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I explored specializing in health econ in college. My professor put it this way - health care is a scarce good. There's only so many doctors, so much medicine, so many beds. You have to control access to the goods somehow, otherwise you have Tragedy of the Commons.

In the rest of the world, it's controlled by extended wait times. In the US, it's cost. You can have moral arguments about what's fair, but that's the economic reality.

At the time I as studying this (early 2010's), the average wait time of diagnosis to first treatment for breast cancer in the US was 12 days. In NIH, it was 5 months.


I recently talked about how I got an old iPod 5.5 off eBay because it fit all my usability needs. Celebrity linux hacker unsarcastically told me I should have built my own MP3 player with ESP32, an audio codec board, and micropython.

Is this basically a table format like Delta/Iceberg but with an SQL engine built in via DuckDB?

Nope, from my understanding the delta log (the files that say which of your data files are actually valid or not) isn’t saved in json/parquet but directly in a database.

Much faster, but adds a dependency... that you would have added anyway with database based catalogs (that are not the only kind of catalogs)


Ah, I see. Thanks. Having the metadata in a DB sounds a lot more robust.

I unironically love that we've come back around to the hive metastore (there are pros to the decentralized and centralized catalog, it's good to have options)

Great. Now do H4, PERM, and OPT next. Close all the loopholes. Numberwise H4 is 4x bigger than H1B.

H1B is a lamb big tech is willing to sacrifice to satisfy the populists. You want real change, get rid of the rest.


Definitely my favorite physicist for the same reason you state. The notion that he just went around different fields and said “here’s how math can improve things,” invented some new approach, and moved on to another field to do it all over again just cracks me up.


Nowadays we'd call that "engineer's disease". I wonder how many potential Von Neumanns were discouraged from branching out into other fields by jealous gatekeepers who assume that any interest in their field by "outsiders", especially technical people, is "epistemic trespassing".


I have yet to meet a (academic) researcher that doesn't like to talk about their research topic if somebody comes and is genuinely interested. I mean most work on a topic that has maybe another 10-100 people in the world who are interested.

The problem is that instead most people to come to them are either obvious crackpots, who think they have solved cancer (energy...) and contact the person because they are a biologist, physicist ... (on a completely unrelated topic usually). Or they come from a place of arrogance, i.e. "we do ... like this, our method is clearly superior you should adopt it", or even worse here buy our clearly superior method.


An example I can think of off the top of my head is Luis Alvarez, the nobel physicist who came up with the asteroid impact theory of dinosaur extinction. The geology and paleontology community shunned him until the 90s when the Chicxulub crater was discovered (though geology is historically infamous for this, to the extent that nearly every important paradigm shift in geology was made by non-geologist outsiders who faced ridicule for their theories)


Geology moves slowly? Discipline name checks out at least.


Yeah. I've been a part of a number of academic projects, and though my career has been in the private sector, my experience is that collaboration across fields and disciplines is relatively pain free (though maybe not a priority because the pathway to a pub and impact is not obvious). I think most people want to work with other interested people.

In my limited experience, the friction is between labs and groups that are working on very similar things, and the competition is direct and obvious. And even here, the source of the conflict is the reward structures of the field, not some aversion to collaboration or personal arrogance.


For every von Neumann you probably have thousands if not millions of crack pots with ideas not worth wasting time on. So I understand the scepticism


It absolutely is different. You just said the Mac Mini is upgradable but the Pi is still soldered on. Desoldering and soldering a new RAM unit carries huge risks no matter how skilled people claim they are at it.


> It absolutely is different. You just said the Mac Mini is upgradable but the Pi is still soldered on.

I'm sorry, you seem to be confused. Soldering is not the problem. Locking up the hardware to have hardware provisioned tier limits to block you from upgrading your own hardware is silly.

And do note, raspberry pi doesn't prevent you from switching RAM chips. The board will continue to work just the same with high capacity variants. But for some reason raspberry pi hardcodes a max memory size that prevents you from using the hardware upgrade you paid for in full.


When done right, product management is 90% idea generation and market/user research. So many companies do it poorly that PdMs are beaten to think their job is to wallow in bureaucracy and metrics.

LLMs are great at helping with aspects of market research and that’s about it. Aka it’s a good deep search engine. It’s not going to decide what features solve certain customer pain points. It’s certainly not going to prioritize and coordinate between competing stakeholders.


