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One Thousand Dollars an Hour

samsoff.es

161–167 of 167 posts

Re: One Thousand Dollars an Hour

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of M&A lawyers bill $1000/hour. Hell, Big 4 accountants who handle M&A bill $1000/hour and get away with it. You're right, even BigLaw lawyers generally don't charge 4 figures an hour. But M&A is a special beast. When you're dealing with a hundred million dollar transaction, the legal and accounting fees are rounding errors.

I'm sure there's a class of M&A laywer, or at least a class of M&A project, where rates can be backed out to 4 figures an hour. But my numbers come in part from recently being a party to a BigLaw-mediated M&A transaction. (Hopefully this doesn't sound argumentative; I believe you. Just supplying a data point. Overall point: $1k/hr is very very high.)

Did the M&A guys get % too? That presumably puts them up pretty high hourly, too.

Re: One Thousand Dollars an Hour

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You mean because of the modulo operator, presumably, and yes, the technically correct way to do it is to retry if the raw random number is larger than N*floor(UINT32_MAX/N). Still, that's a pretty minor bug considering what a minor deviation from uniformity it causes. Yes, because of the modulo operator and this is not a minor thing in my opinion. Especially with small arrays his implementation will return the the…

Edit: I just realized for my math below I used 2^32 as UINT32_MAX instead of 2^32 - 1. The rest of my reasoning holds up though. >Especially with small arrays his implementation will return the the 0th or 1st element much much more often than other elements. Much, much more often? Correct me if my reasoning is wrong, but for a, say, 6 element array, this bug would make a difference less than 0.0000001% of the time ((…

You are correct. I have just checked my code that I used a couple of years ago to generate random numbers using %. I had the impression back then, when I then switched to arc4random_uniform that it works much better. It must have been something different or my perception tricks me. Nevertheless not knowing or caring about uniformly distributed random numbers and charging $1000/hours seems a bit strange. One could argue that % needs less CPU cycles but then again: Does this matter? Using arc4random_uniform makes your code much more readable etc. So from a pure code review standpoint of view I would argue that arc4random_uniform should be used if possible. Of course he might also not have used it because of compatibility reasons. Who knows.

Btw: I would like to talk to you in private. How can I contact you?

Re: One Thousand Dollars an Hour

#164
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an anexdote for that: woman is strolling through a local park, when she happens upon Pablo Picasso sitting on a bench. Struck by her good fortune, she summons the courage to speak to him. “Excuse me. You’re Pablo Picasso right?” The man smiles. “Would it be possible to have you sketch my portrait? I’ll pay.” Picasso accepts the offer. He considers the woman carefully for a few moments and then takes out a pen…

This kind of dynamic exists in a few professions. About a year ago I was locked out of my house and had to call an emergency locksmith - the cost was around $150. He turned up and inserted a piece of rigid plastic into the gap between door and frame, opening the lock. The process took 5 seconds, and I immediately realized that, given the knowledge that this would work, I could have opened the door myself using a cred…

... and for the knowledge that you should probably replace your front door lock if it can be opened with a credit card in 5 seconds ... I would. But fortunately my lock's a bit more secure than that :)

Re: One Thousand Dollars an Hour

#165
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Etymology aside, what's your suggestion for a workable replacement to "they"?

Sure. One can avoid using gendered pronouns in generic contexts. As a writer, one doesn't have to use them at all if one doesn't want. Indeed "one" makes a fine indefinite pronoun when used properly. My own style is to use he as super-generic (i.e. bordering on the proverbial), "one" as personal, shared person perspective generic ("one" in this case doesn't differentiate between first and third person, and has some a…

What I hate doing however is having to explain that by "man" I mean it in its original sense

That's because the meaning has changed, and also the sexism of the term is better understood. If you're American, do you also use the term 'negro' to refer to black people? It's a neutral and descriptive term in medical parlance, but it's a clear case of a word having more impact than its roots back in the day.

So trying to shoehorn in an out-of-date definition is changing the modern meaning of the word, just the same as repurposing 'they'. In truth, I think you're just being stubborn about wanting to use sexist language, since you don't seem to have too much of a problem with using all the borrowed words and grammar we've gained since the 'alewife' days.

Re: One Thousand Dollars an Hour

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Locksmiths are sort of a weird case: you can learn to open 95%+ of commercially relevant locks with $100 of tools and less than an hour of training. The biggest reason it costs $150 and not $25 is that your locality makes it illegal to advertise as a locksmith, and illegal to possess locksmithing tools, without certification. There's a nebulous security rationale for this, because apparently normal people can be allo…

It very much depends on which locality you are in. In plenty of places it is legal to own locksmithing tools. You can find many videos of lockpicking on youtube.

Right. I do not believe these operators are certified.

Re: One Thousand Dollars an Hour

#167
you are missing the point entirely of hourly rates, quite simply, if your time is averaged out to be worth 1000 an hour you would most likely find yourself in a position as a business owner / executive, etc, whose pay is dispersed differently than it is for a lower wage hourly worker, such as stock options, etc... as a contract developer youre better off acting as your own project manager and charging rates on a per project basis, ive worked on 400k projects that are considered relatively small by the companies paying for the software being developed, id take being able to pull in a few 400k projects a year, and executing on these than getting 1000 hr as a contractor, of course ive never accomplished either as im a salaried midlevel devloper
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