mikebenfield

Also a ton of important software was written as a giant mess of spaghetti code, or with horrible security vulnerabilities.

The items you list may not be as universal in software development as you seem to think they are. There are plenty of highly competent programmers who haven’t thought about designing a database schema in many years, or who have never deployed code to a cloud environment (at least not in the way you have in mind).

Having a set of common knowledge to interview about is in fact very useful.

> People cheat at sports all the time and people just sort of accept it.

In pro bodybuilding, steroids are nominally illegal, but essentially every pro bodybuilder uses them, the physique necessary to be competitive in pro contests is not achievable without them, and the people running bodybuilding shows deliberately make no effort to enforce this rule.

In that kind of context it's hard for me to say the "cheaters" are doing anything wrong in any practical sense. Nobody involved actually believes in the rule they're breaking.

I think cheaters in other arenas can rationalize away to themselves that their context is equivalent to the bodybuilding context I described above.

> Many places have out of date documentation — you should correct or update that information as you go through your first few months.

Expecting the newest member to update the docs seems to be pretty common but has always struck me as pathological. The person with the worst understanding and least perspective is the one who's expected to teach it to others.

Granted I've only spent about 6 months of my life living in SF, but I did a decent amount of walking around and never saw human feces.

Obviously there is some level of demand to live in SF, and that's part of the explanation for the high cost of living.

But the factor really driving up rent and real estate prices is the massive resistance in SF and the Bay Area in general to building new housing.

While I do think it would be nice to compare using a program that is slightly less trivial, it's actually useful to see for how many languages the "Hello world" program requires a lot of extra ceremony. Look how verbose the Java program is for instance. I do think this says something about the priorities of the language designers.

The reason there's a housing shortage is that almost all US cities have insanely terrible urban planning and zoning policies. There's no guarantee this will continue forever. In fact, I see quite a bit of evidence that Americans are gradually waking up to the fact it's possible to have decent, livable cities if you don't do everything completely backwards.

So, for instance, I think it's actually possible (not guaranteed) a substantial amount of housing will be built in the Bay Area in the next 10 years, which will decrease the willingness of people to pay $2M for a generic small house in a suburb.

I disagree. If copyright exists, its term shouldn't be tied to anyone's life at all.

Let's say I produce a copyrighted work, and immediately sell the rights to that work to you. Why should the value of your purchase depend on how long I live? Should the work produced by a 20 year old be more valuable than the work produced by a 70 year old because the 20 year old is less likely to drop dead and end their work's copyright?

I've always been fascinated by this phenomenon, which one can also see in the Lua and Python communities: Use a language whose natural implementation is extremely slow, and then invest enormous amounts of time and effort to make it fast. Why not just use a language whose natural implementation is already pretty fast? While I understand the value of some dynamic language features, many of the features of dynamic languages that are hardest to make fast are undesirable in any code base larger than a 50 line script anyway.

> he says never invest in tech, never ever.

He's repeatedly explained that he doesn't invest in tech (well, until recently) because he doesn't understand it will enough, but has he ever told others not to invest in tech?

There is indeed a lot of good content on TikTok. And it's eerily good at showing me things I'm interested in, in a way other social media sites utterly fail at.

But (not having deliberately tried to "train" TikTok), it also shows me plenty of content I find depressing or juvenile. And I am firmly convinced that the experience of continuous scrolling through very short videos damages my brain and attention span much more than watching a traditional TV show or movie.

I don't know if I can relate.

Was the industry really "almost entirely" autodidacts 10 years ago? Were CS graduates "nerds" in a way that autodidacts weren't?

It's still very possible to get into tech without a traditional CS education, and it's not clear why it seems hopeless to you to compete against someone with a degree -- ACAICT most interviewers don't even look at candidates' resumes.

The comment you were responding to only mentioned race by quoting someone else, and I’m pretty confident that was beside the point they were making. I thought it was silly to bring race into it initially too, but I didn’t have anything substantial to say in response to the other commenter so I didn’t mention it.

I stand by what I said.

I've lived in a few urban environments in the US, and it's actually my preferred lifestyle and someday I'll hopefully live like that again.

However, yeah, the neighborhoods in US downtowns where I've lived do not feel safe, despite staying in fairly high end accommodations. Crazy people walking around screaming, fighting, harassing people, banging on cars, using drugs laying in the middle of the sidewalk. I would never recommend that a woman, for instance, live in those locations. It's absolutely ridiculous, and it's even more ridiculous for you to try to cast it as a racial issue.

Sorry, could you clarify? What specifically is the red flag?

This is so obviously false that I'm always amazed there are people who actually believe this.

In _every_ activity I've ever participated in where I can observe many people's performance and progression - including powerlifting, bodybuilding, various ball sports, mathematics, chess, theoretical CS, software engineering, etc - it is transparently obvious that people's natural abilities vary dramatically.

