grue2's comments

This has a certain genius to it. The same genius as sleep sort.

I use a work sample (short paid contract), but it's not perfect and boy is it labor intensive.

As a hirer, you really can't win. There's not one hiring process nor guiding principle that doesn't seem to bring out the pitchforks of those who were frustrated, disrespected, or rejected by said process:

- Show us your open source work. (You're excluding all but a lucky few who have the privilege of writing open source code!)

- Okay then, show us a personal project or some work you've done in your free time. (What, so I'm expected to live eat and breathe code 24/7 to get hired?!)

- Well, how about a short contract/work sample? (How am I supposed to find the time to do that? I have a day job and a life!)

- Shall we try whiteboarding/coding tests then? (This is so insulting! Solving CS puzzles isn't what the job is about!)

One cannot, sadly, rely on the résumé. I have interviewed multiple self-deemed "experts" in such-and-such language, only to find that they could not even write a basic for-loop on the whiteboard.

Is sleep a death sentence?

To boil it down, "I" am made of two things: qualia and memories.

During unconscious sleep, those mysterious qualia disappear, except for brief chaotic flashes which we call dreams. Meanwhile a physical process takes place in the brain: those memories are reorganized, reformatted, and reconstituted.

In this view, there is a very literal sense to the idiom "I woke up feeling like a brand new person." Yet, few people go to sleep at night worrying that "they" will no longer exist in the morning, even though that is quite arguably the case.

I would worry about biological sleep long before I worried about teleporters. While any OSHA-compliant teleporter can (we would assume) preserve the continuity and integrity of one's memories, sleep doesn't even have that feature.

Did you read the book?

This article is borderline "Millennial bait," but: Suppose I invite you over to my apartment to hang out. I offer you a beer. You accept, so I tally "1 beer" on a little notepad.

You have some potato chips. ("13 chips" goes on your tally.) You use the toilet twice, flushing both times. ("7 gallons of water" goes on your tally.) You're a bit hot, so I turn up the air conditioning. (I need to break out the calculator, but "+$0.63 for AC" also goes on your tally.) You tell me about a sad movie you watched recently. (This reminds me of a family problem I am having, which is mentally taxing. Since I'll likely need an anxiety pill, I add a fraction of the prescription cost to your tally.) You suggest a walk in the park; we go out. Walking makes me thirsty, so I buy a bottle of water. (But since walking was your idea, I add "1 bottle of water" to your tally.)

Do any of the above come across as petty - or absurd - to you? If so, then that will give you some idea of how someone might feel that splitting social meal expenses down to the penny - and with a written record, to boot - feels transactional. The point is everyone has a threshold where this kind of Venmo'ing behavior goes from innocently equitable to distrustfully penny-pinching.

Venmo'ing someone can be the equivalent of saying, "I don't trust that our relationship will proceed in terms that will average out in such a way that is fair to me." Insisting on Venmo'ing is a lot like insisting that your significant other tell you their email password. If you have to insist this in all cases, maybe rethink your relationship?

Suspension bridge cables are made of smaller cables. And those smaller cables are made of yet smaller cables. For example: http://regex.info/i/JEF_042406.jpg

That's my guess.

RIP. This hits hard. Before my career as a programmer I was an aspiring fiction writer. Johnson was my Radiohead of writing: an artist working at a seemingly unattainable level of skill, and very nearly transcending the art, as far as my taste is concerned.

You don't exactly read Johnson for his plotting. The magic is in getting lost in the sentences, in the weird and painful beauty they open up. Jesus' Son is his most famous book, but his other works have that same characteristic: Turns of phrase and shocking ways-of-seeing that reveal the world's strangeness and fragility.

I think of it as the "cradling a baby mouse in your hands, feeling its heartbeat, knowing how easily it could be crushed" feeling.

Look into The Tourist/Milo Weaver trilogy by Olen Steinhauer. The third book (An American Spy) is where you'll find the US/Chinese intrigues (and an incident that has a similar ring to it as the above news article). I recommend the full trilogy, as the first two books set up the third.

You might also try The Honourable Schoolboy by John Le Carré. Set primarily in Hong Kong, it's part spy novel, part sweeping tour of Southeast Asia just as the last dominos are falling to Communism in the 1970s. Although it's technically in the George Smiley series, I don't think you really need to read those in any particular order.

Steinhauer if you like beach reads/page turners. Le Carré if you like a more literary slow-burner.