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Realistically, are you using SQLite if you can’t compile and source control your rev of the codebase? Is that really a big deal?

Yes, it's extremely common to be using it and not even be compiling anything yourself, let alone C or any support libraries.

`sqlite3_rsync` must be installed on the remote host too, so now you're cross-compiling for all the hosts you manage. It also must be installed into the PATH the ssh uses, which for a number of operating systems doesn't include /usr/local/bin. So I guess you're now placing your sshd config under configuration management to allow that.

These tasks aren't that challenging but they sure are a yak shave.


I think the point is, most people don't even flip the coin, you're making a false equivalence.

Realistically most people don't get many opportunities to flip the coin

Then many who do get that chance choose not to, they choose a less risky path

It is very few people who even can attempt to flip the coin ten times

And "the 1%" can flip it as many times as they want until it lands on heads 10 times in a row


Instead of coin flipping, I look at it like a baseball game:

Most people are never even given an at-bat. They're born without money/opportunity (on the bench), and they will have to stay on the bench for life.

Some working / middle class people get one or two at-bats. They swing and maybe hit the home run, but maybe instead have a safe base hit or they strike out. That was their chance. Afterwards they're out of money/opportunity.

The top 0.1% or so get as many at-bats as they want. Their parents own the team and the ballpark so they just keep swinging until they get their home run, and then spend the rest of the game talking about how life is a meritocracy, and you succeed by being the best.


How quickly we forget being teenagers and young adults.

Computers, and knowledge in general, is the the most accessible it’s ever been, in the history of mankind.

So you’re claiming that the trillions of dollars that have been spent trying to uplift the youth of yesteryear were a complete an utter waste?

Or has social media been the somma Huxley was talking about all along?

Nothing stops anyone from reading and learning, having hope for the future, and pursuing it. WhatsApp had a staff of like 15-25 people. Linux wa started by some dork with an idea and a lot of time.

Treating the world like victims that need protecting isn’t the play.


> So you’re claiming that the trillions of dollars that have been spent trying to uplift the youth of yesteryear were a complete an utter waste

Well, take a look around?

The youth cannot buy homes. They aren't starting families. The wealth gap between the older and younger generations is enormous

Do you really think we have been successful in "uplifting the youth"?


https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43849966

That’s me, asking the same thing.


Most people don’t want to end up in debt in the likely case that the coin-flipping doesn’t succeed.

A subtle but important point: the people aren't getting taxed, the importer is getting taxed. If the importer passes those cost increases on to their customers, that is their decision.

Of course the importer will pass the costs along, but that isn't the real point.

The real point is that it is _expected_ that the costs will be passed along to the end consumer. The whole _goal_ of a tariff is to make people not want to buy the product anymore because it isn't worth the money.

There is an uproar about these tariffs, and I get that, people hate trump and everyone who supports him, totally get that too, and when he does a thing, people are going to lose their minds about it.

The point of the tariff isn't to tax citizens, it is meant to discourage spending, so the thing isn't imported, so the country of origin loses money and whatever they were selling now has even _less value_ because there is an oversupply.

China needs somewhere to dump their slave-labor made garbage much more than US consumers need to buy it.


Why? It is just a fact. The guy is absolutely overweight. Who cares? Lots of people are overweight. This is also a fact. Are we not supposed to acknowledge that?

I'm not the parent commenter, but I feel the same way. Just because something is a fact (although arguably fat doesn't sound very factual) doesn't mean it needs to be discussed during an interview. If someone started Quizzing me on the chemistry of rubber tires for a software dev role, I'd walk too. If someone started listing off the various kinds of sausage there are, I'd walk too. It would make me feel like I'm not taken seriously at best, or that I'm being scammed at worst.

Beyond that, if I looked east Asian, I could also see myself walking on this question for another reason. It would feel like a comment on my ethnic background, which has no place in an interview.


In American culture it's considered rude and gossipy.

Unless I knew what the reason was for asking, it would be like if an interviewer suddenly talked about how much weight Adele was gaining.


Personally, I won't work with paranoid people.

