I am, too, and it got me thinking... why? And I realized that I've tried to be polite in all my interactions my whole life and I'm not going to practice being terse and commanding for a few pennies worth of tokens.
I had an interview many years ago, that wasn't nearly as traumatic, but the interviewer asked me about my failures like 4 different ways.
- Tell me about a time you made a professional mistake.
- Tell me about your biggest failure.
- Tell me when you last shipped a bug.
- Tell me when you took down production.
Never asked me about my accomplishments, or the positives. I'm prepared for being asked about making mistakes, and have a few examples ready to give depending on the job I'm interviewing for, but to get asked so many times in a row was just deflating.
I conducted a few hundred software engineering interviews while working for a non-tech corp. Aside from technical problem solving & programming interviews we'd also ask a few behavioural questions -- including asking about times where the candidate had made a mistake at work, or a time at work where they were very frustrated.
What we were looking for
- people unwilling to admit they'd ever made a mistake -- red flag
- people who could reflect on the situation and say what they'd do differently in the future
- ideally, people who could use their mistake / failure / bad situation as an example of how they then took initiative to improve things by doing blah blah blah
People who were able to give an ideal response had clearly practised for this kind of question & knew how to play this part of the interview game.
Behaviours valued by one type of potential employer may not be valued by another. Small businesses & startups might value folks who take initiative and have a bias for action. In contrast, regulated megacorps might value folks who are great at consulting stakeholders and getting buy in before making changes, and steer clear of people they believe will go off and do stuff unilaterally.
One rule of thumb for handling these kinds of behavioural questions is "STAR" -- situation, task, action, result. Use the prompt for the question as a way to pick an example, then figure out how to frame an answer that shows you doing something to improve the situation. There's a fair chance that your interviewers are trying to mash your response into a STAR format in their own notes, even if they don't hint for you to respond in this way.
Right, I'm aware, and like I said, I expect those questions, and I have several examples I'm prepared for, and can tailor it to the interviewer. Like if it was a devops role, I could talk about when I took down production and what I learned from it. Or I could talk about when I failed to properly manage a junior if the role was more management-oriented and what I learned from it. Or when I badly architected a feature, and what I learned from it, and so on.
What I _wasn't_ prepared for was 4+ of those questions in a row, and _zero_ questions about my experience, or strengths, or anything else. The questions were more of the type "when did you stop beating your wife?". In retrospect, I think the interviewer already had someone they wanted to hire, but were forced into it by HR due diligence or something.
Where I work we divide up topics and questions so we aren't all asking the same thing in an interview. This guy might have been given the "handling failures" scenario.
It's possible that's what happened here and the interviewer also just wasn't very good. Some people just really suck at interviewing.
I think a lot of technical people interpret interview questions literally. Like yes of course the prompt starts with a negative - but you don't actually have to answer the question fully and literally, this isn't a college exam.
You could for example start talking about how you thought something was a colossal failure only to realize looking back that it was an incredible learning experience and how sometimes the only way to learn big lessons like that is by trying the experiment. And how it's only a failure if you stop. But you kept going so it wasn't really a failure.
Honestly we should probably take a page out of politicians' or media trained people's playbooks and not even answer the question as asked but relentlessly steer towards what you really want to talk about.
I too am capable of waffling to an interviewer. My favourite "took down production" story is a segue into why, when your interns ask you to look over the command they're about to run against the prod environment because they're not 100% comfortable, you should do it, and a broader chat about infrastructure-as-code and review processes.
I don't think it's good practice for the interviewer to require the ability to dissemble from software engineers, though.
Interviewing is difficult IMO - asking imperfect people to judge imperfect people in a short time.
In my experience, which is not that great, it's the attitude that people have which is more important than the perfect answers. You're usually hiring for a team so someone who is prepared to be decent to others is essential and IMO their 10xness is much less important than this.
Then I want someone who is interested in computing or things in general - not purely motivated by the money. That sort of person who is going to try to do a good job for the sake of it and who wants to learn something new - who will be ok with doing things they're not yet experts at.
These 2 sort of areas are not easy to have together IMO. If I find people like this I am eager to work with them.
What I get from being the interviewee is that other people are not always looking for these characteristics. They're often looking for someone they can dominate. This is like my point about being part of a team but taken further obviously. In a team you cannot have everything your own way but you get to put your point across and see if you can convince others, as a peon in a feudal system you will have nothing your own way and must not only do but also say and pretend to think what you are told.
