skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a bit like saying "This person won the lottery, so therefore..."

Sure, it's possible. But having met a few founders, their lifestyle from taking VC money seems far preferable to the bootstrap approach. It's true that you have to grow, but if you have growth, then nothing else matters. And if you don't, then you're one of the most employable people in the entire world.

A shocking number of people, somehow, end up in insane amounts of debt by trying to start their own companies. And you're sort of forced to. An example: one of our family members had a lucrative pole barn business. (Apparently in the midwest, lots of people wanted pole barns built, or something.) But in order to pay his employees to go construct the pole barns, he needed loans, leveraged against the future income from the construction project.

Then 2008 hit. Poof! Contracts all went poof. And he was left holding the bag.

So, if you need employees, and you're bootstrapped, how exactly are you going to pay an engineer roughly $130k per year? (Remember, the fully-loaded cost of an employee is much higher than their salary.) Loans must be so quite tempting.

And sure, LLCs are designed to mitigate personal risk. But that implies you can find someone willing to risk loaning to you.

I'm not saying that VC is great, just that it fills a need.
Not just 40+. I'm just over 30 and I've felt that way for a while. I have a lot on my plate but other than that I live alone so I do have the time and energy to focus on learning the bleeding edge and I do enjoy it. But the truth is, the exact things described in that post kill my motivation. And here's an interesting fact: I spent almost 9 years working in one company. The only reason why I stuck around for so long was the absence of all the ridiculous reporting, filling jira tickets and all that dreadful crap. We had a relatively small but very solid team with simple rules and procedures: everything that needs to be done is done with well-described and documented gitlab issues, each issue gets it's own branch, do what you have to do, push, open a merge request to the lead developer(me for the past several years). Simple and straightforward, releases were always ready well before the deadlines, developers staying with the team for 5+ years on average, even when offered double what they were making. What changed? The exact thing that the reddit post described: new management, endless bureaucratic crap, endless made up acronyms, pointless meetings with tons of questions not worth discussing(ex: "Apple doesn't allow this so we can't do it", followed by 3 hours of discussions as to who should we talk to to get it up anyway) and to top this off: "hey there's this other team that doesn't do anything, we'll mash the two together so they have something to do". As a result all the most senior members(myself included) decided to quit, non-negotiable. it really pains me to see how much ego, bureaucracy and arrogance I see everywhere. Needless to say, I had to make some compromise with all that but it is insanely frustrating.

I feel like most of the software engineering world is going through a Steve Ballmer crisis: the industry is dictated by people who know nothing about the inner workings. As a result unnecessary solutions are pushed down our throats: "We should use X technology". Fine, but why, it will be slow, unmanageable and will leave us pegged to the company that developed it? "Nonsense, it is the best, everybody is using X". And 6 months later...
I wholeheartedly disagree with TDD part, I get it unit tests are more fragile in fact, I prefer integrations and module tests over unit test but doing the test upfront it a worthy investment, because speed up the development (because you only have run the test to validate the new feature) and also more often than not after the feature is done without the tests then the tests are never made
Since you mentioned diminishing returns, stress, and time cost, it sounds like you want to balance practicality with interest. Being frank, don't do it. I'm a software engineer and I have had incredibly talented coworkers, some of whom are the type that everyone goes to for help, who barely know how to use git without a GUI, if at all.

If you want to spend a whole winter break + semester (which is a very valuable amount of time), is there anything else you're interested in that would also line up with your career interests? That might be a win-win for the academic exercise and practical benefit
It's a very comprehensive and detailed post. Thanks for sharing it.
Harel's recent work (which evolve from Statecharts) is so called Scenario-based programming. If interested I follow his work very closely and showcase his techniques in this article about bthreads: https://lmatteis.github.io/react-behavioral/
This is a really interesting use of the protocol and looks very cool, congratulations!

I am curious how this experiment fits with the longer term goals for the project. Do you see Matrix as a social media protocol in addition to chat? If so, do you have plans to integrate with the fediverse/speak ActivityPub?
Correct to a couple years ago OneNote was the best
Plenty of negativity in the comments here. Used properly, a system like this could be a boon to the forestry industry, invasive species management, and forest fire fighting and prevention, among other things.

A friend did his PhD in lidar mapping of trees and forests, with a focus on identifying risk trees. He primarily focused on roadside trees that were a danger to drivers, but that was in part due to the ease of lidar mapping from a vehicle. He did trials with drone imaging, but they had to be manually controlled, which made them no better than people.

I live near a national park, and they average several lost hikers and roughly one death a year. The majority of those are due to poor planning and injury (FFS always check in at a ranger station, tell someone your schedule/route, and stay on the trial if you are injured!). A system like this with thermal cameras could find injured people much faster than a search party every could.

