else's "fuck buddy".

Interpretation: So you would never date someone that slept with someone else?

Am I missing a few steps here? I never remotely implied that.

* Lots of short-term, usually unbalanced, relationships between poorly-matched people.

I would never date someone who was someone else's "fuck buddy". It's just a gross and depressing concept.

Because suburban isolation, widespread tolerance of social alcohol dependence, a crass consumer culture, and widening wealth inequalities (leading to social class anxiety) have bred a generation of social retards who can't muster up the courage to do things properly.

[Edit: As acerbic and judgmental as this comment sounds, I admit freely that I was one of those social retards at ages 17-20, although I didn't hook up-- little interest and even less ability.]

Two words: real estate.

Silicon Valley became disgustingly expensive after building substantial momentum in technology, gaining enough strength that entrepreneurs would live there in spite of the quality-of-life/cost-of-living problems.

New York needs something short of a miracle to become a startup hub. It's not "golden handcuffs" that keep people in the banks. It's the fact that the cost of rent for what would pass as an average apartment in most of the country is more than the median American's after-tax income.

Also, although finance is contracting, it's not quants who represent the bulk of the layoffs, but floor traders and M&A types. These people are useless to a startup, unless that startup wants to target the financial industry (which has sufficient resources to develop NIH syndrome, so good luck). Quants are generally being kept.

New York apartment brokers are a frivolous class of overpaid, lazy parasites who collect 12-17 percent of a year's rent for doing virtually nothing. They also handle the nasty work of ethnic screening (which is, yes, still present in the real estate industry), if you've ever heard of a "code 22" building.

Brokers for engineers (and bankers, traders) exist on the business model you described. They're called headhunters. They won't work for equity.

If you fire someone who can't understand basic programming concepts, the mistake you made was hiring that person.

In a way, it's an admission of impotence. When you fire someone, you're saying that you don't have the resources or power to turn that person into a success at your company.

The "resources" angle is crucial. Large companies can afford to have a non-producer for 6 months and train him up to being able to contribute, and they generally should. Startups usually can't afford this.

Of course, this excludes the cases where a person is fired for doing something seriously wrong or unethical. But I imagine it's much easier to fire in those cases.

I think you need both. You need to detect, and rectify, problems as soon as they occur. It's much better to catch potentially badly-fit employees (which doesn't mean they're necessarily bad, but just not right for the position you're trying to fill) in the interview process. However, there are subtle problems (people who can't handle large projects, or who don't document code, or who interview well but are actually unethical) that can't be caught in the interview process at all.

This is oddly similar to the compile/run time distinction in bugs. You want to push as many of your bugs to compile time as possible (not-so-subtle plug for static typing) but it's impossible to have catch all of them in compilation; such is the nature of bugs. Similarly, you want to catch as many problems as possible in the interview process, but can't get all of them.

It depends on the circumstance. In a small startup, it's going to be a given that a certain fraction of the people you bring on are inappropriate for the company, and that you can't predict this in advance. Fire them, before they do too much damage to the codebase, morale, et cetera. In a larger company, firing is much more of a last resort, because people can always be moved around, and because if the only problem is that they aren't producing, it's probably because they weren't mentored and this can be rectified-- large companies usually have enough time and resources that they shouldn't need to fire many people, except when things are so bad that layoffs are necessary.

I have a friend whose test is to sort a linked list using any sorting algorithm (it can be bubble sort) and any language (excluding trivial calls to library functions). It's fairly hard in C, trivial in ML or Haskell, and this is the point of the test: if you're able to use a high-level language, this is a benefit.

Or the incentive structure, if a lifestyle on the dole is too good for too many people, might be disastrous in the long term.

Within about 50 years, due to technological advancements, we'll have 20-40% paid employment (not unemployment) and there'll need to be some sort of dole.

Personally, I think it would be great to have a society where people don't need to work. The people who only work because they have to wouldn't be working, which means that the people who are working are those with ambition and talent, and only those.

What if they reverse a linked list using a language like ML or Haskell where pointers aren't required?

What's missed here is that being fired, for a lot of people, has real consequences. I don't think I'd take a job where I thought there was a 1/3 chance I'd be fired in the next 6 months.

If you're a startup, you're hiring people who understand the lack of job security. If you're a large company, there's no excuse for firing 1/3 within 6 months: you can move people around until they fit. If you're getting rid of more than 10% in the first 6 months, you're doing something wrong.

