The sad part is that it's Carly Fiorina's fault for turning HP into the mess it was. And now she touts that as the reason why she should be president. It's a sick joke that she thinks gutting one of Silicon Valley's preeminent companies makes her worthy of being president.
HP was the first company to pioneer Silicon Valley culture, ie. The HP Way. It was only after Fiorina's tenure that HP turned into a shadow of its former self. They were one of the first to aggressively lay people off in the US and hire in India, and under her, they lost "The HP Way".
Every CEO since Fiorina has been a complete joke. Now Whitman is coming in to finish the job.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carly_Fiorina#Resignation, Fiorina made over $100M in her time at HP. So she makes out like a bandit and leaves the company in a ditch, rattled, and struggling to regain composure. Do these people have any conscience?
What about the board? There should be a "golden ass-kick" rather than a golden parachute when CEOs have such poor performance. Does anyone else remember Leo Apotheker? I believe they gave him like $25 million when he left a year later after he took the job.
There was an article in the Houston paper a few weeks ago whose main theme was trying to explain to confused readers how Fiorina could possibly be running for president using her record as HP CEO as an actual positive. In Houston, formerly Compaq headquarters until HP bought and immediately dismantled it, she's not getting a lot of primary votes...
Spending $25 billion on a PC company was a pretty dumb idea. Spending $25 billion on Compaq, which had spent almost $10 billion on DEC, was even dumber: either it duplicated the existing business (PCs) or complicated the existing business (severs) by adding duplicate products.
Trying to buy PriceWaterhouseCooper for $14 billion might have been a good move but it was a dumb price. IBM later bought it for $4 billion.
I did go and see her talk at Comdex. She was remarkably clueless about technology.
That's a good question. I don't know why someone downvoted you. My best friend worked for HP and disliked her but I too would be interested in knowing the answers to your questions.
Are you suggesting Gorbachev was the USSR's enemy? He brought Russia out of the dark ages of government run socialism i.e. communism. He and Reagan gave Russia the new found joys of capitalism it enjoys today and brings the world all those cool I Love Russia YouTube videos.
Don't waste your time flying in October. Companies will be applying for H1Bs in April, and they usually run out on the 1st day. And even if you get an H1B in April, you can't start until the following October. Very few companies (probably zero) will allow you to work remotely until you get your H1B and then can start working.
Your best chance is to get into a Master's program and then apply for internships, and eventually a job that way. Then they can apply for your behalf while you are on OPT, rather than randomly while you're in Columbia.
Your other option is to get a job locally at a big Silicon Valley company, like Facebook or Google and then transfer to the US. If you are manager, then you can get your L1 visa which is really fast.
Internships in Silicon Valley are most certainly not unpaid. The company I work at pays our interns really well.
It sounds like you need to increase the breadth of your knowledge. No one hires for Lua, and although Node is pretty popular right now, you not being able to get a job indicates that you are probably missing some fundamental knowledge, like algorithms, etc. You probably need to increase the quality of your coding, and increase your preparation for interviews.
You are 1 hr away from SF, which suggests to me you live in Livermore or Tracy. You probably need to study up on things that companies are expecting. Go to sites like leetcode.com and glassdoor and work on your skills, maybe that's where you're lacking.
I don't think BART goes to Silicon Valley - is there something to connect the two?
Yes, Lua is very much a niche. I tried applying at Cloudflare because they use the Lua module for nginx - that is definitely in my field as I use them both already. I'm haven't heard back but they've had that position (Lua Engineer) posted for months now. I think my resume might be sitting in a stack.
I had hoped my community college AS in Computer Science would account for something, but when you compare it to those who went to uni I'm sure it's greatly devalued. I like to learn on my own as needed, but I can't show that on paper (can I?). I do feel that I know algorithms fairly well - I spent last week learning the Paxos algorithm so I could apply it to database (mirroring?). I have fun doing things like that, it's just not something I can say I'm accredited for by a university.
I hadn't been getting interviews for a few months but I managed to get 4 all last week (when it rains, it hails?). I was nervous for the first interview but because it was for a friends' company I think I still gave a good impression with him vetting me. I had an easier time admitting my limited frontend experience in the subsequent interviews with other companies. I actually think the way I said this made me appear stronger, like I expected to have no trouble picking it up quickly.
Anyway, I've been trying to decide if I should throw myself into a project to show my ability through Github. I'm torn thinking I should be devoting all my time to the job hunt, but many of my friends have done this to get noticed..
Degree is not relevant, no one in SV cares. There are plenty of people that don't have college degrees that have very good jobs. All that matters is your skill and competence.
