- asarkHahaha, touché. I either missed or forgot that bit. Guess I fail the test :-)
- What code of conduct? Who advises that? Expecting that to be followed seems like it would just disadvantage honest hard studiers and honest people who actually do figure out the solution on the spot, while rewarding dishonest talented performers who also happen to be hard studiers—so unless that's what you're trying to select for....
- I think most of the dislike comes from the tendency of typical whiteboard questions to favor someone who happens to have seen a very similar problem recently, the same way someone who comes up with the correct answer to a brain teaser very quickly is usually someone who's seen it before. Many rely on that, in fact, since otherwise they'd be asking people to come up with a publishable (once published, perhaps) finding, under pressure, on the spot, in maybe an hour.
This might be fine if the "very similar problem" is something you'd likely have encountered in your work, but often they questions are drawn from a pool that most people in this line of work see rarely if at all, and if they do it's likely to be some very small subset of the questions, so dedicated study of the remainder of the pool still puts one at a large advantage, regardless how useful it is in doing your actual work.
They're measures of "how bad you want it" (how much of your time you spent memorizing stuff you don't actually use to prep for the interviews) and/or how recently you took an algorithms course. And maybe those are things worth measuring, I dunno. Maybe the absence of strong enough signals on either of those is important enough that it makes sense to use them to reject people who are otherwise very capable of doing the actual work.
- > It doesn't seem that way, it is that way. If you have to muddy the definition to make it fit then it's not very practical.
OK. I wrote a really long response attempting to get through, but frankly, at this point, you should write a paper and submit to some journals, because this whole line of reasoning would be a significant finding if it stands up to scrutiny.
- > Being a central concept does not mean it's not esoteric.
That might be fair. I wouldn't consider a term well understood by anyone with much exposure to the social sciences (any of them, just about, will run you into it, sooner rather than later, probably) or a more-than-tiny exposure to economics (if we're feeling generous and separate that from the social sciences) or just about any higher liberal arts education, to be esoteric, but I can see that falling within one's tolerances for the term, depending. Probably well North of half the population would be lost by it, or take something other than the intended meaning, that's true.
- > This thread was about the term, and that's the definition. If you have to change it to "you'll know it when you see it" then perhaps the definition is not so useful. The biggest companies have started from the smallest of ventures so your personal perception of size and importance has nothing to do with the term's qualification.
You keep ignoring important parts of what's commonly considered the defining properties of the capitalist class, to make the idea seem less useful and much more slippery than it is. Or maybe taking that one sentence from WP as the entirety of the definition, period (though, again, ignoring important parts of that, even). I'm not sure you're going to find what you need to understand the concept, if you're interested, in an HN discussion.
- > I don't think your point is going to get across.
Oh, I'm used to Internet discussions with folks of a certain mindset (I here carefully avoid a convenient, self-selected label that I suspect applies in this case, as its introduction is rarely helpful). They're incredibly common online and usually very eager to engage. Years and years of experience, here. I usually avoid it these days because it's almost always fruitless for all concerned, but felt like giving it a go this time.
> You're talking to basically a huge crowd of well-paid individuals who can and do frequently swap between employment and self-employment, including employing others.
Fussell's class-confused middle by socialized attitude, maybe, coupled with the income and means of his upper-middle and so especially off-kilter. "I'm a doctor, I make good money, I run my own practice, therefore the capitalist class is both what I'm part of and easy to join, so it's a silly and not very useful term". That sort of thing.
- > Also why does it have to be "large quantities"? Buy 1 share and you're a part owner. Many large companies have stock plans. It's not rare and if you're an employee then by definition you "have money" from working.
Because the distinction is whether one's primary activity is using capital to gain income, versus working for pay. "Ah but a worker may own some shares!" isn't important. It's tough to nail down color names at transition points, too, but you add a tiny bit of white to some very red paint and no-one's gonna start calling it pink. It's still red.
[EDIT] at the heart of the misunderstanding, here, is a false syllogism, I think. "Pink paint is red mixed with white, you mixed some white in this red, therefore it is now pink"; "The capitalist class own capital, this worker owns some capital, therefore this worker is part of the capitalist class"; "The capitalist class owns capital, this guy owns and operates a hot dog stand, a hotdog stand is capital, therefore this guy is part of the capitalist class". It's quite similar to another that's often seen: "Mugging is taking something by threat of force, governments ultimately back taxation with the threat of force, therefore taxation is the same as mugging" or variations that end up at at some form of "taxation is the same thing as theft, so your thinking is inconsistent if you don't transfer all your bad feelings about theft to taxation, as well".
