In Orange County, specifically Santa Ana CA, my grandfather had built a house with the help of his 2 brothers back in the 50s. A bald eagle would land in the backyard almost every year in July as some sort of stop along a migratory path. I first saw it when I was 7 and it was at least as big as me.
I took over the property from 2011ish to 2018 in my late 30s and I never saw another. Glad they are still there.
Anyone who wants to go into p5 for games or visualizations would be well advised to either read Dan Shiffman's book (as another poster mentioned) or check out his YouTube channel, and code along to his 10 minute challenges: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17WoOqgXsRM&list=PLRqwX-V7Uu...
Also, there is Disney World, and EuroDisney, and hundreds of other non-Disney theme parks throughout the US and worldwide. Disney is setting a price that keeps them at the upper echelon of theme parks, whether the experience itself is deserving or not.
My personal take on this is that the idea of adjusting for inflation over time based on macroeconomic rates of inflation is useless (apart from showing that even though we make more money now, we can afford less). National inflation does not correlate with cost of living on a 1:1 scale.
The lesson is similar to the adage "the stock market is not the economy". Typical things that are presented to us as the proverbial market forces (jobs creation, stock market indices, currency valuations, national debt) are more often used as excuses by price-setters to increase costs for consumers, whether or not manufacturers and service providers (at any level) actually incur increased costs.
We as consumers are typically blind to this, and just accept that things get more expensive. Remember the oil issues in the early 2000s after the Deep Horizon leak and Hurricane Katrina? Gas prices went from ~$1/gal to over $3/gal for a while, then settled back in at around $2.50. And everyone was relieved and just ate that crap because they could finally fill up their suburban tanks without waiting in line. It's going to happen again here soon, when gas comes back down to around ~$4/gal (or $5.50 in CA).
Also, in what world does a stadium beer at a Padres game cost $5? Even a disgusting Bud Lite will run you north of $10. The reality of MLB is that you can probably get tickets for next to nothing, not need to pay to park (if your stadium is in an urban area and you are willing to walk a bit), but you will absolutely get gouged on food and drink. The movie theater model is in full effect.
Facebook already has a subscription system. They sell hundreds of millions of ad slots per day to willing buyers so they can put messages in front of your eyes. Advertisers subscribe to the FB publishing space based on all your data points gathered on FB and nearly every other place on the Internet...data they gather for free. You willingly go on the site with zero impediments; other site owners willingly put the FB pixel on their sites which track your movements there.
It is as if FB owns a large piece of land which stray cattle randomly enter, FB gladly allows them to graze, then slaughters them and sells the meat piecemeal to the highest bidder. Why would FB want to put up a fence to keep out unwilling livestock?
Excuse the dystopian metaphor, but I think it illustrates how FB actually operates. They put an enormous amount of money and manpower into developing the infrastructure that keeps users on its platform and in its web of tracking pixels, but they don't make any money from keeping the experience a high-quality one. Their main interest is gathering an enormous, aggregated dataset they can sell subscription access to.
They would have to charge an exorbitant account subscription fee to surpass the amount they make from selling access to users' data.
You only need to see who the author of this post is to know that the methodology is crap, the numbers are likely made up (19.42% is WAY too specific), and the post is just a grab for media attention on the coattails of some other internet meme garbage.
This guy (Rand Fishkin) has been selling SEO as a religion for the better part of this century, and is in no small part responsible for all the search-result-garbage style websites everyone is complaining about elsewhere on HN today and every other day.
He's a third-rate market-bro hack that's been taking advantage of web professionals who get thrown into SEO/Marketing jobs and have no idea what they're doing by relentlessly shoving half-assed corporate strategies through moz.com and now his new sparktoro.com, and calling himself the great SEO redeemer.
Wanna question his methodology? There is none. Wanna question his science? Totally devoid.
Unfortunately, this sort of thing is absolutely standard when third parties discuss Twitter spam. There is an astounding amount of academic research doing the same thing with methodologies just as silly.
Too many people here are crowing about the GitHub thing, and not enough about:
> Above all, I try to hire people who I'd want to pair with tomorrow. People who are better than me, and people who I can learn from.
It seems the only way to get hired period is to have all the experience in the world, at least from the author's perspective. This mentality is far more dangerous since it disallows the idea that someone can get better at a job over time.
Also I feel like this conclusion is just a longform version of "we only hire ninjas and rockstars". The author openly disdains applicants who are so "full of themselves" that they send in overly detailed resumes, but conveniently omits the fact (which everyone here knows) that resumes have to be catered to the filters of your HR software to even land on a hiring manager's desk.
His conclusion is that stuffed resumes are for losers, and only he, the hiring manager with the Midas touch, can see the true value of an individual by glancing over their code and preparing some pitfall questions. This smacks of self-centered egotism and coder bro mentality.
Also as others have pointed out, good coding jobs exist in fintech, government, and 1000s of other industries that this guy sneeringly looks down his nose at.
well it depends whether you hire a junior or a senior position.
the general rule is that if i don't hire juniors, then as a manager i want to hire people who are better developers than me.
otherwise if i hire juniors, i obviously expect them to learn, but the paring point is still relevant, and even juniors may bring an interesting perspective to the team, not just their coding skills.
Totally agree on jr vs sr. Another point that is conveniently overlooked in the article so the author can have his holier-than-thou moment. It seems he's hiring seniors, and only wants stars.
"Programming" isn't a monoculture. People can be "better" than others in multiple ways.
I (started working in IT around the millennium) have learned stuff from juniors with a few years of experience - because their experience is in a different field from me. Most of the best practices in the Javascript ecosystem I learned from one young still-in-school JS savant. He didn't know crap about backend or databases, but the dude was a complete wizard with Typescript (and later Rust).
