pdovy

Wow this is a blast from the past. I remember watching this in college around 2008 or so, and it leading me to apply for their internship program. I guess as marketing material it worked!

I didn't get the job, and don't honestly remember anything about the technical side of the interview, but I do remember them being very kind and gracious. I happened to be studying abroad in London and they didn't bat an eye when they had to buy what I'm sure was a way more expensive ticket than usual for the on-site.

Thanks for posting this - very interesting to see where everyone ended up!

Yeah it seems pretty unrealistic to expect Intel to catch up to the NVIDIA and AMD duopoly on their first generation of (modern) cards.

Intel seems to have rightly recognized that the driver advantage is a huge moat for those guys - they have to instead compete on price and focus on having good support for titles that will get them the the biggest chunk of the market.

That said, man, if they could have released these a year ago the wind would have been at their back way more than it is now with GPU prices trending back towards MSRP.

I used them, but only because they have a relationship with my brokerage that allowed me to get preferential terms.

If not for that I'd have preferred someone local, you could tell you were just a number over there, and there were a bunch of communication issues around scheduling the appraisal that were annoying to sort out.

Hard to extrapolate from just what you've said here, but:

- This level of anxiety, especially if you experience it in other settings, doesn't sound normal and you might well benefit from some combination of medication and seeing a therapist. Many, many people experience this - it's nothing to be ashamed of and these things can help.

- As others have said, most everyone finds interviewing stressful! That's totally normal. It's also (especially for an introvert) a learned skill that will get better with practice. Don't sweat it too much if your dream company turned you down. Most places will let you re-interview after a certain amount of time, so don't consider it a forever dead end.

IIRC the level after running the water for 5 min in the morning was around 1 PPB, so not high enough to freak out about, but not zero. I just generally assume that I should not give my kids water straight from the tap, because the level _could_ spike for various reasons like them working on the water main, etc.

As someone else pointed out, Chicago has made some changes here - and they plan to eventually remove all service lines. That said - this is Chicago. The mayor had a goal to remove 650 lines this year and there was a story in the Chicago Tribune recently that so far that number is ... 3. For context there are ~400k lines to replace.

Not only that, but it's really difficult to get the service line replaced even if you're willing to pay for it.

We went through the exercise a few years ago. It can be difficult to find a plumbing service willing to do this kind of work because not only do they need a special certification (makes sense) but the company has to put up something like a $5000 bond on their work with the city.

On top of that replacing the portion of the line that goes from the shutoff to the main requires digging up the street, so it can only be done if your street is not currently on a "moratorium" because it was recently repaved. Finally, the city charges a significant amount in permitting fees before you even get to paying for the plumbing service, roadwork repair and landscaping.

We finally gave up on that project and given the relatively low level leeching into our water just decided that we could live with using water filters specifically designed to remove lead for any water that our kids drink / cook with.

If Chicago was really serious about tackling this they could start with waiving permitting fees and bond requirements and streamline the process for managing the part of the process that occurs on city property. That'd at least make replacing these more tractable during a remodel.

It feels like there is an attitude here that you should be able to recoup the cost of training a junior hire by paying them below market rate for for their new skills. This just isn't reality, as OP has discovered.

That means that the true cost of a junior candidate vs a senior candidate isn't just their 1st year salary difference on paper, you have to count in the cost of training _and_ retaining the junior hire. That doesn't necessarily mean the math doesn't work - especially if the market for senior developers is much tighter than for junior developers.

Also the idea that you'd be mentoring for 16 hours a week one-on-one seems like it is either inflated or there was a problem. Maybe the candidate was a bad hire even for a junior role, or the mentor is micromanaging, or the work product expected was never appropriate for a junior developer - but something seems off there.

Not to mention that AED's are more prevalent in public spaces these days. If you can provide CPR _and_ use the AED the chances of survival increase dramatically.

Personally I will always look through side projects or a GitHub if it's on a candidates resume. It's another source of signal and can be really valuable especially if there is code to look through.