Bullshit is just really a test for whether you're amenable to being part of the propaganda. Some people have no trouble doing this but I think there's something about being a programmer that tends away from fakeness. That's not to say that we haven't got an overload of bullshitters but at the root you have to be able to make things that work.
I've been on both sides of the interviewing process and I agree with you.
It's the questions like "what is you greatest weakness?" that tick me off where an honest answer at most places will probably kill you chance of getting the job. Instead you are told that the "right" answer is to pose a strength as a weakness. I don't see the point of asking questions like these. What are you learning about the candidate from getting the expected BS response?
Ironically, I think having the self awareness to recognize your own weaknesses is a great strength, but this question subverts this.
I've switched back and forth between Vivaldi and Firefox on Linux and MacOS for the last decade, and Vivaldi's UI feels much faster. Even on my 5yo laptop or 12yo gaming PC, I haven't noticed any real slowness with the UI, and I'm usually pretty sensitive to that.
Also in the US, when Unions were starting to get going, the "good" ones that stood on principles and tried to do right by their members had their leadership harassed and even murdered by oligarchs and the government. The corruptible ones were allowed to exist, and be corrupted as another means of control, and for the anti-union people to point at as proof that unions "don't work".
Reading up on this has been eye-opening, they didn't teach much about it in school, except maybe a paragraph in the history textbook about the Ludlow Massacre. They don't mention at all the IWW or other leftist unions from the 1910s and 20s. If they mention the Taft–Hartley Act, they don't talk about how it targeted "communist" union leaders, and left "capitalist" unions alone.
At first I though the Apple one had a half-dozen departments actually coordinating on something, but then I took a closer look and realized it's just more micromanagement.
There’s an interview with someone talking about Steve having an extreme melt down rage about the header not being technically centered in one spot on the Apple page.
I want to see his reaction trying to type a message on the iPhone keyboard from anytime in the past 7 years.
Or navigate the random nonsensical grouping of stuff in settings that got so out of control they added a search bar or watch a pip video or really use anything. Every feature has some sloppy problem.
It used to be excusable as nobody else was trying and they’d be working to fix it. Now they just add a feature that’s sub par to things already out there, no innovation, and then it feels sloppy. Most things just don’t feel good to use down to the size and weight of phones now. Rather than fix the problem Apple just keeps copying the homework and claiming they can’t fix perfect.
Steve would be punching holes in the wall. Probably would stomp a hole through the floor to strangle the keyboard team
And that's just the iPhone keyboard. The physical keyboards on MacBookPros are still terrible. I've had two of them where some of the keys shorted out or stopped working. Eventually, thinness has diminishing returns. I'd rather have a thicker/heavier keyboard where the keys don't die.
My thought on this was always that micromanaging in this structure is rational and maybe even the best. It's not really a Jobs thing—though he's (right or wrong) probably the picture most people have in their head when they think of visionary CEO—it's just that if the leader has a vision then it is great if they're capable of having everything run through them. It's when there's no vision at the top and no leaders sitting across the silos pulling things together that it helps the company to have people below with increasing autonomy. Whether the autonomous people should be higher or lower depends on which other org structure you've chosen. Silos are fine when leaders have a vision. That said, I haven't seen many groups that placed power in the place where their chosen org structure is meant to place power.
This is 2011 though, a lot has changed since then. I doubt Facebook/Meta, for instance, is still as flat as it was then having read some ex-employee accounts
In fairness, there was a time when I was unable to have a computer sort search results so the default hit was the plugin with 1000x more downloads than all the others combined.
Not trolling here but these things are by design cesspools ready for compromise. Any fully open ecosystem where contributions are not strictly reviewed is open to this problem. If you don't like it, don't use editor extensions and use a well audited editor.
If you want to use extensions or node packages or pypi packages without doing a detailed review you're accumulating technical debt. You're assuming a risk in order to ship rapidly. You can either pay that down at some point under control, or bear the interest when it comes due.
I mean I don't think some sort of "access control" within the editor is going to really address this. People edit sensitive text in their code editor and no matter what that is going to be available to most useful extensions. Even if you don't lose a credential or get some arbitrary script running to mine crypto on your machine you could have an extension function as a key logger and exfil code you really think is valuable.
It would have restrained the access here. The extension would have only had access to the repos opened by this individual rather than an api key that gave access to 3,800 repos.