1.) I agree. However, if it other countries can impose tariffs at the drop of a hat and it takes a literal act of congress to pass a tariff, they'll never happen. Would that be a good thing? Maybe. Maybe not. Congress is obviously mostly useless. I was reading, of all things, a buzzfeed a few months ago where the biggest gripes of current house/senate members were along the lines of "it takes way too long to get anything done" and "I'm pretty sure most of my peers drink on the job"

I used the "act of congress" phrase intentionally, as it is generally a euphemism that describes, among other things, how long something can take or how hard it is to approve a thing.

I don't have a good solution to that problem.


This is the correct answer. Tariffs are not why the job market is so awful. Maybe that will be true in the future, but the past two years of horrible terrible miserable state of the job market is not because of tariffs imposed a month ago.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who remembers all those posts on hn 2-3 years ago about how bad the job market is, right? It has only become worse.

I know a kid who interned at a job last summer. Graduated, applied to a full-time job at the company. He happened to know someone in HR who told him "we got over a thousand applications for this job req in one day."

How tariffs can be blamed for that kind of situation, which is happening all over the US and has been for literal _years_, defies logic.


> Carville (DNC strategist) is advocating a "play dead" strategy.

Our tax money hard at work. What a fucking joke.


Do American parties get tax money to spend on strategists?

All I did was a quick google search, but I searched what the US imports from China, to fill in the word "stuff" from your post:

"The U.S. imports a wide variety of products from China, with the top categories including electronics, machinery, and furniture. Specifically, significant imports include computers, smartphones, electrical equipment, toys, and furniture."

I just don't think there will be riots in the street over this stuff. Maybe there will be, maybe there should be, I can't say for sure. I do know kids will survive just fine without toys, and I don't see riots over furniture. I don't know about the rest of it.

The other side of the coin is interesting: What if China decided they were never going to sell anything to the US? Would people riot in the street? Even more interesting, if China really wanted to play that game, why don't they? Why are they so mad? If this wasn't a threat to them it would be a giant nothingburger on their end.


Vastly underestimating the impact.

Think of all the Made in USA stuff that makes use of Chinese components.

Many of the machines used in factories are made in China.

A lot of tool making is outsourced there (an injection molding die that might cost $50,000 to make in the US might be $10k in China, and the Chinese typically make them with a quicker turnaround time, even with shipping.


Unfortunately our homes, offices, and lots of infrastructure kinda require things like electrical equipment (amongst other trivial things like wood, metal, insulation materials, etc)

As long as it isn't food. Heard a quote once (Last of US maybe?): humanity is always about 3 missed meals away from riots." In reality its probably more like 6-10, but the details aren't important. It doesn't seem like there will be food scarcity, but perhaps there could be. I'm sure there will be less food diversity, which stinks, but that is a different conversation. People will still eat.

As for toys, most kids don't play with a plastic toy for more than like, 3-10 hours of its existence and then it rots on a shelf or in a drawer until is eventually ends up in a landfill. I'm not going to miss that. I'm sure that someone will point out important things that china makes dirt cheap and I'm sure they'll be right. I personally don't care if clothing options are limited or plastic toys are scarce. The US will not implode.

It really seems like china has more to lose than we do, but because they're a communist country they can just deploy troops to quell uprisings. Tiananmen Square comes to mind. So we play this game of chicken and the media screams that they sky is falling.

Of course the Walmarts and Amazons of the world care, most of what they sell is plastic shit and clothes. I have little sympathy for them.


My only two thoughts there are, China needs to fill that 15% gap, and I don’t know where they’ll do it. China also doesn’t want to sell too many treasuries least it upset their own financial stability in terms of purchasing power for their own citizens.

The economic outlook in China isn’t great right now. The US and China are playing a game a chicken, not sure who blinks first.


That 15% is not going to go away overnight. Some of won’t be sent to the US will be sold to the rest of the world instead. Possibly at a discount, so it is not ideal from the point of view of the Chinese government, but they are still well equipped to weather a temporary dip of 7% in their foreign trade.

Nobody said that it would be painless for China. Just that

1- it will be less painful for China than the US

2- China is more resilient against this particular kind of stress because they have a command economy and have more control on the population.

If the US blinks and caves, it does not matter whether China got a scratch, it’s still going to win the war. And Covid taught us that something would need to be quite dire for China to blink.

Also, it got lost in the noise, but right now there is still a blanket 10% tariff on anything that enters the US, and presumably these 10% can turn to much more when Trumps feels like it. It’s not the US against China, it’s the US against the world.


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