I wouldn't say it's "garbage prose" but I read A Tale of Two Cities in school and found it impossible to form a mental image from the text in some parts.
I'm still struggling to understand what "Tellson’s Bank had a run upon it in the mail." means.
Or more recently, the run on SVB last year where everyone started panicking that the bank was no longer able to hold its deposits, just because it announced that it had taken action to generate something like $40 billion in liquidity. And then the next day alone, customers withdrew $42 billion.
All of this was much worse during the Great Depression, before we had FDIC insurance guaranteeing deposits up to a certain threshold. If you've ever seen It's a Wonderful Life, it depicts a bank run during that era as George Bailey is about to go off on his honeymoon. (I remember my 6th grade history teacher describing this as we watched that movie around the holiday season.)
Not really the media were covering it a lot in 2008 - Front page headlines in newspapers and first story on TV news.
Ok people did not lose money directly. But they were withdrawing from some banks (e.g. Northern Rock) and it made massive economic and political issues.
I wasn't familiar with the passage but having read it I think it means that the sounds and sights of the nighttime mail carriage ride made the bank messenger fantasize a run (i.e. an excess of customer withdrawals) upon his bank. The wider context is that the shadows of the night are cast as various phantoms in the minds of the people on the carriage, and even the horse pulling it:
> While he trotted back with the message he was to deliver to the night watchman in his box at the door of Tellson’s Bank, by Temple Bar, who was to deliver it to greater authorities within, the shadows of the night took such shapes to him as arose out of the message, and took such shapes to the mare as arose out of HER private topics of uneasiness. They seemed to be numerous, for she shied at every shadow on the road.
> What time, the mail-coach lumbered, jolted, rattled, and bumped upon its tedious way, with its three fellow-inscrutables inside. To whom, likewise, the shadows of the night revealed themselves, in the forms their dozing eyes and wandering thoughts suggested.
> Tellson’s Bank had a run upon it in the mail. As the bank passenger—with an arm drawn through the leathern strap, which did what lay in it to keep him from pounding against the next passenger, and driving him into his corner, whenever the coach got a special jolt—nodded in his place, with half-shut eyes, the little coach-windows, and the coach-lamp dimly gleaming through them, and the bulky bundle of opposite passenger, became the bank, and did a great stroke of business. The rattle of the harness was the chink of money, and more drafts were honoured in five minutes than even Tellson’s, with all its foreign and home connection, ever paid in thrice the time. Then the strong-rooms underground, at Tellson’s, with such of their valuable stores and secrets as were known to the passenger (and it was not a little that he knew about them), opened before him, and he went in among them with the great keys and the feebly-burning candle, and found them safe, and strong, and sound, and still, just as he had last seen them.
I actually think it's a really neat passage, it invokes the surreal more than I would expect from 19th century prose. Also, this part just before is very vivid and quite funny:
> Except on the crown, which was raggedly bald, he had stiff, black hair, standing jaggedly all over it, and growing down hill almost to his broad, blunt nose. It was so like Smith’s work, so much more like the top of a strongly spiked wall than a head of hair, that the best of players at leap-frog might have declined him, as the most dangerous man in the world to go over.
> for many software engineering positions in Silicon Valley these days
Do US most companies outside of Silicon Valley not use leetcode style interviews? Every single software interview I've done in Canada had at least one round of leetcode programming exams.
I've hardly dipped my toe in SV and have almost entirely worked in the Eastern half of the United States.
Leetcode questions do happen but typically they are guidelines for a further discussion rather than the entire signal. By that I mean, they are used to investigate problem solving, communication, and personality.
It tends to be the bigger places have more rote tests. One company posed the "If you were re-making Instagram, design me the ability to handle millions of page views over the span of an hour" or something like that. Apparently CDNs, caching, and load balancers wasn't the answer...
Never bothered to look it up because I spent what felt like an hour trying to figure out why this guy thought a CDN wasn't good enough and whether he was _trying_ to get a rise out of me.
What only made it funnier is this place had nothing to do with images.
I think outside of silicon valley (and companies emulating that culture), US companies still give coding problems but they're usually not leetcode style, more of just an implementation problem, if that makes sense. Instead of checking that you have some obscure algorithm memorized they simply want to see you code a bit.
--- very clear opt-in method for having your data sold
--- rejecting cannot prevent regular use of services
--- heavy penalties for breaking these rules
Problem is that no politician wants to touch this because
--- manufacturers sell data to subsidize the product
--- if they can't sell data, costs are going to shoot up
--- if they do this in response to a law, they get to raise
costs even more because it affects the whole industry at the same time and there's a clear scapegoat
Consumers care a LOT more about their cheap, connected devices than their privacy. Because getting by your data like [2] happens to individuals, but costs affect the group.