My thought: we should have a real safety net (including universal healthcare and a basic income that everyone gets, even the gainfully employed millionaires) and then allow companies to hire and fire whomever they want, because no one's life gets ruined by the loss of a job. But this would be a radical departure from the society we currently have.

Depressing and not surprising.

Why is it that so much about the state of human behavior and society is summarized by those four words?

I would rather have a society where people are paid unemployment, even indefinitely, than one where they work under Wal-Mart conditions for Wal-Mart wages-- a circumstance that would be considered slavery by most societies dating back to ancient Greece, although we're afraid to admit that this arrangement is such today.

No. Rich does not mean upper class, and upper class does not mean rich. The two factors are strongly correlated, but not the same thing.

The upper class is a tightly-connected group of people who work to consolidate power, social resources, and wealth within their own ranks. Most of them are parasites and a lot of them are criminals whose politics are regressive.

Most rich people are technically upper-middle class. In fact, if you weren't born upper-class, upper-middle is as high as you can go (your children and grandchildren have a shot, though).

It's not, at least not completely.

Arbitrage and market-making are legitimate businesses that provide liquidity to markets, making it easier for other traders to get fair trades. (Whenever you trade, the fair value is assumed to be somewhere between the bid and ask, so you're paying about half the spread on every share you trade.)

Of course, many hedge funds out there are scams that exist to take fees while taking ridiculous (and poorly-disclosed) risks with others' money, but not all of them are.

Actually, a much worse con, if you want to have this discussion, is that millions of private-sector corporate employees are getting paid peanuts for their work, compensated largely with a promise of future prosperity/advancement that will never come through. A much worse con is that the economic growth since 1975 has been siphoned off almost entirely by the increasingly entrenched upper classes, with consumer debt, a housing bubble, and student-loan debt bondage replacing wage increases to fuel the growth. A much worse con is an economy now plagued by individual insolvency and a widespread lack of trust, resulting from these catastrophic social changes.

Do you really think that it's of benefit to society for some people to show up to work every day and take home Wal-Mart wages, instead of having real alternatives?

A large share of this government waste goes to military contractors employed in completely unnecessary wars such as the multi-trillion-dollar mess in Iraq.

Also, please cite your "on average double" statistic. If my memory serves me, the discrepancy is about 30% on average, mainly because private-sector pay is far more recession-sensitive. (The discrepancy would shrink, if not reverse, in a growing economy with a healthy private sector.) For the record, low-level government employees do make more while upper-level people make considerably less than they do in the private sector.

I like programming and solving problems, but I also like working at the big picture and being aware of the financial aspect. I'd be a great VC, although I'm also a pretty strong programmer. It'd be nice to straddle both worlds and learn from the best on each side.

Since 1975, the upper class has done a great job of making sure the proceeds of economic growth and progress go mainly to them. Increased productivity is good only when the benefits are shared.

Fair point.

We believed that the unmaintainable code problem would be less of an issue after launch, and that this person knew his codebase well enough to keep it on life support until that point, at which we could hire people to fix the problem, possibly with aid of post-launch funding. We assumed it was benign "technical debt" -- a bad technical situation that can be paid off later when resources are less scarce.

What we didn't count on was the meltdown of the person responsible for the problematic code. In hindsight, we should have seen it coming, but it seems like there are always things going wrong in a startup, and everything seems urgent.

I've wanted for a while to fire this guy, throw out his code, and rebuild everything from scratch, but have been under the impression that we don't have the time/turning room to do this. I'm not experienced enough to know the externals (e.g. how hard it is to get funding, etc.) and whether or not this is the case.

A lot of HF traders pull out in times like this for technological reasons. For example, most quotefeeds (such as Reuters, if my memory serves) have outdated technology that handles load really badly. When quotes are 5+ seconds slow, they're essentially useless, given that HF trading occurs on a millisecond timeframe.

Most liquidity providers would love to be in the market when it's panicking, because this is a great time to make a lot of money, but can't be there if their data is bad and they're at risk of enormous losses.

By "big picture" I mean aesthetics, design, and also strategic resource allocation. I'm in my late 20s and know for a fact that, with a year of study, I could do better than 50-80% of society's major decision makers if in their place.

This is normal procedure. In the US, if a trade is an obvious rip-off to one party, the exchange usually cancels it. It's better to be horribly incompetent and off by 50% than marginally incompetent and make a trade that's 0.5% bad.

In Japan, on the other hand...