cwp

Rust has a static garbage collector.

Next we'll see articles talking about how we've overestimated the centrality of New York for "money jobs".

Yes, it was. I took a 15% cut. It's still a financial win, given the lower cost of living, lower taxes, and cheaper real estate. I'm finally able to buy a house.

Yup. I moved to SF because that's where the good jobs were. Now I can leave and keep my good job. Huzzah!

Well, they are also working on helping the black-footed ferret recover and they started on that project before doing mammoths, so maybe cut them some slack?

Sloths are a tough one. No preserved DNA, and no closely related surviving species.

We did manage to wipe them out once.

Sigh. It was a work of fiction.

It's the precautionary principle that's irrational. The status quo isn't inherently desirable. It's not true that "know one knows what would happen." We don't know everything that would happen, but we do know a lot. We also know what is happening now, with an important ecological niche unfilled.

Humans have historically had enormous effects on the planet, in all sorts of dimensions. At this point there's no avoiding it, but we can be more thoughtful and deliberate in how we manage our environment.

The case I'm thinking of is informal. The pharmacist keeps a blister pack of pills behind the counter and will tear off as many as you want and sell them individually. The unit price is probably higher, but not exorbitant. It's probably against the rules, but the pharmacist deals with poor people all the time, and he isn't trying to gouge them.

And I think it's the perfect example. What good is a better unit price if you can't afford to buy in bulk anyway? If you're poor and you have a headache it's better to pay 25¢ for two aspirin than $10 for 100. Part of being poor is steeply discounting the future. The other 98 aspirin might take care of headaches for the next two years, but a lot can go wrong in in that time, and that $9.75 is money you need today.

I noticed this after spending time in developing countries. They are set up much better for being poor. Trivial example: you can go into a pharmacy and buy two aspirin. Some people can't afford 100 at a time, and don't need that many anyway.

Or rent: you can get a place to live for only $60/month. There's no running water, but it's clean and dry and it has a lock on the door. The cheapest place you can find in the US is a lot nicer, but also much more expensive.

Buses have no route maps, no shelters and no doors. They might not come to a complete stop when they pick you up. But you can ride for 25¢.

The US has a kind of minimum standard of living, but it comes with a minimum cost of living. If you can't afford that, you end up with nothing.

That's true, but the transport layer has ossified, and the application layer is the only place we can still innovate. RIP SCTP.

Yes! Revive and Restore (mentioned in the article) has also done some preliminary work on reviving mammoths, and the plan is to use Asian elephants as surrogate mothers.

This would be pretty different from the ferret project, as the mammoth DNA available isn't in good shape. It would require genetic engineering as well as cloning, and mostly consist of introducing mammoth DNA into Asian elephants a few genes at a time.

Resumable exceptions - ie, exceptions that don't unwind the stack when they are thrown - do let you examine the problem in situ.

Yeah, good point. The reason NPM can have packages like left-pad is that it works so well. It's easy to publish a package, it's easy to find one, it's easy to install and use a package. So sure, why NOT make a package for one function that you use all over the place?

There's a downside to all this, but ultimately it's to NPM's credit: the tools are so easy to use that people... use them.

It's not your imagination. Python tooling is awful.

If I may be forgiven a bit of preaching, I'll point out that the fundamental problem with the Python ecosystem is that package definitions are executable python code. This means they have their own dependencies, and are subject to all the pitfalls of general purpose programs - the halting problem, non-determinism etc. The Python community keeps trying to fix this by writing a better installer, and it's never going to work.

NPM and Cargo, with their declarative package definitions, are built on a far more stable base!

What a great headline. Almost British.

Ignorant? Not at all.

These cities DO make it hard to build new housing. There's no question about that. It's an ongoing political issue, and all the reasons listed have been used to attack or defend that policy.

This sounds more like a wishlist of features that elite Apple developers want, than what Apple is likely to do.

Dunno about research, but I've worked in a few SV startups that organized development with Jira and had high autonomy for engineers. Some of the features of those teams:

1. Most tickets are opened by engineers themselves, and don't contain detailed specifications, but just notes to provide context.

