- It's unfortunate, but I agree with the comments that say asking too many of these questions (and the way they are asked) can be a red flag for the interviewing company.
In my experience, the best way to get to something closer to the truth about a work environment is to do something casual (lunch usually, but even just a group interview can work) with your prospective peers. You can observe how they interact with each other - do they seem happy and friendly with one another? Or do they seem cowed into submission, afraid to open up about anything? The stories they choose to tell you often will reveal much more than you could get out of a formal list of questions. I've actually had people tell me that the boss was a jerk in one of these situations (and the whole group agreed, not just one disgruntled employee.) Or heard about the time some employees did some wildly inappropriate (and hilarious) things in a conference room. I ran away from the first situation, but would have gladly accepted a job at the second (not _because_ of the conference room thing - these people seemed to genuinely like working together and at the company.)
- I'd encourage people to look at the history of Fujifilm (the Japanese peer to Kodak) to see why they didn't fail, but Kodak did.
https://petapixel.com/why-kodak-died-and-fujifilm-thrived-a-...
TL;DR: Fujifilm diversified quickly, Kodak clung to the film business for far too long.
- I agree we need to remove the perverse incentives across the entire system. I also agree the current ACA subsidies are a band-aid.
It's incredibly frustrating because this is a solved problem - even just fixing the most egregious flaws in the ACA would be a huge improvement. I am very skeptical, though, that in my lifetime American voters will ever be unified enough again to take on the de facto doctors union, the health insurer oligopoly, and the pharmaceutical companies, all of whom currently benefit from the broken system, and basically control the government top to bottom.
- >The Data: Before the ACA, Maine implemented this. Anthem requested a 20% rate hike due to adverse selection. After the pool was implemented, the rate hike dropped to under 2%.
>This shows we can protect the sick without forcing the healthy to pay $25k/year premiums to an oligopoly.
So in effect give the oligopoly tax money so they keep their rates the same for the sick and the well? Isn't that what Congress is basically currently fighting over (federal money vs. state?)
Congress also intentionally removed the unpopular requirement to have to buy insurance (either through your employer or the ACA market), essentially re-creating one of the death-spiral conditions in the first place. It's been the Republican goal all along to get the ACA to die in a death spiral so we can go back to forcing people into medical bankruptcy, like God intended.
- Again, forget about who "needs" what. The basic problem is that you don't have a written agreement. Time to negotiate with your co founder and get something signed. I obviously don't know anything about each of you, but if you are truly each contributing 50% to the success of the company then your angel investor co-founder is not getting 50% of the value at present, so has, in this scenario, a point.
I've seen lots of best friend co-founders end up not being able to be in the same room together eventually. Most of these situations boil down to fundamental misunderstandings that could have been addressed at the beginning. That's why signed employee agreements (where compensation, equity, vesting, and expectations are clearly laid out in black and white) are a must.
- Personally, I think you may have already gotten a great deal if the angel/co-founder is willing to do a 50-50 split and not take a salary (or get paid in equity in lieu of salary.) Is your co-founder now demanding to be paid in salary/equity after they agreed (I assume this is written down somewhere?) otherwise? If this is a "handshake agreement" situation, then I guess you are in the process of learning an important business lesson...
That said, fairness in business has nothing to do with your or your co-founder's personal financial situation, other than the constraints of reality (i.e., you simply can't work without a minimum amount of salary.) Frankly your co-founder should be paid in something (equity) if they are not drawing a salary. Theoretically, ownership and compensation should reflect what each of you are bringing to the company. In fact, your co-founder is actually getting compensated less than you while investing their own money - that means you are already better compensated than them. Is that "fair"? Maybe, maybe not, you guys have to agree.
But get a written agreement - if this already exists than just stand by it.
- I agree that the way the US pays for health care is completely broken, but your framing of the Association Health Plan rule change is strange to me.
Association Health Plans are a way to weaken the ACA, so Republicans can finally get back to the days of underwritten health insurance (i.e., de-facto denials for preexisting conditions via unaffordable insurance costs.) It has been in legal limbo for a while, and the Department of Labor finally (rightfully, in my opinion) seriously limited the scope of these plans.
AHP's are able to charge based on the "health" of the group, and aren't subject to covering the ACA essential items (like, say, emergency, maternal, or rehabilitation care.) This would encourage groups of "healthy" people to form low-cost plans that lacked basic coverage, and would leave "sick" people on ACA plans, which of course would go up in cost because of this.
We saw this in the bad old pre-ACA days. It's the classic death spiral that made most "high risk" pools basically non-functional before the ACA. The only option was to have a job through an employer with a large enough group plan that your rates wouldn't skyrocket. Otherwise, the option was usually bankruptcy.