You are in an awkward position. You know Javascript, but you don't know front end. There aren't very many purely backend positions that require only Javascript/Node. They probably expect a complete fullstack knowledge, so not knowing front end will hurt you, and not knowing a more back-end language like Python, Java, etc will also hurt you.
Keep interviewing, but learn a new language, like Python or Java, and try to get some experience in it, through open source projects, freelancing, etc.
I did say SF - the fellow before me said internships were paid in Silicon Valley so I was curious if there was a leg that added to BART to get there.
I just don't know what companies expect for frontend work - I have been doing the tutorials for React, Meteor, Ember, and Angular but this sounds more like backend work to me. Should I be looking in the direction of markup languages? I have used HAML to work with data in YAML, I need to conquer SASS, LESS, and Stylus I think.
I feel pretty confident about my language list - IRC kinda 'raised me' on programming.
C, C++ (templates are still hard), Java (don't know popular libraries), Ruby, Python, Lua, Coffeescript, JS, Lisp, Haskell (can read, not write..), Erlang, Elixir (beginning), PHP, ...
I just mean to say I do know Python quite well - I worked through the Violent Python book a month ago and loved the hell out of it :-)
Thank you for your feedback - I just wish I had a better idea of what is frontend. Imo things like React blur that line building components against the backend so closely?
Not that error handling is unimportant, but my opinion is that C is about focusing on resource usage, and keeping very close track over giving back any resource you take, including memory, etc. If you do that, then the number of hard-to-debug runtime bugs drops significantly.
This is a quote from Michael Lewis' The Big Short, I'll never forget it:
Obsessing over Household [Finance Corporation], he attended a lunch organized by a big Wall Street firm. The guest speaker was Herb Sandler, the CEO of a giant savings and loan called Golden West Financial Corporation. “Someone asked him if he believed in the free checking model,” recalls Eisman. “And he said, ‘Turn off your tape recorders.’ Everyone turned off their tape recorders. And he explained that they avoided free checking because it was really a tax on poor people — in the form of fines for overdrawing their checking accounts. And that banks that used it were really just banking on being able to rip off poor people even more than they could if they charged them for their checks.”
Eisman asked, “Are any regulators interested in this?”
“No,” said Sandler.
“That’s when I decided the system was really, ‘Fuck the poor.’”
> form of fines for overdrawing their checking accounts.
Why in the world shouldn't you be fined for overdrawing your checking account? A checking account is not a loan, am I wrong in thinking this quote is B.S.?
Because the bank should just deny the charge to the account instead, and have no fine. You are right that a checking account is not a loan--so the bank should not treat it as if it is!
I'm not really in the know, but I'd guess "back in the day" it legitimately cost somebody something to deal with a cheque with a value greater than the balance of the account. Nowadays, it should be the same $0.0001 worth of computing/networking power which is already spent if it's a good cheque. I'd welcome corrections from someone who knows more, but I figure modern fees are just a way for the bank to extract money from people too harried to fight back. Perhaps some of it is legitimately used to subsidize general account maintenance, and maybe the banks are passing on a real cost specifically charged by a clearinghouse for bad debits -- but somewhere down the line, the bulk of it has to be lining someone's pocket.
If someone were attempting thousands of bad charges in a month, maybe they "deserve punishment" for abusing the system. What the fees do now is just taking money from people who already have little, and/or just lost track of their balance and made a small mistake that would have no bearing on anyone else if the bank didn't fine for it.
Exactly what kind of choice is it if banks aggressively pursue strategies to make it impossible to determine if you have sufficient funds in your account? "You have a choice to go through Door A or Door B. One door will brutally kill you, the other has pizza and ice cream." There! Aren't you happy? You have a choice!
Because the distinction between being a victim and being a willful participant in a malevolent scheme is an important one. Recognizing that makes it easier to diagnose why things aren't as ideal as we wish they were.
What is the purpose of a fine? Before we discuss further why one shouldn't be fined, can we make sure we agree on why one should?
Off the top of my head, I see "dissuading behavior that negatively impacts the bank", and that doesn't seem to justify a fine in this case, but maybe you're thinking of a rationale for a fine that I and maybe others are not thinking of.
> Off the top of my head, I see "dissuading behavior that negatively impacts the bank", and that doesn't seem to justify a fine in this case, but maybe you're thinking of a rationale for a fine that I and maybe others are not thinking of.
Great! Someone that wants to participate in reason and not just boisterous proclamations. I'm down.
So yeah, I agree with your definition and it applies in this case because the bank is negatively affected by having to shift money from other accounts to cover your overdraw.
