skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ok one specific example. I'd say the 10x part isn't about productivity but insight into the problem. Most people solve the problem as given, but the times when I've been 10x I managed to change the definition of the problem to something simpler, and easier to solve.

Here's an example: At one company they had a 'financial calculator,' i.e. a program to help visualise how some financial math played out over time and it was giving incorrect results. When I looked at the code I saw that it had been written by composing a lot of those functions you see on actual financial calculators, (1/V, PV, PMT, etc...).

This may have seemed simpler to approach it this way, but because there were so many compositions and there was a root finding algorithm involved, it quickly got out of hand. I started from the problem definition, defined a recurrence relation for what we are trying to calculate, found a closed form formula for the recurrence relation. This part was the hard part.

Now those 3000 lines of FV1P(XYZ(ABC())) turned into like 20 lines of simple math, _and_ the formula could now be solved for the other variables, so no more root finding. I just solved for the other variables, wrote functions for them and that was it. It ended up being faster, correct, numerically more stable, and the code was smaller.

I wrote up a white-paper on how the math worked, included a proof and that was it. It took two weeks.

The value to the customer was that this bug in this one part of their 'suite' of applications was holding up a sale to major prospective customer of their's. So fixing this had an outsized valued compared to the severity of the bug.
Strange suggestion. Have never heard of "mentors for hire".
Probably just insufficient incentive to stop it
I did, I was a new father, and in my late 30s. Took a paycut at the time, became a trainee developer. 6 years later, I'm a (proper) dev and they are asking me to apply for senior dev positions, I'm making more money, doing more fun work, and with less stress and more remote working. Do it.
I'm 45. I run a small ISP. It's a dying business, which will be dead in maybe 7 years or so as prices in my geographical area drop 10-15 percent every year.

I started an agri commodity trading business in 2015 (anticipating telecom going down in the future) which did quite well for a while. Covid years were ultra bad. And the market instead of recovering has gone even worse now. Many small companies are closing down (2 of my clients this month).

Learnings from 2001, 2007/8 were to turn to education in a down cycle. I had anyway not completed my undergrad college degree. I joined one in data science. Found some problem areas for my existing clients could be solved with data science. Registered a new company last month, and this week got my a miniscule seed funding (debt).

Things are not great but they're still looking up for me. I do not consider myself skilled at anything except maybe relationship building. I too feel that I've faked a lot by just being there. I would suggest you leverage your existing experience, join a MOOC, network with people - it'll take a while, maybe a year or more, but things will work out.

I'll leave you with this cliche - luck is when preperation meets opportunity. Be prepared.
The people working in the tesla factories, the line workers, are millionares? Get RSUs?
the irony is going to make my head explode
Don't forget that "type derived code" also happens with any language that has implicit arguments, e.g. type classes in Haskell and implicits in Scala. For example, in Haskell, if I compare two lists-of-maps-of-tuples for equality, there are many nested equality functions involved, but the type class machinery generates this code, at compile time for me. In a language without this, e.g. OCaml, many generic operations like equality, to_string, serialisation, etc become very painful.
Optuna is pretty automatized I'd say
Being pessimistic, I say Reddit will do this eventually. Either on the eve of finally following through an IPO, or a few years post-IPO as the stock price languishes while activist investors angrily shake their fists. Reddit has increasingly rolled out more features that are only accessible through their official app and new mobile/desktop web UI. That makes 3rd party app users more of a liability even though these users are often the main content creators on Reddit that drives traffic. Reddit rode on the mobile network growth in its early years without having to commit a full team on mobile dev, and now the time for payback has come.
I plugged the elevator pitch of "my novel" and asked it to write the plot of that novel (I will never write it, I just like to think about the elements of it and have some notes and snippets) and it spat out almost exactly what I had written out as the longer form of the outline.

I laughed, because I knew exactly how original my thinking was going in. It was really funny (and depressing if I had a big ego) how close it was to my idea.

However, doing so allowed me to iterate a bit and I took a minor aspect of the plot (people don't always have enough to eat) and magnified it (the government is the only source of food and they use this to control people). It has made the story much more interesting (still not super original!).
> The future cannot change the past.

This statement, like so many of the statements in your comment, is tired climate-denier rhetoric.

Past measurements are re-processed all the time, because the map from the measured quantity to the desired quantity needs to be re-calibrated.

The data you're pointing to is a binned temperature dataset (5-degree by 5-degree bins). The land stations change location and instrumentation over the time period covered, and you have to account for this. Over time, you learn more and more about these effects, so periodically you re-process everything with new calibration.

