Surely there are way worse questions that companies ask.

Also, I stopped reading after his first argument which is incredibly stupid. He thinks the fact that he found inefficiencies in code at companies asking such questions proves something. The company I work for asks questions about testing yet we still have untested code. This is not strange, because outcomes depend on many things, not solely interview questions. It’s such an idiotic argument.

Means-tested benefits result in bureaucracy that sometimes costs more than the increase in cost from giving the benefit to everyone would be, they create poverty traps, and they screw over people in atypical situations (i.e. a kid whose parents care so little they can't even be bothered to get the paperwork done that proves their low income status).

If vJ is the perceived value of getting the job, pJ the perceived probability of getting the job, vI the value of the literal payment for going through the interview process, and vT the perceived value of one's time (and any other cost if it exists, such as travel) required to go through the process, we can represent the expected value of going through the interview process as:

  EV = pJ * vJ + vI - vT

I also assume that the candidate would choose where and whether to apply based on EV for their various options.

One one end, if your pJ is close to 1 (you're highly qualified for the job and will likely get it), the result is dominated by pJ * vJ which is ~= vJ; vI and vT matter little. This means that if you will probably get the job, it doesn't really matter much whether the interview is paid (and it also doesn't matter as much how much time it takes). For top candidates, the difference in pJ * vJ for different companies should be the dominant factor, i.e. they will apply for the best jobs.

On the other end, if your pJ is close to 0 (you're applying on a long shot), then vI and vT become much more significant factors. If your chance to get the job is really low, then the interview being paid makes it significantly more attractive, and it also matters more how much time it takes. The companies that pay for interviews, and companies that are easy to apply and interview for are likely the ones with the highest EV for the poorer candidates.

Basically the worse of a candidate you are for the job, the more important it is for the interview to be paid, because with a low enough probability of getting the job, this payment becomes a big factor in the expected value of doing the interview.

Of course it's not as simple as that, because people are not machines chasing pure financial interest and have feelings about how you treat them. Also, a highly qualified candidate is more likely to have a job that is closer to the one they're applying for, while an unqualified candidate might have a much worse job, making vJ higher for the less qualified candidate. But it is likely that the relative difference in pJ is much greater between a qualified and unqualified candidate than the relative difference in vJ. The candidate's own perception of the probability of being hired (pJ) might also be unrealistic in either direction, and I'm assuming it is a good predictor of the true probability of being hired. But I think in general the rule should hold, paid interviews would decrease the quality of the candidate pool.

There was a case in my city where they wanted to build a shopping mall and offered the people who owned homes on the plot a deal. Only 1 person refused and asked for much more money (in his words "Who accepts the first offer??"), and since this plot wasn't critical for the project, they never even contacted him after that and just built it without his plot: https://www.vecernji.hr/media/img/38/97/a9f29b9fca44602d5b41... (the lone house in the "corner"). He got mad, sued them, etc.

This was a private company; I'm not sure why the government would have this problem, since they can exercise eminent domain for stuff like infrastructure, it's literally why it exists.

This sounds like a lack of technical leadership. If the junior's boss is an engineer, and they do their job, then this won't happen. The story reminds me of my first job, which wasn't even remote, where my boss was a non-technical person and I was going down "dark paths" constantly because he couldn't recognize it as he lacked the expertise.

The issue is mainly people wanting to live in a large city, but also wanting to live in a single family home (and most of them, although maybe not on HN, seem to favor residential zoning instead of mixed) which results in really shitty cities that are environmental disasters with endless sprawl, long commutes in city traffic, having to drive even for basic things like going to a grocery store, etc. And you don't have a "prairie preserve without having to drive" in that case, in fact you more likely than not have a longer drive to get out of the city than a person living in a denser city. Check out Perth, it's probably the best example in the world of this being taken to the extreme, with almost the entire city being just endless rows of houses.

Why do you care about this stuff? I don't understand. Surely most developers can build a simple app with a few buttons easily in whichever framework they're using. This stuff doesn't really matter for I'd dare to say 90% of developers. What matters is how hard it is to build and maintain complicated stuff. And there WPF blew WinForms (and VB6) out of the water.

Not sure why you think how difficult it is to put a couple buttons on a page and make them do something would have any effect on the success of a UI framework. That's literally not even a consideration when we make decisions on what to use for a project.

If WPF ran on other platforms, we would use it for everything. We use Avalonia instead, and it's pretty great.

But there are 2 basic types of multiplatform UI frameworks - the ones that wrap native controls and look like most other apps on the platform, and the ones that do their own rendering and look the same on every platform. Avalonia is in the second group, so if the former is a hard requirement then it is not a good choice.

For example, my experience with CSS has been the opposite of that. F5 a million times before the layout works the way I want it to. Sometimes even googling how to do create some type of layout because I can't think of it on my own.

It doesn't mean wealthy people. It means people who feel they deserve to be a part of the elite, usually by virtue of their formal education. If we're "overproducing" such people, a large part of them cannot actually achieve this, because there's a lot more such people than available positions in the "true" elite (ie people having real wealth/power), which causes discontent.

Elite overproduction generally leads to more intra-elite competition that gradually undermines the spirit of cooperation, which is followed by ideological polarization and fragmentation of the political class. This happens because the more contenders there are, the more of them end up on the losing side. A large class of disgruntled elite-wannabes, often well-educated and highly capable, has been denied access to elite positions.

This however is also not a uniquely American problem.

The main thing smart contracts bring to the table is a mechanism of enforcing contracts without government involvement or control. The contract gets enforced, period. The parties can be anonymous, it doesn't matter which country they're from, and so on.

Ironically, you've just confirmed what GP said by confusing the concept of grammatical gender with the modern social studies concept of gender.

That's a ridiculous statement.

When you tell someone the grocery store is 5 mn away, you're expressing time, not distance, because you think they're interested in the time, not distance.

Yet you don't convert meters to minutes when you're telling someone how high they should build a wall. And you don't say "drill a hole 1/2000000 minutes by car wide".

That's the point of having a well-organized system of units, you can clearly express whatever you need to, always using the same system, and anyone who knows the system will understand it regardless of context.

Not being able to express distance as a separate concept is clearly inferior, since in our system we can express time, like in your example, but we can also express distance precisely when needed.

Expressing distance by travel time is a similarly stupid concept. I can tell someone something is 15 minutes by car, but here I'm expressing time, not distance. If I tell someone something is 15 meters away I'm expressing distance. The separate concepts of time and distance allow me to precisely express whatever I need to.

Edit: crap, looks like it's US-only :/