1. Why can't the bank refuse to process the charge?
2. This seems to be failing, in practice, at dissuading people and making them pay attention to keep a positive balance. At least according to a couple of comments here, there are people who are repeatedly hit by overdraft fees. Is there something better that can be done do solve the actual problem, which is banks having to come up with money to cover these tiny loans?
3. Is there a more proactive way to solve this, such as notifying people (phone, text, push notification, whatever) that their balance is low and they have a recurring charge coming up? Wouldn't that be better for the bank, so that the problem wouldn't happen in the first place?
Oh, you're under the illusion that a for-profit business' primary responsibility is to maximize the value they provide to their customers? Sorry but that's not the way the world works. Now that could possibly be the case if we lived in a country where banks were allowed to compete on things like "treating the customer right" but we don't live in such a country; we live in the one where ever more annoying fees is the only game in town.
But none of this is relevant from your (and my) point of view; ours is really simple. We're completely aware of the murky rules that apply when your account gets close to $0 and the best solution is to not use the account in that case.
No, I believe nothing of the sort and now I'm curious what part of my post conveyed that, so I can write in a less sloppy manner in the future. Sorry!
Judging solely from the point of view of the bank, and conditioned on the assumption that fees are to dissuade customers from behavior that hurts the bank, it's in the bank's interest:
1. To find a way for that behavior not to hurt it in the first place.
2. To actually, successfully dissuade behavior, so that the bank is hurt less.
3. To warn people right when they're about to hurt the bank, so they don't.
That matches the three questions I had.
If fees are themselves for the bank's profit, then yes, sure. But then we can just admit that the bank is charging fees to people who maintain low balances (= "poor people", to first order) for profit purposes, right? That seems clearly within the margin of rhetoric that "tax on poor people" is a fine description.
No, it's the same system that allows the lottery to exist. It's not "fuck the poor", it's "fuck the stupid" (alternatively, "fuck the bad-at-math"). If there's a high correlation, I don't think anyone is going to be terribly surprised, as uncomfortable as that may be.
I have been poor. I have also been the opposite. I have also been a bank employee, and a professional investor who studied security analysis by looking at banks. The feds have rightly come down on banks via recent regs about how to charge overdraft fees, because banks did in fact used to play bullshit games with how they charged fees. A lot of that has been fixed. But the uncomfortable truth is that the people who repeatedly fall victim to these fees these days are simply irresponsible. You might as well complain about the high price of parking/speeding tickets - every opportunity in the world is there to avoid it.
I'm sure this will get about 50 downvotes but whatever.
There is a cognitive overhead to managing every predatory relationship. The poor have to deal with many, many predatory relationships all the fucking time. People make mistakes and extremely powerful people and institutions exploit them as much as they can when they do.
Good on you for being able to say that you were poor, in the past tense. I'm glad. I don't think people are stupid just because they stay poor. When you call people stupid because they suffer and can't catch their breath or get their affairs in order because human institutions are structured in the most hostile, alienating, predatory way they can get away with, you start seeing stupidity wherever you ought to see compassion and empathy.
You're right that the poor face many asymmetric relationships day-in and day-out. Whether I would describe it all as "predatory" I would disagree.
Again, I think this is a very, very uncomfortable topic to have an honest conversation about, but I think people often mix up causation and correlation on this general topic. Let's stop kidding ourselves about it - many, many poor people are poor because they lack the basic building blocks for success that we take for granted: god-given intelligence, a strong work ethic, long-term thinking, careful considering for non-trivial decisions, an upbringing that values education, etc. I'm NOT saying all, but definitely many. So to the extent people and organizations are trying to in some way take advantage of "poor" people, this isn't really accurate - they are trying to take advantage of people who don't make good decisions. Heck, if you were trying to sucker someone for money, wouldn't you (ignoring everything else) go after someone with lots of money? People can't "catch their breath" or "get their affairs in order" not because of systemic oppression, but because they simply don't have the basic life skills to do it in the first place...that's probably a large part of why they're poor. There's also just a lot of inertia with this stuff, but we're getting way off topic. I read an interesting book about this years ago called The Persistence of Poverty, which I would recommend.
None of this is to say I am not empathetic or have any compassion. The blatantly predatory behaviors are deplorable and should be stopped and if applicable, the people involved should face whatever punishment is allowable. But adults need to be treated like adults at some point.
Sounds like victim blaming. To an extent you're right, but the situation is not at all this black and white (like anything in reality).
Take for example just the fact that it's easy to lose track of your current savings especially without ready access to the internet, a common situation for the low income.