All this is documented in the papers pointed to by the website:

https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/land-based-station/noaa-g...
Well now you can write full types in both of them
I *HATE* pipes. For example from Elixir School (https://elixirschool.com/en/lessons/basics/pipe_operator):

```
foo(bar(baz(new_function(other_function()))))
```

They offer this example of an improvement:

```
other_function() |> new_function() |> baz() |> bar() |> foo()
```

While yes, pipes improve readability, how do they deal with errors? How do they deal with understanding what each thing is supposed to return?

I would prefer something like this, (descriptive variable names):

```
var userData = other_function();

var userDetails = new_function(userData);

var userComments = baz(userDetails);

var userPosts = bar(userComments);

var finalUserDetails = foo(userPosts);

return finalUserDetails;
```

Then I can easily debug each step, I can easily understand what each call is supposed to do, if I'm using type script, I can assign types to each variable.

I strongly oppose clean code for the sake of looking pretty, or being quick to type. Code is meant to be run and read more then written, it should be descriptive, it should describe what it's doing not a nasty chain of gibberish. Hence why most people hate REGEX.
I think that if you can't get yourself to do something for a long time, it's because you truly don't want to do it but haven't admitted it to yourself. Probably you have a strong vision of who you are -- a PhD student, an eventual academic -- and it turns out it's in conflict with some other part of your identity, what you actually want to do.

You'll find instant peace if you admit that you don't want to do it and stop feeling like you should. It is fine, actually, to do a thing until you realize you don't want to and then change your mind, but it's tied up in a bunch of other stuff so it's hard to see that clearly.
I can’t change the past. I fully support changing the course of Africa towards more education, but that doesn’t make Africans suddenly super proficient software engineers, and doesn’t teach them "how to work productively with western companies" (if you get what I mean - there’s more to work than pure manpower).

Does that make me a colonialist?
Germany had done more than enough already for preserving the holocaust memories and condemning themselves. The reality is that Germany was not the first one and isn't the last one who partook in the genocide. The only reason Germany is getting so much blame is that it lost the war. That doesn't excuse the rest. For example, the Soviet Union also committed genocides[1], tried to destroy cultures[2], and forced people to use Russian instead of their language. You don't hear Russia being remorseful about its past.

What I'd like to see, is Germany taking a stronger stand against those who are committing genocide right now and supporting the people who are fighting for their freedom. I'm talking about Uyghurs, Rohingya, and Ukrainians.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_the_Sovie...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_transfer_in_the_Sov...
In Memory of Tweetbot
Wouldn't see them "acting like villains in a sci-fi movie" if there weren't systematic economic incentives for them to act this way.
The 10x jerk is a really common trope that's thrown around every time the 10x debate comes up anywhere in technical circles. Truth is while they exist, not all 10x are like that.

I've seen 10x that were excellent mentors. Perhaps not in a traditional sense, but through code reviews and answering questions. Everyone working with him seemed to improve really quickly.

I think the reason so many people have doubts on the existence of 10x is that they might have never encountered one.

I recall a story someone told me a while ago. Software business that did local CoL/prevailing wages. Hired an intern one summer that was just running around in circles around the other, more senior devs. Useless to say they loved him and the next summer they tried to get him back, even offering a signing bonus for an internship (something they considered unheard of) but he was already at a large search engine company down in the Bay. You can guess the comp was probably already 3x what his previous job was offering. Of course, he wouldn't return.

There's a whole class of engineers were completely invisible to most companies, even if they are in the same "local market" [0][1] (Some use the term "dark matter devs" but I know it has another meaning [2]). These guys tend to fly under the radar quite a bit. If you are in a tier 2 market or company, your chances of attracting one are close to nil. Because they are extremely valuable, they don't interview a lot and tend to hop between companies where they know people (or get fast tracked internally). When hiring is red hot, they might completely disappear from the hiring pool by junior year.

[0] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...

[1] http://danluu.com/bimodal-compensation/

[2] https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dark-matter-developers-the-un...
I hate that this became an insult. Therapy can be a really useful thing for a lot of people. I don’t know why some people need to punch down at people who are already hurt.
‘-tsu’ in Japan was used to refer to low caste/outcaste people

Claudette Colvin was called it by the police when she was arrested

But I do have a trans friend who prefers it pronouns so that’s a sample size of one in the opposite direction
Yes, I know a few good examples.

A friend went to university in her mid 30s during/after her maternity leave and switched the industry completely, then started her own company in that industry.

Another friend made his hobby a career and switched from sales to UX design in his 30s.

I suggest you start meeting people and network. You don't know where opportunities will come from in the future.
Take off the £167 VAT first, and that gives you £832, or $1030.52. So, depending on what the £/$ value was when the price was set, it's still close.
How did they get promoted, when they did not perform well?
As someone who has spent a career in infosec, I've seen the opposite. Infosec has far more counter culture remaining than software dev (I have worked both roles - currently I'm employed as a Software Engineer).