They probably should have some permission system where the default extension is only able to operate within the repos open at the time and has no internet access. Then you can grant internet access for the ones which genuinely need it.
The majority of VS code plugins are just syntax highlighers and linters which don't need any dangerous permissions.
Most of these problems could be solved with something like wasm/wasi where you can limit access to web, disk, etc... WASI is made to run code you don't trust, you could even limit compute third party is using so they can't mine crypto (I think it's called fuel limit). Ideally we would have whole IDE run in this kind of environment where we can explicitly say what it can and can't do.
It's easy to wave a magic wand and have one developer do better than a corporation of tens of thousands. There is a reason I don't use Microsoft products: I can't do it myself and do won't do it for me.
Just five years ago this opinion was heresy on HN. Those of us who still remembered their behavior in the 80s/90s were belittled.
"They have changed, gramps. This really smart Satya Nadella is CEO. They are the good guys now. Don't be so bitter over old stuff like systematic use of illegal tactics to attempt to kill all of its competitors including Linux."
Also: Note that the headline undersells the news dramatically. The article begins with:
"GitHub has confirmed that roughly 3,800 internal repositories were breached after one of its employees installed a malicious VS Code extension."
Well the vacuum cleaner joke is very old, was true then, is true now, has continued to be true despite some people having the wool pulled over their eyes and thinking that Microsoft was no longer the enemy at some point. They have always been the enemy. Stay on your toes, don’t let them in.
I first started noticing they were actually useful around Dec 2025, through about February. I got pretty good at using them, and was amazed at their utility, especially Claude and Codex. Then sometime in March, they got really frustratingly dumb. Things that they used to get right in one shot suddenly took several tried, and I had to watch them like a hawk because they constantly made stupid mistakes, not following instructions that previously worked. I had one try to fix a failing test like this:
assert_eq x, true if x == true
Both Claude and Codex, both with the latest versions and the original versions that had been working.
Now I just use deepseek. It isn't any dumber, and it costs way less.
How about a law that says your documents, like your car registration number on a plate, doesn't have to be displayed except in case of reasonable articulable suspicion a crime has been committed. We could call it, the 4th amendment.
Sure, but for decades the license plate was an implicit social contract of functional pseudonymity: a random string of characters that for almost everyone on a day to day basis meant the government wasn’t tracking your whereabouts but could identify you if they really wanted to (at a stop).
So what people are really reacting to is the government using technical means to change the terms of that social contract without our input.
Same thing with Flock. People do the whole civic engagement thing and cities still sign contracts anyways.
A lot of people wouldn’t even be opposed if the whole thing was on a ballot measure. It becomes a problem when the government decides they no longer need consent of the governed.
In the US, driving is a hard sell to call a privilege. It's basically a necessity. When society is designed around the assumption of getting around by car, it's no longer a privilege.
Also,
> So your plate is really the proof that you've paid a bit for the infrastructure to drive on.
You paid for a bit of the infrastructure being driven on just by being a tax payer.
That's one of the best ways to do business. You take something that is technically a privilege, turn it into a necessity, and then charge through the nose for it. It makes you very rich and very powerful.
Yet you can have a license without owning a car. They don't issue you a plate to use. So the plate is clearly for something else, mainly I think, to indicate that you've paid the appropriate registration fees on the vehicle. The plates are tied to a vehicle to prevent the obvious "plate swapping" attack that people would use against this regime.
> roof that you've paid a bit for the infrastructure
Actually those are gas and sales taxes, are they not?
> you're required to wear the wrist band.
The wrist band need not have a unique identifier readable from several feet away emblazoned on it in order to function.
> So the plate is clearly for something else, mainly I think, to indicate that you've paid the appropriate registration fees on the vehicle.
I think it's so they can identify the car owner quickly and easily and hold them liable for any law violations or damage. And of courese, at least partially (or ostensibly) for revenue generation and taxation purposes (though if that's all it was for, just using the VIN would make more sense IMHO, which is why I suspect it's more for the former).
>Your plate is displayed because driving is a privilege, not a right (note that traveling is a right, but you can travel without driving).
But the 4th amendment is a right, that applies even when engaging in a "privilege." See also the fact police can't just willy nilly check your driver license while engaging in a "privilege."
>So your plate is really the proof that you've paid a bit for the infrastructure to drive on.
False.
