marktangotango

I think that requires a level of competence that Musk has failed to display in the past. Shotwell told an interesting story once, in response to a question like "what's it like to work for Elon?" She related an occasion when she got frantic calls from a meeting Musk was in. In the meeting he had decided to cancel Falcon Heavy to meet a schedule for something else. Shotwell went in and reminded everyone (Elon) they had customers who had already paid for Falcon Heavy and cancelling it wasn't an option and to find another solution. Elon responded like "oh yeah, ok well...."

Then there was BTC to purchase Tesla cars, then there was Doge. The point being I think these types of things indicate Musk, like a lot of smart people can be really, really dumb sometimes. Also a bit Hanlons Razor.

I'd counter that for a definition of "merit" like "performs the duties of ones job exceptionally well", it's always a fallacy. I note that this definition of "merit" is what nearly all corporations consider when evaluating performance of employees and granting annual "merit increases".

In nearly all cases, merely performing ones work well, will not gain the employee anything but more work. Sometimes there are promotions or meaningful raises, but this is the exception, not the norm. It is not in a businesses interest to pay employees more than absolutely necessary. It's a true-ism in software development that to see meaningful increases in salary one must "job hop". This reality has given rise to aphorisms such as "I pretend to work they pretend to pay me" and Johnsons "Who Moved my Cheese?".

Of course merit can be hard to define, but if it's defined in a way other than performing a job well, well that's something else isn't it?

This resonates with me, in my experience I think there's a fallacy in believing the world is a meritocracy when it's not. I also noticed a lot of patterns at different companies over the years. Venkatesh Rao writes about these pattern nicely, he calls it the Gervais Principle. If you can bear it, it's worth a read.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

Thank you. This is precisely my point.

> the companies who simply collected too many under performing employees can afford to churn some of them back out of the company. Doing it as a "layoff" makes it more palatable than going on a firing spree.

Seems to me this implies that companies that do this, have found a way effectively measure performance and productivity. I don't think OP intends to say this, it is pretty much impossible to measure productivity of individual developers. I mean those on the team know who is or isn't contributing from day to day, but among teams and over time it is much more difficult. If someone has figured this out they should be a $billionaire by now.

I'd go further and counter that this is completely bogus claim, and yes, no one hiring should view a candidate being laid off as being related to anything performance or desirability of the candidate.

In my experience, layoffs are merely a popularity contest.

> My elder brother is mentally challenged due to lack of oxygen when he was born.

My wife had a great uncle who was similarly afflicted; at home child birth, this sort of brain damage was not uncommon in the early part of the last century. He was non verbal, he communicated in grunts and gestures. When I knew him his family had all passed away. My mother in law, his niece was his guardian.

He lived in an assisted living facility for the 30+ years before he died a few years ago. My wife made a point of our family visiting him for the holidays. We were often the only visitors he'd have for the entire year. Then his health took a turn and my wife became more involved. We visited him one final time when he was in hospice and near death. Seeing that poor shell of a man in obvious pain was the saddest, most pitiful thing I have ever seen. It broke my heart to see what had become of his life, and how his parents would have Grieved to see what became of him.

Dear internet stranger, I hope you're able to cherish the time you have with your brother.

> how much energy bitcoin spends daily on a continuous massively distributed partial preimage attack on SHA-256.

I would not be concerned about this. The way the asics operate is they discard the results. Also, the hashes are random strings which don't compress very well, so storing trillions upon trillions of them (for later analysis) is not practical.

Lol read the responses here, you're kidding yourself.

It's a pitiful state of affairs isn't it?

Take home test as the first step in an interview process is the ultimate evil in this. I've spent hours then got ghosted. I will never do it again. This is a "run like hell" signal imo.

> 11:00 PM sleep until 6:30 the next day

Dude, if your wife is getting up multiple times a night, you really ought to consider stepping in and helping out. True males can't do the feeding, but if there is anyway you can help out with this, I guarantee your wife will be grateful. If your kids sleep then ignore this, but sleep deprivation is hell (to most people). My wife and I both worked and we slept in 4 hour shifts, then when they slept more, we went to night on then night off. Saved our marriage.

Wow, I just read a rant on a site that hosts static websites, damn I miss that! Sounds like this person needs to snake his sewer line.

I've been hoping a runtime would arise for this use case explicitly, and v8 is close. But the solution has to have multitenancy, limiting of memory and cpu, and security baked in from the beginning. The lua runtime seems promising, but again, not designed for that.

> Total storage size: 663 TB available, 515 TB used

I was interested to see how they're storing the result (100T digits), it's not clear if this if memory for the result or for the algorithm. I'd be interested to hear what the encoding is; a byte/char per digit, or a nibble?