Yes, it's is 100% victim blaming, because for god's sake, at what point do we expect grown adults to take some friggin responsibility for themselves?? Puh-lease, spare me the "easy to lose track" garbage. It's never been easier to keep track of one's finances, and that's before even considering an internet connection. If your budget is that tight, maybe, just maybe, actually closely tracking your bank account should be a priority, no??? One would think. God knows that's how I was when I had almost nothing to my name.
I don't like the banks playing games with this stuff and I'm glad most (but not all) of their bs got stopped. But my god, when are we going to hold adults accountable for just basic life skills instead of insulting and coddling them? Ever??
You're obnoxious, but you're right. I've suffered more than my fair share of overdraft fees, and every one of them was my own fault. It didn't help that my bank's online banking system was a filthy liar with a long-standing bug that caused it to display an incorrect balance (for up to a day or more) when there was an incoming transaction that wasn't pre-auth or posted -- but ultimately that just meant that I had to start writing down all of my charges and deposits, so that's what I did.
Overdraft fees are onerous, banks absolutely do exploit their poorer customers for extra revenue, several of the larger banks are next in line for most-hated organizations in America behind AT&T and Comcast, and the structure of fees across a wide array of services are all biased against the poor. But, none of that changes the truth that most overdraft fees could be avoided if the poor were more diligent about their finances.
Oh please. Everyone should be more diligent about their finances. The difference is that someone with money says "oh damn it, I spent too much. I should buy less stuff next week" and someone without much money gets an overdraft fee.
Maybe the problem with the current system isn't poor people, the problem is just people. It's just that some people don't have any sort of margin of error, so we shouldn't tilt the scales against them too. No need to add to the shit situation they're already in.
Examples? Again, as a former bank employee and someone who's analyzed banks for well over a decade, I know with certainty that you are 100% wrong...but I'm interested in your explanation.
I used to use Ninjatrader. It has integrations with a lot of brokers, and you can write C# algos. The GUI is pretty good the last time I used, it so overall I would recommend it.
Articles like this really strike home how huge this world is. I feel ignorant when my first thought is that we should be able to locate a cruise ship in the ocean, but I clearly underestimate how huge this world really is. It's also hits home when entire planes like the Malaysian airline plane can disappear and literally no one knows what happened to it.
I find it difficult to believe that the large governments, in control of many imaging satellites, could not find something like this if they were so inclined.
Take an enormous number of photos of the region at the right resolution, and have software eliminate the boring (empty) photos and flag the interesting ones (contain something of the right size) for human review. Heck, I bet it could even exclude known shipping lanes to minimize false positives.
There are 510 trillion square miles of surface area on the planet. Just.. imagine the logistical challenge of taking and storing these pictures, let alone the _process_ of obtaining them. It's almost impossible to achieve anything like a "snapshot" of the surface; because of this, it's almost useless for locating moving objects on the surface.
You could, conceivably, completely miss the object in your imaging passes; or the satellite you have tasked for a particular ground track has an error in it's imaging sensor or downlink equipment, meaning you're missing a huge chunk of data for a while. You might also have to move the satellites around occasionally making imaging useless during these periods as well.
Also.. there's night and weather. You can't always freely image the surface just because you have a camera pointed in that direction.
These are just a small number of reasons that whole-earth real-time imaging is seriously difficult.
If you're looking for a ship you're going to have much more success with a synthetic aperture radar satellite. They work through clouds and at night, and the bright reflection of a ship's flat steel plates is fairly easy to spot against the background clutter of the sea.
Unfortunately they generally cost hundreds of millions of dollars and there's only a handful of them in operation.
If a western government actually wanted to look for this ship (while it was still floating, anyway), they'd almost certainly find it. There's whole divisions of the air force and navy trained to do exactly that. The cost of the search would be pretty much unjustifiable though.
What? You're off by several orders of magnitude. The surface area of the earth is only 196 million square miles. Still very big, but nowhere near 510 trillion square miles.
The Earth's diameter is ~13000 km. Surface area is therefore 4 * pi * r^2 = 4 * pi * ((13000/2)^2) = 500 million square kilometres (which is, as you say, about 200 million square miles).
I suspect the parent is both confusing a million with a trillion and also miles with kilometres.
Neither. It's just such a habit to type miles. I meant 510 trillion square _meters_, which google and wolfram alpha tell me is correct.
In any case.. the reason I chose that is because that's probably close to a reasonable maximum single pixel resolution for tracking imagery. I wanted the scope of the problem to be obvious by choice of units; unfortunately, I screwed that part up. :(
> There are 510 trillion square miles of surface area on the planet.
I understand it's a big job, but that's why big governments have billion dollar budgets and toys.
