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Ask HN: What has melted your brain recently?

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61–70 of 231 posts

Re: Ask HN: What has melted your brain recently?

#61
post #11

There is an infographic floating around at the moment that maps the migration of millionaires in 2022. I have not dug through the data to see if everything in the infographic is accurate, but as I think most people would presume: it shows loads of wealth holders are making their way into the western world from Russia, China, India, Ukraine (you can predict the others net negative countries). However what's got my min…

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/migration-of-millionaires-w... This one?

That graphic shows ~44k HNWI emigrating, and ~20k HNWI immigrating. I skimmed the underlying text and didn't see an explanation, so are we to assume the other ~24k HNWI immigrated to the rest of the world's countries in relatively low numbers per country?

I suppose another answer might be that it's easier to track HNWI leaving countries than it is to track them entering other countries?

Re: Ask HN: What has melted your brain recently?

#62
post #13

Age. I turned 40 and realized I probably wasn't on the upswing of life anymore. I've developed a small but weighty sense of "time is running out" that I didn't have before. I want that to be a motivator to do good and meaningful things and not a growing sense of foreboding. That necessitates contemplation of life, faith, priorities, etc.

This, but with the added realization that I seem to be losing brain power and memory quite rapidly. I used to be able to contribute to intelligent conversations, but these days find myself unable to keep up with peers and elders who're still super sharp. It's terrifying.

See a doc mate. Fix sleep, stress, nutrition, exercise.

Re: Ask HN: What has melted your brain recently?

#63

The good outcomes from Covid. Trying to look positively, the leap forward in vaccines and mRNA really restored my good feeling about some areas of technology. Many great things like HIV vaccines can, and are emerging. It melts by brain that humans are capable of solving extremely challenging scenarios when we work together, but have to wait until things reach a crisis point before doing so. This is countered by the v…

> medical advances cannot be "undone"

While I share your optimism I do not agree with this particular argument for two reasons: the preventable disaster that is US healthcare shows how structural issues can undo whatever benefits expert knowledge might otherwise have given us (look at insulin price hikes, for example), and the fragility of said expert knowledge.

Re: Ask HN: What has melted your brain recently?

#64

1) Execs complaining that it's hard to find skilled workers nowadays, while doing their best to make the company an unattractive workplace and not bother retaining existing workers who are leaving (including me soon). Guys, it's not rocket science, just ask your employees what's bothering them. If people are leaving by the numbers, then you have some serious issues that need to be fixed, otherwise the churn will neve…

> And the voters who keep voting for the same parties, time and time again, despite the corruption scandals and evidence of gross incompetence across the board

Hardest nut to swallow if you are interested in politics. To a large degree it is due to a dysfunctional media. I have no better ideas how to create and fund a better press that is still independent though. Politicians need to get on board of the circus because it is their only chance to publicity. That said, I wouldn't want to replace the current misery with people popular on tiktok either.

edit: My colloquial English is a bit weak, but I think it would be more apt to say "hardest pill to swallow" as nuts can have an unfortunate double meaning. So better to swallow pills and to crack nuts and better not mix that up too much...

Re: Ask HN: What has melted your brain recently?

#65

Reality check I got after being accused of having anti-minority opinion while arguing for protection of all categories of people, just without double standards and without giving priority to some over others. This got me instantly banned from a community I had professional interest and participation in, which made me realize the damaging effects of culture wars that are about to get worse for major corporations. With…

How is this even relevant to tech work? Minority, inclusion,etc... do you work in HR, legal or PR? If not how does writing code or engineering systems include that subject? Honestly curious.

Re: Ask HN: What has melted your brain recently?

#67
post #52
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s been ten years and I am still mad at Facebook. Post phone interview on Friday I was given a code challenge to complete over the weekend. When I submitted it on Monday I received a response immediately “The team has reviewed your resume and decided to not move forward. We will not be reviewing your code challenge. Feel free to apply again in one year.” I spent my whole weekend on it, it was shined and buffed and…

That just sounds like an attempt to save both of you time (elapsed time, from interview to offer, not time spent) in case your phone interview did do well. After the phone interview, somebody needs to write it up, a hiring committee needs to look at it, and then they can decide whether to move forward or not. If they give you the challenge after that it's easily another week. Frankly I am surprised they gave you a fu…

I went and looked up the emails. I submitted my code challenge at 9:45pm on Sunday central time and received the response at 2:18am Monday. Couple hours, and a strange time to get a response. I suspect the recruiter was not US based.

Given that the job was supposed to be west coast based, I have to imagine they’d made their decision on Friday.

Re: Ask HN: What has melted your brain recently?

#68

Reality check I got after being accused of having anti-minority opinion while arguing for protection of all categories of people, just without double standards and without giving priority to some over others. This got me instantly banned from a community I had professional interest and participation in, which made me realize the damaging effects of culture wars that are about to get worse for major corporations. With…

I think there are two points: first, 'all lives matter' is a typical dog whistle for a lot of people who are racist, even if you are not. If you're going to argue that line, you have to try and put some clear water between you and them.

The second point is that, in an unjust society, not accounting for the effects of that injustice on people (say candidates for a job position) compounds that injustice. So like, if you were an employer in post-abolition America, and you refused to employ ex-slaves because they had no history of employment, on the one hand, it's formally fair, because that's a criterion you can apply to all applicants. It is still, however, materially discriminatory. That's the observation at the root of a lot of affirmative action stuff.

Re: Ask HN: What has melted your brain recently?

#69
post #37
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A quick chat with HR followed by a "coding challenge" for free. I just had a recruitment consultant tell me that my perspective might be wrong for not wanting to do it. He had 70 people in his pipeline for 25 jobs. So I do half a days worth of work for free and I have approx 2 - 1 chance that I don't get the job.

It’s been ten years and I am still mad at Facebook. Post phone interview on Friday I was given a code challenge to complete over the weekend. When I submitted it on Monday I received a response immediately “The team has reviewed your resume and decided to not move forward. We will not be reviewing your code challenge. Feel free to apply again in one year.” I spent my whole weekend on it, it was shined and buffed and…

I have been burned like that before.One time it was probably a days worth of work, but split over evenings of my free time took longer, so I didn't finish it.

Another time it was as if some junior developer was circle jerking. Whining about the most trivial things (a couple of whitespace errors in Pylint, not returning JSON when they had requested a "page without styling", Not adding a setup.py, when they didn't ask for it. )

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