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The game looks similar to Rocket Bunnies (which I think might not be available anymore or isn't maintained since the developer has closed shop): https://youtu.be/m0fuRys9plo

Will check yours out.

Will this make Rust's type system dependently typed like Agda or Idris?

How did things change?

> It was estimated that the water would reach us in about 30 minutes. We continued with our breakfast, unaware of the seriousness of what was coming our way. Then, without warning, the water hit us.

Without warning, you say?

I guess they meant without any immediate tangible evidence that water is actually going to hit them, but there definitely was a warning.

Is it common to get false alarms or to wait it out and see when getting informed of a flood? At face value it just seems reckless, but I don't know enough about cave exploring to judge.

My own interest comes from nostalgia mostly. Many old games looked better using a voxel engine than contemporary polygon based ones. Though, of course I later realized in fact there weren't any real voxel engines in the sense of what I wanted them to be. I think Voxlap really was the first time we saw one.

Why the appeal now? Voxels are a simpler model for describing the world and adding granular detail, at least at first sight. Ultimately you still have to model bending, physics, animation, free rotation, etc. which is AFAIK more complicated than for polygon based 3D data. Essentially a voxel object still needs to have a secondary parametric representation to describe things like elasticity or connectivity, etc. (not sure how it's done), though I assume the techniques are not too far off from skeletal animation etc. in traditional engines (which also use such a simpler representation overlayed on / inside the mesh.

But I think that leads to the second appeal: Trying to squeeze out a few more polygons per second or a specific little effect on the fundamental technique level in traditional 3D engines is pretty hard but only gives you so much in return. I can understand how something you can approach with a fresh set of eyes, with fewer established working solutions, is appealing in itself. There's (seemingly) more to discover, more to invent.

What do you mean by drop-shippers and what do they do that's risky/bad?

Looking for drop shipping on Google leads me to pages e.g. by Shopify or Square explaining it's a model to run retail where the store doesn't hold stock or fulfill but instead has a distributor / manufacturer fullfil the transaction, shipping directly from them to the customer.

A lot of the user interfaces we use today are "better" than what we had in the old days. The old generic windows and buttons and whatnot don't work on a finger touch input. Switching apps via gestures, visual cues by animation, use of space, effects to bring things in and out of focus, a lot of things have been refined and evolved over the years.

Yes, things are not perfect but claiming that designers are making everything difficult while programmers would have just made everything better albeit not as pretty looking is really not a fair assessment. I mean, preference and general nostalgia, I get it, but it's a bit much.

Getting raw access to your data also wasn't a breeze in the past with program often having their own binary formats and not exposing any programmatic interface at all to get data in or out. Not sure how this relates to the cloud.

I disagree. A product might be visually appealing, serve hundreds of functions, be inexpensive, be sturdy, etc.

These are all things that affect whether a product could be perceived as good vs. bad.

Importantly, intuitiveness is not relevant for some products, or not what makes it good or bad. The tradeoffs between other aspects of your product could be such that trying to achieve intuitiveness would actively reduce value.

Identifying intuitiveness as something you can optimize for or not is not pointless. I'd also argue that intuitiveness can be measured and strategies for more intuitive designs/patterns can be formed.

Thanks a lot for the context. I have to say I didn't really have a hard time understanding him. I didn't even consider the possibility that it was a speech impediment.

Thanks a lot. I wasn't aware of this speech impediment and how it causes the vaguely British at times.

This is completely off topic but what accent is the narrator speaking?

He pronounces "research" as "resorch"/"resauch", "greater" as "greator" etc. and in other regards it seems to flip between American to slightly British English.

Never heard this accent before.

Yeah, I'd argue that this hasn't changed during/due to the pandemic.

Gravitating towards people you know happened already even in an in-person setting.

The difference is lack of opportunities outside of core work to engage with others and getting to know them, i.e. there are fewer and less diverse forcing functions. In the past it was getting lunch together a few times, now maybe the only forcing function is your manager assigning you to work or as a mentor, etc. Which is not as effective IMO to build healthy same-level relationships.

What are specific actions to address these problems the manager could have done?

This is all correct but the places I've worked at all had the same problems already:

> Maybe you won't get on with your new manager

Manager turnaround (one per year) because they leave or get promoted is pretty common. In fact the better the manager the quicker they seem to move on to some other team or higher up that has more potential for impact.

> or team-mates

Engineers don't have that much influence on hiring decisions. And even then, it sometimes turns out they may need more hand holding than expected or maybe that you don't get along on a personal level. So the risk is here even if you stay at a company.

> Maybe the codebase is a tech-debt spaghetti nightmare.

Let's be honest, it almost always is like that even where one works right now. But I agree it can be worse than what you are dealing with at the moment.