I read this as confirmation that "hardware is hard". Ie most of these premade SBCs have issues of this sort. The exception being the raspberry pi's generally. The alternative is designing and laying out the PCB yourself and with DDR3/4, that's a huge job (my understanding at least I've never done it myself).

I thought it was very innovative that my kids started "writing" in kindergarten using whatever phonetic spelling they could come up with. Interesting to see these children were doing the same thing long ago. Encouraging children to write this way must be more common than I thought, I don't recall doing it when I was a child.

> Houston, we have a problem

A lot of people comment on this, but it succinctly relays the severity, in that the the pilot is alive, and the radio works.

Very normal and expected actually:

> I joined one year into the business and have been there for the last three years. I took on a lot of responsibility early on because I was excited and I learned a lot. I worked on tasks that had a direct impact on revenue.

This is usually paired with "I used to be integral to the company, now they've hired a lot more developers, PMs, and qa, I used to have a lot of impact, now I have none". Ie the early employee role is diminished as the start up grows.

This can be a good time to grow with the company by moving into a development adjacent role, like sales engineer, PM, management etc. Or take your experience and move on.

There was also a lot of work in this area in the 90s leading up to the y2k (non)event. Mostly back then it revolved around cobol, which was understandable given y2k impact was in many cases related to legacy cobol systems. A lot of architecture visualization and recovering business requirements from code. I did some work on diagramming mainframe JCL files for example.

Presumably this is a solid core design and since these would never fly in the atmosphere anyway, I've always thought that going all in on nuclear salt water engines would be the way to go [1]. These things are so high performance, I bet even a small/micro one could enable tic tac levels of performance, buts that just a guess.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_salt-water_rocket

After the MVP is found, then the real work begins in building a company. We all understand that if everything is a priority, then nothing is, but often times, business resources don't. Support wants bugs fixed to keep customers happy and to re-sign. Sales whats features to land their whales. Engineering wants to work off tech debt, refine, and innovate. Etc.. I've found that a formal "Intake" process works wonders. Engineering needs an advocate to take these disparate priorities and refine what, when and how to address. It's really that simple, and that complex. Finding someone to own it. Sometimes it's impossible depending on the Org and personalities involved.

Nice write up, very informative, thanks for taking the time and sharing. There are a lot of these sbc's around nowadays, I've always been hesitant to explore them, for exactly the reasons here (huge learning curve).

Lol, as if this would happen: "Hey aren't you that bloodyplonker who told a story about doing something dishonest on a public forum?" "No way I'd hire you!"

Like is the story even true? How would anyone connect the real person to this post? Is anyone even reading this?

Genuinely curious about anyones thoughts here.

Interesting comment. Personally I would say this hasn't been entrepreneurial community for a few years now. Mainly because a lot of people figured out it's easier to go make $X00,000 at Big Tech Co. than to take on the risk of a startup. Secondly the "market place" of ideas is pretty heavily saturated nowadays (imo), seems like unicorns are becoming less common, and the domains a lot harder where there are.

And when you do work at Big Co, there's a whole lot of Dilbert-esque stuff like this. Hence the prevalence of this type of material.

Ask the military planners of the world how exciting drones are. That one little device being dismissed so casually has changed warfare, for all time.

> The object, a small meteorite measuring just 1.5 feet (0.45 meter) across, slammed into Earth's atmosphere on Jan. 8, 2014, after traveling through space at more than 130,000 mph (210,000 km/h)

Can anyone say what percentage of the speed of light that is?

Propaganda aside, there's a lot to talk about technology related with the current conflict. Warfare is changing before our eyes. Does anyone now of where this topic is being discussed at a high level (ie hackernews level of discussion)?

> Once I understood the basic guiding principles of how AI actually works

It was the opposite for me, current machine learning seems fundamentally limited to me.

In this talk Vernor Vinge talks about progress toward the singularity, and events that may indicate it isn't/won't/may never happen "What If the Singularity Does NOT Happen?":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_luhhBkmVQs

I believe the significance or relevance of the "weather topic" depends on location. There are some places where the weather never really changes, and is indeed unremarkable, like southern California. But some regions can have drastic changes in weather, and some places the weather can kill. For example in the midwest US the weather can go from blizzard conditions to sunny and warm in 24 hours or a strong storm can destroy crops and ruin livelyhoods for thousands of farms. In tornado alley a "pop up" severe thunderstorm can throw off tornadoes and level towns. As someone who's lost family members to tornadoes, the weather is a topic I'm interested in.