What infosec has much more of is sales people. There's just a huge market trying to solve a tough problem. So from an outside perspective maybe you see a lot of bullshit but it's a highly technical field. Really, I only learned to be a software dev to up my infosec game, I find infosec to be a far more challenging and interesting field.
It absolutely is. A few weeks ago I decided to create what are now dozens of rules to manually filter out spam and it has been extremely effective for me (20+ a day we’re hitting my work inbox).

My best filters target the “opt out / unsubscribe” language people put in their footers. I iterate a few times a week as things sneak in. I’ll never get 100% but the results have been very positive.
No Acura?
> There is also Krita and Lightroom, and even the browser-based miniPaint [2].

Lightroom as in Adobe Lightroom?

miniPaint is very impressive, thanks for sharing.
I get what OP is saying with something like "... having to be "present" with nothing to actually do but make some some BS stuff to appear busy." and once was in a similar situation for a brief period. What I ended up doing was completely focusing on my own development. Using my time to explore technologies, tools and ideas that I was interested in. It really boosted my skillset and I was able to leverage that to improve my career. Once I was in the correct mindset it was liberating... I was being reasonably well paid to explore and teach myself whatever I liked.
I think the next level is post scarcity. In a post scarcity world maybe we don’t labor and toil to live because it’s unnecessary to tie home, health, food, and life necessities to labor if our labor isn’t useful. Maybe life becomes about something other than working to live and living to work. Maybe tying labor to life necessities was necessary given scarcity of labor, but when labor scales independently of people we need a new way of allocating resources.
Prison phones have been a topic on LTT some months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xouEd5cVE8
I've used Gmail since 2003 and consequently was (un)lucky enough to get my $FIRSTNAME@gmail.com - it's certainly handy but boy do I get a lot of spam - 3-400 hundred a day I expect.

I've definitely noticed an uptick recently and what is most perplexing is that some seem like they'd be easy to catch - in fact, I set up some Gmail filters to do so and they seem to be working 100%.
+1 for rotating within large companies. finding the right team at a large company can make all the difference, at least it did for me.
> technical undergrad degree

OP stated they were in grad school, implying they have some degree. I'm not sure it would help to take another one now?
The first one is generated by apparent user actions from paid organizations. Although it's clearly spam, you can see how this is difficult for a provider to tackle, because all of the superficial signals are good: authenticated user, paid account, using official APIs. Obviously they need to step up their defenses against abuses like sharing from docs, calendar, etc to stop bad actors from laundering their spam through Google's highest-reputation internal senders.

When I worked in this area of gmail we called this the "russian urologist" problem. How do you correctly classify traffic like this when hypothetically some of your customers want to send and receive messages about viagra in russian? Casual observers will say that is spam but not to the russian urologist.
922r is basically just a buy American regulation that has the added bonus of letting ATF hassle people selectively. On the other hand, "solvent traps" remind me of wine bricks[1]. Both are obviously legal. Sure you could do illegal things with them, but you could do illegal things with a coke bottle too.

But what does this have to do with illegal guns as any ordinary person understands them? Maybe some Republican bubba's Benelli duck hunting gun is technically illegal because he put a mag extension on it without swapping out enough Italian made parts, but frankly you're grasping at irrelevancies.

Meanwhile, plenty of Democrats in Chicago own illegal sears for their Glocks along with drum mags[2]. Now that's something that maybe we should care about, because those are real criminals hurting real people and not just criminals on paper for violating frankly ridiculous regulations.

Edit: Added easily Google-able link for illegal sears in Chicago.

[1] https://vinepair.com/wine-blog/how-wine-bricks-saved-the-u-s...

[2] https://www.npr.org/2022/10/28/1131026241/chicago-handgun-vi...
This is why I can never understand these articles. How much is $1.46/hr? Is it a little? A lot? Average? So I head over to Google and look up the answer[0]. But everything is in yearly wages so $1.46*2080 ~= $3037. Looks like it would be a lot in Sudan or Myanmar, an average in Egypt, and not a lot in Sri Lanka or Ukraine. But are these numbers even trustworthy? We had a post about this just the other day.

But we don't even know the countries that are being used! So we're back to the original question: is it a little? A lot? Average? Honestly, when I see people spout out raw numbers alarm bells go off in my head. Doesn't matter if it is wage, number of car crashes, or number of murders. We have so many fucking people on this planet that a small percentage of a large number is still a large number. There are definitely people using this in deceitful manners. There are also dumb people, but idiocracy can still be accidentally malicious. The reason it is easy to lie with statistics and data is because it is actually really difficult to compare numbers and data across differing conditions. In this case, it really does not make sense to compare the wages of an American to the wages of a Sri Lankan. The price of an apple in both places isn't equal.

Still, I don't know the answer to my question.

