w.cd had the best recommendation system for music and audio equipment. The communities that tried to take it's place after don't come close.
It's a shame because I don't know where to talk about it anymore. r doesn't come close, at least not yet. The community music collages on w.cd were unreal.
yeah, we really lost a huge resource when w got shut down. I had mostly stopped pirating music by then, but still visited the site daily just to find new recommendations. r seems like a good place to acquire music, but has completely failed to recapture that community aspect.
Not too mention, at least in America, the vast majority of American lives are far worst off than they were in the 70s, 80s, or 90s. Making smart phones and personal computers just made rich people richer.
Smart phones and PCs both coincide with big shifts in global politics, the post 2001 War on Terror, Operation Iraqi/Afghan Freedom, etc. Trillions spent on insurgency control, that could have been spent a lot more effectively.
All the while the middle class shrinks. (David Autor's 'Why there are still jobs?' paper is open access and has striking graphs that show just how much happened/happening.)
Globalisation lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, while the financial benefits of this economic optimization were not distributed back to those who lost their old socioeconomic status. (They only got the lower prices, but that's not much considering most of those people affected were not living in a distortion-free "free market", they had no idea what to do, they were not used to chasing new skills-in-demand, not prepared to relocate, etc.)
That said comparing healthcare outcomes, civil rights to the 70s is worthwhile, and if you think it was better then, that is mighty strange.
> Making smart phones and personal computers just made rich people richer.
With some positive sides also. Having a free encyclopedia, cheap universal access to educative videos or detailed satellite photos of the whole planet in 70s would have been mind blowing. Being poor today is more frustrating, but the DIY part is much easier, as making connections, and this has also an economic value.
Knowledge is not protected in semi-secretive guilds anymore. The counterpart effect is the disparition of entire sets of steps in the social stair. You can not make a living anymore selling printed maps for example. Poor people could climb, a little, but there is no so many stairs to grasp.
When I interview candidates who mention github contributions or courses they've created/taught or talks they've given I never have time to look at it. I'm literally told we're bringing someone on site maybe a day or two in advance, mostly it's day of. I don't have much time to personally comb over their resume sadly.
If you can bring this up during the interview I'd greatly appreciate it otherwise don't assume these things (open source contributions, blog posts, talks) will help you get interviews. What they may give you is the ability to network with people who are hiring which gets you an onsite.
I've work for large national ISP where they are heavily trying to create a new series of network engineering tools (device discovery, adding new ARs with ease, upgrading existing devices, pragmatically change thru-puts between regions based on load, etc).
Most of the backends for these types of tools would explicitly be done in Java. Why did they chose Java? Mostly because they would staff entire teams with H1Bs and dump them after 5 years. The directors of these projects would only hear about "buzzwords" surrounding the latest tech if they themselves went to conferences or happened to luck out if the project managers they hired had varied experience.
Oddly enough, there's a lot of greenfield work being done using Scala at Verizon and Comcast. But from my direct experience, it's entirely dependent on the team. The more the team doesn't rely on contractors the more likely they are to use niche tech.
I have no idea what the metrics are, but to continue my devil's advocacy, would the counterpoint here be "average lifespan of a marginal product that doesn't get acquired by $BIG_COMPANY"?
I forgot the shinning examples of conservative rule that is Alabama and Mississippi. For all the faults that California has political, it's still an economic powerhouse.
It's not just California, it's every state and every city in the US. People have an aversion to public works projects often crying about taxes or how the service is useless or not good enough. We have a political system where one major party (out of two) decries any public spending that might help people who aren't millionaires/billionaires/corporations.
Is it any wonder when you have evil groups of people spending hundreds of millions of dollars to tell people that they should vote against their interests?
> We have a political system where one major party (out of two) decries any public spending that might help people who aren't millionaires/billionaires/corporations.
Wasn’t it Newsom who canceled the project? Most high ranking Democrats are certainly rich from things like “energy” and “weapons” via k street and international analogues. We are bipartisan in our corruption and failure to build infrastructure.