That said as the role gets more senior the value of the signal goes down IMO. Side projects are typically done solo, and are small-ish in scope. Whereas a key function of a good senior IC, at least in my opinion, is to be a force multiplier more than a heads-down coder.

Interesting reading through all the negative comments here. Maybe this is an indictment of the state of the web, but it seems to clearly solve a problem a lot of people have.

Also have to imagine the long term vision is beyond just accelerating the web as it is now. This opens up possibilities for moving resource hungry applications to the cloud, expanding beyond just a browser to be more of an OS, white-label installs for brands to offer a cloud app, etc.

That this has been tried before (Silk, Stadia, etc) IMO is validation that this idea has legs and just needs the right timing and execution. No idea if Mighty will be what makes that go mainstream, we'll see!

Good quality domestic craft beer and imports are typically very easy to find in most populated areas in the US in my experience. Granted I'm in a big city (Chicago) but the "big box" liquor store here has a whole aisle of Belgian imports, for example.

That said, a quick googling shows that 2/3 of the American beer market is still dominated by non-craft domestics (AKA your cheap, watery lagers like Bud/Miller). Even amongst the craft segment it's definitely the case as another commenter pointed out that IPAs are overrepresented for whatever reason.

I think where we're still really lagging behind is quality of beers at your average bar. If you know where to go you can find great selection but the average bar probably still has just a handful of decent non-domestic-lager offerings, likely in cans/bottles. In comparison to when I lived in the UK and it seemed like any corner pub would have a couple great draft ales .. it's not the same.

I don't like this solution either, but kind of weird to see defending / explaining away ghosting as normal in some of these posts.

When I'm involved in the hiring process I've always approached it from the angle that you want to leave a good impression with the candidate regardless of whether you hire them or not. Careers are long, word gets around, and you'll reject way more candidates than you hire.

The economics don't quite work the way you describe.

The brokerage is forwarding your flow to one of it's partner broker-dealers who is providing the actual execution service. Those BD's would happily take this flow for free (as evidenced by the fact that they now _mostly_ pay for it). The executing BD, not the brokerage, is on the hook for trading fees _if_ they need to execute the order in the public market - which is rare as they mostly internalize that flow. The executing BD's business model is based on the assumption that the flow is not particularly toxic and that at scale, the profit margin per share exceeds any execution costs.

The larger point stands though: from the perspective of the executing BD the payment for order flow + price improvement are both costs, which they want to cap. If you dial up PFOF, you naturally get less price improvement.

The payment for order flow piece is a little confusing as presented in the press release, but the actual SEC order makes this a little clearer: https://www.sec.gov/litigation/admin/2020/33-10906.pdf

Basically there are two ways broker-dealers that want to do business with Robinhood or similar firms can provide incentives:

1. Pay the flow provider (i.e., Robinhood) some amount per order/share

2. Provide price improvement over the prevailing market price to the end customer (which the provider can then use to market themselves as providing good execution).

Ultimately both of these are coming out of the broker-dealers bottom line, so the unit economics have to work - (1) and (2) have to leave a positive profit margin on average. Typically a firm like RH would be monitoring execution quality and negotiating price improvement requirements with the broker-dealer. This order finds that RH failed to do that, and likely as a result of their demand for high payment for the order flow, (2) was below their peers while they were stating otherwise in their marketing materials.

Curious if any FAANG employees know if this kind of thing is still standard above a certain level, or does say "staff" level and above tend to be internal promotions only?

I guess the pay is phenomenal but I have a hard time imagining that this kind of algorithmic trivia approach makes any sense at all for hiring into senior roles. Especially if someone was trying to move laterally between FAANGs.

We've tried to continue patronizing independent bookstores during the pandemic, but it's not surprising they are struggling (our favorite recently closed). The value-add over Amazon was always the warm atmosphere, personalized recommendations and the sense that you might discover a great book you didn't know about while perusing the shelves. Very hard to recreate that online, and independent shops can't compete with Amazon's shipping speed - so you're left with no value-add other than the store still being there in the future. Sad state of affairs.