EDIT: To clarify, the MP only suggested that costs would go up and people don't care. The rest is my personal speculation.
It's a great filter though. I am exactly the type of person who you don't want to see a video of, and therefore perfectly unsuited for YCombinator/SV/etc. which are all about personality.
I totally get it as video is anathema to me too, but I think you're drawing exactly the wrong conclusion. YC doesn't care about any social commonplaces (personality, dress, etc.). They just want a sense of who you are as a potential founder. A lot of what might be considered 'negatives' in more conventional contexts aren't negative at all in the YC context, and might actually help an application.
p.s. YC is definitely not "all about personality" - I don't know where you got that idea, but the spectrum of YC founders is about as wide as you could get that way. There are extraverted outgoing types and introverted awkward types and pretty much everyone else too.
Even with all the questions, it's not a lot of effort, you're right. I apply for the diversity visa every year and that's more work for maybe, oh about the same chance of success?
> I don't know where you got that idea
Admittedly I haven't seen a large percentage, but of the founders I've seen speak, all of them had a certain charm. Granted, there's a bias where people with these personalities put themselves out to be seen.
> but of the founders I've seen speak, all of them had a certain charm. Granted, there's a bias where people with these personalities put themselves out to be seen.
Correct, and also, people change over time as they learn and become more comfortable in a role. The difference in some founders' confidence even between the start and end of a YC batch (only 3 months) can be striking. That isn't true of everyone, of course, and it's fine if it's not.
Strange that you chose as acne your demo topic but none of your results mention one of, if not the most, powerful treatments that is Tretinoin/Retinol and which comes up in the first search results on Google.
Problem is that some of the best skincare is not available over the counter, and surfacing prescription treatments dips into medical care, which is a whole other can of worms.
In the end, you are missing valuable treatments but presenting a summary of poorly researched (by Reddit users) or anecdotal information.
I love the concept though and would love to see it catch on!
You're right that there are some very effective prescription treatments that aren't shown, but it doesn't seem like prescription acne treatments are the usually the appropropriate / doctor prescribed choice for most people facing mild to moderate acne.
Personally, my pediatrician told me that acne is just something that happens to teens and recommended that I go try some acne washes from the drugstore instead of prescribing something like Tretinoin which could have some pretty intense side effects.
Reading r/SkincareAddiction has been really helpful for me, especially seeing the range of experiences that people have had, and that's why we made Lumona summarize these results.
> Clinical trial data revealed that approximately 50% of women in their 20s, 33% of women in their 30s, and 25% of women in their 40s suffer from acne
>which could have some pretty intense side effects
Your site recommends benzoyl peroxide which has similar or worse side effects compared to tretinoin.
It's also a lauded product on both r/SkincareAddiction and r/30PlusSkincare. Not something recommended for kids, but for adults with persistent acne
it is worth trying, especially over antibiotics and alongside BP.
Lately topical Tretinoin has been shown in numerous studies to cause Idiopathic Intracranial Hypertension aka Pseudotumor Cerebri which is quite intense. My post about this on sca from years ago recieves a many comments to this day from other sufferers. I'll never touch it again despite my adult acne. I wonder how many other people have debilitating potentially blinding brain pressure headaches and don't realize it is caused by this medicine commonly accepted as safe.
First the LLM needs to know what it doesn't know, and it looks like except for the explicit limitations embedded by the developers it isn't capable of doing that. When I asked ChatGPT about its own model variants, it gave me wild answers for things that made sense but didn't exist.
"""
There are several variants of GPT-3 model, each fine-tuned for specific tasks or industries. Here are a few examples:
- GPT-3 "davinci" is fine-tuned for creative and imaginative writing tasks, such as poetry, short stories, and song lyrics.
- GPT-3 "curie" is fine-tuned for conversational and dialog generation.
- GPT-3 "babbage" is fine-tuned for code generation and language understanding.
- GPT-3 "einstein" is fine-tuned for question answering tasks.
- GPT-3 "jules" is fine-tuned for summarization.
- GPT-3 "parliament" is fine-tuned for legal text generation.
- GPT-3 "bronte" is fine-tuned for creative writing tasks like storytelling and fiction-writing.
"""
I'd almost assume "parliament" it's a leak of some sort if any of the other examples (except for davinci) were accurate.
> instead of laying off 10% of their workforce, they had everybody take a 10% wage cut except for senior management, which took a larger cut. So instead of giving 100% of the pain to 10% of the people, they give 100% of the people 10% of the pain.
This doesn't seem like a good strategy for tech. Cutting everyone's salary will dislodge your top performers who can get a better position even in poor market conditions.
