it's painful to see what was once such a loved and admired brand be reduced to this. :(

it's like tar or rsync or ffmpeg. Yes, it's hard to keep track of all the command line flags etc. but thanks to the internet we don't need to. it's far more useful to understand the underlying concepts.

Some might disagree. The democratization of content creation that happened with the internet and social media was in general a good thing, but it can't be denied that it also resulted in a massive reduction of the Signal to Noise ratio in content quality. The reason the Google search result page is much worse today is precisely because there exits tons of content today that should never have been made.

The difference is that journalism no longer has a pseudo-monopoly on the kinds of things they historically did (content, distribution, eyeballs etc.).

My grandfather read the whole newspaper every morning. In one day I think I read a LOT more content than him but it is spread over a wide variety of surfaces, print, websites (no single author) etc.

I am sorry but this makes no sense. You do realize that the only reason you are able to use aliases is because your email provider chooses to parse meaning out of the supposedly "opaque" text right? If your email provider is free to "break" the spec, so are people you give your id to.

Probationary periods could work but it's a coordination problem. Such periods are the norm in Europe (coz it's very hard to fire someone) but for an at-will place like the US, given that the industry doesn't really do probationary periods in general, any employer who starts doing it would be at a disadvantage.

All of this, instead of asking a simple question. If this is not technology fetishization I don't know what is.

1 - cos(x) can be written as 2*cos^2(x/2)

Take the logarithm and you get 2ln (cos(x/2)), which is relatively common and the solution is https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-integrate-log-cos-x-from-0-to...

BO hasn't even launched to orbit yet, why are we considering their bid?

In reality, it's just shirking of responsibility. Schools neither care about creating an environment where bullying will be reduced nor about actually resolving cases fairly. Their attitude to bullying is to just close their eyes, plug their fingers into their ears and go laah-laah-laah

Yes, which is why I said he was the 'source' of diversity. If 7 data points have value X and one has value Y, then Y is the 'source' of the variance, else the variance would be zero.

> Diversity doesn't mean "non-white," it means "varied."

It's funny that literally the sister comment of my comment links to how someone at Apple was driven out of their job for saying this. For your own sake I'd recommend you don't express these opinions at your workplace.

The eighth guy is a white American guy in his 40s who grew up in Alabama, was in the US Air Force for a bit, then did his undergrad in an unrelated field from a relatively unheard-of university, then self-taught programming and worked a few odd IT jobs before landing here.

If you ask me, he is the true source of diversity in the team, but pretty sure none of the teams tasked with increasing diversity see it that way.

Companies do care about performance / output, and anyone who works in a group setting can see that there is often a clear difference in this metric for people, and for many people this difference is consistent (it's not a matter of having high days or low days, their highs are consistently high or above average).

In my current team of 8 engineers, 2 are clearly way above average in their overall performance and output. They pay attention to detail, they actually think through their designs, they care about code quality, they are diligent in code reviews (while others mostly just rubber stamp each other's shitty code) and hold each other accountable, they are useful sounding boards for design discussions while the others just nod along, and they are generally proactive with finding bugs and fixing them.

As a manager, I want more of these people on my team, except there is just no way to actually find this out by interviewing. All these people did similarly well in their interviews, and in fact one of the so-called 10x candidates did less well, because they are a bit more polite in nature, that causes them to sound non-committal at times.

The only way thing works is a direct testimonial from someone who has worked with them, but this is not scalable, and these days we are told we shouldn't rely on that anyway as it favors candidates with 'networks' and disfavors candidates from underrepresented minorities.

References rarely talk ill about a candidate, but when you ask a reference about a good candidate, they literally start gushing with praise, while for the average or mediocre ones they say generic things and are relatively muted in their praise.

Many industries work this way. In the legal industry, for example, interviews are mostly perfunctory / nominal, because they work through a chain of strong recommendations. Of course, the flip side of that is that it is extremely credentialist.

The Tech industry is the opposite. Most generally smart people can get in by doing a few hundred hours of Leetcode but you have no idea how they will actually be on their jobs.

After all, there ARE countries where more or less anyone can relatively easily become a citizen, it's just that most people don't want to actually live in those countries.

Some countries give people easy visas on arrival. Others make you jump through several hoops. Why? Perhaps this works out best for both groups of countries. The first group benefits from the tourism dollars, the second group perhaps sees benefits from not having the country flooded by tourists who might or might not leave easily.