Of course, literally every other modern democratic nation besides the US has figured out how to provide health insurance in one way or another without bankrupting their citizens. Maybe you could do another article showing how other countries systems avoid the US problems.
- I have a Pi4 running Raid 1 NAS with two SSD drives, and an externally powered USB hub. Unfortunately, it crashes every 6 months or so and needs a power cycle. Haven't been able to track down why, but I also suspect a power supply issue.
Initially I naively tried to run the two drives right off the USB3 ports in the Pi, and that basically crashed within a day - but that is of course because I was exceeding the power draw. An external hub and supply helped, but didn't fully fix the issue.
- FTA:
"When asked if linking things like blue eyes, blonde hair, and IQ could be interpreted as eugenics, he clarified with a laugh, 'I said brown hair!'
Then, miming the same hand motion that Elon Musk performed following President Trump’s inauguration, Asparouhov joked, 'My heart goes out to you.'"
Uhhh, _what_?
- If you can be a little flexible on (2), then Beancount hits most of the Holy Grail points. The ledger format is literally text (it is plain-text accounting after all) but there is a query language the works really well.
I end up saving CSV's locally and importing the transactions from there (no hand entry, but I still need the intermediate download step.) I don't find it that too burdensome since I don't have a zillion different accounts.
[This](https://reds-rants.netlify.app/personal-finance/the-five-min...) project (I am not affiliated in any way) claims to automate ledger update even further.
- Whenever a new attempt at limiting exposure to what is obviously harmful content (e.g. explicitly violent content, and anything to do with minors), I always see the same patterns of argument against the attempt:
(1) It's the parent's fault.
(2) Freedom! No government censorship!
(3) This is technically impossible to control (the fix is worse than the problem.)
While each point can be argued, I think the debate needs to be framed a different way. We are facing a dosage and availability problem, just as in comparing, in order of harmfulness: coffee, alcohol, and heroin.
We know what happens when a harmful substance suddenly becomes widely available. Do people say "hey I drank some beer when I was a kid so all drugs are fine, including opioids, in unlimited amounts"? And, "if your kids gets addicted to opioids, it's the parent's fault for not keeping it away from them" (when your trusted doctor prescribed them first?) Or, "people are free to do what they want, and it is technically impossible to control the supply of opioids anyway, so why bother"?
The unfiltered internet is FLOODED with violent, disturbing pornographic images that literally NO ONE should ever see. It's not some sort of law of nature that this content exists - humans made it and put it there, and the wide availability and potency of this content is the problem. It isn't seeing someone's naked behind in a context-appropriate scene in a movie (that's closer to coffee in the above example.)
As it turns out, I think this law is a good step, but far from complete or perfect (or even good.). Requiring each individual to personally set up 100% effective filters is an impossible burden. For sure, when I had young kids a decade ago, I tried, and I also talked to my kids about it. But how about also that drug dealer isn't allowed to sneakily approach my kids with free samples? And I can reasonably expect that my kids aren't forced to walk through the floor of a casino, with all the flashing lights and prostitutes, on their way to school? Since most school work requires the internet these days, that's what it feels like as a parent.
I have two adult kids, one doing well (despite visiting some questionable sites as a youth, I found out later), and one struggling, in part from the crap that is found on the internet. I know many of my peers with young adult children are telling the same story - at least one of their kids is way off the rails with a serious real-life problem, usually fueled by the internet casino in some way (and before you tell me we were all bad parents, these are now adults in their 20's and 30's, who mostly seemed normal and well-prepared after high school.)
Now, I am not completely blaming the internet, an excellent tool that has improved many things in my lifetime, for these outcomes. But let's not kid ourselves - there is a huge distinction between, say, Google Maps, and animal torture videos.
This is a hard problem, with lots of nuance and gray areas. It's the entire reason that laws and courts exist - sometimes you really do just need to sit down with a group of people and come to some sort of solution, however imperfect, and iterate to make it better.
Because clearly something has to happen - the opioids coming through the municipal internet pipes aren't going to be completely remediated with a personal water filter. This law provides for free water filters, but ones that won't work everywhere without prohibition-like enforcement (e.g. open source, DIY distributions of Linux.) It's part of the solution, far from perfect, and far from complete. But we are done doing nothing.
- The appearance of this on an official US Government website, and the fact that it is not the result of a malicious joke, fills me with sadness and a sense of loss.
It also fills me with anger at the Senate politicians who approved these fools as fit for their positions.
- A concise 9 word summary of OTR. As a young person, I found the idea of just running around with your friends, doing whatever, and not trying to be "productive" in any way, intoxicating.
After I got a little older, though, I identified more with people left in the wake of destruction (e.g., the guy who owned the new car they were driving across the country for delivery.)
- >Physics can't claim domain over the study of reality and then say that reality can only be studied using mathematical rules.
