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bulatbon When will we fix the tools that run the world?

Sometimes asking, "When will we..." is just a turn of phrase, but sometimes it's a serious misframing of the issue. There is no such thing as "we" that meaningfully acts or makes decisions. Thinking about "we" as if it's real because the individuals in "we" are capable of choosing is the fallacy of composition.

If you want collective outcomes that are different than the sum of uncoordinated individual action, you have to design them. Don't talk about "we." Who specifically is doing what, and for what purpose, and why would they do that, when they could just not?

Answering those questions often shows you that the problem isn't what you thought—because the mental model of a "we" that does things is so harmful.

Or you end up with a plan to solve the problem, so win-win.

bulatbon AI-assisted coding will change software engineering: hard truths

"If everybody just" is a description of a problem, not a solution. The problem is that everybody will not "just," no matter what could happen if they did.

bulatbon Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

Wouldn't you feel just a little bad if you worked really hard on something, gave it out for free in the spirit of sharing, and someone came along and said thanks, loser, and sold it for money? Would you want to go on making it for free for them to sell?

bulatbon Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

Yeah, I hear this. Anything I put online is feeding the machine that will replace me.

Maybe I can carve myself a niche if I can find an audience, and maybe turn that into something kind of reward-shaped, but that's not happening without me feeding the machine. And almost certainly I won't succeed, and I'll just make it harder for myself and everyone like me to succeed in the future.

It seems the only thing to do is do it anyway and try to be unique enough to make it work. And somehow just be fine with pulling up the ladder behind you.

bulatbon Most people don't care about quality

Absolutely, "quality" can often be descriptive shorthand for a set of traits. It's also, independently, always a normative judgement. I think mixing them is where the disagreement up and down this thread is coming from.

Someone says, "Good cars are fast" and someone says, "Good cars have heated seats," and then the second person says "That car you like must not be fast because it isn't good because the seats aren't heated."

Mixing "is" and "ought" like that can be convenient, and separating them is usually pedantic, but the shorthand only makes a mess as soon as anybody starts debating.

bulatbon Most people don't care about quality

"Doesn't break" and "actually turns screws" are obviously properties of certain screwdrivers, which maybe you don't get with modern ones. I didn't need to say the screwdriver is "quality" to say that. I just had to say what's true.

The only thing I'd add by saying "quality" is that I think a screwdriver that "doesn't break" and "actually turns screws" is good, which only tells you something about me. If I'd be happy with a different one that breaks and won't turn screws, I simply wouldn't call the old one "quality" and nothing about either one would change.

You might think it's weird if I don't care about a basic thing like whether it turns screws, but maybe I just want a cheap, simple prop for a movie. Maybe it's about a guy whose tools don't work. Maybe I just want the crappy plastic part because it's perfect for some art I'm making. Maybe I bet someone I could break it with a hammer.

All that information about me could change what's fit for me to buy, but none of it would change what's true about the product.

bulatbon Most people don't care about quality

"Quality" is what we call the difference between what we like and what's objectively successful, not a property of any object. It's the name we give to one of many ways we confuse "is" and "ought."

There's nothing we can say about a thing with "quality" we couldn't also say by tediously listing every single property it has. The only thing that only "quality" can add is information about what the speaker thinks is good.

In other words, it's purely an opinion. If most people don't have strong opinions on most products, which seems true, then quality is null for most pairs of person and product—so "most people don't care about quality."

bulatbon Why it's hard to trust software, but you mostly have to anyway

Moral fiber is important. Choosing ineffective, superficial actions that feel righteous over unrewarding slog that leads to moral good seems like the opposite of that.

bulatbon Why it's hard to trust software, but you mostly have to anyway

People want to think in terms of people and their actions, not in terms of systems and their structures. That's the problem.

Show a programmer a system that requires constant on-call burning out the team—they'll tell you (if they've been around) heroics are a sign it's broken, not to find more heroes. Definitely not to pull the person working on systemic issues off that nonsense and get them a shift.

Show them an equivalently structured broken system in a different field and they'll demand heroics.

I can't give you an example of an action, because I don't know, and I'm not talking about actions. I'm saying the approach itself is wrong and any action it suggests won't be effective.

Moralizing has a brutal, self-perpetuating metaproblem that makes people more and more convinced it works the more it doesn't. Actions based on moralizing will be chosen if suggested and they will not work, so any moralizing framing needs to be rejected right away, even if you can't suggest a better action.

bulatbon Why it's hard to trust software, but you mostly have to anyway

Standing in the wind won't stop the storm. You only get blown over.

"If everyone just" stood in front of the storm, they'd all get blown over, and the storm would go on.

No one wants to hear that individual heroics aren't the answer, but they aren't. Our moral intuition fails on problems bigger than it's meant for.

