skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This might sound like a rant, it probably is but I’m sick and tired of articles that create this perfect personna, meddle in theory but behave like they’re sprouting truths. The ninja rockstar developer, the amazing product guy... I could write an article right now about any profession.

The reason you need the CPD (Coal/People/Dreaming) focused worker in your coal mine is bacause he will:

1. Understand that coal is an important product.

He will give himself to this quest and personal mission to understand how people use coal and just how much society depends on it. This will push him to better himself in its exploitation.

2. Be a dreamer.

Most people will just wave their hand and dismiss the possibility that coal extraction is a flatbed for innovation. Your coal focused worker will spend all his time thinking about new ways to work with coal. That will increase the creative output of the whole operation thus raising the bottom line.

3. Be a people person.

Coal mines are dreary places that’s why your 10x coal worker will have social skills. He’ll need to keep the people around him entertained and challenged so that he may create friction value.

Anyway, turns out I can’t write a proper article in one go but I will end this unsubstantiates comment by saying that most of these articles target the management type that makes ill informed decisions based on blog aricles, and the fact that this kind of feedback loop exists in the world infuriates me.

Later edit: just reread the article and got angry again. What’s the value in this? Can we really throw such absolutes right now?

I’m sorry if the post author is somehow seeing this comment, it’s not a bad post, it’s a bad post type in my opinion as it brings nothing new to the table.

Actually, it might make the reader feel like product developing is this weird arcane science and that unless he has those attributes he’s not this unicorn product engineer, when the reality is that most product engineers can’t become what is described in this article because the work they do is tied to reality, not to the rainbows and clouds world of our imaginations.
The protest is about all the special pensions, SNCF and the 50 other, they're all quite similar.
China steals American technology and a timeline of recent events
Thermophile-inspired gel gets 1,800 times harder when heated
To me "Product-minded" engineers defined here are mostly engineers who has the willingness to go "above and beyond".

Some may have this willingness because of their intrinsic nature. Some may have had this willingness but it slowly eroded because of many external factors (i.e. not getting recognized or compensated for their "above and beyond" work). Some simply have other priorities in their life (which I understand 100%, I suspect I'll be in the same boat if I had kids).

I've always seen myself as a "product-minded engineer". However, recently I'm struggling with keeping that mindset. Part of it is because of external factors and part of it is because I've also started to prioritize my personal life more. I do recognize that this is not black and white but rather a spectrum but it is so much harder to be fully engaged to a product when you are not giving it your 110%. :P

That being said I also believe it's also up to the company to foster and reward this kind of engineers, instead of just asking engineers to be a "product engineers"
Why can't console hardware be sold at a profit? Make up for the increased sale price by bundling a rebate on the first X officially-published games the customer buys. Then everything after that is pure profit for the console vendor.
Why the hell do you need an arm to flip a burger? A simple motor that rotates it would be enough.
Eyeballing the graph, it looks like it’s growing about 10 years every 30 or 40 years. That’s fast enough to put a drain on the system to pay for a decade longer of pension for the average participant.
I completely understand.

That was a big reason that I learned to draw people out when they interviewed. I asked them to "tell me stories" about projects they worked on, without getting detailed about specifics. In my experience, they were always able to demonstrate plenty of enthusiasm and creativity without revealing the family jewels. A half-hour whiteboard test would have been completely useless. I was usually able to establish a fairly comfortable level of tech knowledge fairly quickly, and the bulk of the interview was really about how well I thought they'd fit the team (NOTE TO SELF: Don't go for homogeneity).

However, this isn't a problem that's unique to our industry. My father was in the CIA, and I never found out until just a few years before his death. Lawyers have legal cases they can't discuss, doctors have medical cases they can't discuss in detail, without violation of HIPAA, etc.

Somehow or another, these folks are able to interview for jobs that often have a far greater risk than a line programmer on a major initiative.

True, some are screw-ups, and that doesn't become apparent until after they are hired, but the same goes for an engineer that can ace every problem on HackerRank, but goes all to pieces, when presented with 100 KLoC of spaghetti code, and told to fix a problem (exactly what happened to me, on one of my first programming jobs. 100 KLoC of 1970s-vintage FORTRAN -I fixed the bug, but had to hold my nose, while doing it. I later learned that this was what everyone did).

What bothers me most, is that a chief reason that I'm given for these tests, is that companies want to find people that can come up with innovative and unique solutions, yet they seem to actually have the opposite effect; filtering for people that only come up with standard solutions.