I think the difference is in attitude to address the issue as well. This is indeed really hard to assess ahead of time. In my last job I thought we had a good attitude towards recognizing tech debt for the first few months, then realized it's not the case and all plans to address it soon appeared to be just empty talk.

> You can't carry over the reputation and clout

Yeah, definitely. Unless you have built a public reputation in the industry.

In the general case you will indeed have to build new reputation in the new place. But often that's also an opportunity for those who failed to succeed at that in their current environment. So it's only a risk if you have something to hold on to.

I believe the risks of moving jobs are likely outweighed by the higher pay check and experience to gain in the new place. A few companies even allow you to come back (given available headcount) if you actually are someone with clout and a record of high impact work. So the risk for those folks is likely not that significant.

I think the bottom line is still that folks don't leave "just for the money". There needs to be some promise of the new job providing something you are not getting now. For successful long timers it's often just "got bored with being in the same place".

The risk of not getting experience at some places is also not to be ignored. It's a balance of course but if you have a few 3 year stints at good companies with some tangible output wrt impact to talk about it's usually better than spending 12 years at one place. Eventually you might end up having to move, and then you'll not have as much salary to expect (or the confidence to ask for it) compared to those who played the job change game.

FYI, that's not what "kindred spirit" means.

Sure, that's what you'd attempt to address errors, but that still doesn't convince me. That only gets you so far. My intuition says that you won't be able to distill any meaningful results in practice across long distances and requests being routed to different backend servers under varying load. You are trying to isolate a very specific duration in the order of microseconds.

Of course, I'm not in the field and am happy to learn more. However, my intuition also tells me we should have seen more realistic experiments and results over the years to get a clear picture of the extent at which such an attack is actually feasible and when it seizes to be.

But in the "real world" wouldn't any such time difference be very small and fluctuations in network delay and measurement error so large in comparison that this isn't typically exploitable?

Sure, better be safe and use a safe comparison method and that's simple enough, but still, how realistic is such an attack over the public internet?

I'm aware of "practical" results: http://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/papers/ssl-timing.pdf

But the experiment setup was on a LAN, with AFAICT a single server, no other traffic to that server, and other such conditions.

Good, that "solves" the problem for all the tall folks. Nobody can recline, and by definition everyone has "leg space".

> Fast forward to an hour or so later, and I see the same family at one of the coasters, standing in line while I walk right ahead and past them to the front. I start to think -- geez, is this sending the right message to this family, that those with more can just zoom ahead?

I think it's great that you are worrying about this and that you ended up giving them your pass later.

OTOH, there's no end to these thoughts. Some families cannot even afford a park visit. Other families might have time but no money for a FastPass. Why is your ability and willingness to pay for the pass an issue by default? That family might go to Disney every year, save up and enjoy the experience. You took a limited opportunity to go and hop on rides, you might have not done without the FastPass system.

> I do tend to think though that with a little empathy for everyone else, you'll do pretty well.

Another family could have used the FastPass more, could have swapped an airplane seat etc.

Ultimately your empathy cannot fix things / make the best possible choice, but yes, it's still preferable to not taking the opportunity to be considerate. And it will make you feel better as well. Win/win.

Though, in the end, it doesn't mean we shouldn't look to improve policy / systems to address these issues of imbalance.

Yeah, that's why the parent comment says they are doing the opposite from the article.

I would think G Suite is pretty successful.

I always wondered, doesn't that require the clocks to be synchronized?

Like, what happens if I set my phone to a different time?

What if the server has lost connectivity to an NTP service and its clock is a few minutes off?

Now they'd have an incentive to let them go in under a quarter, by that logic.

Not sure if that's really their concern here. Companies don't just ditch reasonably well performing employees because they want to avoid compensating them. That would already mean that each time RSUs vest the company would have an incentive to fire.

I don't really have the necessary background in physics so maybe that's it but this article just doesn't seem to get the point across very well.

> Two advances would be crucial to solving Maxwell’s demon.

At this point in the article there had been a description of what Maxwell's demon is as: "Imagine that this nonexistent thing does X and has this outcome", however it's utterly unclear what the question is that needs to be solved. Whether such a system can exist? Whether two rooms with more order would violate some law and why? No idea. Can't I have two insulated rooms if some magical creature teleported certain particles magically from one room to the next? I saw other comments about the pointlessness of the thought experiment, but that's not my gripe. But there must be an explanation of why it really matters and what is to be "solved" here when the word "solve" is used.

I have the same problem with other thought experiments or rather their dumbed down description, e.g. Schrödinger's cat. They focus too much on the quirky scenario and superficial outcome ("oh, that would mean ...") but not on what specific questions it raised in the end and what the exact follow-ups were. And most importantly they leave out very crucial details. For instance, I think one important piece to Maxwell's demon (from Wikipedia) is that the demon doesn't do "work".

