hornban's comments

I happened to come across her on 60 Minutes a couple of weeks ago, and that interview seemed awkward and sound-bitey to me. Thinking that she just might not be great at short-form segments I dug a little deeper and found an awesome long-form interview that she did with the Council on Foreign Relations. I highly recommend this to get a feel for what she is actually like as a policy person. She really impressed me.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=L_QaZk5iJOA

Cigna denied my claim for an ER stay for a broken leg because it "wasn't medically necessary". This whole "click and close" thing is so obviously happening that I find it hard to believe that the company is even bothering to deny that they do that.

One of the worst parts about this for me was that while I was dealing with trying to get my life back together from that kind of injury, I thought I was also going to go bankrupt as well.

In my case, everything did turn out fine because apparently the hospital has an entire department dedicated to dealing with insurance claim denials. This whole system is an absolute joke.

The primary situation where I find this behavior useful is on the web where I find Country drop-down lists. I am trying to find United States. It could be "United States", "USA", "U.S.A.", "United States of America", etc. All you have to do is keep pressing "U" until you find the match you want. It really helps when the desired match could be formatted several different ways.

That assumes, of course, that the website isn't using some ridiculous drop-down component that doesn't support keyboard interaction or tab handling. Sadly, that's about 50/50 these days.

In what capacity are you counted in this situation? I have a hard time believing that "asking a friend" somehow makes it into government labor statistics.

I recall that it was either old versions of Solitaire or Freecell that had the same issue. I remember intentionally losing games until my points were -32767ish, and it was the first time I experienced integer wraparound as a kid. That's the sort of thing that teaches you a lot unintentionally.

Anyway, I think that it's not really surprising that they'd use a signed integer in either case. In every codebase I've ever worked on, signed ints are the default merely because they're the obvious choice for a number. I only see uints when it actually matters, or when a developer is overly pedantic.

I find this whole "the division in which you work is no longer profitable, so therefore we're laying off everyone who worked there" mentality that larger companies have is offensively short-sighted. As if the people who are working in those divisions can't adapt to something new that the company wants to grow into. The blog post even mentions that Amazon is lagging in AI, and so the smart move would be to move the people involved into the company's AI efforts.

I find it very hard to believe that profits are so slim at Amazon that they simply cannot afford to migrate existing employees to something new with growth potential. Where I work, an admittedly very small company by comparison, there is an active effort to hire people that want to stick around for the long-haul. Sure there have been several missteps in product divisions, but as long as the employees involved are at least somewhat competent then there will always be a place for them to work on something. The benefit to doing this is that it creates a culture where everybody working there legitimately wants the company to succeed, and they're not thinking about it as merely a step in their own career path.

This is a bit of an aside, but I have a question that I'd like to ask the wider community here. How can you do a proper bug-bash when also dealing with Scrum metrics that result in a race for new features without any regard for quality? I've tried to do this with my teams several times, but ultimately we're always coming down to the end of the sprint with too much to do to implement features, and so anybody that "takes time off" to do bug bashing looks bad because ultimately they complete fewer story points than others that don't do it?

Is the secret that it only works if the entire company does it, like you suggest?

And yes, I completely realize that Scrum is terrible. I'm just trying to work within a system.

> how do they solve it?

Release iMessage on Android. If there is a concern that it wouldn't be secure with Google controlling it, then they could put it out on F-Droid, which would simultaneously prove that they're serious and also undermine Google's own efforts at controlling the culture war.

From everything I've read on the matter, I believe that the UX nightmare when you include a non-apple user is an intentional design choice, rather than an engineering problem that hasn't been solved. They want the experience to suffer when somebody outside of the ecosystem is involved so as to create social pressure for the outsider to change.

The ironic part of all of this is that while the EU may be forcing Apple into supporting RCS to fix the situation, Google has resisted every effort to extend RCS to their own Voice platform.

It's really a shame that Microsoft gave up on mobile, because they really could be a real middle ground for the rest of us that just want interoperability.

Asking candidates to come up with this kind of solution in an interview setting where they are under all kinds of pressure is honestly dehumanizing.

There's a lot of good insight in the article about the correct way to approach the problem, but asking anyone to come up with it on the spot is unrealistic. You have the benefit of having seen the problem before with time on your side to reflect on it. They haven't.

When I do interviews like this, I prefer to talk them through the problem together, like we were actual teammates working on a problem together. That more closely relates to life on the job, which to me is the point of interviewing someone.

My primary phone number is a Google Voice number, and I am entirely legitimate. Just curious, how often are other people filtering with this kind of criteria?

I have been considering migrating away from GV for unrelated reasons, but if that sort of thing automatically makes me less attractive when looking for gigs then I'd like to prioritize actually doing that.

There's some interesting discussion in this thread about truncated vs winsorized means. For my own part, this is the first time I've come across either of these terms.

I tend to benefit the most from seeing the entire distribution visually, and that helps me decide if I'm looking for a median, a "normal" mean, a "mean minus some weird outliers", or something different entirely.

Does anybody happen to know of a good visual guide for how different measures of central tendency apply to various distributions? Anything that emphasizes pathological cases is helpful.

Actually, that kind of thing makes a lot of sense to me and I think it's a good idea. I've read so many stories about hardware with bogus ACPI and EDID data causing problems with Linux support over the years. It seems to me that Linux tends to treat hardware information as always correct, whereas Windows is far less trusting and has information about device-specific bugs. The result is that while things tend to work out-of-the-box on Windows, they require far more tinkering on Linux.

> How can there be no books published on the subject of Wayland programming in 14 years?

Just my personal observation here, but I don't see a lot of value in programming books any longer due to how often things change. Usually I'm looking for official documentation or recently updated blog posts on the Internet.