I never claimed that physics claims domain over all studies of reality - in fact I quite limited the domain of physics to finding the "best set of mathematical rules" that gives a certain probability of events happening.
>Otherwise you're just precluding the conclusion of what you're supposed to be studying, that reality can be described by mathematical rules.
Just the quantifiable part of reality - the "metaphysics" parts (e.g., why are we here? Is that a sensible question?) aren't the purview of physics (although physicists generally have their own opinions, as does Prof. Rovelli...)
>So we should hide reality under a rug if it could possibly lead to harm? I never said hide it - I said such metaphysical beliefs could lead to harm. So be aware that the popular interpretation of there being no "objective reality" (which relies on interpreting something mathematically rigorous in physics) can be twisted into justification for nearly any action.
- Don't get me started. I recently rented a car (American make) that didn't have an actual physical control for the headlights (and no, this wasn't a Tesla.) Took three Ph.D.s in the car to find the right sequence on the touch-screen to operate the headlights.
Makes me think that the UX people don't actually drive cars - are they all riding their unicycles (wearing a top-hat) to work?
- Another Ph.D. physicist here. Any popularization of quantum mechanics (or quantum gravity in this case) can quickly degenerate into potentially foolish, or even harmful, metaphysical speculation. Physicists are in the business of finding the best set of mathematical rules that describe "If the conditions A exist, then B happens [with a certain probability]." The frustrating part is that about 100 years ago, quantum mechanics provided a set of rules that didn't have an easy intuitive interpretation (i.e. that quantum mechanics is not both a "real and local" theory.) Yet it is wildly successful for what it does, and the mathematics is crystal clear. (By the way, regular non-relativistic quantum mechanics can be interpreted as having "no reality", no fancy quantum loop gravity needed; see e.g.https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9609013 - more precisely, only correlations exist.)
Taken to its metaphysical conclusion, though, "there is no objective reality" can lead to harm. So, I guess morality is all a matter of perspective? That can be used to justify anything. We do seem to have an emergent reality (at least the one I am experiencing at the moment) that is held in common - just because the underlying mathematics is hard to interpret doesn't justify "anything goes", or my crazy belief is just as good as your crazy belief.
So although it is fun to think about, don't take "there is no objective reality" too seriously - you still have to go to work, you still have to pay your taxes.
- False dichotomy (ruthless vs. empathetic.) Sometimes managers need to be ruthless, sometimes they need to be empathetic. That's why it is called "management".
- Email still has its use cases in the modern workplace. Sometimes you need a slower, more detailed communication channel, especially when inter-company communications are involved.
But most of the things the OP likes about email make it a nightmare from a legal perspective. Once a company gets sued over labor/trade secret/IP related things, one result is a strict email (and other electronic communication) retention policy. Some retention periods can be as short as 6 months. Apps are deployed that scour your local storage to make sure you aren't archiving emails off-line. This removes many (most) of the archival advantages of email.
Emails are often front-line evidence in lawsuits. A good example: https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-google-recruitment-ema...
- Grouping students by ability was also common in the US (for the same national security reasons) up to the 1980's.
- I've hired many people for science and automation software positions at small and large US biotechs. We usually did a phone screen (both technical and HR), then an on-site interview. The overall process wasn't much different for Ph.D. vs. Bachelors/Masters, but of course we asked very different questions depending on the level. Ph.D.-level positions were usually required to give a brief talk (partly to probe their communication skills.)
For certain specific software automation positions, we did end up giving a coding test during the on-site interview. But no homework or multi-round stuff.
The present situation in software is mostly the result of an oversupply of labor. Companies are endlessly picky because they can be. I am old enough to remember other recessions where companies could make ridiculous demands (once had a company demand I come in early Sunday morning for an interview, just to make sure I was truly committed to working 24/7. No thanks!)
Recessions eventually end, although not always in a way that helps specific careers. Good luck!
- This is the study that the Guardian article talking about https://www.bmj.com/content/378/bmj-2021-068921
So, before everyone accuses their favorite mechanism:
"After multivariable adjustments, men who consumed ultra-processed foods in the highest fifth had a 29% higher risk of developing colorectal cancer than did those in the lowest fifth...However, we found no significant association among women"
and
"our results show that the association between ultra-processed food consumption and colorectal cancer among men was largely independent of body mass index."
and finally:
"Why the association was seen in men but not in women is unclear."
They also saw the obvious factors (smoking, alcohol, being sedentary, etc.) correlate with cancer, but were accounted for.
So this is a sex-based result. Make of that what you will.
