skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's what I've experienced over the past few years. I went to work as a SWE at a large tech company and was paid handsomely, think SWE L5 level at Google.

For almost 2 years, I had almost nothing to do, no software to write, no green fields to explore, no products to develop. I'm in a large unit and there's unit level funding with silly goals that the whole unit (hundreds of people) has to achieve. I have consulted here and there for specific projects, but for the most part I am left alone.

Which means I have a lot of free time in my days and my vacations, official and unofficial, have been of the "gap year" or late 19th century bon viveur type: visits to major Asian capitals, beach life in Turkey, adventures all over the world.

My ratings have been more than good, but I often wonder if I should stop this grand experiment in paid time off and take a new step in my career. But where? There are few companies that pay as much and it's pretty (or very!) stressful living. Then, I'd have to go on the interview circuit, studying for a couple of months to prepare (wtf!) being judged by half-asleep people who couldn't care less if I get into the company or not. And why? I enjoy my free time and have lots of activities, hobbies and interests that I love. Certainly the current state of affairs could end, but the same could be said of any "experience".

Contrary to what many others in the tech industry apparently think, if I didn't get paid, I would never work one second for someone else. It's all a transaction and I'm not particularly passionate about my job. I don't hate it, but if it were to disappear as a profession tomorrow, I wouldn't cry.
> actual bubbles burst [...] not because of a puncture, but because they were continuously filled with air from a source that at some point can't provide it anymore.

Don't they burst because the source doesn't stop before the bubble gets larger than what it can be? The source stopping would just lead to a deflation where it slowly gets smaller if the air hole is still open, or remain the same size until tiny leaks make it not be the same size anymore.
My perspective is that work is no less pointless or purposeful than anything else you do with your life. Everything is from a certain lens meaningless. Yet we still live and do things and so on.

So I spend my time on what I enjoy doing. Which up to a point is my day job. Overall I find my job as enjoyable as any hobby I've had plus I get paid for it. I get to solve problems and watch the outcome of my solutions play out. My employer isn't aiming to save the world but they also doesn't destroy it.
I feel like the term “mid-career” is a bit misleading here since the CEO says up to 100-200 hires, which depending on the size of their engineering team might be ~1% of the engineering team.

Eg they want very senior talent and are willing to outbid Amazon, etc.
Be aware that these old HP printers consume a rather large amount of energy no matter whether they are in use or in standby.
I feel no desire to fly a jetpack, ultralight of hand glider. The jetpacks have zero lift(except the powered wing suits). I read about frequent accidents/injuries/deaths involving them = few will clamor to do it. It is a solitary game. Ultralights also have higher death rates than I like - interest fell off greatly after John Denver died from a design flaw that prevented him switching to his reserve tank = crashed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Denver#Death

Hang gliders also seem to be a good way to ruin a vacation - lower deaths, but lots of injuries.
People are risk-averse for the most part, and need a strong social reward for engaging in that sport - there is zero social reward + lots of risk in all these machines.
Thank you, I am sorry for the inconvenience.
Given how bad for the planet are, I would be more keen to use MAGMA
This is the previous discussion they were referring to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30009529
Abstractions are not always leaky. Often the “leaks” come from wanting to push past the bounds of the abstraction (for performance, additional capabilities, whatever). A good abstraction, if used as intended, needn’t always leak.

People also often define “leaky” as “can break”, which is kind of unreasonable. The notion of a data stream across a network is an abstraction over many layers of complexity. People often say it’s leaky because of packet loss and failed connections, but that’s not a leaky abstraction unless you define the abstraction to not include a failure mode.
I have an ancient Roomba still on its original battery pack that runs for almost an hour or more on wood flooring and very thin carpet. I wouldn't use a roomba for all but the thinnest carpet; it doesn't have enough suction or agitation to get dust and dirt out otherwise.
hmm, those emails are cringey
The author leaves so clearly work at FB sucks, yet he spends most of the article praising the company. There are leadership changes, reorgs and direction churn yet it is somehow very easy to follow the career ladder by "just executing the plan". People leave being burnt out and yet he somehow managed to only work "few hours" per day.
Many vaccines are not sterlizing vaccines. That doesn't mean they don't work. I'm writing this comment from home, while covid-positive. I have no symptoms, thanks to the immunity I already acquired from vaccines.
> What is the reason that we can thank for prion diseases not being much more common?

We kinda take this for granted, but it may be the case that our deeply-rooted psychological disgust and aversion to eating human flesh is a product of prion disease killing populations of ancestors who did. Or perhaps, even our tendencies to ceremonies of death helped us: those that feared the bodies of the dead, or were more likely to create rituals of destruction and avoidance, were more likely to persist and pass on their genes :)
For reference Ireland
• Fully vaccinated:
18+ years: 94.8%
12+ years: 92.8%
• Booster / immunocompromised:
18+ years: 67.1%
Thank you dang for managing this community with such care!
Congratulations! You've not yet been duped into the assumption that you have work 8 hours a day for a paycheck to live.