One person, out of hundreds, working in a factory that makes a slightly cheaper widget, that changes a BOM, that drives a different industry to swap one process for another, that forces other factories to move, that changes water use and heat flow in a region, that nudges weather systems out of a regime that favors storms, is doing more to stop the storm than any hundred people standing in the wind.

The person washing windows at a lab that figures out how any of those steps might be connected doesn't get to be a hero, and doesn't feel righteous for fighting, but they're fighting, while the people who choose feeling righteous aren't.

bulatbon The RAM Myth

Some apple-pickers think the point of picking apples is to prove how good you are at climbing trees. They'll never not be mad at pluckers who just pluck the nearest apple, and the people who reward them for the apples, and the world that doesn't understand the pluckers picked their apples wrong, and didn't even earn them, and they're not even real apples.

bulatbon Egoless Engineering

There's a complex of these passengers you can't discuss because it wakes them up and they reflexively defend themselves. They wrap themselves around your sense of truth and it's impossible to get them out.

Sleep tight. :)

bulatbon I'm a Developer Not a Compiler

I've been the guy who nailed it, and I've also been the guy who proves that frauds are everywhere and resumes are meaningless because he can't do FizzBuzz.[0]

I'm not doubting there are people who apply and just aren't qualified. But if your evidence that there's a ton of fraud is coming from a fraud detector which keeps finding fraud, confirming that you need the fraud detector, and showing you how good it is at finding fraud, how would you detect if it was finding fraud that isn't there?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16915511

bulatbon I'm a Developer Not a Compiler

These companies are following the universally efficient strategy for life, to be as bad at everything as you can get away with. Interviews like this aren't good at anything they're meant for, but the companies that use them keep succeeding, so why would they stop?

Many of us here have been complaining about all this stuff and calling out the problems for over a decade. We've been right these interviews are terrible at testing candidates, and they've been right that it completely doesn't matter.

The fact we're still complaining means these companies are right about what works for them to stay competitive and stay in business.

bulatbon Effect of a giant meteorite impact on Paleoarchean environment and life

I meant that "you" like the general you, not iambateman you. Sorry if that wasn't clear. I couldn't figure out a better phrasing at the time. Hopefully it's better now.

I'm nobody to lecture people. I don't matter. I just really dislike seeing epistemic nihilism framed as skepticism, and that's the vibe I was getting from the top of the thread.

Science is the proven process for investigating nature while dealing with questions like "What if you're wrong about everything?" The comment at the top reads, out of context, like an absolutely wild example of someone asking, "What if you're wrong?" as if it's something new that's never been asked.

bulatbon Effect of a giant meteorite impact on Paleoarchean environment and life

Skepticism should begin with the skeptic's own motives. A skeptic's second question (after "Really?" or "Why?") should be, "Why am I asking?"

Do they want to test the claim to learn something, or to dismiss it, just to dismiss it?

If they're asking questions which are literally answered as part of the claim, they need to start over, and start with themselves.

bulatbon Trapped Priors: A Fundamental Challenge in Rational Thought

The hardest part of this is fighting Goodhart's law. You have to really be the skeptic that you say you are, not just declare yourself a skeptic and take the day off. You have to care about the truth of your positions, not how good it feels to hold them. Not how rational you feel for being such a skeptic.

Which is expensive. It's inefficient at producing confidence from information, and efficiency is fitness. Why do the work when you could just...not? But feel as sure as if you had?

There's also rarely a reward for caring. Few people choose truth over tribe. If all you get for challenging a core belief among your group is punishment, less opportunity and more cold shoulders, without even changing their minds, why even try?

You'd have to care about the truth to an irrational degree.

We've known a bunch of ways to be more rational for thousands of years, but who wants to use them? It's just extra work. The methods in the article are simple and effective—but they're mostly good for leaving you upset, a lot, because nobody cares and they want you to stop.

bulatbon Probing unknown unknowns: A new generation of telescopes

Yes and yes. Comparing to a tennis court communicates the scale, not the size, which is more important to the vast majority of readers. It's a big thing, close to very big, but smaller than huge. So for a mirror, it's gigantic.

Does it really make a difference if it's 45x45 or 53x50? If you're trying to imagine roughly what it looks like, no. Their point is that the thing is close to something you could reasonably sort of picture.

I couldn't be less interested in tennis, but I've seen what they're describing at my local park.

bulatbon Fisker EVs Hired an IT Spy Who Funneled Millions to N. Korea's Missile Program

My battery ran out before I could delete. I had another sentence there at first about "unless you call respecting rights an obligation," but I took it out because I didn't want to make a mess. To me an obligation in this context means the thing which is created by a positive right. (IME when someone uses "obligation" for negative rights, it's often for a bad-faith argument relying on the vagueness of "rights" to score a rhetorical point.) The analogous but different thing that some would say arises from a negative right, to me, is properly described another way.