Better can mean better at learning or teaching, cleaner approaches to problem-solving, interesting combinations of ideas I wouldn't have thought of, more potential, or any number of other things.
I firmly believe in only hiring people who are better than I am. That involves looking for ways the candidate is better than I am instead waiting for the candidate to fail the entrance exam.
A Whiteboard coding challenge is the exact thing you describe. But instead of interviewers looking over your shoulder, they look at the whiteboard as you stand in front of them and write code on the whiteboard.
I just bought a house, and signing all the mortgage docs, they told me I had to sign my name exactly as it appears on the document: First Middle Last. My signature, the one that is most personal, recognizable, and ubiquitous to me, is a quick scribble that kind of includes the first letter of my first name, then some flairs of loops and things. Having to laboriously write out my full name in script was a giant pain in the ass. I could not repeat the same signature twice. In many cases I couldn't remember how to write the capital cursive letter for my middle and last name.
TL;DR: I am 38 and completely sympathize with your nephew. I can't sign my name either.
The author was born in the 90s, and was in elementary and middle school in the 2000s, when keyboarding was already seen as a primary skill. His take that "nobody writes cursive anymore" is true, given that for him, "everyone" is under the age of 30. Those of us who grew up prior to personal computers and phone touchscreens being ubiquitous can scream all we want "I learned cursive and I still write it!", but it doesn't change all that much. Some of us learned and it and can't do it any longer. Some of learned it and still do it, for whatever personal or professional reason.
Here's the hotter take:
Skills like handwriting are (hold on to your hankerchiefs graphologists!) pseudo-sciences. They are vestiges of elitist education systems, whereby a bunch of rich, but likely average-intelligence, students who paid for elite education, hired private instructors to help them become members of the "learned class". It doesn't take any special intelligence to teach or to learn, and can be used as a signal to others that you "belong" to the upper class.
Fast forward to the 90s, in rural North Carolina, to a grossly underfunded school system that can't afford specialized training for teachers or students. What do we get? Over insistence on out-dated markers of education: cursive, Cotillion, woodshop for boys and home ec for girls. What don't we get? Computer science, math beyond algebra and geometry, science beyond basic earth science, and US history that stops at WWII! 1600 students with excellent penmanship, who know how to waltz, but none of us is even aware that computers can be programmed or that people get paid money to do it.
And to the commenters claiming graphology is a thing or that it is in any way useful in sorting candidates for job opportunities (I'm looking at you France), you are just as wrong as the author who claims "I don't use cursive, so nobody uses it either".
NB: This is not an attack on the hobbyists, or on the aesthetics of cursive in general. Well-written cursive is marvelous. I just think we had too much emphasis on it it school, and likely it was due to our schools not having the wherewithall to teach us anything else of value.
Cursive may well functionally fill the role of social class shibboleth in certain circumstances and specific social environments, but that is very secondary to its highly practical primary function: you can write _much faster_ in cursive than by any other means.
There were no typewriters or computers through almost all of human history. Writing was it. This skill had, and to a large degree even today still has, enormous practical and economic value.
The utility of this ability to efficiently produce text artifacts is vastly higher when one can do so in a manner that is readily legible to others, which requires that one use an approximation of standardized, well-known glyphs. The closer you can produce them, the more differentially legible your written output is to others. It's not merely a coded signal for your elite status.
Even today when many can take notes on a keyboard, writing notes by hand has a well studied secondary practical effect of improving retention and comprehension, as well as being available any time a pencil and paper are at hand. These still work when dropped, when they get wet, when the power is out, or when you forgot to charge them.
I learned math and programming but I wish I'd also taken wood shop (and metal shop, and other practical courses.)
Making actual stuff with your hands and using physical tools is immensely satisfying and empowering. I really crave it after spending all of my time staring at a screen and typing on a keyboard.
Other practical skills like personal finance, home improvement and maintenance, and cooking can pay dividends for the rest of your life.
I wish I'd had more time for many courses (also including music, art, drama, etc.) that weren't part of the "college prep" track.
100000% agree. I would have loved to get more practical stuff in high school, and less fluff. Woodworking is a lifetime skill, and contributed to my understanding of spatial organization, practical math, fractions, and precision. Plus now I can make stuff.
Cooking as well. I worked in kitchens for 7 years during and after college, and wouldn't trade that knowledge for the world.
I only mentioned woodworking and home ec since they were gender-assigned by the school, not because they were less useful.
I learned how to operate tools safely in woodshop and it's one of the more valuable skills I picked up from my school days. I've forgotten most of my Spanish, almost all of the math, but I remember how to keep my fingers.
> And to the commenters claiming graphology is a thing or that it is in any way useful in sorting candidates for job opportunities
It is useful, just not in a way that many people find acceptable. It is a marker of a particular sort of "elite" education. Your comment that this surfaces a "bunch of rich, but likely average-intelligence" people is true, but it misses the point. It's not meant to reveal intelligence, but whether a person is "one of us" — the right sort, a safe pair a hands, a sound fellow, etc. The decision-makers care much less about intelligence than whether they can be trusted to "do the right thing," which is whatever maintains elites in their position—exactly what these people have been brought up to do by their parents and educated to do by elite institutions.
I was arguing that, in Europe, and France specifically, it's a way to see whether or not a potential candidate is "French" enough. It's expounded as a psychological tool (orthographists and graphologists are paid to psychoanalyze you based on written documents that you MUST submit), but in the end, it leads to a gray area of racism and classism.
That's cool. This type of thing just sparks something in my brain. I learned cursive because it was beat into me. As soon as I could abandon it I did, and for good reason too. My cursive was terrible and dyslexic, and block text was much easier to write and to read.
The other stuff I wrote is secondary to your post, and just a hot take. Thanks for the stimulating article though!