- > This is a fallacy. If you're going to talk about profit then you must also consider that the risk and loss also goes to owners while workers get paid either way.
I think you're falling into a set pattern of argument rather than looking at what's under examination and considering it on merit.
> This is something that should be rather simple to understand in the HN/Startup crowd. Considering that anyone can buy shares or start their own business, my point stands that this is the most non-exclusive club possible.
Please look back over the previous posts in the thread and consider the points that have already been raised.
- > And yes, agree that it's a useless definition. I've never seen it used outside of esoteric political debates.
Esoteric? It's a central concept for understanding how capitalist societies are structured. The central concept, even. It's not math, it's language, exceptions or hard-to-pin-down boundary regions don't wholly invalidate or render useless an idea.
- Owning a few shares isn't really what's meant. If your way of life still depends on earning wages for the bulk of your adult life, that's usually not what people mean by the term "capitalist" (or "capitalist class"), since it'd be a pretty useless definition.
- And they're pushing 8k now! I don't know who that's even for. The "actually benefits from 4K" slice of the market's already pretty damn small.
- HDR and larger color gamut's nice. Deeper blacks are nice. Agree 4k's more useful for monitors than TVs, where it's bottom of the list of important modern upgrades to ordinary hi-def TV, IMO, unless you're rocking a legit home theater, as in projector and huge room and all. Semi-properly-set-up surround's way more important than 4k, though also expensive and very inconvenient in most people's TV spaces.
- Some bad companies: no big deal, no one's making you stay, leave if you don't like it.
Some bad unions: all unions are awful and the solution is to not have unions.
- > Modern capitalist societies—marked by a universalization of money-based social relations, a consistently large and system-wide class of workers who must work for wages, and a capitalist class which owns the means of production [....]
Emphasis mine.
- > Also, why 4k? Small room, massive display? Many people can not even detect a difference between 1080p and 4k at normal couch distance.
I've got a 55" 4K at a viewing distance of maybe 6', tops, if you're leaning waaaaay back on the couch, and can only barely tell the difference. A good 1080p source (high bitrate h264 or h265, or a normal ol' 1080p bluray) looks a hell of a lot better than Netflix's 4k. HDR matters a ton more than 4k itself does, as far as how good something looks.
[EDIT] and what really matters is having semi-decent speakers in a somewhat-OK 5.1 layout, with a proper receiver. I'd drop to 720p on the picture before I'd give that up.
- Apple needs another of their performance-focused releases, like that one where one of the biggest features was reducing memory use. For MacOS and for iOS, focused on reducing system latency in both cases. Both are a lot laggier than they used to be, and the power of the hardware under them barely seems to matter.
- I'm probably still easily in the 80s WPM, and could practice back up into the 100s in a day or two. Input lag doesn't so much throw off my typing as it makes computing feel kinda remote and gummy rather than real and crisp. You lose the feeling of a direct connection between your input and the computer. Like you're poking the keys with a stick underwater, no matter how fast you type.
Even this text box, on HN, is noticeably disconnected compared with, say, DOS on an IBM PC-XT, or your average text input area on early Apple computers, BeOS on a first-gen Pentium, QNX on same, that sort of thing, and that's without applying the linked site's extra latency. Everything, just about, is a bit muddy on a "modern" computer. iOS is the closest thing to an exception and even that's gotten worse over the years.
- 75x... factor in the inverse cube law... yeah I'm gonna say unless it's somehow a directed effect it's still won't even be close to mattering a little bit, even if there is some sub-light "wave" of some kind coming toward us from this event.
[EDIT] inverse square, that is. My bad.
- Pick a job that offers actual maternal leave (teaching's probably the best—time it right and you get the Summer, too, plus your daily schedule will be close to that of your kid so you'll have lower daycare costs) or otherwise is either fairly tolerant of people disappearing for a while for kids or is easy to get back into after leaving—I don't have direct knowledge of this but I suspect family-friendliness and relative ease of relocation to follow a higher-earning spouse, say, is part of the appeal of all of teaching, nursing, and real estate agent..ry? ing?
Or just take barely enough unpaid leave (or draw on other pools of paid leave, which are usually tiny anyway and may have been eaten into over various pregnancy-related issues and appointments already) to get back on their feet and head back in, leaving the baby with a cheap unlicensed daycare down the street (maybe fine, maybe, uh, not, but not like there are other options on a limited budget) or older relative or whoever :-/