> Cutting everyone's salary will dislodge your top performers who can get a better position even in poor market conditions.
Will it? Are your top performers only there because of the pay? And how do you even determine who your top performers are? I see this sort of logic frequently and I don't even know how to measure it, much less believe it.
> Are your top performers only there because of the pay
In an ideal work environment, probably less so than other employees. But I think anyone who has their salary reduced is going to reevaluate their position, and those with more valuable skills are more likely to leave. The question is, what is more likely to cause a serious reevaluation, salary reductions or layoffs?
I think for most tech companies, a single round of layoffs is preferable, as the people who you want to remain are more likely to feel they aren't and won't be affected and not reevaluate their position. The reductions approach could work for smaller or startup companies with a flatter structure, where employees are more invested in the company's goals and successes, either through culture or shares.
It's a strange balance. Either you get a pay cut with a job that might cut again, or your colleagues get laid off with the potential that it's you next time.
Either way you'll probably be thinking about interviewing, with a bit less urgency if you get to keep your job.
I don’t think the math checks out: Salary isn’t the only expense, so you might be looking at a 15% wage cut to keep 10% of the workforce. With stock performance, I’ve already taken a 10% wage cut. Cut another 15% in cash and I’m gonna be super unhappy about my comp.
Its not a weird attitude if there is an implicit agreement between the employer and employees.
BigTech specifically has lured people with the promise of stock appreciation on top of already great base. When stock prices collapsed last year many companies offered “top ups”. The implicit agreement was that stocks only had upside.
They didn’t say the company was letting them down, or that it was unfair. They said they weren’t happy about it. You can understand that risk sometimes doesn’t go your way and still have human emotions about it, as well as make different choices in reaction.
Some solutions to this include furlough rather that straight cuts. Those do reduce some infrastructure costs. I can’t reduce service staff and contract work at all if everyone is working 40 hours a week still. We use the same toilet paper, water, electricity, other consumables and depreciating equipment. A saw blade cuts X feet of metal. But I can trim if everyone is working 37 hours.
>"Cut another 15% in cash and I’m gonna be super unhappy about my comp."
In case of Google they already "overpaid" by more than that percentage wise. Sundar can just say take your unhappiness and shove it up the place. What you gonna do? Quit when every other FAANG is laying off in hope to find something better? I do not think Sundar would give a flying fuck about this kind of unhappiness.
Betting you’re not one of those with a target on your forehead, eh? Cutting salaries and keeping staff is better for the company going forward. Those driven by comp aren’t those that’ll stay long term. Raises come from switches.
Will it? Most of the top performers I know are not very motivated by money, and instead value doing interesting work with people they like.
Granted, there are a set of people who are very good at job-hopping while executing a performance of being a top performer. But maybe a company will do just fine those people hop away. Maybe it would do better.
Layoffs definitely hamper morale and disrupt operations. I'm not so sure about paycuts as long as they're done in a spirit of solidarity. I'd be fine with it as long as a) it was temporary, b) execs took the largest cuts, and c) I thought they had a real plan for getting us through the tough times.
And obviously, not laying off people has a much smaller impact on staffing and the work one is doing, so I'd like that part better as well.
I do a lot of DevEx and performance and reliability work. It’s not as sexy as a mid-boom greenfield Shiny Shiny project, but most of us are reinventing software IBM wrote in 1988 anyway, so the shiny is mostly an illusion.
You need the sort of work I do when you’re trying to get more done with less. Do I prefer using these skills to prevent over hiring in the first place? Of course I do. I’ll even take it for winding down a cash cow so we can start new product lines.
The “goodness” of most people who conflate new with better is a matter of prospects. This kid is going to be amazing someday. In a downturn you need amazing now, not some day.
I think it is an S-curve: if you are below the curve, or just on it, then pay amount matters a lot.
But above the curve, everything else matters a lot, especially having a good boss / project leader and a project that makes sense / is actually used by people.
I am not motivated by money. That's why I am not looking for another, better paying job. But I will if you take from me what I already earn.
Advice to reduce the wages of all individuals is disconnected from reality and likely originates from someone who is insulated from the practical implications of such a decision, such as those in an academic setting.
Out of the millions of things I find “interesting”, helping a huge corporation make money is very low on the list. The company pays me to exchange labor for money.
If my skip-level took a bigger paycut than me to ensure that my team keeps their jobs, then I will take the pay cut also. If my skip-level lays off a non-bottom-performing co-worker and then claims "full responsibility" I'm getting the fuck out of there.
I'm still struggling to understand what "Tellson’s Bank had a run upon it in the mail." means.