There are three versions of solving this that I see happening right now:
(0) Recruitment firms, trusted ones, as filters
(1) Recruiting personnel from the hiring company going to one of just a few college campuses
(2) Friends/acquaintances of employees

The recruitment firm "solution" is just outsourcing the problem so I barely count that one.

The other two (1) and (2), are economically inefficient and unfair. Plenty of sharp people go to un-recruited colleges. And the friends thing lacks scale while also encouraging cliques. And yet, they seem superior to automated filtering of high-N resume counts.

I believe the job market was much more economically efficient sometime before leetcode-type tests became common (let alone AI).

For sake of this post: let's define a "good coder" someone who does well in properly-managed tech interviews

Obviously I don't know what your area is, but here, in a large midwestern USA city, 160K is not very much for a good coder in any language...let alone a rare choice like C.

The perceived lack of available personnel has a lot to do with not coming to terms with the job market as exists. This is perhaps exacerbated by employers whose pay scales haven't even kept up with inflation in the recent half decade.

Economics works: firms that bid salaries too low may complain, but it is their own fault if no one is willing to hit that bid, and all the candidates concentrate on better offers.

How do I know? Our company hires lots of C/C++ coders, and we are swimming in resumes. By the time a candidate makes their way through filters to interviewing with me, I am always very impressed with their coding skills. We also pay considerably more than 160.

As the article mentions, the parallels (haha) to John Harrison from 300 years ago are strong. He was an Englishman who solved the problem of finding how far east or west ship was, even in the middle of the ocean, by putting accurate clocks on ships, just like the UK scientists.

Dava Sobel covered it beautifully in the book Longitude, and I can highly recommend the illustrated version.

Citi operates internationally, and so their software likely is set up to handle a broad range of currencies. Including ones like the Indonesian rupiah which is over 10,000 per dollar.

I'm not defending their software, which obviously needs to be revamped, but I think the decision to allow that many digits in the field is defensible.

From the link

So you can respond from Android, just not create your own. Similar to eVite, really.

Most large companies are presently run by the remainder of boomers (born up until 1965) and Gen X, neither of whom tend to have school-age children at home any more.

I hope that the millennials have more empathy and wisdom when they take power. I apologize on behalf of my fellow GenXers.

I am lazy. I have only one prescription, for Lipitor / Atorvastatin that keeps cholesterol down. I get 90 days' supply at a time, my doctor will re-prescribe with a web form, and my drugstore is about 4 block from my house.

Even given these tiny barriers, I still sometimes go without for a full week before getting around to resupplying. I shudder to think what it would be like if they were nontrivial. Making prescriptions easy to obtain is a big health win, so I wish Amazon and its competitors a good competitive effort here.

I'm old enough to say I was there at the time, and pretty much disagree with you. Maybe I agree on the Panama canal, but that's kind of a minor item.

With respect to inflation, and the economy, these things operate on a lag to presidential (and congressional) terms. Carter appointed Volcker, and Reagan enjoyed the credit for the corresponding drop in inflation (Reagan extended the tradition of good heads of the Fed with the Greenspan appointment, and I think they've pretty much all been good since Volcker).

On the hostage crisis, Carter literally sent a commando mission to Iran to rescue the hostages. Totally the right move, and I think it is fair that he lost confidence in the special forces' ability to complete a second attempt mission after that first mission failed without even coming close. Reagan had nothing to do with the hostages' release, outside of just existing.

The thing I liked least about Carter was how he pronounced "nuclear" as "noo-kyoo-lar". But, given that he had commanded a nuclear sub and become president I have learned to let that one go.

True.

In high-bonus land, it is very difficult for job-seekers to know what kind of compensation a given job offer really entails (unless they have a friend or other backchannel). Some firms think a 70% bonus is generous, whereas at others "generous" starts at 700%.

> cares more about people’s well being

Totally agree. I reckon Nguyen would be an excellent friend, and very interesting to know in person.

For those of us too lazy to use a search engine or LLM, what is this Fabrics thing?

FYI there is no such word as touristic in native speakers' English. In French, there is the word touristique and I reckon Spanish probably has a cognate, given how often my Spanish speaking colleagues use that neologism.

Native English speakers would say touristy or use an awkward compound such as heavily touristed.

Of course, one could reasonably argue that, by now, international English does have the word touristic, even if the word is absent from US and UK versions.

For entertainment, I also leave this map of "Every European City":
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.itchyfeetcomic.com...

Mathematician (no longer practicing) here.

Mathematical statements are highly context-specific, far more so than most non-mathematicians realize. And so, almost any concept, such as "flatness", "prime", "representation", "multiplication" and indeed "equality" depends on highly specific circumstances.

In different contexts, for example, the word "prime" refers to a kind of integer. In others, to a kind of polynomial, or a kind of algebraic group.

Consider the following abstract from a journal article "On the arithmetic moduli schemes of PEL Shimura varieties" published in the year 2000:

Even to understand what this abstract is saying would require most mathematicians to spend weeks of study (the exception being algebraic geometers who presumable already know what Rapoport and Zink did, and what a Shimura variety is). The words prime and flat in this abstract do not mean what lay readers would expect.

Picking on the concept of equality (equivalence classes, whatever) seems like an almost trivially small part of the problem in relating real mathematics to computation. There's a gulf between solving that problem and having a computer actually understand what a unitary group is in a mathematical context.

Specifically with respect to different concepts of equality, I will add that this is one of those places where operator overloading makes a ton of sense. If you are doing integer math, equality is the usual thing, and if you have infinite sequences of rationals (e.g. when constructing the real numbers), equality is something quite different.

Thank you! I have Polish colleagues and have been wondering about pronunciation for a long time.

I usually come close when I first hear their name, but if I don't see them for a few months I end up flubbing it.

Korean hangul is a proper alphabet, with separate, consistent letters for the various consonants and vowels (about 20 each). Japanese has no alphabet, but does have two syllabaries: katakana and hiragana.

To the Western reader, hangul looks like a syllabary, because of its layout. In addition, many modern webpages use it as though it were a syllabary via Unicode's combinatoric representation (see here for more information than anyone would really want to know).

The difference is that the hangul glyphs, separated by (I think) U+3164, are composed of sound-dependent sub-glyphs. In contrast, there is no relation between the shape of the katakana glyphs for e.g. "ko" and "ka".