nightsd01

Very few people want to actually defund the police. But try being a black friend of mine, who got thrown out of his car without resisting and beaten so bad he had to go to an ICU, purely because he was driving a car that “matched the description” (that didn’t even match the color) of a crime in the area, and perhaps you can begin to understand why the “other side” is frustrated…

And let me guess. You think these train robberies happen because they defunded the police in their area…?

It seems like you are already analyzing the mistakes you made and will adjust in the future accordingly, so you’re already many steps ahead of many of the less successful engineers I’ve worked with. Many of them will just blame everyone and everything else for poor outcomes rather than accepting responsibility and trying to improve in the future.

My main advice: always under-promise and over-deliver. Managers don’t see code typically, they usually are more focused on deadlines. Be very pessimistic when discussing deadlines. Take your initial estimate and double it to account for potential problems. Be very clear about risks beforehand. And lastly, no one cares if you wrote some chunk of code or if someone under you did, all they care about is knowing who lead the team that delivered it on time. Be that person and you will be successful at almost any company.

Trying to coerce and manipulate expats by threatening family is a time honored tradition of the Chinese communist party unfortunately.

I have found that I have my best (and worst) ideas by changing mental states. For example I’m usually sober so when I’m intoxicated I usually have garbage ideas, but every now and then I think of something truly incredible/useful that I would never have had insight into sober. The same applies to being sleep deprived, it leads me into a different mental headspace where I can think differently than normal (though I try to avoid being sleep deprived cause it’s miserable)

I am a self taught engineer without a CS degree, and I went through Triplebyte at the end of 2017. It was an absolutely incredible experience, and really helped me break into the industry, and I’ll always be grateful to them.

I found an awesome startup to work at. And now, years later, I work at a FAANG company, working on tons of interesting problems. Thank you triplebyte, and good luck with the pivot!

Already exists, I heard about it on NPR the other day (perhaps the idea got implanted into your subconscious) https://mushroomai.ml/#mushroomai

@wittyreference can this ATF4 stress-inducing pathway also lead to problems, perhaps even brain damage over the long term? Some people take suboxone daily (buprenorphine) and I cannot find anything anywhere talking about whether or not it activates the ATF4 pathway

Rolling your own crypto: most definitely a bad idea.

Using existing best security practices AND adding in a few low risk plot twists: genius.

If you are naive enough to believe that the Chinese government sensors foreign internet companies so that they can protect their citizens from “terrorism”, I have a bridge to sell you.....

Let’s be real, the Chinese government only wants to allow internet companies that will allow them to monitor all communication and traffic between Chinese citizens so that they can stamp out any dissent. But dissent and disagreement is not terrorism. It’s both creepy and Orwellian.

The state of California is actually in a pretty decent financial position. In fact, the blue states are net contributors to the federal budget while red states are net negative (they take more resources than they provide back in federal taxes)

If there weren’t any blue states around to sign the red state welfare checks, they’d be in a pretty poor position.

The real problem is when you get to scale. At a company like Facebook or Google, it seems like you end up spending half your time simply looking for similar code that other developers wrote to solve a similar problem so that you can avoid duplication in the codebase. When you have tens of thousands of developers that becomes VERY challenging.

Code duplication is one of the biggest mistakes I made as a new developer. As you became a better engineer, you learn how to simplify and extract common patterns into shared classes/libraries/components to avoid duplication. Code duplication is almost a cardinal sin due to the complexity and bugs that tend to result.

I wonder if you could apply the same homomorphic encryption to ML model training as well, so that you can fully train an algorithm without ever being able to actually “see” the training data.

$4M isn’t that much, even just in one quarter. Look at the oil/gas or health insurance industry if you want to see what a real lobbying bill looks like.

Monopolies are typically considered “bad” because they hurt consumers by jacking up prices when they acquire a dominant market position. How is this happening with Facebook? How is Facebook hurting consumers in a way that could be alleviated by breaking it up into 5 smaller companies?

If you take a look at something like disinformation campaigns, that’s something that big tech companies can handle MUCH better than smaller ones.

And if we did break up FB, network effects will just lead us back to the same situation in a few more years anyways.

Why do you think the right has spent years whining about Google and Facebook’s supposed “left wing bias” with literally no evidence...? If anything the liberals are doing it to counter BS from the right.

Tethics!

I would highly, highly recommend tests. The problem with not writing tests is that you think it will save you time, but instead, it will end up slowing your velocity greatly as your codebase grows and it becomes harder to discover what specific change broke feature X.

You don’t have to write thousands of unit tests. But you should absolutely have a basic test suite with integration tests that give you confidence in a new release. And it will make it easier to hire developers in the future.