Good lord. Please use logic and Occam's Razor this.

Muse is a platinum album winning band that's got 10 albums over 20 years. If this was stolen, they (and their label) would be raising hell.


Good lord. Smart people doing the dumbest things with their work equipment.

I have a former coworker who was the VP of Finance at my company. He suddenly got fired out of the blue. The company was in the midst of trying to find a buyer (this was announced) so this was extra surprising. Turns out, he knew a lot of bad news about the company, and they caught him looking for a job. They fired him because he was too much of a liability.

How did they catch him? He was putting resumes and cover letters on OneDrive. "Yeah, in retrospect, that's one of the dumber things I've ever done," he said to me later.


I worked at a pharmaceutical start-up years ago.

* one of our medicinal chemists had studied nights to become a patent agent (this isn't the bad part).

* he landed a pretty nice job at an IP firm with a considerable raise in his salary.

* we were _in the middle of his farewell party_ when the IT guy told the CEO that during the previous few days the chemist had printed our company's entire library of novel chemical structures and their associated biological activity data.

* in the moment, i had no idea what was happening, but i've never seen someone go from looking happy to absolutely miserable at their own farewell party.

* i do remember that my boss later said she wanted him frog-marched out of the building in handcuffs.


I am constantly dumb founded at the people who conduct deeply personal business on a company laptop. Some individuals do not even own their own computer. Has every job hunt they have pursued has been done on their previous employers equipment?


I have more personally owned computers than is reasonable, but I can understand people who get issued a company laptop and use it for everything.

It’s a couple hundred bucks a year to keep a personal laptop and if you’re mostly accessing cloud services, I can easily understand the temptation to use a company laptop for it all.


Also, when you travel or even commute using public transport, you don't always want to carry two laptops around.


I fly around the world for work. I have two laptops, plus a triple screen setup. https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0GTQZWG77/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_bdcrb...

1. You leave the company laptop at work(in my case, at site).

2. Get a lightweight laptop for yourself.

3. Get a proper travel laptop bag. I have this one from Brics

https://www.bricsmilano.com/en-gb/products/underseat-backpac...


A tablet with Samsung Dex has replaced my travel netbook.


I never worked on a job that company policy allowed for personal use.

Naturally there are enough to try to flex the rules, while hoping not to get caught.


Lots of workplaces allow reasonable personal use.


The problem from IT security point of view is what is "reasonable" and how it impacts internal systems if the laptop gets used as attack vector.


>Has every job hunt they have pursued has been done on their previous employers equipment?

Yes. And the resume was updated and the applications filed while on the clock.

https://youtu.be/WcyNWbx8kAo?t=4

(the timestamp is important)


If you're salaried, every moment of time in your life is on the clock.


Certainly not in European countries, although probably irrelevant in this case.


That depends on jurisdiction


Last year, I was recruiting a data scientist for a side project. I was referred to two DSes, albeit from academia, to help.

Neither had their own personal laptop. One kept his laptop in the office all the time and just used an iPad at home. The other just plain didn't have a personal one. Work was the only one she had and she had to return it when she got laid off.


But when I said the exact same thing [0], people were talking about how it's their "culture" to use corporate laptops for personal usage, and I even got downvoted and flagged if you read the thread (turn showdead on in your HN settings). It's baffling indeed, but I guess people will learn the hard way, that companies can see everything you store and even type on there.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47851948#47854312


Really depends if company has some spyware installed. My work MacBook was just given me as plain new MacBook that I installed everything myself. Personal iCloud, work OneDrive, no corporate spyware


I have worked in 3 companies and none of them had installed anything on the work laptop. One IT department tried to, but I ignored all their messages. I would probably be pissed if I have to give up the right to work with privacy.

I had formatted the laptop both while getting it and returning it. I had filevault on and I wouldn't have shared my password.


Modern MDM solutions use Apple Business Manager to automatically deploy the MDM after a system wipe. If you have a company owned Apple device, and the company has it enrolled in ABM, then you can wipe and filevault all you want, but the agent will still be reinstalled, and the file vault key escrowed.


Yeah I know. It's not like Apple is trying to hide it or most companies try to hide spyware, and I know how to check for Apple business manager or spywares.


It’s always good at the beginning. What happens when you leave? Is the laptop yours? Theirs? Is this documented?


