candu

Agree with others here that "web development" isn't quite as neatly bounded as "core computer science principles".

That said, I'll add MDN Web Docs [1] to the pile of links here as a good resource for practical details. If you're interested in the fundamentals of large-scale data-driven distributed systems (into which category many larger web applications fit), Designing Data-Intensive Applications [2] is quite excellent. NNGroup [3] has a lot of great foundational material on basic concepts of UX, usability, interaction, etc. for digital products.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/ [2] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/designing-data-intensiv... [3] https://www.nngroup.com

YMMV, but I've also found that treating all side projects as potential businesses sort of...takes the intangible quality of magic / fun / joy out of those side projects for me.

For OP: it's OK to not want to monetize everything you do, even if those things might potentially be monetizable (which most things are, as the parent comment mentioned) - past some point, the incremental value of really, truly enjoying more of your time can have way more value than even fairly large amounts of additional money.

Where that point lies exactly is a matter of debate, and probably depends greatly on how you place value on intangible experiences vs. tangible things. From experience, many people in the tech industry are well past this point but don't realize it, largely because we have a cognitive bias towards comparison with those around us. (Also, the above framing suggests strongly that we can learn to change where that point is for ourselves.)

> unless an alternative sargable predicate is too complex or not possible...

As you note, functional indexes can sometimes be the best solution - some common examples: when working with different geospatial projections in PostGIS; when building a full-text index using `to_tsvector`. For anyone who works with relational databases that support this, definitely a good tool to have in your toolkit!

Actually, yes - you can find this and many other excellent historical medicine tidbits in Quackery [1] (and then be really, really grateful that both science and medicine have advanced significantly since we thought it was a good idea to, er, blow said smoke up said ass).

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33572516-quackery

Personally, I dislike IKEA for registering as a non-profit, when they're very clearly not. To me, this belongs in the same bucket as any number of tax avoidance schemes that ensure wealthy individuals pay far lower tax rates than the average person, and that large corporations pay effectively nothing.

If they're able to provide great customer service - well, good on them, but I'd much rather the public purse have the money necessary to support people in general. I'm very, very tired of "innovation" being used as an excuse to completely ignore relevant taxes and laws, especially when said innovation is often possible only because of extensive public investment in research, supply chain stability, etc.

(If you're not sure what I'm talking about with that last sentence: read The Entrepreneurial State, or talk to anyone who's ever received a DARPA / NSF / etc. grant, or maybe even just go look at an actual public sector budget sometime.)

I don't have optimism about the diligence of politicians. I have optimism about (and direct experience with!) the diligence of the bureaucracy that advises those politicians, and that carries out the actual operation of policy, maintenance of infrastructure, etc.

The people you see on camera and in the news are a tiny, tiny slice of the operation of government. It is a grave misunderstanding of how society functions to equate "politicians" with "the government". This is true of any large system: a company is not its CEO, a non-profit is not its executive director, a program is not the interface it exposes to the outside world, and so on. In dealing with large systems, equating the part with the whole like this is effectively throwing away 99% of your power to understand and change those systems.

Thanks for posting authoritative sources!

IMHO it's unfortunate when the kneejerk reaction to "governments / leaders do thing X" is "but did they think about obvious edge case Y!?"

Yes, they thought about obvious edge case Y; they employ / engage with loads of policy and domain experts for whom thinking about obvious edge case Y is table stakes, especially if Y is something one can think up off the cuff in a comment on HN. Perhaps not all of that thinking makes its way into final policies, whether for practical or political reasons. Perhaps much of that thinking - especially where nuance, expertise, or uncertainty are concerned - gets dropped from layperson reporting on the policy. Almost always, you can find publicly-available documents, transcripts, etc. that exhaustively list these details - all the arguments, all the community consultations, all the policy whitepapers.

These all exist, and unlike in modern academic publishing, you can almost always find and read them for free! That said, I do agree that we as a society need to put much more effort into accurate communication around expert fields. Specialization, and the resulting glut of information written for and consumed by specialized audiences, is one of many forces that make it harder to build a shared, agreed-upon sense of reality. What might it look like to solve this problem in the 21st century?

I was curious how realistic the advice to dress in your finest would be, so...

In the US, at least, union wages would have brought in $20-30 or so per week. [1] Looking through [2], you could get a whole gentleman's outfit for roughly $50 or so. Even still, you'd be spending 2-3 weeks' wages on a single set of clothing - not to mention that you'd need somewhere to store all that, and you'd probably also need additional stuff to maintain it so that it looked half-presentable for your daring escape.