Half the battle of fighting a forest fire is understanding its location and boundaries, and tracking/predicting its movement. A system like this could be augmented with smoke particulate sensors and thermal cameras.

Many ecosystems are being devastated by invasive species. Wild hogs, anacondas, airborne pests. Early attempts to track 'murder' hornets were hampered because the scientists could not follow their transponders effectively.
Just put it on a second monitor and mute it?
Pretty sure your getting downvoted because this sounds like the advice of a professor who hasn't spent much time in an industry setting: grind algorithmic problems to succeed, only to find out past the interview that knowledge rarely gets used.

Ive managed to not have to do a technical interview for all of my internships and jobs so far, largely due to my efforts networking and focusing on learning popular technologies (especially React). Ive done the theoretical coursework and enjoy the problems, but the hour-a-day leetcode would not have been nearly as useful as learning a popular library and building connections.

And that said, I'd say git problems are the norm especially with newer devs. Having that one person on the team who is a git-master is invaluable when you've made a mess.
I'm really excited about using Matrix for more than instant messaging. This November I spent a week reading all the specs (which were really well documented!) and some spec proposals that I think are really important for non-IM clients (room types, event relations (replies), portable identities). I was able to get a simple web client up and running in ~300 lines of clojurescript.

Cerulean is looking great! Does it support e2e threads? I'm about to take a stab at implementing e2e in my application and I'm curious how much overhead it is.
Congratulations. It is somewhat surprising to me how some credits required vastly more effort than others. For example Algorithms 2 is worth as much as "Introduction to IT" - 4 credits each.

Were there other restrictions on which credits you could use? In your opinion is this "fair"?
https://i.imgur.com/vtdxe02.png

This is what was promised by CDP. None of that has been delivered. It’s a shallow, juvenile experience, with very little depth, bad story, repetitive and useless side missions, non-consequential choices, brain dead AI, barren city with zero point in exploration, terrible inventory system, bad shooting mechanics, bad skill system, ridiculously retarded driving and racing mechanics—just to name a few things. And it’s ridiculously unoptimized and buggy.
I was initially skeptical, but this looks pretty solid after reading. The author seems to be an absolute beast though, so anyone diving into this should expect to focus and work hard / very consistently.
CCPDS.
Ultimately after several attempts at trying to like chess, I find its determinism bit boring. Games with random elements have gameplay elements like evaluation of risk and rewards, so I gravitated towards them(like Scrabble).
software development is not for everyone, who has interested only those stay connected with it.
To be fair anything is a significant improvement over manageability of Jenkins.
This is interesting to me. I attended a public/state university for 5 semesters studying computer science, and dropped out due to personal matters (while also getting paid employment during the internet boom in a relatively rural part of the United States.) My first paid job didn't pan out, but then I got my first salaried position as a web developer, and I've been employed ever since (though I'm currently furloughed but mostly satisfied to be so because - I can handle it financially, and I have lots of work and projects around the house to keep me busy.)

I've often thought about getting a degree, mostly for some additional pointers on low-level, algorithmic engineering, and for exploring more interesting computer science subjects in greater depth. However, I don't plan on doing full-time development work for a significant period of time going forward, so the investment of money and time at a traditional four-year university doesn't seem worth it to me.

This alternative may or may not pay for itself in compensation, but that isn't why I would pursue it. I'm just interested in the education!
I can't relate with the OP because tech lets you write your own ticket. There are so many different types of jobs and opportunities.

> I'm sick of wasting time writing worthless tests

You can find a codebase to work on that aligns with your testing preferences

> I'm sick of endless meetings and documents and time tracking tools.

I found a gig without heavy process. It was one of the main criteria in my job search.

> I'm sick of reorgs.

There are well organized, flat companies that don't suffer from endless team reshuffling.

> I'm sick of everyone above middle management having the exact same personality type.

Tech lets you work remotely and choose who you interact with. I live in a middle class Colombian neighborhood. When I finish Zoom calls with Americans, I can walk out my door and am transported to a different world.

I'm glad OP found a new city and job that work better. Not sure they needed to leave tech. They could have started a bootstrapped small company (no VC), or gotten a corporate sponsored open source gig, or whatever.
I am about 15 hours in on a PS4 Pro and absolutely every side mission I played was bugged.

One is completely broken to the point where I can’t complete the quest because Johnny isn’t spawning.

And on top of that the Game crashes at least once per hour.

I do expect A LOT more when paying 70€ on a game. No, not RTX, but at least >20fps. The game is constantly hitching every N seconds.