2. The purpose of the ticket is to provide something to link to, and a place to put information as it emerges. So commits and PRs usually link to a ticket, as do engineering and product management planning documents, reports etc. Some tickets are terse and quickly closed, others could develop a long history, with status changes, links to other tickets and documents, ownership by different engineers over time etc.

3. We organize development into sprints, but a Scrum master would be disgusted by our process. Sprints are just short-terms planning horizons; we ship as soon as the code is ready and close tickets when the code is in production. The purpose of a sprint is to batch up all the low-level planning and prioritization so most of the time we're focused on execution.

4. High-level planning is all in GDocs, spreadsheets and Photoshop/Figma. Product management doesn't create tickets unless they are reporting a bug, and even that was pretty rare. Engineering management gets a lot of information about what's going on by observing Jira; this reduces the need for meetings to communicate status. (Doesn't eliminate meetings, of course, but it does seem to make them more interesting.)

Basically, it boils down to, you have to keep status somewhere, and Jira does that pretty well.

My company does this too, for the same reason. (Not using Stripe though.)

I would distinguish between growth-at-all-costs and a scalable business. Both are startups, but VCs only invest in the former. Jetbrains is a good example of the latter.

Not that important, at least in the SV-centred tech world. I have a journalism degree, and I don't think it's ever been a problem. I've also been a hiring manager, and on hiring committees and never really paid much attention to it. Degrees matter in data science but not software engineering.

Interesting. That's not a vaccine anymore that's a strain of SARS-CoV-2 that's never produces symptoms, but is still similar enough to the original to prime the immune system. Presumably it would out compete the original in a Darwinian sense, because people who caught it would never get sick and stay home.

Risky, though, because if it turns out to be less benign than we thought - or mutates in such a way as to become lethal - we've just started a second pandemic.

Ok, this is fascinating. Even beyond escaping my own echo chamber, it's really neat to escape other echo chambers.

Let's escape the woke bubble:

  1. How to Be an Antiracist 
  2. White Fagility 
  3. Between the World and Me

The books it recommends are pretty diverse - Maya Angelou to Peter Drucker to Plato.

Or how about the Trump bubble:

  1. Time to Get Tough 
  2. Righteous Indignation 
  3. Going Rogue

Lots of religion here. What if we escape atheism?

  1. Letter to a Christian Nation 
  2. God is Not Great 
  3. The God Delusion

Hmm. Not so much religion here... but we got Aldous Huxley, Bruce Li and Richard Feynmann.

I think... I've got a lot of reading to do. I LOVE this tool.

Hmm. No, just my ISP's DNS resolver. I guess they don't support EDNS either...

Can't resolve that domain name.

My point was not that nobody ever does unnecessary work. That does happen, obviously, and we can certainly object to it.

In the case of rewriting an application feature for feature in another language, that may or may not be a good idea. Maybe we're switching from an interpreted language to a compiled language because we need better performance. Maybe we're replacing a huge pile of impenetrable bash with a well organized Python app. Maybe we're taking advantage of a library that's only available in another language. Maybe there's a good reason for the rewrite but it's so much work that it's still not worth it. Maybe it's just a engineers wanting to use the latest toys because it'll look good on their resumes.

It's totally legit to question the need for a given project. But the phrase "reinvent the wheel" is just scornful insult. It adds nothing to the discussion, and in fact makes it harder to discuss trade-offs.

I really hate that expression. Nobody EVER reinvents the wheel. We all know about wheels, and how they work and why they are useful. But we invent new types of wheels all the time. Maybe we put teeth on it and invent the cog. Maybe we invent the tire to improve traction and reduce bumps. Maybe we put spokes between the hub and the rim and to reduce rotating weight. These are all new and useful inventions despite still being wheels.

Sometimes an existing wheel design is perfect for our use case, or at least good enough that creating a new one isn't worth the effort. Sometimes a tweaked wheel is what we need. Sometimes a radical departure from established wheel design is required to make a new machine possible.

Build vs buy is an eternal question, and it's reasonable to examine and reexamine it for any project. But "reinvent the wheel" is just hyperbole.

OTOH, telling an entire industry to reorganize to accommodate your internal processes is also a fools errand. Just imagine the dilemma this puts on the growth team: "Hmm, spend 1000x effort to land this one customer or fix an obscure bug in the signup page and get an extra 1000 self-serve customers this month. Golly, I don't know..."