Go find something to do that you find meaningful. It may not be in computers. Maybe you'll enjoy making art, crafts, music. Maybe you'll enjoy helping people directly, like teaching or social work. Maybe you'll work with nature. Maybe you'll develop a new beer brand.

You will be working harder and struggling more initially, but you'll be enjoying what you do more. Good luck to you!
> At the time, the choice was C or assembly language for embedded/operating systems. There was no other choice in the 1970's. In fact, it wasn't even an option for most of the 1970's.

Unix was written in C because Thompson and Ritchie had been working on Multics, which was written in PL/1 in the 1960s. So the idea of an OS written in a high level language was hardly obscure and had nothing to do with C. It’s hard to say that C was much of an option in the 1970s anyway as k&r wasn’t even published until 1978.

There was a lovely (and also annoying) Cambrian explosion of languages and OSs in the 70s and even into the mid 80s or later. Computer companies often wrote their own languages and OSs, which made porting difficult (but porting wasn’t hugely common).
You completely ignore multiple studies showing that in 80-95% of legislative actions, the action is the one favored by large corporations and NOT the action favored by people or poor people.

IOW, the US legislature is responsive to people and especially poor people only 5-20% of the time.
There is plenty of evil. FAANG has no lock on it. Microsoft, Oracle, ransom gangs, Goldman Sachs. Wanting to get out of them ought to be a mark in one's favor.

Not sure what makes Netflix evil, though. Clue?
This isn't the a direct answer to your question, but maybe you should consider being an entrepreneur if you find SWE work pointless or unfulfilling? Maybe you're just looking for bigger, more inter-disciplinary challenges. Figuring out how to convince people to give you money by giving them something they want is pretty hard and therefore a rewarding problem to work on.
I think the point is that this negative pitfall happens to people and multiple people concur. It's easy to say "fight this with positivity", most people on HN started with this philosophy. In practice, it's hard to do that consistently after the first 10 years, especially when you don't notice the slide until you're in a pit.
I wouldn't be so quick to call it depression. This person is seeing a truth about the state of affairs in the corporate world and hasn't yet figured out how to integrate that truth and become functional in our broken system.
Maybe you just see capitalism for what it is [1]. If so, this might be the wrong forum for you to be asking that question on. On the other hand, not every job is unproductive busywork (despite being for profit), so maybe you're just not feeling well or you've had exceptionally bad luck?

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/
Work out what is meaningful to you.

Go do that.

If it doesn't pay enough to live on then get a job that brings in the money to allow you to do it in your spare time.
>how do you cope without wanting to off yourself?

it's simple really-- make no attempt to pretend you have freedom! acknowledge that, unless ww3 comes and the entire system that runs our world is upended in a likely radioactive manner, we are but hamsters running in wheels.

why do the hamsters run? some enjoy running, some only for food and water, others because they feel compelled to fit in with the other hamsters.

but if you are looking for a way to exist in this system without having money, be prepared for quite the journey!
find some goal? squize as much money as possible working as little as 2 hours a day. avoid companies where they want more.

or try learn some foundational math and do some weird yoga from youtube, if not yet) keep going until you find that things you undrestand can do are above what others swe can do.

or became stoic and force discipline on self)

and stop coffee if you do) or other stimulants.
Try a non-profit organization?
The original article has so little information about what that case is actually about, it's stiking by its absence. There's discussion about motivations, but no real discussion about any relevant laws. It's like it's from a parallel universe where the entire concept of a legal system doesn't exist.
If you fly low how do you deice the thing while avoiding terrain?
Most of the crashes were due to flying into the terrain in adverse weather conditions after all.
So what's the over-under on E-ink replacing our current computer monitors much like we've come to replace cathode ray tubes.
Meanwhile half the items on their website are out of stock right now - maybe they ought to spend the money on production instead? That’s the only way they’re going to get my money.
A person that dedicates time to learning how to be efficient at their job can in some roles achieve more in less time.
You should check out /e/OS. It's Lineage with microg by default and with all the Google contacts stripped out of the source. Been running it myself for a few years and installing it for friends and family --- without a single Google app.
My homelab is still cobbled together like this. I bought a 10-year-old kvm, used switches, a used 1u server, etc.
Guy works at Facecrook for a decade and all he can muster is a selfish article about compensation and his precious "work life balance". Couldn't even say a few words about the ethical ramifications of this "contributions" to society by working there. No soul, no mindfulness, just pure ego.
I'd be worried about it overheating?
I always love these BBC articles that are just a bit of fun for everyone to enjoy.
Personally, I would immediately offer an enterprise tier, charge 10x-100x, then promise to answer these (using some type of better marketing language, of course).
Is it just me or is the quote imply they want a startup founder inside Uniqlo? Why not just make a separate business? Or at least a new business unit at first.
This is a neoliberal take. Consider the deeper roots may be part of the system you’re absolving of responsibility, whether out of your own optimism or realism
Well, the simple answer is that marriage is the formal consent that lets you have sex. That's what the "I do" part is all about. (No, it's not just a pretty tradition.)