I remember once doing a "take home" test that asked me to apply a third-party library. I did what I always do with dependencies; I encapsulated it, and that seemed to totally freak out the interviewer. To this day, I have no idea why they lost their bottle so badly over it. My solution worked extremely well, and it also gave the problem tremendous "future-proofing." That's why I encapsulate dependencies.
The first job I had there was a probationary period - it was good and bad. It was good because you knew everybody there was extremely talented and you could rely on your coworkers. There was a bit of an understanding about the cut throat nature of the place though, and obviously that's not for everyone. But at the end of the day, when it came time to just get shit done, there was never any problem.

I can't name that place without doxing myself, but it sounds like Netflix has a similar culture. Some people love it. Some people hate it. But I don't think many people would say they have an issue with employing less-than-stellar employees.

Of course this is only "solving" (it's certainly not perfect) the problem of hiring for engineers, which most of us are on HN (at least I assume, but certainly more engineers than engineering managers). It does nothing to address the issue of hiring bad managers. I have no solution for that, other than to make sure the first manager is excellent. A players hire A players because they want to do the best work they can, and will go out of their way to hire people better than themselves. B players hire C players because they just want to make themselves look good. Once you have a bad manager, the assumption is everyone beneath him will be as bad or worse (obviously there are exceptions).
If train drivers have their own pension system (meaning they both contribute to, and cash out from it) and they contribute so much each year that they can cash out at 57, then I can see the outrage if they suddenly need to work 10 more years.

But if the train drivers don’t contribute more than some other group but still get another ten years of retirement compared to other groups - then I’d be outraged if I was part of the other groups which effectively subsidize the luxury of a very early retirement.

That said, it’s always tricky to change old systems even when they are bad. There may be people who chose between a much better paying job and driving trains because they knew about the pension benefit etc. These types of systems may need to be phased out (e.g raise the retirement age of train drivers one year every two years).
That is a very good point. The calculations I did were well after the value drop (early 2018) in Ethereum, and assumed that case, motherboard, cpu, ram and power supply were 0 dollars. Just based on the cost of electricity and buying several thousand dollars of GPUs. Even then it didn't work out.
The spectrum of (product engineer) <---> ($NEEDS_A_NAME) has been one I've encountered a lot and which I find is underappreciated in hiring and team-building.

The way I think about it is that you're giving weights to one of two different goals:

1. Building the right thing

2. Building the thing right

I've found that in early-stage work, you really really need to have engineers who are more interested in (1) than (2). I'd probably say a product engineer who's a good fit for early stage work probably has an 70%/30% mix of what motivates them between these two goals.

The strongest product engineers also have a keen sense of the power of MANUALLY handling some cases as a way to learn. At small scale, the cost of manually handling something can be way lower than building for that case. So another attribute I've seen is that strong product engineers are either okay with or even actively enjoy supporting users in those edge cases, talking with them as a way to learn.

I'd be curious to know how companies most effectively hire for and/or cultivate these kinds of behaviors in eng teams.
FDA is grossly understaffed. And more importantly, its policies are directly responsible for the skyrocketing prescription drug prices.
Linus Torvalds: “performance per watt” measure is complete garbage
Polymer gel w flexible highly-ordered 3D network synthesized w bond percolation
> I also realized that SAT scores are heavily impacted by SAT specific training/tutoring

It's difficult to realize something that isn't true. The effects of training on SAT scores have always been negligible, less than the measurement error associated with taking the test one time.
How about we raise an alarm when drugs aren’t approved promptly? People die when good drugs are held up in bureaucracy.
This is an excellent observation, it sums up nicely some "big picture" thoughts I had myself on this topic. In fact I think it works at the individual level as well: I think climate-change skepticism/inaction comes from people who understand this consequence subconsciously. They like their cheap and easy energy, and the freedoms it brings (mobility, bigger/cheaper housing, consumerism), and they instinctively don't want to give up on anything. Cheap energy enables individualism (live far from others, self-reliant with lots of machinery and power tools, etc.) so it immediately has political ramifications.
Magic Leap’s next-generation headset reportedly ‘years away from launch’
How's Google cloud doing? Does that count?
What about that comment made you believe it was referring to something you said specifically?
That's an idealistic way of looking at things.

People would look-up solutions to that exact problem; it's very hard to come up with a unique problem that was never asked before, and questions leak pretty quickly. (especially at larger companies)

The goal of a test is to evaluate whether you'd be a good employee; I agree algorithmic questions are not representative of day-to-day work, but evaluating your friend's ability to help you is out of scope. Companies want to hire someone that has decent programming skills; you can't rely on other people to solve all your problems, you need to have a minimum level of skill.