[0] https://www.worlddata.info/average-income.php
It seems like the latter is more correct, though. That is, more representative of how things actually are.
So write it locally in an unshared document and paste it into overleaf when you want someone else to see it? I don't like overleaf to begin with, but to feel this tied to it is a bit wild.
I think it is insulting to insinuate that someone’s writing is similar to ChatGPT.

Firstly, do a basic check using https://openai-openai-detector.hf.space/ - it isn’t always correct but it is a strong indicator.

Secondly, it is entirely normal that some real people will have a style that reminds you of ChatGPT. After all, ChatGPT reflects an “average” writing style of real people.

Finally, perhaps reread https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html . One word comments are usually a sign of particularly poor form, and many of your comments are a single sentence. That can be a sign of deep insight, but usually isn’t.
Because it's fun. If you get to work at top speed in a no-BS environment solving big problems, you'll be happy as can be.

I get paid more than enough, but what I look for is to be able to spend 40 hours a week having a blast.
I don't see design docs as a tutorial on how to be a better programmer using a new syntax, the goal is to flesh out a new concept built on some fundamental ideas.

You cherry picked one example of a tangled/messy block of code that they used to communicate specific idea around "left to right" comprehension and flow of the data using the new syntax. For that specifically it did a fine job.

But that doesn't mean that's the way you should be writing code in the first place, given it started with a mess and only used one piece of syntax to change it.

I will admit it's a poor example to open with. But for a design doc about exploring and debating ideas it's fine.
"workers aspiring to join the owning class" sounds more like effective capitalist propaganda to me. A socialist aspiration would be to remove the distinction between owner and worker. By transforming a business to worker-ownership, the owning vs working class distinction is eliminated.

The compliment to "workers aspiring to join the owning class" is that the biggest risk a capitalist faces is the possibility of being thrust back into the working-class, and having to actually work for a living, as opposed to living off of profits derived from the labor of others.
So he has an opinion that is different than yours. Sometimes it is good to read an alternate opinion. I had an English teacher in 8th grade that taught me how to read a news paper. She was from Eastern Europe and had escaped from the Soviets. She was very adamant about using multiple sources. Understanding the motivations of the writer, getting other sources of evidence. I think she was wise and I will always be indebted to Mrs Holtzman.

AFAIK the function of the Fed is pretty understandable. Whether you agree that they make the correct decisions that is another matter. It seems to me that in an economy that is producing new things that did not previously exist being able to adjust the amount of currency in circulation to reflect the total value of things in the economy makes a lot of sense.

Suppose the 350 million of us had to share the millions dollars that was in existence when the country was founded. There would not be enough for each of us to have a single dollar. That would make the currency pretty useless.
Fun fact, in the pre-1.0 days Rust did try to provide a batteries-included stdlib, and came to the exact same conclusions as you have. :P In the run-up to 1.0 an enormous number of modules were jettisoned from std and into the then-new crates.io. I'm not opposed to having a larger Rust stdlib, but it is better to at least let subject domain experts hack on the problem for a while until, perhaps, the community standardizes on a de facto API.
denies that the photos were taken inside the base

Those are pretty squirrely words when you're flying a drone outside the fence but 1000' up.
I discovered that, in real life, it doesn't pay to be too agreeable. Sometimes enough is enough and dwelling too much on it will just hurt you.
So you're right: though you admittedly ended up in a good place, you've lost opportunities by biding too long.

Congrats for the new career. Enjoy, and the take hard the lesson with you. :) You paid for it, after all.
> My self esteem is terrible and I haven’t left for fear that I won’t be able to “make it” anywhere else, paralyzed by the fear of ending up unemployed.

> I’m angry that I have a 10 year career full of ambition that went absolutely nowhere, I want to leave, but it’s scary.

> Your story gave me a great boost of encouragement to start seriously planning my exit.

I worked for a shit software company in the midwest for a few years after graduating. I also felt scared I wouldn't be able to make it. I eventually landed a job in SF and learned my value as an engineer.

But I suspect a lot of people have similar stories to this.
It's very well documented, no point in speculating.

https://www.tsa.gov/travel/passenger-support/travel-redress-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Fly_List
Why “nonzero”? That’s already explicit.
We also hurl prepositions at people based on their appearance.

"He doesn't look with it": preposition and pronoun.

Oh, and don't get me started on adjectives. If a 5-foot-tall Douglas wants to be called Giant Doug, just oblige.
I'd guess that Asians with lower grades are less likely to apply. You'd get a distribution that looks like that even with completely random acceptance
Oh it payed good! But it cost me plenty in burnouts too.

Don't worry about asking me to be humble, it's _taught_ me to be humble, believe me.

I also understand what you say about alternating between being the hero and being the problem.

There is a tightrope to be walked so that you leave your client with code that works for them. I mean some tiny little kernel of code that only you understand isn't going to serve them in the long run.

I'm not claiming to have always gotten that balance right.