My right to life[0] can still exist without you being obligated not to murder me. It means that I am always justified in self-defense, so if you try to kill me, I'm allowed to kill you back. Except not always. But basically always. Except for the exceptions we can frame a million different ways. In practice, neither of our rights to life are absolute...and so on, down the rabbit hole.

[0] But wait: My natural right? My legal right? In terms of enforcement? Or in some vague sense that I "have" a right and those are words I get to say, and, uh, if you don't like it then I'll say them again? In practice, no one cares. People just say "rights" to mean "I'm right."

Talking about rights is fraught and frustrating and mostly pointless, and my comment wasn't worth writing, but there's nothing I can do about it now.

bulatbon Fisker EVs Hired an IT Spy Who Funneled Millions to N. Korea's Missile Program

Only for positive rights, and not always for those either.

bulatbon Is there now a generation of users who never worked with files?

Autosaving means you often save a state the user didn't want to save, sometimes one they wanted not to save, erasing one they probably wanted to keep as a savepoint.

You can give them back the point-in-time or known-state recovery with manual snapshots or history tracking, but now your data system has to support that.

bulatbon Stupidity

"All people are not trained" can either mean "no people are trained" or, less commonly, "it's not true that all people are trained." Using it the second way can be confusing because it doesn't really mean what the plain reading says, but I think that's what they're doing.

bulatbon What Your Job Ad Says About You

If the process being broken doesn't hurt them, why would they fix it?

If they don't need to fix it, what makes it broken?

I've been critical of hiring in tech for years and years and years, but hiring has only gotten worse (from my point of view) and the companies seem to be fine.

bulatbon WW2 week by week coverage finishes after 6 years

They were covering what happened every week as if the war was happening in real time. They also covered tactics and equipment, key events and people, spying, and war crimes in specials and side series, and followed D-Day and Pearl Harbor hour by hour.

bulatbon Dokku: My favorite personal serverless platform

"Serverless" means there's no stateful application server in your architecture. No instance, just callable code. Shell script, not daemon.

You write narrow business-level functions that take inputs, do their business, and give you the output. They're called, they run, they terminate and carry nothing forward. You deploy them to a hosting platform which will handle making them available, routing requests, and all the other stuff that's incidental to doing the work. The only thing that's your concern is the logic that turns inputs into outputs. At least that's the pitch.

Technically a PHP script that you run as CGI through Nginx is "serverless" that way, though of course it's hosted with a software server running on a hardware server. It's serverless because you write a PHP script and it doesn't care what runs it or what's going on around it. It doesn't need to work within the context of an application server like an endpoint in a Django or a Rails app would.

Someone else could own a bunch of servers running Nginx, you'd give them prettyprint.php, and it would pretty-print your JSON or whatever at the URL they'd give you.

Services that do this are called serverless platforms. The hosting model is called "functions as a service" (FaaS). If you like the architecture but you don't want FaaS from Amazon, Heroku, or some other third party, you can host yourself a mini FaaS with something like Dokku.

bulatbon On the cruelty of really teaching computing science (1988)

I've always heard that tech employers value all the things you'd expect them to value, but I've only ever seen them value LeetCode.

bulatbon Homebound: The Long-Term Rise in Time Spent at Home Among U.S. Adults

Sorry for the snark. That was unproductive.

My point is that if Alice has what she wants, Bob will not convince her that she doesn't by explaining that she ought to want what Bob wants, which she doesn't have or want. Especially if what Bob wants, and Alice doesn't, is for Alice to be social with Bob.

"You don't live the way I want to" is an observation, not an argument for anyone to change their values or their life.

bulatbon Homebound: The Long-Term Rise in Time Spent at Home Among U.S. Adults

> You see other breathing humans

...who will cheerfully explain to you that you're unhappy, your hobbies are empty, your choices as wrong, and how much happier you'd be if you'd just value what they value and like what they like and stop being you and start being them.

bulatbon EFF’s concerns about the UN Cybercrime Convention

> lobs it randomly onto the lower part of the front page

That is where it was. So the process posts a copy of the article and comments with the current date? But gives it the old URL?

bulatbon EFF’s concerns about the UN Cybercrime Convention

This thread with all these comments (the ones up when I wrote this) was posted three days ago. Here's a post that referenced it then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41211151

Why is it back on the front page and posted "5 hours ago"? I'm not implying underhandedness or anything but I'd like to know why this happens. Anyone know?

These are the comments it got at the time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41210091

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41210379

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41212594

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41210086

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41210905