Although it's not the most common scenario (training and experience do matter), I have seen many situations where someone with, say, 6 months' haphazard and lazy experience will absolutely crush the performance of someone with 3 years of serious and dedicated training.

Talent is real.

This seems like a pretty extreme point of view. Not that ageism doesn't exist... but I entered the tech industry at age 38 and have gotten offers from two FAANG companies. I do think I'm a good programmer (obviously if you suck you'll have trouble getting a FAANG offer) but not God's gift.

Even when they are, that doesn't mean the people electing them have equal power. The 40,000,000 people of California elect two senators. The 500,000 people of Wyoming also elect two senators. A person in Wyoming literally has 80 times as much influence over the Senate as a person in California.

And even in the House, where at least some effort is made to scale the number of representatives by population, California has only 53 representatives to Wyoming's 1, which still means each Wyoming resident has 1.5 times as much influence over the House as each California resident.

The process you're describing in this comment is exactly the outdated approach people are saying they don't want to do.

> We should abolish software patents.

Maybe so.

> Reason software builds on Mathematics and you cannot patent Mathematics.

This is not a convincing reason. All engineering builds on mathematics; this is not specific to software.

> the location of the stop sign defines a line perpendicular to your lane and you're supposed to stop completely before this imaginary line. Almost no one knows this is the law.

I am inclined not to believe this. I have been told by a traffic cop before that if there is no marked stop line or crosswalk, there is no legally defined point where the stop must happen: it's just a "use reasonable judgment" kind of thing.

That was in NC. The following is apparently a quote from a statute in Washington State that contradicts your statement:

“every driver of a vehicle approaching a stop sign shall stop at a clearly marked stop line, but if none, before entering a marked crosswalk on the near side of the intersection or, if none, then at the point nearest the intersecting roadway where the driver has a view of approaching traffic on the intersecting roadway.”

Can you point to a statute somewhere supporting your claim?

I think the point is that Youtube expects to make money off that video. If Youtube could not make money from people's content, it wouldn't exist.

FWIW, at least in mathematics "obvious" doesn't mean "you're an idiot if you don't instantly understand this." It means, "this isn't deep. If you're thinking about really deep, complicated things beyond what we've been talking about, you're missing the point."

I have on multiple occasions sat down and worked with another mathematician on a problem for an hour+, only for us to find the solution and both conclude that the answer was "obvious."

> invariant to class imbalances

I think this is a red herring that comes from not thinking probabilistically. If the distribution of your training data does not resemble the distribution of your real-world data (or cannot be made to resemble it), you're just guessing anyway. If it does resemble the real distribution, then you want those class imbalances. In fact, I tend to think that the fact that ROC is "invariant to class imbalances" is a significant downside: it means in some sense your score is just as sensitive to things that rarely happen as it is to things that happen all the time.

> "probability of choosing a positive sample over a negative one"

I find the practical implications of this pretty opaque, and it's never been clear to me whether this is measuring anything I actually care about. As far as I know there aren't theoretical guarantees that a better AUC score means anything real. I haven't thought deeply about it, but I am reasonably sure I could find some simple examples illustrating how to "cheat" AUC by getting a higher score with predictions that are worse in any practical sense.

I still like the Brier score: just give me a number indicating how well my estimated probability predictions do on a test/validation set. There are even theoretical guarantees about it, because it's a proper score function.

If you really don't know the loss function and are not willing to guess at it, classification is hopeless. If you estimate there's a 70% chance that instance A belongs to category X, there is literally no way to decide whether to classify instance A as X or not.

Anyway, the point of Brier score is that it evaluates your probability estimation (without the loss function), so this is no objection.

Well, I'm definitely aware of what mainstream programming langauges look like. But I think the popularity of a language is only loosely related to its technical attributes.

Well, mathematical notation is written for humans, not computers. With a bit of context, and comparing to human language (not code), it is very much not ambiguous.

> J is even worse. I stared at the J code for a full minute without any comprehension of the language syntax or what was being accomplished. That code isn't readable or maintainable. It is bad code.

But why does code need to be readable to someone who doesn't know the language? Yes, it's true that Python and some other languages are pretty readable even to people who haven't written any of that language, and that is a nice feature in many contexts... nevertheless, if I'm hiring a Python programmer, I'm either going to hire someone with experience in Python, or I'm going to accept that they're not going to hit the ground running and be massively productive right out of the gate... so how is it really such a loss to write in J and accept that non-J programmers won't understand my code?

> aren't particularly fond of deciphering complicated math equations?

But it's not complicated. One of the great things about mathematical expressions is that they are simple. But two of the other great things are that they are concise and unambiguous, and it's those two that unfortunately lead many students to think they are complicated.