Plus the PR was all about that stunning AI but it’s not there at all. Just compare the 48min E3 demo with actual gameplay.
This looks what I was searching for. Thank you!
Oh, I'm aware of the problem, and I agree that it was a terrible oversight. I'm just saying I don't think they actually intended/expected to cause players to suffer epileptic attacks because that would probably result in the biggest lawsuit in history.
> Not that it really matters, but is it only me or she is not actually "black" but most likely of mixed race (almost certainly mostly white, given her skin tone)?

I'm sure it isn't "just you", but this is wrong.

Gebru was born in Ethiopia to parents from Eritrea, a West African nation whose inhabitants are often much lighter skinned than the "African" stereotype.
Sure, but that is not the setup I interpreted from his comment, as I'm unsure why you would mention linux if the point of the comment was about virtualizing macOS on macOS.
What do county taxes have to do with anything?
> Startups become large companies over time, if they don't fail.

Picking nits, here, but this isn't true. My personal (multiple) anecdata is that a very good number of startups neither fail nor become large - rather, they become stable small businesses.
"New York will also eliminate a policy that allowed some high schools to give students who live nearby first dibs at spots — even though all high school seats are supposed to be available to all students, regardless of where they live"

It's entirely reasonable that people living nearby one of these schools get some priority to attend. Commute, community, etc.
Posted earlier today (theguardian.com version):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25464817

EDIT: Whoops, different radio emissions from a different place ! (but I'll leave this here because it's interesting anyway).
At least in pre git days many large companies had people whose entire job it was to merge and resolve merge conflicts. They were not part of the project teams. They were part of the build and deployment team.

Granted in any sane company this should just be done by the devs themselves. But as the OP said, in most teams knowledge about versioning, branching and version control is very very limited. Even if all you know is how to do a rebase of a longer lived feature branch easily in git (skipping the commits from the other branch) you will be the wizard that everyone goes to. Many many devs will not even attempt a regular rebase. It's black magic for them.

If all you desire is a cozy job in a large company with braindead processes and policies this sort of thing is probably enough to be tipping the scales towards: well we shouldn't lay off that guy coz he's the only one that can work the version control magic AND he codes like mad.

If you wanna stick out in a company filled with John Carmacks you will have to do better, sure.
It will be very cool to show diff in the API contract with every new version or release. Visually implementing - “what is changed”
Imagine you are in a sinking rowboat surrounded by sharks.How would you survive?
One of the few tools I gladly pay for a yearly subscription even if I only get a few weeks use out of it.
Current model still isn't perfect as you only get the version that existed when your sub starts not when it ends. So if your sub expires you actually have to downgrade the product to an old version.

Before if you bought a major point release you would get all minor point releases as upgrades. Now you don't even get any bug fixes that occurred since your sub started.

I love their products though.
I see this response in almost every thread about Apple and privacy and it’s such a weird reply. Do things that are good only count as good if you don’t have a financial interest in them?

I am much happier that they’re motivations aren’t altruistic. Absent appropriate regulation — I want to be able to support privacy with my consumer dollars and support a sustainable business model with them, I don’t want to rely on the altruistic grace of a company.
My solution is freelancing and online entrepreneurship. I quit my last job right before lockdown, and since then I've been building my own products and doing freelancing to stay alive.

While it's arguably more stressful, it's at least good stress. Everything you do is about making a good product and making money. There's no politics, just users and clients. The act of software development turns into the craft that you wanted it to be at the corporation/startup, instead of monkey work with little to no stake in the outcome. I'd rather be poor than waste my life.

Another good thing about it is that I decide when the product is finished. Every time I've gotten a job at a startup, I built the product in about a year then was forced to stick around for the endless revisions, updates, new features, etc. It seemed like work for the sake of work. What happened to the lazy developer trope? I believe 90% of it is superfluous, and the main product + good marketing is what's actually important for revenue and satisfying users.

A dog-walking app should be finished in a few months. The end. It's not like the software somehow erodes over time (unless you keep screwing with it and adding stuff). If the users are happy, just cash out already.

Finally, you decide who you work with - as a partner, not an employee. That changes the dynamic a lot. You can say when you're done, and you get a real stake in the outcome.

Since the coronavirus, working as an employee in software has lost its lustre. You don't get the big beautiful office with bean bag chairs, you don't get to socialize, you don't learn anything, and you sure as hell don't control your hours.
Agreed, they’re definitely a “stand on the strength of our products” company. IntelliJ IDEA is not just the best IDE I’ve ever used, it’s one of the best software products I’ve used, period.

Also, they’ve got a great open source license program! https://www.jetbrains.com/community/opensource/#support
What Makes Norm Micro ORM for .NET Fast as Raw DataReader – Dev
> [no one alleges] the election was materially hacked in 2016

While the voting machines themselves may have avoided foreign interference, other infrastructure around the voting process may well have been compromised. For example consider this article from last year[0]:

> Florida incurred an election-related security breach in 2016 that could have resulted in voter data being altered, Sen. Marco Rubio said Friday. ... Hackers were “in a position” to change voter roll data but apparently did not, Mr. Rubio told The New York Times.