[again, playing devil's advocate here; we all agree the process is suboptimal, but let's not ignore the negatives of some of the alternatives suggested here]
Code coverage was first developed in classified military paper [pdf]
I remember seeing recently a restaurant owner complaining that he couldn't find any waiters for a seasonal job, while the the salary that he was advertising was 1/3 of what an interim worker would get paid for an equivalent work week at the minimum wage. Such a surprise !
I actually did what this article suggests in college. It didn't go well grade wise. However, I had money and time to study and learn about things I wanted to learn. I found that my path often was interwoven with the path of the class, but that the perspective was different and sometimes professors are only grading on perspective--specifically their own. The biggest dividing line is, I suspect, that college does not, at this point teach one how to think. How to think and good grades are not necessarily the same thing at all. I was busy learning how to think, and deciding what could be relegated to "It's in a book, I can find it if I need it" vs "I should memorize this because it will be useful in life for me later".
They kind of had to stop downplaying the importance of vaccine-derived polio. Apparently it's now the main form of polio actually paralyzing kids at this point in the campaign to eradicate the disease, and no-one seems to have any workable end-game: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/11/15/7798654... Western countries eradicated polio thanks to better sewage and water treatment limiting the spread of vaccine-derived strains and a switch to an injectable dead vaccine that's less effective but can't cause disease outbreaks, neither of which seem to be feasible in the affected countries at this time. Stopping the outbreaks is done using mass vaccinations which introduce more vaccine poliovirus into circulation, causing more outbreaks down the line.

Also, it seems the claim in the article that type 2 poliovirus has been eliminated isn't quite the whole truth. Wild type 2 poliovirus has been eliminated, but vaccine-derived versions of it are still in circulation and causing paralysis.
>The Information reports that two high-profile board members left quietly in 2018: Google CEO Sundar Pichai and former Qualcomm executive chairman Paul Jacobs.
OP here. I’ve written this based on what qualities I’ve observed several of my engineering colleagues exhibit, who are pretty good at building products and working with PMs. And who consistently get stellar feedback from business stakeholders, certain teams going straight to them, to discuss new ideas.

I beg to differ the article is super generic, as it closes with very engineering specific recommendations to build a “product-muscle” for developer [1]. This is the kind of advice and coaching I give to devs around me who would like to make more product/business impact.

[1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/the-product-minded-engine...
Yes, that's how it works in the UK. If you, yourself, enter someone's bank details and send them money using a bank's online interface, you are responsible. The bank can not just reverse that transaction. Best they can do is contact the recipient and ask politely.

It's the cause of millions in fraud.

So, learn from this and double, triple, quadruple check what you enter every time. It takes less than a minute and can save you from bigger headaches. Just like wearing safety goggles.
hm. "An APL" sounds fine to me! i'd say that, grammatically, "APL" (and other acronyms) become independent from their expansions.

e.g. would you say that expressions like "the FBI's policy" or "multiple DUIs" are grammatically incorrect? expanding the acronym gives "The Federal Beaurau of Investigations's policy" and "multiple Driving Under the Influences" which sound wrong, but the original expression is fine.
Structuring Your Project
PS1 didn't hold back PC or other consoles so I bear it no ill will.

PS2 dominated sixth gen sales. By being the winning console but releasing 18 months earlier it held back everyone. And since, like you said, Moore's law was very much alive this represented a significant reduction in overall quality for an entire generation. :(

PS3 at it's peak was great. But it took waaaay too much effort to get there making it a very poor value proposition for developers. And 7th gen was a fully multi-platform era so the end result is the average game was held back and only first party prestige titles could justify the extra cost.
Your general point is correct. But the USS Guardian surface ship was lost when it ran aground in 2013. It didn't quite sink but couldn't be repaired.
Sorry, can some explain the ‘universe is expanding’ concept? So far I thought it only meant that the space universe occupies is expanding, meaning the matter keeps going farther from its origin point, but I didn’t know the ‘fabric’ of the universe is expanding. I’m not able wrap my head around this concept. Can some please point me a resource that dumbs it down?
> But you can fit a line through anything.

Only if the sample size is small enough.
We need redistribution, but we also need production, i.e. GDP growth. You can't have one without the other. (And it's damn hard to redistribute sizeable fractions of GDP without killing the golden goose. It can be done, but it's the sort of policy that has to be designed with great care.)

> The market is profoundly irrational at allocating resources to meet human need.

The market in places like France is deeply distorted by misguided government policies, many of them a product of simple corruption and misguided thinking, and not any serious attempt to remedy any market failure or promote social goals. It is "irrational" indeed, but not in the way you assume. This explains why there's so much structural unemployment and wasted and unused capital there, as you point out.
> SNCF is something like $45 Billion in debt?

The state owns and controls the SNCF, its expenses, subsidies and pricing. Its debt is meaningless, in that the government decides how much in debt it is in.

> can retire using last 6 months of wages (vs avg wages)?

Retiring based on the status and position you've reached is common in many workplaces/industries, in many countries.

> They are guaranteed a job for life?

Nobody is guaranteed a job for life. If you mean to say, that if they do their job, the company can't fire them, then I don't see a problem with that.