Take a look at this: https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/trading-investing/t...

At the end of the day though, the allocation prior to trading starting in the secondary market is almost entirely discretionary on the part of the issuer and underwriters, and hard to access for the small-fry investor especially if there is a lot of interest.

Not the OP but you get tuned into this pretty quick going through the normal gamut of kid issues. The _worst_ cry I've heard our son do was when he had a double ear infection, it was immediately obvious from the shrill tone that he was in pain and needed to go the doctor. There is also a slightly less desperate one where he's stuck in something (usually leg/arm in the crib, not really stuck but can't yet reason out how to fix the problem).

HFT market maker here (my views are my own), there are some consequences that immediately fall out from periodic batch auctions like this.

1. There will still be a race to update your entry in the auction as close as possible to when it runs, because equity markets do not operate in a vacuum. Correlated futures markets don't operate this way (and the regulatory lift to make them do so is separate, and just as hard as doing this for equities), so there is still a race to incorporate the most up to date information ahead of a periodic auction.

2. This _will_ widen the bid-ask spread and reduce liquidity, for the following reasons. There are right now 16 distinct exchanges, excluding dark pools. As a market maker, I want to show my quote to buy/sell to as many participants as possible, and so I quote across a decent subset of these exchanges at any given time. I _don't_ want to get simultaneously filled on all these orders, and am relying on the fact that most of the time if I get filled once, I can cancel from all the other exchanges and then re-evaluate what I think the fair value of the stock is, and put out new orders reflecting that view. The more confidence I have that I can do this, the tighter a spread I can offer, and on the flip side the more risk of overfill there is, the wider I need to quote to account for that risk. In a simultaneous periodic batch auction world anyone can take all available liquidity market-wide trivially, so I have to either reduce liquidity across the market to a lower level to cap my risk, or substantially widen my quote to make that risk economically viable. Both are ultimately bad for counterparties.

3. This would likely serve to entrench existing wholesalers unless they were forced to stop crossing orders internally, or otherwise play by a stricter set of rules (and good luck with that). The vast, vast majority of retail activity never sees a public marketplace, but is executed by a wholesaler - so if you're leaving them out of this picture you're not really changing much.

My personal $0.02 on this is that the latency race is just a turf war between liquidity providers, but has no real impact outside of that arena. There are other areas of needed reform: market fragmentation to the degree it exists today is a net negative IMO. Similarly the market-wide best execution requirement is just extra complexity and creates opportunities for regulatory arbitrage. The proliferation of exotic order types and "differentiating" exchange behavior adds complexity and creates opportunities to game the system. Exchanges charge exorbitant fees for access that create barriers to entry for smaller participants. To name a few.

What is the actual attack vector here for taking advantage of incorrect voter rolls? Just that it's easier to vote more than once by mail than in person?

Where I am in IL you don't need to show photo ID to vote, so the level of verification that occurs in person vs by mail is the same.

Generally it seems like you want the voter rolls to err on the side of being overly broad than vice versa, so long as it doesn't enable fraud - i.e., it's better to leave someone on the voter rolls who has moved/died (who is overwhelmingly unlikely to actually cast a vote) than to disenfranchise a voter by erroneously purging them.

If CPD has a lot of positive press out there I've certainly missed it. In the last five years alone:

- Homan Square interrogation facility revealed where CPD detained suspects without access to a phone or lawyer

- Laquan McDonald murder and subsequent charging and conviction of Jason Van Dyke, only after dash cam footage provoked a public outcry

- CPD Superintendent ousted after being found asleep (possibly drunk?) in his running car at a stop sign.

- FOP (CPD Union) elects new president who is on administrative leave(!) and is one of the most frequently disciplined officers in CPD. Also has history of making public comments defamatory towards minorities / low income.

- State's Attorney vacates ~100 drug convictions based on false evidence from disgraced ex-CPD Sergeant Ronald Watts

- Damning DOJ report that lead to a consent decree

These are just things I can recall off the top of my head. They do not have a particularly good reputation.