Do you really think that's the only thing that changed in the world in that period?

I agree that smartphones could play a role and they are easy to point to as a new way to consume media (Was there a similar rise in depression when TVs were becoming common? When newspapers or tabloids became common?), but since the early 00s a lot went for the worse in terms of future outlook and expectations on what a happy life is or can be, not to forget wars, and economic depression, which all would maybe not immediately have an effect on mental depression statistics and slowly caused a rise from 2008.

But let's say it was the smartphone, then I'd still argue that the emergence of the smartphone (and the iPad) as a whole is likely more at fault than Facebook itself. Many many more people started to spend time looking at small screens doing all kinds of things as a distraction, including people who never had a computer or played games or browsed the web before for leisure.

I'm sure Facebook and Instagram were factors as common places where that time is spent, but there's also so much more than social media, for instance the fact that people are more connected in general via chat Apps and chat groups, where they also share photos or have discussions, though it's not really falling under the "social media" umbrella.

I sometimes spend hours after work browsing HN and reading articles about tech, trying to keep up with new frameworks or concepts. Seeing everyone understanding stuff in comments is sometimes very depressing as I feel under pressure to match up to what others seem to grok so easily.

So, it can be quite the same as Instagram. The comments on HN are often similar in nature to the Instagram posts in that they only show people at their best, in the sense that they generally wouldn't post if they didn't have something smart to add. But there are so many folks in tech that don't necessarily understand everything.

I am exaggerating a bit here for the sake of argument. There is certainly a difference, but the core reason is often identified as comparing yourself with unrealistic representations of what life, abilities, looks, etc. of others is like. And that can happen in any forum.

> There’s a reason my copy of “JavaScript: The Good Parts” is extremely slim next to its sibling, “JavaScript: The Definitive Guide”.

The reason is that these two books don't fulfill the same goal. The Good Parts is a rather short walk through the language and reads more like a "get started quickly" guide. The other goes into much more detail. That doesn't mean the latter's size os due to it covering all the bad stuff whereas the former doesn't. It's just a clever title but it's an apples and oranges comparison and I'd suggest not using it as some sort of supporting argument.

Whether JavaScript is good or bad as a whole is a different question (I think it is), I'm simply taking issue with that meme (that originally popped up in picture form, the two books side by side, rather than text).

Sure, it's fair to be concerned about that, but is it necessary to focus so much on that?

A company builds a new feature, it's useful, and even more they write a detailed article about how they built it. Isn't it fair to appreciate that and discuss the approach?

I get it, there are some issues with Dropbox, etc. but must every article about some company feature have a majority of comments talk about how they liked them better in the past, how they wanna stop using it, how environmentally problematic some of the company products are, and the likes? I think there's also a time and place to discuss those (e.g. on comments for an article about the business practices, or some medium opinion piece), but I'd prefer on submissions like this one we focus on the content at hand, and maybe have a single comment thread only dedicated to tangential issues about the company.

EDIT: TBF, I don't actually see that much unrelated negativity in this comment section.

Should it factor in? [1]

I'm not even sure anymore that local demand / supply should affect it either.

I'm still not sure what the right approach is but I can think of a few arguments against this practice.

Re: COL, is it on the company to adjust your pay based on your environment? Should they then not also pay a father of 4 kids more money than a single one (in the same location)?

More generally, consider what different pay based on location does to morale: Say for a single employee in the US / SV the company could afford 2 to 3 employees in India. By extension that makes an US employee more valuable as the company wouldn't spend that much money if they weren't sure that employee delivers more than 2-3 Indian employees. But do they? Wouldn't the US employee then by definition have to be in a higher grade (title) as well?

Also take into account that it's traditionally harder to get promoted if you are not close to / in HQ, so Indian employees would already be at a disadvantage.

I don't know what folks in India think. Maybe worrying about inequality is something people have given up on, but I'd personally avoid a company that "transparently" told me I was worth less for doing the same job just because of were I live [2]. We don't like when that happens to women or underrepresented groups. Why should we be okay with it in the context of globalization?

[1] FWIW, they say their formula does take COL into account, so not sure what's going on.

[2] In fact, and sadly so, I'd probably go for a company that is generally known to pay well but not transparently, instead, even if they end up paying me less than US employees as well. At least nobody's claiming fairness there.

As someone who isn't visually impaired I have little to go by or background to judge, but HN strikes me as not being particularly inaccessible, given its minimal UI and very little reliance on non-textual elements, in particular compared to most social media sites.

What in particular would you wish to have improved?