If we can take Mr. Rubio's word for it, the Russian hackers went to all that trouble and then decided not to act to change the result of the election, but perhaps they found that the voter rolls had already been subject to so much partisan tampering that any more manipulation would risk backfiring.

[0] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/apr/27/marco-rubio...
I know, many folks love css, but I find it a big mental discontinuity from html and js. It's solving a different problem

This is actually the misconception that leads to confusion with (and ultimately, poorly written) CSS.

It comes from a misunderstanding of what creating a web page actually is.

As Alan Kay once remarked, “A change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points.”

This is no less true with CSS.

Most developers view CSS an annoying 'styling' language, that's 'not really a programming language'. Which separates it in your mind from the engineering frame of view that tends to excite you as a developer.

This makes CSS tedious to use.

In truth, HTML and CSS are parts of a holistic language of layout construction. They work in unison, not as individual components. Very much an engineering toolset. Just that the problems to be solved are more visual in nature than you're probably used to.

Instead of seeing CSS as an annoying way to 'style' pages, see it instead as a visual programming language for constructing visual guides (UI's) for your user.

You don't 'style' pages, you 'construct' and 'architect' them. It sounds weird to use these words, but they have a massive effect in changing your perception of what you're doing. And that has a massive effect on your impression and willingness to learn how to do it well.

I think that understanding this is one of the key differentiators between developers who are good with CSS and those that struggle.

Tools like TailwindCSS (that lead to a massive increase in both productivity with CSS as well layout maintanability) are based on this fundamental premise.

I expand on this more in a recent post called "How To Get Better At CSS", which you can read here: https://planflow.dev/blog/how-to-get-better-at-css

Sidenote: I'm also working on a book that aims to help you gain mastery over CSS, showing you how to truly understand it, by learning how to debug its most common issues as well as re-framing how you see it in the way I've described above. You can check that out here: https://gumroad.com/l/Debbg/z823cp8.
It's also worth mentioning that there have been an unusual high number of tech product launches really close to the end of the year in 2020 where demand is naturally high. Last year AMD had around half a year between launch and shopping season to build up stock - this year it was less than two months with additional competitors for chips launching at around the same time.
Thanks! I think next we'll try to naively increase the levels of red before printing, and see if that helps enough. If it doesn't, maybe it's time to look into alternative red inks that don't fade from heat as much.
The great thing is that the next time this happens, a vaccine can be created equally quickly.
Thanks for the honest review. From the little I got to play of it, you hit the nail on the head.
That sounds positively Orwellian.
Are you based in EU or outside? Perhaps it's an EU-only bug/feature after latest changes to be compliant with EU privacy rules.
I decided to start my midlife crisis after a long FMLA (first eldercare, and then raising my nephews). I just couldn't go back to the daily standup agile velocity kabuki. My work has to mean something, at least to me.
The description says it's autograd + XLA. So I assumed it always compiles to GPUs via XLA.

But, had a look in the code and jax has cublas and RoCm blas, and it looks like there is a flow where it uses the gpu directly, unless I'm missing something.

Definitely worth having a closer look. Autograd via function reflection should be faster than backprop. And if it's running on AMD GPUs then it's quite intriguing.
Not saying that these videos are a good thing, but would doing things like this be proof (assuming muting/active viewing is logged somehow) of gross negligence allowing the company to hold you personally liable if you make a mistake that could have been prevented had you watched the video?
Then why the hell are you still taking?

HCQ is not effective and that's the conclusve statement. Who cares that back in jan some kooks tried to be famous based on non blinded study on 10 patients?
> it's not the job itself, it's the whole system that makes it unbearable after a while.

Absolutely this. I'm in my mid thirties and I've been working professionally since high school (worked full-time through college). I still love the craft but I've had a hard time finding companies I enjoy working at long-term. Thought I found one, then we got acquired and the work and culture changed. The acquisition was probably a good thing as I don't know if we could have weathered COVID as a small company, but that fact only makes me lament the more the inevitable unbearability of it all.

I say this to underscore my agreement. It's not just one job. It's the whole system that seems unbearable. After a while you give up on finding the mythical company that fits you.
This is normal. When I was scheduling classes I would weight them by difficulty and have a cap for total course weight to account for it. Otherwise it's easy to overload on hard courses.
Half-Life 2 and Fallout 2 Running on M1 MacBook Air on Windows 10 in Parallels
Algorithms II is typically a mathematical proof class about algorithms. At my university, it was used as a filter class, and quite demanding. I think it was also 4 credits.
16ms of network latency has little to do with framerates.