Off the bat, you said that there shouldn't be expectations of privacy, not just that there currently isn't, which is not the exact same thing.

I've never used company equipment for anything personal beyond a quick Google search, but I'd still like there to be some degree of privacy in case I ever feel pressured to do so, e.g. by a deadline to fill a form.


especially in the tech industry, where you get paid more than enough to buy your own personal laptop


In many countries it is a plain office job like everyone else with high education.


A coworker of mine once answered the wrong cell phone and said the wrong company name. (He was working for a competitor as well as our company.)

Another turned his computer that “wouldn’t behave” into IT, full of porn.


A professor at a vocational training degree shared us a VM for a class project. Filled with dozens of porn bookmarks. He eventually realised and stayed after class to delete the VM from every class computer, deleting all the work of classmates who didn't take a backup home.

This prompted the people who lost their work to actually report the porn in revenge.


> Another turned his computer that “wouldn’t behave” into IT, full of porn.

Every tech support worker has seen this countless times. So many people are completely blind to the idea that turning your device over to support means support can actually see what’s on your device…


It’s wild. It’s one of those “Do we have to tell you people to not do this?!?!?”


We have a plague here in NZ of top-level Police officers using work-issued devices to access and store CSAM material.


Wow that got dark real quick, mind sharing any links/evidence? Never would have thought NZ has a CSAM problem.



I mean, the headline says "second". Anything greater than 0 is bad but seems a little short of a "plague".


The first link appears to say 22 cases. 12 have faced sanction.


1. 22 "investigated" as part of a wide scope review, ie, it could mean an entire department was investigated 2. review was for "staff internet usage" so those sanctions could be for anything from regular internet porn or gambling sites or whatever else violates their employment conditions 3. OP said the plague was among "top-level police officers"


Anything greater than 0, in leadership roles of the organization that should be one the most highly trusted in the country, is a plague.


so you would call it a "plague" if it was just one guy? hopefully you can see how ridiculous that would work out in practice.


From the sysadmin PoV it's never "one guy" or even "just two"; what is common, however, is just one or two policemen, one or two soldiers, or one two judges make the news and the limelight of public prosecutions.

It's good to be seen to be tackling this kind of behaviour, rarely ever good (apparently) to fully rip the band aid off and report just how wide spread such behaviour can go.


It’s horrible, it deserves severe legal punishment, but “plague” to me implies a broad pattern.


It's rarely sunshine, but there are a lot of rainbows!


https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/auckland-police-officer-matthe...

Here’s one. There are more. Don’t be so naïve as to think any single country is free from these kinds of issues.


I can't find the stat, but if memory serves me correctly, NZ over-indexes in CSAM-related crime. It's unfortunate, but it's not always good news down on our little islands.


Why not? It’s the same as everywhere else, it has men. Just knowing that places like Kiwi Farms exists is enough evidence of good number of garbage people


being dodgy is hard work. it takes effort to maintain and the longer you maintain it the cumulatively harder it is to get away with.


To paraphrase the sage Jimmy McMillan: the number of people who interview on their work laptops is too damn high. I'm always flabbergasted when they admit this and not once has somebody who did so passed. IME there's a strong correlation between good judgment and technical prowess in this regard but I suppose stories like this prove me wrong.


Who cares? A modern worker is on Zoom meetings for multiple hours a day, if one of those hours happens to be talking to a recruiter or hiring manager, so what? People also sometimes talk to their kids school or their dentist or the plumber at their house during the work day.

I'm a people manager, and I wouldn't bat an eye at a candidate I was interviewing joining the zoom from their work laptop and I wouldn't care if someone on my team used their work laptop rather than their personal device if they were interviewing elsewhere.


Coincidentally, I just checked law school rankings in CA. In my day (mid 90's), Boalt Hall was at the very top, and most kids were told don't even bother trying for it. Now it's not in the top 15 in the nation and latest USNR has it third in CA behind Stanford and UCLA.


Stanford has been top three in the US for at least twenty years (the other two are Yale and Harvard), and UCLA hovered in 14–16 range for twenty years as well. The past few years, the rankings went haywire. I think their methodology changed, bc there isn't a law firm in the world that would hire a Chicago student over a Harvard student, ceteris paribus.

Boalt has kind of been the butt of a lot of jokes since I was a student decades ago. Maybe those jokes came to fruition. (A bit like Brown among the Ivies.)


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