Also remember we have no need to take photos of the entire surface, only the Atlantic (and even then, only the North Atlantic right now)
>You could, conceivably, completely miss the object in your imaging passes
I feel quite confident when images are taken their exact co-ordinates are known, so it can be quickly determined if you've "missed" a patch or if you have them all.
>* or the satellite you have tasked for a particular ground track has an error in it's imaging sensor or downlink equipment*
I feel quite certain they've tested these things extensively, and they're not going find some previously unknown bug while looking for a ship in the ocean. They work properly.
> * You might also have to move the satellites around occasionally making imaging useless during these periods as well.*
I thought most satellites were in orbits that make it possible to image almost the entire surface without moving them.
> Also.. there's night and weather
I didn't say it was going to be easy.
> whole-earth real-time imaging is seriously difficult
I'm not for one second proposing whole-earth real-time imaging.
> I understand it's a big job, but that's why big governments have billion dollar budgets and toys. Also remember we have no need to take photos of the entire surface, only the Atlantic (and even then, only the North Atlantic right now)
Yes.. but spending a billion dollars to save a few million is kind of silly, isn't it?
> feel quite confident when images are taken their exact co-ordinates are known, so it can be quickly determined if you've "missed" a patch or if you have them all.
Knowing you're missing data is one thing, but if you're _looking_ for a _moving_ object it can really set you back. You also then have to wait for that satellite, or another one on the same ground track to make the next pass. Most earth imaging satellites have a 90 minute orbital period. Even then, the earth is spinning, so you can't get back to the _exact_ spot very easily (if at all). Still confident this is easy?
> I feel quite certain they've tested these things extensively, and they're not going find some previously unknown bug while looking for a ship in the ocean. They work properly.
You can't image from geosynchronous orbit. I mean, you can, but it's pointless. You need a polar orbit. These orbits aren't stable. You need to adjust them (seriously, sign up for the GPS update list and see how often they have to be adjusted and moved).
Also, "they work properly." Clearly you're not an engineer. Things work properly until they don't. Which could be because of component failure, debris strike or you know, plain ole solar flares. These objects are in _space_. It sort of ups the bar.
> thought most satellites were in orbits that make it possible to image almost the entire surface without moving them.
As I said before, these orbits aren't perfectly stable. You need to boost and adjust and make movements. You may also want to put a new satellite in a slot where a previous satellite (with lessor technology) was. This all requires an insane amount of coordination and effort. Or, an insanely huge cluster.
> I didn't say it was going to be easy.
You made it sound as if it was a foregone conclusion. My effort was to point out that it is in no way that simple. It's going to be hard, it's going to cost a lot, you're going to have to throw people and money and equipment at it _constantly_. Is this justifiable for looking for missing objects? Probably not.
> I'm not for one second proposing whole-earth real-time imaging.
Then good luck finding those _moving_ objects. Also, I'd like to know what orbit takes a satellite only over the Atlantic Ocean. Yes, there are orbits that can "park" over an area, but those orbits are useless for the type of imaging you're suggesting, so you have to deal with the whole-earth problem anyways.
Or use crowdsourced anomaly classification like http://www.tomnod.com/ Though you get more interest in relief, search and rescue cases, not abandoned ships.
I think drones will leapfrog over self-driving trucks. Why even bother having things that drive on roads when you could fly them directly to a warehouse, over hills, forests, rivers, etc?
There are a lot more technical challenges associated with self-driving cars than self-driving drones. Self-driving cars aren't even fully solved at this point. However, even very cheap hobby drones can accurately fly to specific GPS coordinates. Even most plane flights are auto-piloted and even auto-land, so I believe that drones are a lot closer in terms of implementation than self-driving cars.
If there is a business case that determines that drones, while being potentially more energy-intensive, can save a company money due to speed, I believe it will win. For example, imagine Amazon could redistribute inventory between two warehouses with a click of a button and overnight, that sounds like a definite competitive advantage to me.
I would expect trucks with drivers to continue to beat drones on cost for a long time, a single trailer load is at least hundreds of drone trips, maybe thousands.
The comparison was between self-driving trucks vs drones, not human-driven trucks vs drones. Obviously those are going to be cheaper than whatever current technology we have.
And there's nothing preventing drones on the rough order of magnitude of trailers from flying around, as long as it's done in a safe and regulated way.
HP was the first company to pioneer Silicon Valley culture, ie. The HP Way. It was only after Fiorina's tenure that HP turned into a shadow of its former self. They were one of the first to aggressively lay people off in the US and hire in India, and under her, they lost "The HP Way".
Every CEO since Fiorina has been a complete joke. Now Whitman is coming in to finish the job.