No. Newsom was the messenger saying what was already pretty evident: the project had run itself into a logistic and financial corner that there was no feasible path out of (at least for now).
Note that HSR planning and construction is still taking place. The current public assumption seems to be that the "train from nowhere to nowhere" is all we'll ever get out of the project, but Newsom was actually pretty careful not to say this.
Fair enough! I think my assessment on the partisanship of infrastructure development stands. My understanding is that the underlying reasons for cost inflation are non-partisan.
> People have an aversion to public works projects
People have aversion to public works projects because they routinely see public works projects being mismanaged, hugely overbudget, delayed to geological times, used as source to appropriate public money into private pockets, and paraded for political influence while being badly maintained and chronically broken. I am far from being a millionaire, but I would require a lot of convincing to see how it actually benefits me and doesn't turn into another boondoggle for politicians and contractors. Maybe spending serious chunk of my income on a project that would not happen for decades, would be poorly maintained and I probably won't end up using because they'd screw up something like not having proper access to the endpoints is actually not my interests?
Major highway and road projects in the US are often completed with minimal fuss. You don't really hear about these, because they go off smoothly. The difference may perhaps be that there's plenty of experience and precedent in doing these, both in government and industry, as road projects are constantly executed.
Major rail construction has basically been absent in the US for a generation or more. Does the lack of experience and support, combined with a general reluctance to bring in foreign expertise, explain the difference? Maybe. The Texas HSR project may be instructive, as it's bringing in a Japanese firm.
> Major highway and road projects in the US are often completed with minimal fuss. You don't really hear about these, because they go off smoothly. The difference may perhaps be that there's plenty of experience and precedent in doing these, both in government and industry, as road projects are constantly executed.
... yeah, I don't think that's true. Major road projects in the US often have exactly the same kinds of hemorrhaging cost overruns and other issues that rail projects do: look at Seattle's Alaska Way Viaduct replacement project, the Bay Area's Bay Bridge replacement project, or Boston's Big Dig for infamous cost overruns that are measured in large integer multiples.
The major difference, I believe, is that there is often massive public pressure to force through road projects when they hit snags, whereas rail projects tend to get cancelled at first opportunity.
On the flip side, the reconstruction of LA freeways after the Northridge earthquake was a resounding success, finishing a month or more ahead of schedule. How? By offering financial incentives to complete early. ;-)
That's only a small number of the hundreds of major road projects. Most of them you don't hear about because nothing interesting happens.
FWIW, my experience with smaller-scale local projects in my area is that they are completed generally on time, competently, and achieve the desired aims.
This is going to be an extremely cynical take but most software jobs (>80%) are basically the same. That goes for the companies as well, we aren't as unique as we think; and the companies that are unique or doing unique work aren't exactly having trouble finding employees (FAANG vs nearly everyone else).
If you want an employment as a beginner apply to as many postings as possible. Only do research for companies once they want to talk to you, anything else is a waste of time. It also takes very little time filling out job applications (outside of obnoxious companies that ask lots of behavior Q), it should less than 10 minutes to fill out job apps.
IDK how to feel about cover letters, every company I've worked at (startups, national ISP, to massive insurance companies) have stated they never read cover letters sent. They just want to make sure candidates have all the keywords on their resume before even talking (this part is largely automated away).
I have a basic cover letter that explains what I'm doing at my current job and how I'd like to work at $company doing $unique_stuff. Basically my cover letter is 90% the same between job apps, but I change the intro paragraph to match the title, company, and job description.
But as a beginner or moving to a new city where you know no one, apply to everything everywhere. It's a numbers game and even as you progress in your career, you may not command enough talent to target specific companies.
Before changing jobs, I was in a WeWork location at DTX in Boston. There were many rooms that were empty, but Puma was paying for an entire floor so maybe they were making the difference up with large corporation clients?
It's a shame because I don't know where to talk about it anymore. r doesn't come close, at least not yet. The community music collages on w.cd were unreal.