Consent was very important in the middle ages, and it's making a huge comeback in the 21st century.

(The monetary issues can be settled with standard contracts, but the sex part is what requires a special and distinct form of agreement.)
There has been much discussion about how this post is highly misleading. See

• Hillel Wayne, "Donald Knuth Was Framed": https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/donald-knuth-wa...

• me, various comments, including https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22407313 in the comments on that post, linking to older/other comments.
Thanks for posting this.

I have a background in embedded and a couple years ago I built a custom Windows GUI for an Advanced Motion Controls based motion system as a freelance project.

Until your post, I totally forgot that I have a Kollmorgen AKD control with a servomotor in my basement. A customer had sent it to me so I could test some custom hardware I designed for them and I always wanted to see if I could integrate it into my GUI project, but got so busy I completely forgot it was there.

Time to dust off the hardware...
While I’m of the opinion that trans-generational epigenetic inheritance is not typically important in human biology, the most convincing argument I’ve heard is that the egg cells that will become a grandchild are present and post-meiotic in the fetus of the mother, so exposures to the grandmother could have effects 2 generations down without requiring some relatively exotic pattern of inheritance.
In the classical inflation scenario, rising wages without rising output leads to price increases as input costs get bid up. So the wage increases we see in a tight labor market are what cause inflation in the first place.
I just don’t understand why a clothing company needs so many engineers. It’s not as if we know anything about fashion.
It is used as fertilizer, often not for food consumption. You would be depressed to know how many horrible things are to be found in human excrement, including pharmaceuticals, plastics, fire retardants, etc. To me the greatest use of human waste would be carbon sequestration. Think about it: we have an existing network of pipelines directly from every house to a centralized facility that can collect, dry, and [optionally] store that output in the soil or elsewhere for many years.
I went back and revisited what I read and realized I was overstating the case on gains in fertilization efficiency. It's unfortunately too late to edit my original comment.
>People who work 8 hours a day, mostly for a paycheck, how do you cope without wanting to off yourself?

Knowing that work is just the means to fund my life, rather than being my life.
Of course there are bootstraps available. Look around you on this forum; it's full of hard working, self taught, highly motivated and successful individuals working in an industry that has some of the lowest barriers to entry imaginable.

I think when choosing between "unhoused, with access to drugs" and "housed but no access to drugs", many (not most, and not you!) choose the former. It's empirically true: most shelters don't allow drug use and so addicts turn them down in favor of camping.

You are projecting your own relative values if you think no one would ever make this choice. You are also over-weighting your own experience when you say that all drugs are a coping mechanism for all people all the time. Different drugs affect the same person differently; the same drug affects different people differently. Caffeine, Adderall, LSD, coke can all be productivity enhancers and are on average less destructive than meth. With all these tools at one's disposal, and plenty of precedent for successful straightedge approaches to life, suggesting that the meth problem is a result of people earnestly trying to survive the rat race is poorly supported by logic.

I can't even guess what you think the alternative to "earning a living" should be. The default should be to provide unlimited benefits for those who have no interest in contributing to society? Great, that's what we effectively are doing, so you must believe the status quo is ideal. But if you believe these people aren't living their best lives, then maybe consider that the current approach (extreme coddling) isn't helping them.
Show HN: VF running on smallest possible cloud instances
Apple has already begun. Apple + Nike targeting sportswear. Apple + Hermès targeting upper class consumers. How long until they acquire all the know-how they need and ditch their strategic partners?
Bitcoin’s throughput is limited as a function of network security and network delay. It has nothing to do with making it easier for clients to sync with the current state. You can improve Bitcoin’s transaction rate in two ways:

1.) decrease mining difficulty, i.e., the amount of hashing required to produce a valid proof-of-work on average. This impacts the security of the network.

2.) increase the block size so you can fit more transactions into a single block. This negatively impacts network latency (and therefore scalability, as it increases the burden of propagating messages across the network).

To your question on Algorand: yes, new consensus participants can quickly and easily sync with the current state of the blockchain through fast catch-up [1], without any meaningful security degradation [2].

[1] https://youtu.be/BOnond-J3Zo

[2] https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/269.pdf
I actually think this applies to the passive analog world too. Very few engineers could tell you how steel or concrete are made. And we all use abstractions / libraries, for instance using tabulated properties of steel alloys rather than knowing the underlying physics.