It's much more likely that, as someone in steerage, even your "finest" wouldn't have passed muster for the keenly class-conscious Brits on the upper decks. The fabrics and cuts would be different, you'd be missing fashionable accessories and key pieces of the outfit, nothing would be tailored, and everything would be in worse wear. (Not to mention your lower-class accent and diction would likely give you away, unless you'd somehow had the benefit of a pricey elocution tutor.)

[1] https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/union-scale-wages-hours-... [2] https://vintagedancer.com/1900s/edwardian-1910s-historical-m...

It reminds me a lot of the excesses of software patents, many of which in effect say "it does (insert mundane thing X)...BUT WITH MORE TECHNOLOGY".

As far as a practice of mindful examination: yes, this makes sense. Examining your thoughts, and the spoken assertions of others, is valuable if only to train critical thinking.

I do think it's possible to prize independence in this regard too much, though. Taken to the extreme, it's a sort of personal not-invented-here syndrome: it can shut you off from valuable sources of ideas and mentorship, and cause you to endlessly re-tread mental ground that's already been covered. Taking the successful scientist as an example: they "stand on the shoulders of giants", and their "independent" thoughts are only possible because they're immersed in, and actively synthesizing, lots and lots and lots of "conventional" thought.

The "independent" breakthrough is just one small iteration on heaps of "conventional" thought. The "independent" product is just one small iteration on heaps of "conventional" technology. It's the deep familiarity with the "conventional" part, and thinking through what all that really means and makes possible, that makes the "independent" part possible.

So: are you really thinking independently? Or are you just thinking blindly, without that familiarity?

There's a fascinating study on orchestra auditions, where it was found that performing blind auditions (where the interviewee's identity is hidden to the interviewer) led to more equitable gender representation: https://gap.hks.harvard.edu/orchestrating-impartiality-impac...

IMHO, if the tech industry wants to live up to its narrative of meritocracy, this is one obvious improvement over existing processes. No, it won't take care of pipeline problems; no, it won't solve the "tipping point" problem (i.e. where candidates of underrepresented groups are dissuaded by a lack of pre-existing representation, making it very hard to go from zero to one, so to speak). That said, we're uniquely positioned as an industry to do this - technical interviews are similar to auditions in that they hinge on skill-based performance - so why not? It can't be any less arbitrary than asking random questions about manhole covers and light bulbs.

I'd posit that even the "show your thinking process" parts could be done in this way - e.g. via text chat, or inline comments, or maybe even using voice obfuscation and/or neutral avatars.

Exactly this. From one viewpoint, https://pad.riseup.net/ is just a worse version of Google Docs, and most people will never use it. From another, it's a vital service for preserving the anonymity and security of activists, and comparisons to Google Docs are moot.

In other words, these tools quite effectively solve the pain of a small but clearly-defined group of people - turns out this approach is useful beyond the startup world!

Yes - there is likely a "high-risk, high-reward" dynamic here, which is entirely consistent with both your and OP's descriptions: the long tail will toil uselessly, while the lucky few will a) discover that they were right about its significance, b) be in a position to explore and articulate that significance, and c) find themselves suddenly at the top of a new field with few competitors.

On the other hand: there's a second interpretation of all this, which is that doing just about anything big - a major product launch, a body of research, etc. - involves a lot of drudgery. In other words, even big significant things involve a lot of work that looks silly / insignificant. I would agree that learning to commit to that drudgery, and to see it as necessary and even occasionally enjoyable (or at least meditative), is essential to reach a positive outcome. (Which is not to say that all drudgery has value, or that we shouldn't still seek to reduce / manage toil over time: it's also possible to fall into the trap of assuming all drudgery is of equal value, which it definitely is not.)

...yes? This is an automatable process these days, AWS / Amazon certainly have the resources to do it, and under many OSS licences it's a legal obligation to give attribution.

1. Yes, we will largely return to offices. Digital tools remain sub-par as replacements for direct human contact / communication, and that isn't likely to change soon. (Mayyyyyybe mixed reality will finally make a dent here, but meaningful computer-supported collaboration is still a very active area of academic research. Haven't found any tool that comes close to the fluency and reliability of a quick huddle around a whiteboard.) As others have noted, there's also a lot of investment in commercial space - so there will be economic / political pressure to return to office work.

Will this happen in 2021? No idea. Some workplaces have announced full-remote until mid-2021 at the very least, and any cure / vaccine will take time to fully study, productionize, and distribute. It might take a few years to fully return, and there may be a slightly higher proportion of WFH even after that.