I'm not arguing that we need to entirely restrict activity, sorry if that was unclear. However, very little is fundamentally different today than in March. The virus is no less virulent, we have no widely available non-supportive treatment, and only a small percentage of the population is thought to have immunity.

Our only advantage is a higher level of preparedness in terms of testing, tracing and standards of care for the sick.

That should allow us a greater level of freedom than at the height of the lockdown, especially in less hard hit areas if testing and tracing can be relied upon to catch flare ups early.

All that doesn't change the fact that 100% business as usual will eventually require either a vaccine, an effective treatment, or a large number of deaths.

EDIT: Can't believe I have to say this here, but the downvote button is not a "dislike". If you disagree, engage in a discussion please!

I've seen a lot of people on social media tout a 0.5-1% death rate as if that's inconsequentially low, which is baffling to me. 0.5% of the US population is 1.6 million people. Even if you make a lot of optimistic assumptions - a slow enough transmission rate to continue providing a normal standard of medical care, herd immunity at ~60% infected, etc, the number of deaths is still extremely high.

Unless this is revised substantially downward as we get more data, there is no clear return to normalcy without a vaccine.

Great move by Twitter. It's a big lift to move from mostly in-office to 100% work from home, so if you've done it successfully it seems like a no-brainer to retain that option as a perk post-pandemic.

Personally cutting out ~90 minutes of daily commuting has been fantastic. The lack of childcare .. not so much, but when that inevitably resolves I don't see myself going back 5 days a week in the office.

IMO the severity of the situation and the economic fallout has become more clear over the weekend as more states have issued broad orders regarding school/restaurant/bar closures and limits on public gatherings.

Ultimately the Fed can give a lot of help here, but can't fix the underlying problem. Easing credit for businesses will help get some through to the other side but it won't replace lost revenue.

Things are going to be very volatile for the foreseeable future. Non-Farm Payroll data released in a few weeks time would have had the househould sample conducted last week, so we may not know the full impact on unemployment until May, realistically.

USO is probably the biggest, most liquid one available in the US.

Almost all of these funds will hold some combination of cash, short term debt and oil futures, with the ratios depending on their target leverage.

Performance between them will vary depending on, among other things: whether or not the ETF is levered, which particular type of crude it's tracking, it's time horizon, and how effective the fund managers are at rolling their futures holdings.

NOT investment advice. Commodities are fickle.

The brush attachment is actually quite good on rugs/carpet, but most of our house is hardwood or tile. The hard floor attachment we have is basically a soft roller that is supposed to sweep debris backwards and funnel it to the actual vacuum inlet. This doesn't work particularly well and will sometimes fling debris out the back, and the design also seems to mean that it works best pushing forward, rather than just vacuuming in kind of a W motion. I have a theory that this is worsened because our house is old and the floors are not that even, so maybe it's not able to trap debris as effectively? Our other normal vacuum's hardwood attachment is the super simple suction cone type thing, and that will suck up basically anything in it's path.

I have a V7 that my mother in law gave us and the cordless part is the only thing it has going for it. It doesn't do nearly as good a job as our corded Miele but it's good enough that I'll use it to spot clean when I don't want to lug that out.

> It is important to really think through the logic here: if Johnson wanted to stop Parliament he would delayed until AFTER October 31. He didn't do this.

I don't think the logic leads to this conclusion. His calculus may have been that the prorogation would be more likely to be successfully challenged if it _clearly_ cut parliament out of the process altogether. By leaving some time for them to sit ahead of his October 31st deadline he likely hoped that the prorogation would stand, he could negotiate a deal, downplay the possiblity of an extension, and then force a vote to approve the deal as the only alternative to a no-deal Brexit given the short timeline.

I'm not quite sure how the terms / licensing for this works, but anecdotally OSE, SGX, TOCOM, BrokerTec and at least the derivatives business in Hong Kong all run on some variant of Nasdaq technology.