> They get free / low cost housing?

They don't get free houses. Maybe they get free accommodations if their shifts take them far away from home; which would be reasonable.

> They get 28 regular paid days off an maybe another 22 or so RTT days?

Read about RTT days here:
https://www.e-days.com/news/france-in-focus-understanding-di...

this is not special to railway conductors. The fact that in other countries people are being worked to the bone is the problem, not the fact that in France they aren't.

Also, RTT is a means to decrease unemployment by spreading work among more people. Saying it's excessive means essentially "let's pay the same thing to less people for more work".

Yes, the conditions are not bad; and people in the US should be inspired to organize, unionize - and not in those yellow collaborationist unions in the AFL-CIO, but in independent unions or in an IWW section, and demand decent, French-level employment conditions, at least.
Save .ORG from Arbitrary Censorship by Halting the Private Equity Buy-Out
Ken Iverson started work on APL to teach courses on data processing at Harvard in 1955: https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/autobio.htm

"I was appalled to find that the mathematical notation on which I had been raised failed to fill the needs of the courses I was assigned, and I began work on extensions to notation that might serve. In particular, I adopted the matrix algebra used in my thesis work, the systematic use of matrices and higher-dimensional arrays (almost) learned in a course in Tensor Analysis rashly taken in my third year at Queen’s, and (eventually) the notion of Operators in the sense introduced by Heaviside in his treatment of Maxwell’s equations."
FWIW this wasn't my experience when interviewing with Amazon; I felt the bar was much lower than other companies I interviewed with, even when I wasn't that good at algorithmic problems.

That's just one data point, and maybe what you're describing is for more senior hires?
Java is the name of a language as well as the name of a platform that contains it, in addition to a VM, core libraries and a wide selection of tools, all as integrated but distinct components (those living in Britain will find such dual meanings familiar, even though they recognize they might be confusing to outsiders). You yourself have talked about "under the hood improvements" to C#, meaning the .NET platform, not just the C# language. The discussion of reified generics applies to the platform, not the language -- indeed, reification has hurt interop on .NET precisely because it occurs in the runtime (VM and standard libraries) rather than just the language -- and this very article about project Valhalla applies to both. Being languages that target Java (the platform), Kotlin and Scala would benefit from Valhalla just as much as the Java language. They would benefit not only from the changes to the JVM, but also from the relevant changes to the other parts of the Java platform that they rely on, like the core libraries and serviceability tools.

Now, I don't mind at all you calling the Java platform "the JVM," as many do, but using the more accurate terminology does not distract from the discussion, even though the terminology in itself is not very important. It serves to highlight Java's design and strategy from its inception, as you can see in the video I linked to: the intention and strategy all along have been to have a platform made of integrated but distinct components, with a state-of-the-art VM and a conservative language. To this day, the Java VM is state-of-the-art while the Java language is intentionally conservative. .NET's design philosophy and strategy are just different, also intentionally so. To ignore all that is to ignore how Java's designers see it and maintain it, and misses the point of what Java is. It also misses the central elements of Java's strategy, which has made it so successful.
What a relief this article was to read. It articulated and confirmed so many things.
No, this reads like you working there has just made you immune to seeing all the missteps. No one made them do all the scuffed Sony custom logic they keep putting into their devices, causing all this overhead and compromise on engineering. No one pressured them into the ever more convoluted, bound-to-fail DRM schemes.
> Yes it really cannot emphasized enough that the legacy filesystem system interface with it's too-simple 1970s origin and then far, far, far too complex decades of duck tape is a disasterous albatros.

Except that nobody will sign on.

Look at what happened to FreeBSD in the 5.0 timeframe when they reworked their storage layers into GEOM. It was a NIGHTMARE. Most people agreed it needed to be done, but there was an excruciatingly loud segment who complained incessantly. It took some gigantic brass balls and asbestos-lined flamesuits on the part of FreeBSD heavy hitters to drive it through.

If the system in Linux is to get fixed, Linus would probably have to step in and pronounce.
Googling isn't much help. You can find references to AFS, DFS, VM-FS, and EOS...all being used at CERN.
Yes I definitely see that point of view. Being smart is a special case of being adaptable, but many other organisms thrive by being well adapted in their niche.

On the other hand, Sapiens has a good quote about there being 2 (at least ?) orders of magnitude more domesticated dogs than wolves in the world. Ditto for pigs and wild hogs, or cattle and comparable wild herbivores.

It has many other pretty shocking statistics about large cats, elephants, etc. The world today is simply much more suited to a dog's way of being than a wolves'.

To put it more starkly, wolves will likely be extinct long before dogs are, because of their different relationship to humans.

But of course ants and other species don't compete for the same resources as humans, and are complementary many ways.