- In my experience, the hiring managers with the best track record have these in common, which mostly boil down to the hiring teams doing their homework:
(1) The expectations for the position are clearly defined (2) The hiring team members coordinate on questions and expected responses, and they are consistent in interviews. (3) The hiring team members know how to spot potential issues (e.g., excessive bad-mouthing of previous employers, etc.) (4) The hiring teams effectively leverage their networks for references. Ideally, there are not-too-distant trusted relationships between the candidate and the hiring team. In the absence of this, references are followed up on carefully (this has become an art form in modern times.)
These reduce the risk of someone slipping through the cracks. Hiring teams also get better with experience, so any mistakes should be carefully analyzed and corrective actions incorporated into the hiring process.
- If you like this sort of thing, check out https://www.magyaradam.com/wp/ too. A lot of his work uses a line scan camera.
- As always, the poison is in the dose, and the environment matters a lot.
It's a very similar pattern to other engineered addictive substances (introduction/harm/recognition/regulation.)
Tobacco has been around forever in the Americas. Were Native Americans sprawled out on the forest floor, unable to function because of tobacco? Of course not. The mild high and self-limiting supply of tobacco was no problem in their environment.
Then came the industrialization of tobacco. Cigarettes came in convenient dosages, and were cheap and ubiquitous. You could get cigarettes anywhere, and you could smoke them almost anywhere. They were given out for free to soldiers. Movies made smoking look glamorous. And smoking does help keep you slim.
But then people started living longer, and the health problems of tobacco addiction (even to people just in proximity to tobacco smoke) became clear. So we no longer let tobacco companies advertise to children, and attractive actors (mostly) no longer smoke in movies. We tax the hell out of tobacco, and restrict smoking areas more and more. We also forced the tobacco companies to clearly label their product, and there are widespread education campaigns.
Eventually tobacco use dropped. But it wasn't primarily because the addicts all suddenly found self-discipline.
The social media companies, just like tobacco, will never see the problem until they are forced. And I am afraid, given the sums of money involved, we will end up with the equivalent of social-media "vaping" (that has to go through the full cycle of introduction/harm/recognition/regulation again...)
- Was just going to write more or less the same thing. A second home (especially far away) is a huge expense, not a financial investment. Whether or not that expense is worth it (e.g. as a place to create good memories) is a very different prospect than real estate as an investment.
We rented the same vacation house for many years - it was way less expensive than owning the place. Recently it was re-zoned to be in a flood plain - that would have completely killed the place as an investment.
We could have bought the house BTW, but instead invested the money in stock and bond index funds. That turned out to be a really smart move. We still have the great memories, and don't have the ongoing headache of a far-away property to maintain.
- "Homemade" and "submersible" are two words that, when used together, mean "hell no!"
- As the parent of two mid-20's adults (one thriving, the other not so much) I actually downloaded the paper and read it out of curiosity (shocking, I know.)
They asked people how many days last month they had "bad mental health days" ("Q1".) The measure of Despair in the graphs is constructed as: "by setting the Q1 variable to one when an individual gave the answer 30 and zero otherwise." So if you had a continuous month of "bad mental health days" you are in despair. The fraction of those months is y-axis in the graphs (typically around 0-10%)
This is all US data BTW.
Anyway, the abstract and title oversimplify the data in my opinion. Across the board (even up to 60+ years of age) the surveyed report overall 2x more "despair" than in the 1990's. Yes, it is worse amongst under 40 workers, as shown in Figure 4. Despair used to be pretty flat by age for workers, now it it highest for young workers, with linear-ish decrease until about 60 where the value hasn't really changed over time.
But the graph in Figure 8 shows that "despair" hasn't really moved much for any age group of college educated workers since the 1990's. And their mention of the change in the "hump" shaped in the abstract doesn't account for the fact that in absolute terms, unsurprisingly, the unemployed have a lot more despair overall than workers.
So the "young workers" in the title are those without a college education in the US - that's probably a very different demographic than the average HN participant...
- Kinda surprised that "No need for an interpretation" was so low. I bet most respondents just picked "Copenhagen" and went on with their day (apparently around half of experimentalists, ever practical, picked Copenhagen.)
Full disclosure: I think Copenhagen is as good as any of the others, but find many-worlds more intuitive. Spontaneous collapse is another nice way to get around the measurement problem. The math is the same no matter which.
It's fun to think about, but until one of the differing interpretations leads to a testable prediction, not much progress will be made.
- And this one from the National Park Service web site, funded by NSF:
https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/ys-24-1-the-challenge-of-unde...
TL;DR - the observed reduction of the elk herd correlated with wolf introduction, but also with an increase in cougars, grizzly bears, and even bison, all of which either reduce or compete with elk. Human hunting also added pressure, but that has been limited as the herd size reduced. It is complicated.
Uh, monogamy of both partners is also an option, not just celibacy. Not common in these times, I know, but you don't have to completely abstain from sex to be safe.