Plates are required even on my own privately owned publicly accessible road, and a large portion of my trips happen on publicly available but 100% privately owned roads with 0 taxes to maintain them (in fact, I maintain a lot of the roads in my community myself because they are all private). In fact some of those roads, I 100% own and maintain, and yet since I legally can't bar anyone from driving on it the law in my state (AZ) requires a displayed plate (even for me).
>It's like having a wrist band to an event. You're not required to attend the event, but if you do attend it, you're required to wear the wrist band.
It's like citing me for not having a wrist band on my own owned road easement, which is the law in my state. There is no property right you are attempting to assert under which that makes sense. I can go about 90% of the way to "town" on privately owned roads in which none of the owners care if I have a "wrist band" yet the state can still cite me for not having it.
The fact that the road is legally accessible to the public makes it a public road for the sake of this discussion. You must have a license plate to drive on a public road. It really isn’t any more complicated than that.
It doesn’t matter whether the road in front of my house is owned by the federal government, state, county, city, or Bob, I and everyone else is allowed to drive on it, so it’s a public road.
Cars are also lethal weapons and around 1 out of every ~83 deaths in the US is a traffic death (~38k traffic deaths/yr, ~3M total deaths/yr). It's good to keep track of cars given how dangerous they are.
I’ll throw you an olive branch and say the registration sticker is completely pointless. The source of truth for whether my car is registered is in a database, not on a sticker. Someone can steal your sticker which results in a false positive for the thief and a false negative (and huge headache) for the victim.
True - but couldn't the same be said for ID then ? Just memorise your license number - cops have been able to look it up in their car computer for years. Saved me at least once.
Typically also they don't even bother with looking at your registration unless the sticker is way out of date
The tech companies will just use face recognition, tracing, gait recognition, unique properties (like scratches) etc. etc. for the same purpose, same way they pioneered browser fingerprinting.
It's going to the administration overhead. If you have to document everything and argue for every medical procedure and deal with 20+ different processes for filing claims then it takes time. And, as a provider, you have to pay someone to spend that time if you want to get paid.
It doesn't help that our healthcare billing systems are so outdated and broken. I once had a doctor visit denied with the reason code that it should charge the other insurance (for people on multiple plans). I was only on one plan, but my wife was on two. The doctor and I went through all the paperwork - my name was right, my birthday was right, my policy number was right and when I got notice of the rejection it had my name on it. Eventually we traced it to an error - not in my insurance company, not in the company that handles claims in this areas for my insurance, but instead in some middle-man company that was responsible for transferring claims between the two. Nevermind that all three companies claimed to be BlueCross BlueShield. This took over a year to resolve.
No it's not. There is absolutely no way to get from $360B of insurer admin and net cost of insurance to $2.5T --- two point five trillion --- in practitioner costs on paperwork overhead. That is not a plausible argument.
> A new study finds that the extra time and labor physician practices spend on interacting with insurance companies and government entities cost U.S. physicians $82,975 each per year, while doctors in Ontario spent $22,205.
> Canadian physicians follow a single set of rules, but U.S. doctors grapple with different sets of regulations, procedures, requirements, formularies and forms mandated by each health insurance plan or payer. The average U.S. doctor spent 3.4 hours per week interacting with health plans; Ontario doctors spent 2.2 hours. The bureaucratic burden falls heavily on U.S. nurses and medical practice staff, who spent 20.6 hours per physician per week on administrative duties; their Canadian counterparts spent only 2.5 hours on paperwork.
All that falls in your $2.5T bucket. And their cleaners, HR, etc. And insurers have had 15 years of innovation since that study.
You haven't done the math here. Multiply the numbers out. This is what I'm talking about. How are you supposed to engage with these topics if you're literally recoiling from 7th grade arithmetic? Congratulations, taken on your own terms, you just found 3.6% worth of savings from practitioner costs.
My local grocery store wouldn't even bother issuing a coupon for that small a discount.
Yes, as I said, if we accept your claim at face value, that every dollar of American practitioner-side insurance overhead --- not the delta from Canada, but every single dollar of it --- is mis-spent, you managed to identify 3.6% of the waste in the system. Congratulations.
I said earlier we'd gone round-and-round on this topic before, and I was a little burned out on it, but I didn't expect you to refute your own argument like this. I'm glad we gave it another run this time! This is a great statistic; I'll be using it elsewhere. Thank you.