In fact, if put in plainer terms, every engineer would nod in agreement with Hyrum's Law. Everybody has a story of a design that worked because of an undocumented property of a material, that stopped working when Purchasing changed to a new supplier of that material.
Both, learning curve was difficult and is impossible to get resources with good/real Elm experience. Also, you end up with a huge Main file in enterprise apps.
You can buy a lot of security for half that.
> At Facebook I could get by barely working a few hours a day.

A note of caution that this is not the common Facebook experience. I joined being fully aware of their reputation for poor work life balance, but even then it was soul-crushing. The pressure to perform is near constant, consequences of not performing are real, and the bar for meeting expectations is very high to start with, such that externally hired senior engineers are frequently overwhelmed by the sheer amount of expectations.

I was a manager there and got the distinct impression that the expectations bar was also rising over time. FB/Meta tends to hire the overperforming types, who put extra pressure on themselves to get those Exceeds and Greatly Exceeds ratings that come with real monetary rewards. The problem is you can't have everyone exceeding, not at the macro level anyways. So there's a real pressure on the managers with too many of those Exceeds ratings. The goal is to prevent a manager that misunderstands the expectations from giving everyone Exceeds, but the side effect is that over time there is a drift of expectations from Exceeds to Meets side. Having been with the company for so many years, the author likely did not notice this drift and was able to adjust over time naturally. Newer hires (which, given FB's rate of growth, is the large majority) aren't so lucky.
Depression often is the seeing things as they are and being unable to accept the ugliness and imperfection of our reality. Same with cynicism.
Well both can be true. https://www.vice.com/en/article/8x9j3k/depressed-people-see-...
Corn is a very good carbon sink.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016719871...

https://denvergazette.com/news/environment/one-global-warmin...
For example one of those deeper roots might be that most prestigious well-compensated jobs actually don't have value to anyone except the owners of capital who will become richer from the work we do!

Seriously I had more positive impact on more people's lives as a poverty wages barista than I do as a six figures software dev. That is depressing.
I guess it can also be answered with a "no", so i fail to see your point.
Articulate and Incompetent
You don't even read carefully!
Ditto.

Only difference is that I haven't resorted to any other types of milk like almond or cashew.

These days I feel energetic all day and no bloating.

The only hard part was to convince my spouse. She thinks milk is some sort of elixir.
My condolences. Similar situation in my area. Hospitals preemptively shut off care for a wave that never came to them. Shameful
I recommend Bitvise SSH Server for Windows, which I've used for 10 years. It's free for personal use (also a free trial).

As an aside: it supports blocking by client identifier, which completely shut down bot connections (and probably will until OpenSSH does the same).
Not a software engineer, but have gone through this.

Siva7 is partially correct that coming to this realization is depressing af and can lead to a feedback loop of negativity that's hard to break.

It isn't you though. Really, there are tons of useless roles and companies. See the book Bullshit Jobs.

Also, 40 hour work weeks are just ridiculous unbalanced. It's more like 50+ hours when factoring in commuting and lunch etc.

I'd offer a few solutions.

1. If you focus on what your life goals are, or what fun things you can do with the money that a full time job brings it can make it more bearable.
2. Find a gig that you can work 32 hours a week—makes all the difference.
3. Build or buy a small business and work your own hours on something you care about. www.empireflippers.com; www.bizbuysell.com

A lot of exercise helps too.
A pointless job can still be a good time if the people are good. If you hone a skill, it's rewarding to put it to professional use

Sometimes I want to off myself too, but work isn't why. I have the unhealthy habit to overwork when I'm feeling that mood tho, so it's different for everyone. I'd suggest you try isolate the feelings you're having to understand whether working for a paycheck is really their source
Why do you feel the need to tell people that they are suffering from depression online?

Did you fill out the HAM-D questionnaire in your head based off his post?
>"We are looking for people who can create new value and think about businesses from scratch, not consultants and those who worked at big corporations," Yanai said. "Geniuses who are more capable than me. If the pool is bountiful, we'll take 100 or even 200."

I think it's the "mid-career" that's misleading here. They're really looking for the top, actual world-class talent with those potential salaries. In which case they aren't so insane.
*up to

So they’re probably looking for one CTO with $8.8m comp, and a ton of engineers for $100-200k.
People have slowly become accustomed to high refresh rate displays.

So that's a big no on e-ink displays unless they manage get them to 60Hz+ somehow
It's always going to be application-specific. In my case, the kind of software I'm likely to write is going to have a majority-Windows user base, at least in the US.
Thaad Missile Defense System Has Made Its First Combat Kill Defending the UAE
> who takes others into account

Odd then that you seem so dismissive of the other concerns called out.
Why Facebook and Twitter are embracing NFTs
I've been waiting for e-ink displays to become affordable since the first Raspberry Pi came out.

I'm still waiting.
Or government.