A good test suite doesn’t slow you down at all, in fact, it speeds you up by helping you identify problems rapidly so you can fix code before it becomes a real problem.

China’s best tech is mostly just stolen American tech so I can understand why they’d want to focus on US startups.

Cars kill thousands of people a year....in a country of 330 MILLION people? Sorry but the sheer convenience of automobiles greatly outweighs the cost.

This trend to “ban cars” is one of the silliest and dumbest ideas I’ve ever seen. Just because you don’t like cars doesn’t mean they aren’t often the best option for many people. Banning them and pretending they don’t exist doesn’t change that fact.

beefield: a self driving car doesn’t NEED to take up space in a crowded city. It can drive you to work, then you get out, then it can go drive itself to a less crowded area. Then when you’re ready to leave the office it can be there when you’re ready to go.

And I’m sure that everyone who currently uses e-cigarettes in those countries will simply shake their heads and give up the habit. Which history clearly shows is what happens when we ban a substance. Right?

Yeah....

Not only is there vanishingly little “evidence” that e-cigarettes are harmful to health, most of the evidence we do have is for knock-off street THC or cheap Chinese juice. That’s hardly a logical reason to ban e-cigarettes entirely. Especially given the fact that many of these people will go back to smoking real cigarettes.

What if this very article in the NYTimes was enough to get our universe suspended (because of course even The Architects read the NYTimes).

This is hilarious, the NYTimes is the last place I’d expect to read such a metaphysical philosophical piece.

This cat-and-mouse ad blocker game is quite interesting to watch, but it’s also a bit ridiculous.

I can understand blocking terrible ads on some news sites that make them practically unreadable (looking at you extremetech).

But Facebook’s ads aren’t that bad. They’re intentionally unobtrusive. If you don’t want to see them keep scrolling.

It costs money to run these sites, the people who use ad blockers are ruining it for the rest of us because they’re just making the web more complicated than it should be. This post is a perfect example of this.

Maybe you won’t shed a tear if Facebook’s bottom line loses a few dollars when you block their ads. But a lot of smaller publishers absolutely depend on ad revenue.

I hate to say it, but Jesus, this is one of the worst apps I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen bootcamp coders create better apps after just a month in bootcamp. I can’t believe you spent $25K on this, did you use one of those Indian app shops...? It kinda shows.

Isn’t this....kind of what the entire tech community has been PUSHING Facebook to do? Paying you for your data instead of acquiring it through shady means...?

I’m sorry but...it’s not as if they’re using this data to do evil things. They’re trying to target advertisements. Whooptie doo. So evil.

The problem with this argument is that programmers don’t work alone in a vacuum. How do you account for the support staff? The recruiter that hired you? The cleaning lady? The DevOps people? And so on.

It’s avtually fairly non-trivial to be able to say with even a modicum of certainty how much value a given developer brings to their company.

From what I understand, Google isn’t actually giving away people’s data to “hundreds of companies” for advertising purposes.

When an advertiser wants to target a specific group of people, Google doesn’t say “here’s everyone’s private data, good luck”. GOOGLE does the filtering and targeting internally.

I’m sorry but that isn’t evil or bad. Unless we want to start paying for google searches and Facebook, this is how it’s going to be. And personally, I actually like getting ads relevant to my life. For example, I even got my current job based off a highly relevant Facebook ad.

My personal suspicion is that people are just jealous of how much success Google and Facebook have had.

The fact that only one percent of people go on to download a competing browser isn’t Google’s fault.

I’m sorry, but this idea that Google is some evil monopoly because it actually bundles USEFUL software with its OS just isn’t this huge problem.

I don’t even use Android, but I think it’s absolutely ridiculous to expect Google to either leave out critical software from its OS, or to force them to preload competing browsers (inferior for the most part).

That’s a bit extreme. Most of this data gets used for targeted advertising. While that sounds (and sometimes is) shady, it also enables a lot of niche companies that had a much harder time existing before.

For example, what’s the point in showing ads for custom quadcopter parts to an 80 year old grandmother who doesn’t know what a quadcopter is?

Data should be regulated and protected much more than it currently is. But the idea of banning it entirely would have a lot of negative effects. Let’s be smarter than that.

Am I the only person who is getting annoyed at these increasingly hysterical articles shrieking about Facebook’s supposedly deceptive practices?

Because for christs’ sake, Facebook is one of the most OPEN and transparent tech companies around when it comes to data privacy. Many companies out there are far shadier when it comes to this stuff.

Let’s face it, no one wants to pay for Facebook. Personal data for advertising is pretty much the only way Facebook can exist.