blutoot

Yes - I had similar thoughts when I saw the word "startup" used alongside something so far-out (same 'critique" should apply to Fei-Fei Li's World Labs - https://www.worldlabs.ai). These are VC-funded research labs (and there is nothing wrong with tat). Calling them "startups" as if they are already working on an MVP on top of an unproven (and frankly non-existent) technology seems a little disingenuous to me.

A 1000 yes! I can't sleep deprive mgself any longer and ironically midnight-to-6am is when I seem to be able do most of my quality work (including grinding problem after problem from leetcode) only to feel like shit in the morning.

The fear of failure also comes from the concept of "cool-off". I recently failed a coding challenge in Zoox only to find out after the rejection that the cool-off period is 2 years!!

I would have never applied to Zoox had I known up-front that I'd have to wait for so long to interview with them again.

I am indeed learning a lot more about Python through my leetcode exercises. E.g. (this might sound lame to many) but I had never used the defaultdict type or the @lru_cacbe decorator up until I started doing leetcode.

Wanted to respond to a few comments about why motivation has been an issue for me up until this point.

It is an issue simply because leetcode grinding makes me feel like all my 10+ years of commitment to my previous employer (often foolishly at the expense of my personal well-being) and all the things I have contributed and picked up on the way mean nothing / nada / zilch to my future prospective employers. The whole prep process makes me feel like I need to start from scratch and nothing that I did in the past matters at all. I find this extremely frustrating.

These are the types that want academic freedom in a cut-throat industry setup and conversely never fit into academia because their profiles and growth ambitions far exceed what an academic research lab can afford (barring some marquee names). It's an unfortunate paradox.

Since the cat is out of the bag (i.e. there's no stopping of LLM-generated code / PR / issues now that vibe-coding is fairly universally accessible), the only thing in our (especially those who are custodians of software systems and products) control is to invest a lot more in testing and evals. Just plain opposing LLM-generated content as a policy is a losing battle at this point..

I’m afraid, focusing on privacy is a bit shortsighted because what we need to judge is whether this thing has legs to disrupt the whole concept of internet browsing, and and what it means for monetizing web traffic. And more importantly, are we looking at a V0.1 or V1.0 version of the new experience. If it is the latter, then the transition from the traditional web has accelerated, and they will have some significant economic implications, and this will definitely justify all the AI investment in data centers.

Judging it on the basis of our personal hang-ups is more or less making the discussion here too flame-bait-y.

Why is most of the AI-tooling industry still stuck on this "bring your own key" model?

So when you're the CEO of this group do you tell your board "I'd like to own everything that falls under consumer-facing e-commerce"? I am thinking in cases like this the vision is to plain make as much money as possible. Everything else is just a mechanism to achieve that. This is no different than running a hedge-fund group where you make money off of your portfolio.

I actually commend BuzzFeed for having unabashedly liberal social viewpoints. So maybe through listicles and what not, it can help push for more openness in our society to heterogeneity.

"I decided to put €10,000 of my own money, just to see some of the ideas I’m nurturing could fly." Maybe you wanna edit your comment now?

Is Alibaba equivalent to Proctor & Gamble? If so, what is the vision of Jack Ma? I'm still not sure how one articulates a vision for such a conglomerate.

This maybe a bit off-topic but I fail to understand why the top 2 textbooks on Distributed Computing - Tanenbaum and Coulouris - don't have a dedicated section on Consensus Algorithms. I learned distributed computing from Tanenbaum and can't recall encountering it.

Contrary some of the folks here, I found the presentation very cool. But that maybe because I'm a slow learner.

"Having recent wage and salary income in the same industry as the non-employer business has a large and positive impact on the likelihood of transit- ing to being a non-employer business." - isn't this capturing the typical Silicon Valley story?

I wonder if US would attract more quality students for the undergrad programs from around the world if it adopted a blind standardized test approach like JEE in India. SAT/ACT aren't comparable to those tests. Anytime you involve something that is open to subjective interpretation like essays that don't need to be created "live", you will open up opportunities for workarounds like this one (i.e. hiring ghost writers). Or maybe tests + interviews is the best combination since interviews bring out character and at the end of the day that's what matters - character.

It doesn't work for me - I've tried. Self-control works really well for me when the task at hand is really interesting and I want to give my everything to it. I don't know about you but so far those tasks haven't come to me at a regular pace. And I tend to seek out these online distractions as a diversion tactic when the task I'm supposed to be working on is really boring or uninteresting. So it's all about one's personality.

Instead of disabling the browser completely it would probably be more prudent to use a white-list of websites which the iPhone allows as well:

Restriction -> Websites -> Specific Websites Only

I used Do Not Disturb a lot during the peak hours of my dissertation writing. It was pretty helpful. That of course means I would miss new emails and phone calls but those could be responded to later

You know what would make my life really distraction-free? Ban Hacker News on every device I have access to for a prolonged period :)

The fact that Linus didn't take offense to the criticism of his abrasive nature shows that he expects it to be a two-way street. He really does have a thick skin.

I am really heartened by his push for consumer-facing simplicity of the OS which, by his account, the distros have not helped in achieving. I didn't expect that from him given that he operates at a much fundamental level of computing. But his example with his kids' connectivity issues tells me that even the nerdiest person starts appreciating the value of simplicity when they start facing use cases that demand it.

I know what his title will be - Chief Benchmarking Officer - CBO...

haha... he's headed to the company that'll make the iWatch ;)

http://recode.net/2014/08/31/veteran-tech-journalist-anand-s...

How many average joe's carry an American Express? They need Visa/Mastercard and some well-known retailers to make this work from the get-go.

I wish he retired after the review of the iWatch? :-/

Can Machine Learning (or NLP) ever help in estimating effort based on expected lines of code where the model would be trained upon similar applications/files that already exist? If so, is anyone researching this in academia or in any research lab?

What is the tolerance level for naps in silicon valley companies (both big and small)? Does it depend on the role/position? Wouldn't they rather have all their employees down mugs of coffee instead of taking even a quick nap?

I don't see the problem in sampling only professional women when the hypothesis is whether professional women are rated differently than professional men. It would be problematic if this hypothesis was tested with a sample from the overall female population. Non-professional women don't have reviews to be useful to the study. What you described is an explanation for WHY they are rated different. It doesn't discredit the study methodology.

Not sure if this is off-topic but my concern is related to technical interviews.

How do software engineers/devs/etc "stay in shape" for technical interviews? Let's say I wanna switch jobs and the first hurdle to cross is inevitably algorithms and data structures (for dev-centric roles) or something like operating systems/networks/whatever. How does one stay sharp on those _fundamental_ skills on a regular basis while working on a job, to avoid cramming everything in one week before the interview?