For a historical perspective: consider that humanity has weathered catastrophic pandemics before, and look to what happened there in the longer term. This time around, we have the further advantage of much better medicine / logistics than, say, during the 1918 flu. (We also, of course, have both the advantages and disadvantages that come with much faster communications channels.)

2. Absolutely not! By working from home, I'm taking on additional office-related expenses that would normally be paid for, plus expenses related specifically to remote work (e.g. webcams). If anything, I'd expect the company to help cover those expenses, and/or bump my salary up to compensate for added setup and logistics on my end (or even just to reflect the reduced overhead on their end - if they save money having me work at home, why shouldn't I see some of that?)

This is a deeply false equivalence.

In the workplace, employees have (broadly speaking) a _legal_ right to be free from discrimination on the basis of protected grounds. If your boss (or their boss, or their boss, etc.) makes it clear they don't support that: that's not a political statement, it's workplace discrimination / harassment.

That a stance against marriage equality happens to overlap with political fault lines is _entirely beside the point_.

Lots of competing opinions on what the big question in politics is, so I figured I'd add my own :)

To me, the biggest question in politics is: how do we build political / societal systems whose impact on human society is consistently positive and equitable?

This implies _fundamental_ changes in those systems. To wit: publicly-funded R&D returning value to the public purse, and not just to private companies (see: Mazzucato's "The Entrepreneurial State"); effective and highly coordinated wealth / corporate tax regimes (see: Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century"); complete transformation of education and its relationship to both human psychology and technology (see: Papert's "Mindstorms"); eradicating the very concept of "good" and "bad" neighborhoods through massive and equitable investment in schools, housing, mixed-use zoning, mixed-income development, multi-modal transit, functional green space, etc. (see: Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein's "A Pattern Language"); and, backing it all, a modern, responsive, truly digital government that is empowered to invest in tools and technologies to continually improve both internal work and external service delivery (see: Cyd Harrell's "A Civic Technologist's Practice Guide").

Well, if you want to be _extremely rigorous_, there's always https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Mathematica ;)

Less flippantly: pedagogically, there's a big difference between "here's your addition tables, memorize them" and "if I have 1 of _anything_ and another 1 of that same thing, I now have 2 of that thing." The latter offers way more opportunities for further thought: by that logic, if I have 2 things and I take 1 away, I now have 1 thing! If I have 2 rocks and 2 sheep, I can count the sheep by laying out 1 rock per sheep! And since I can add more things, maybe there are more numbers for those amounts of things too? And what about differently-sized things? Or parts of things? Or...

That's the difference between getting "1 + 1 = 2" across as a literal by-the-book fact, and getting it across as an invitation to build / connect ideas and ask further questions.

I've definitely repeated that line in the past to justify tech industry interviewing practices - but sometimes it goes beyond "setting a high bar" to something more toxic: an interviewer using the interview as a chance to show off how smart _they_ are, rather than assess the candidate; deliberately creating high-stakes "pressure cooker" environments because, you know, that's just how we work here and they should get used to it; and so on. These things then get rolled into the same justification: after all, we're an exclusive club of ultra-smart 10x ninja pirate Jedi, which of course means we should have the default assumption that others don't belong in this club.

I wonder now: for every "bad one" not let through by this sort of process, how many other "good ones" look at it and say "no thanks"? How many hear about this sort of hazing and are dissuaded from applying in the first place? How many experience it one too many times and just quit the industry altogether? How many of those "bad ones" are even objectively bad, and not just having a bad day or intimidated by a process rife with both intentional and unintentional hostility? In other words: are we actually assessing what we claim to assess with _any_ predictive accuracy, and is the collateral damage to company reputation and the pool of available candidates - a damage often hidden to the individual companies that impose this process - even worth it?

Assuming charitably for a moment that you're posting in good faith: if you're wondering why you're being downvoted, it's likely because these laws, their effects, and exceedingly strong evidence of racist intent behind them are all easily verifiable matters of historical fact.

(See, for instance, Jim Crow laws, redlining policies, poll taxes, etc. as many other commenters have already pointed to.)

One could extend that logic to argue that all package managers are red flags: after all, you're downloading third-party code from external servers; you just happen to be doing it ahead of time, rather than at runtime.

In principle, there's no reason why the same supply-chain security mitigations npm and other package managers / repositories have put in place could not also be applied in this case: you just apply them at download time, same as before, except now it might result in a runtime error instead of an npm install failure. (No idea if deno does this in its current state, tbh.)

Agree, however, that blindly executing third-party code without somehow vetting it is a security risk.

