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baursak commented on The Myth of the Second Chance   ft.pressreader.com/articl... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
jmward01 · 2 years ago
A corollary to this may be that those who get many chances are more likely to succeed. This is often the case for people that have a safety net of some sort compared to those that don't when it comes to, for example, starting businesses. Those with a safety net can fail and try again and again and eventually tell the story of how 'gumption and spirit' made them a success while those that didn't have a safety net 'just didn't try hard enough'. I know I have been exceptionally lucky in that I have been given many chances to fail, and taken them! Without those opportunities to fail safely I wouldn't have the success I have now.
baursak · 2 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15659076

"Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.

Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.

Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work.

Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it."

baursak commented on Climate change has turned permafrost into a carbon emitter   cbc.ca/news/technology/pe... · Posted by u/asaegyn
dev_dull · 6 years ago
Yet the rich keep buying waterfront properties.
baursak · 6 years ago
The rich also kept buying mortgage backed securities all the way until they suddenly wanted to sell them all.
baursak commented on Ghost Villages for Sale in Spain   bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/hourislate
mmjaa · 7 years ago
No, I completely disagree with you. Having travelled the world, I feel the worst thing we can do is continue with the big cities. They need to be dismantled, and replaced with smaller, lighter, more local communities that do not require so much energy to maintain - very big city requires immense resources to keep it running, every single day.

More rural living is what will save us, imho.

baursak · 7 years ago
Rural areas have a much larger ecological footprint than urban areas, per capita. There's no way around that.
baursak commented on Can the world quench China's bottomless thirst for milk?   theguardian.com/environme... · Posted by u/edward
baursak · 7 years ago
Yet another Western hypocritical "oh no, Chinese want to consume almost as much as we do, think of the consequences!".
baursak commented on WeWork’s Annual Loss Doubles to Nearly $2B Amid Rapid Expansion   wsj.com/articles/weworks-... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross
shereadsthenews · 7 years ago
Only the truly innovative can lose money by being landlords.
baursak · 7 years ago
I don't think they own most of their locations. They're just leasing long-term and subleasing short-term.
baursak commented on A Beginner’s Guide to MMT   bloomberg.com/news/featur... · Posted by u/uptown
tptacek · 7 years ago
Help me understand where I went wrong reading this. I read, paraphrased: "The problem with MMT is that if everyone believes in it, they'll do things that cause inflation to rise", and "This is a problem primarily for the investing class".
baursak · 7 years ago
MMT is both a description of the current system, a system that is already in place, and a set of policy proposals. So "believing" in MMT may simply mean understanding clearly the process already happening.
baursak commented on My Life as a New York Times Reporter in the Shadow of the War on Terror (2018)   theintercept.com/2018/01/... · Posted by u/spof84
resters · 7 years ago
The major takeaway is that one can't count on the NYT to challenge powerful interests. This makes the NYT a powerful conservative force in US culture.

It follows that most of the articles that appear opposed to powerful interests are a) inconsequential, or b) used as a distraction, helping to create the impression that the paper is anything but a powerful conservative force.

It's no accident that the paper ran the Judith Miller work selling the Iraq war, or that it was an early participant in the smear campaign against Assange, or that it is a thought leader on the threat posed by China. Sure there are stories about CSAs and the homeless, but ultimately it's a big budget right wing PR operation, intent on preserving the status quo.

For even more obvious evidence, just look at the people whose weddings are covered in the paper's nuptials section -- predominantly children of powerful elites who the paper wishes to flatter with its coverage.

If one were to ask "what kind of coverage might we expect from a paper controlled by a billionaire industrialist?", we might actually predict a right-wing perspective. But due to the Times' history as a progressive paper (most notably the writings of Frederick Law Olmsted which fueled the abolitionist movement), the paper is uncritically viewed by many in the present day as a voice that opposes the right wing, authoritarian social goals held by powerful elites.

baursak · 7 years ago
> It follows that most of the articles that appear opposed to powerful interests are a) inconsequential, or b) used as a distraction, helping to create the impression that the paper is anything but a powerful conservative force.

It could also be taking on a rival powerful establishment interests, like in Democrats vs Republican type bickering.

Chomsky in his famous Andrew Marr interview addressed Marr's example of Watergate scandal as one part of the establishment defending itself against another part of the establishment, thus allowing the story to be broken. He compared Watergate, which everybody knows about, to a much bigger scandal of the same time, COINTELPRO, which relatively few people have even heard about.

The entire interview is worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjENnyQupow

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baursak commented on Microsoft changed how it interviews software developers   businessinsider.fr/us/mic... · Posted by u/pplonski86
kronin · 7 years ago
It's the start of the coding interview. It moves on from there. This candidate didn't even ask if he could use Apache commons, and I hadn't yet specified that he couldn't use a 3rd party library. So yes. He failed on many counts.

1) not asking clarifying questions 2) not being familiar with some well-known libraries 3) not being able to implement a basic reverse string 4) not being able to explain whether or not a simple method was thread safe (with multi-threading experience all over his resume)

I expect engineers, senior or otherwise, to be able to write code. If you can't do that, don't put it on your resume.

If you honestly think implementing a reverse string method is "too complicated"...

Edit: sorry, leaving the response as-is, but I recognize you didn't state "too complicated". You stated "focused on the wrong skills". I posit that an engineer that can't reverse a string, as a litmus test, will be likely unable to solve a more complicated problem.

baursak · 7 years ago
How many times in your job did you have to implement reversing a string without calling a library?

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u/baursak

KarmaCake day879January 16, 2017View Original