Insurance has more than one way to run the costs up; this is but one of them. Weird rebate deals with drug manufacturers. Vertical integration. Buying practices and paying them higher rates.
> I was a little burned out on it
I just did my taxes and am a little burned out by the $49k in healthcare expenses I got to deduct on them.
The reason it's going to providers is because US healthcare is extraordinarily inefficient. Providers spend too much time doing, well, everything. From admin, to medical records, to documentation. Very little of their time goes to actual, direct care and decisions around care. You can talk to a doctor about this if you want, they'll all tell you the same thing.
Even surgeons. Ask a surgeon how much time they spend in the OR. It's less than you think.
> Today, many of those practices have been bought up by large corporations, including hospitals, private-equity firms and even health-insurance companies. It’s a shift that not only has changed how money moves through the health care system, but may also be helping some insurers boost their profits, according to new research published in Health Affairs.
> A study from researchers at Brown University’s Center for Advancing Health Policy through Research and the University of California Berkeley found that UnitedHealthcare, the nation’s largest health insurer, pays doctors who work for its own physician network, Optum, more than it pays independent practices for the same care.
This isn't a response to anything I just said. I really don't understand why people collapse into all this handwaving when people point out the obvious: the money in our system is going to providers, and, in particular, it's going to practitioners.
What difference is that supposed to make? The money is still going into the pockets of practitioners. And: no, the claim you're making here about practitioners fighting insurers: closer to the opposite thing is true.
The idea that the problem with our system is health insurers is just slopulism. We have grave problems with our system! But they start with the providers, where the majority of all the funding in our system goes, not to the scapegoats they've stoop up in our insurers. The distinction is vitally important, because the most popular answer to this problem is to extend Medicare to everybody, and Medicare is just as victimized by this as everything else is!
We pay doctors too much, and we artificially restrict the supply of practitioners. Those doctors routinely overprescribe. Every other problem in the system is marginal.
"The money is still going into the pockets of practitioners."
And by inflating that amount...
> Using newly available federal price transparency data, the researchers found that UnitedHealthcare pays Optum physician practices about 17% more than non-Optum practices in the same region. In markets where UnitedHealthcare holds a large share of the insurance business, that difference was even larger, up to 61%.
their capped-by-law 20% cut of premiums goes up, too. "Oh, those mean old providers we own charge so much! We have to raise premiums again!"
Show me the more recent NHE table where this effect shows up and I'll be ready to have the conversation, but right now this seems like a dodge. Whatever effect you're describing, if it's material, has to have started after the NHE data I just posted, from 2023. I don't remember thinking that the health system in 2022 was good.
Fun thing about the NHE: you can project it as far back as you want. The data is there.
I feel like we've been in this argument before, and I like you just fine as a commenter, but do feel like you're tying yourself into knots to avoid a simple conclusion plainly supported by the data. I didn't post a trend story about what companies are doing or who they're acquiring; I posted the macro NHE table from last year. It simply refutes the argument you're trying to make.
> It literally breaks practice and net cost of insurance out!
But it's not a "Cost of Health Insurance" item. It's an expense at the practicioner level! They have to factor that non-billable time into what they charge for the procedure!
If an insurer manages to double a doctor's administrative costs for billing/appeals/etc., where does it show up in your tables, per your link's PDF of definitions?
You have no evidence for this argument. It's just vibes. The numbers here are stark. It's not like it's close, between providers and insurers. Insurers are almost literally a rounding error.
You asserted "the macro NHE table from last year… simply refutes the argument you're trying to make", but that claim is false. You are welcome to answer the question about where "doc spends two hours on phone arguing with UHC" falls in the expenditure list; it's not insurance, but it's caused by it.
> Insurers are almost literally a rounding error.
Again, the argument is that the raw cost of health insurance does not reflect its externalities imposed on the other items in your list; that insurers drive up hospital and practice costs, as they have to staff up enormous amounts of staff and expensive physician time to deal with the insurer.
You stated this claim upthread, for the record, and tracked down an actual Canada vs. US statistic on this, which turned out to account for roughly 3.6% of total provider inpatient/outpatient expense.
"His" companies seem to do better when he's not around. SpaceX has been doing good things while he was distracted with the Cybertruck, then Twitter, then stealing an election, destroying the government agencies that had the audacity to investigate his companies, and now this lawsuit.
I'm hoping that when the robot apocalypse happens, they'll let me stay in the breeding harem, or worst case let me live a few extra minutes.
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