Also, re: Python - there's a reason why libraries like requests exist; while the Python Standard Library is pretty comprehensive, the APIs it exposes are not always the most intuitive. You might be surprised at how often people pull in helper libraries to work around some of its warts - now, one could argue that maybe they shouldn't do that and should just know the built-in modules better, just as one could argue that functionality is useless unless combined with usability.

OTOH, you end up with a great Shadowrun campaign hook generator?

That works in certain fields - for instance, many of us here on HN can indeed walk across the street and get a new job if our employers are teetering into miniature surveillance states.

To be honest, though, the average worker doesn't have that kind of leverage, they don't have pockets deep enough to wade through the interview cycle, and many of the other employers they'd go work for are doing exactly the same thing. For them, the alternative to employment at a company deploying these kinds of tactics is very much destitution - especially right now.

I'm with you on one thing: if my employer demanded minute-by-minute accountability for my time, I'd leave, no questions asked and minimum notice given. I have that choice, though; when discussing things like UBI, I always try to remind myself that someone for whom that support would be life-changing is in a very different situation from mine, with a much more constrained set of responses / actions available to them.

There are also practical reasons to stuff everyone in one box.

With class sizes steadily growing, teachers are often stretched thin - from speaking with a few friends who happen to be teachers, they also often get lots of well-intentioned advice on pedagogy. Very little of it is actionable, especially when you're already overburdened and have little time to rigorously investigate further, some of it comes with thinly-veiled edtech pitches ("this shiny new tool will solve all your problems for every kid!"), and yet other parts are utter nonsense from helicopter parents who will insist that you're teaching their kid incorrectly no matter what you do.

As a result, it's a lot easier if you can simply teach everyone to the same template - if that works for 90% of kids, that's arguably better than catering to the other 10%, especially if half of that 10% is comfortable with self-directed learning. Plus you can point to standards to argue that you're just doing your job, which is much more straightforward than defending your profession / methods and their value to every last person who believes something random they found off the internet or a vague feeling about how best to educate over those with actual practical and theoretical expertise in the field.

Among HCI researchers and UX practitioners, it's well-understood [1] [2] that consistency and standardization in interfaces often improves user experience by helping users lean on pre-existing mental models.

(That said, the question of when to lean on existing convention vs. establish a new one is a difficult one.)

[1] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/ [2] https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/princi...

As a user, I'm all for browser choice in the abstract: it sounds like a good thing, but it doesn't often deliver me tangible benefits in usability, performance, etc. (And, to wit, the only real exceptions are when large organizations bankroll extensive browser development teams.)

As a developer: even with several browsers converging on the same renderer and JS runtime, it is _still untrue_ that all things work in all browsers [1] [2]. HTML, CSS, and JS continue to evolve as standards, and mobile browsers complicate the compatibility picture.

This may be hard to hear, but: right now, polyculture delivers largely abstract ideological benefits to a small subset of users who care about these things. Monoculture delivers real, tangible benefits in usability, performance, and accessibility to users, plus massive gains in productivity to developers and tech companies.

On top of that: few of the privacy / security features in modern browsers are at the rendering or JS runtime level - they often have more to do with defeating cross-domain cookie trackers, execution sandboxes around JS, a whole slew of security headers at the HTTP level, and value-added features like password managers and private browsing sandboxes. IMHO, centralization of the HTML / CSS / JS part is a net win for privacy / security, as it makes it possible to focus efforts on these sorts of features instead of on the fine details of basic rendering and execution.

[1] https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ [2] https://caniuse.com/

That's the good old Pareto principle for you: the last few percent are going to take a lot more effort than the first 95%.

More to the point, this falls into the category of safety-critical systems, with the added wrinkle of potentially being used daily by millions of people. Unlike many domains where software is applied, 80% of the way there doesn't cut it, nor does 95% or 99% or even 99.9%.

(Leaving aside the fact that, for all of us not actively engaged in autonomous vehicle R&D, we likely have absolutely no idea how close we are to success here, or even what all the relevant goalposts would be.)

Exactly.

If we're willing to settle for "as good as a human" in autonomous vehicles, then IMHO all this expertise, R&D, time, effort, money, etc. would be better spent on the public transit and/or active mobility solutions of the near-future.

To put that in context: 1 cubic foot of flour is 37 lbs; of sugar, 50 lbs; of water, 62 lbs.

If you've ever tried to pick up a sack / large bucket of any of these things, it's like that but even denser. Compound that by the usual "volume varies as the cube of a side" thing, and this gets really heavy fast.

Also not affiliated with them, and have been very satisfied so far.

OTOH, I'm in Canada, and I've only used them for personal transfers. I have no idea how they perform for businesses, nor do I know whether they work well for individuals in other countries.