rhines

Yeah I remember binging his blog while between classes in university - he wrote well and had interesting thoughts on marketability, mastery, business, etc., all things that I was interested in as someone learning to be an adult and find his place in the world. Then Trump ran for president, and honestly the blog was still good - Adams had some genuinely good insights about why Trump appealed, and suggested that he might be using the Republicans to get into power but he really doesn't share their values and will shake things up for the better. But then somehow Adams' identity got wrapped up in the idea of Trump not being as bad as people think and he just supported Trump more and more even when it became clear that Trump did not have a master plan to liberalize the Republican party.

When I looked at working in America several years ago, many people I spoke to and people commenting about it on Reddit/HN/Blind emphasized that it's TN status, not TN visa. They even suggested that calling it a visa when trying to enter the US could get your application rejected. I'm not sure if things have changed since then but if so there's probably lots of people who heard that same advice in the past and haven't learned the updated info.

It is an unfortunate side-effect of spending too much time online I think. Or online in the wrong spaces.

Everyone has a different tolerance for dealing with unreasonable people, but there is a breaking point for each of us. And if you hit that, you will be prone to throwing your hands in the air, exiting the space where you found these people, and decrying them all to be braindead. I have hit that point multiple times and it has resulted in my making callous generalizations of people after.

It's hard to imagine that people you interact with in an online community are the vocal minority of that community, when you cannot find the silent majority. But I suppose the silent majority doesn't tend to spend time on forums for their viewpoints.

I have changed my mind on things in online discussions. Usually in the form of them saying something I disagree with, me trying to articulate why they're wrong or searching for evidence that they're wrong, and then coming up short or finding information I wasn't previously aware of. I find this is more likely to happen online than IRL since you don't really interrupt IRL conversations to go spend 3 hours looking for sources, though I do also get what you mean about a lot of online comments being so blatantly hostile that you just don't engage.

Personally I see the "validation" as not so much trying to validate the person's feelings, but rather establishing that I understand and agree with their goals. Otherwise any disagreement with them comes across as hostility and they're unlikely to listen.

Though if I see no common ground then I won't agree with them just to placate them, it has to be genuine.

I think there is some inherent value to PhDs in general. Even the ones commonly looked down upon as frivolous here, even the ones with little to no economic benefit.

The value is that obtaining a PhD involves deep research into something beyond what anyone else has done. Even if it's a topic that you don't think is important, even if it's a topic that no one thinks is important, I think there is still value to exploring that boundary of what we know and testing the limits of our understanding.

So many people spend their lives consuming rather than creating, doing the same things over and over again every day, maybe producing lots of economic value but not doing anything novel or interesting to anyone. A PhD forces you to do something different.

Of course you can do novel things and do deep research without doing a PhD, a PhD is just a certificate to prove you did it. I value the process equally regardless of the result of the research or the setting it's done in. And I don't discredit the value of work that isn't novel either - there's also a lot of value to the routines that make the world function day to day. I just think that in a world where most of us will never get a chance to spend years becoming a true expert on something obscure and novel, that encouraging more people to take that opportunity and explore that niche is worthwhile.

I can't speak for other fields, but this does seem true of computer science. I worked in a university lab for a couple years and knew many PhD students, and most of them were most interested in leveraging the PhD to make more money in industry.

I think the issue, should that be an issue, is in industry setting unrealistic requirements for education. There certainly are some jobs where the work is true research and a PhD can be a good indication of experience in that, but a great many PhD-locked careers are not really so research oriented. Requiring a PhD to demonstrate expertise in something that makes up 10% of a job is excessive and creates this system where people do 4-5 year PhD programs just to check off a box for the resume filter.

You can create BMP files like that - I wrote some image generators that do that and they render fine in all image viewers. But the spec also supports much more, so if you're writing a BMP viewer then things get hairy.

My phone could not handle it at all, it started dropping widgets after the slime (like subway surfers and hydraulic press disappeared) and then it started to lag before finally my whole phone became unresponsive for a couple minutes even after the tab was closed. On an iPhone 12 mini so not the newest but still a little surprising that it stopped so early in the game.

No, but it does assume you already save a large portion of your paycheque. Suppose you make $400k as a senior SWE at FAANG, or maybe $250k after taxes. Now you move to a lower CoL area and make 30% less - so $280k (for argument's sake suppose taxes are the same, so you take home $175k).

Now supposing your CoL is halved, your CoL needs to have been $150k+ for this to be worth it. Since you lose $75k in pay, and need to make that up from the CoL difference. If you're single, chances are you weren't spending that much on food and housing, so you actually end up with less money. But if you're supporting a big family, you may well have been spending most of your money on necessities and the CoL reduction is worth it. (At least financially.)

While it's hard to shift, as long as you're making an effort it's fine. If you slip up from time to time, especially early on, that's understandable. But eventually you should learn it. You were willing to call them by what they asked to be called originally, rather than just calling them "big guy" or whatever, so I don't think it's unreasonable to respect their wishes on what they wish to be called in the future too.

Yeah, not saying it's a simple camera, but the AF system is simpler.

There are issues with AF, but that goes for Sony and Canon flagships as well. Overall, Nikon probably still is third in AF performance, but it's a very, very close third with the Z9. You do however need to know how to use the camera. A lot of the complaints about the AF online are from people who pick it up after using a much simpler camera like a D850 and expect to be able to get the most out of it without reading the manual or conducting tests.

Also can change with what focus point is used, distance to the subject, focal length (for a zoom). It's a huge source of frustration, and while mirrorless cameras aren't perfect at this, they're so much better than DSLRs. I do still love the shooting experience of an optical viewfinder though.

While I also only completed an undergraduate degree, I did spend a few semesters doing research with a professor and ended up being co-author on a paper with him. Doing a first paper without the guidance of a researcher in the field would be very hard, but doable, and certainly performing research is doable.

I'd start with figuring out roughly what you want to investigate. Try to narrow it down as much as you can, but I understand that it'll start broad and probably eventually narrow down after going down a few rabbit holes. Eventually you have a pretty specific field you know you want to do research in. Find the top conferences in the field, look through some of the papers that seem interesting, and look at what they cite. You should be able to compile a list of textbooks and foundational articles that crop up often - read all of these. Maybe even try to replicate the results of some of the foundational papers - a lot of the time new work is extensions of the foundations, and people writing papers started out replicating those initial works anyway. If you're struggling to narrow things down or figure out what's important, focus on papers from one researcher or research group. Maybe even send them an email if you want their advice on what to read.

Finally, you have a decent grasp of the underpinnings of this narrow field and have seen some examples of how it's been extended in modern times. You might now have some ideas of what to experiment with in your own research, or if not you can try replicating more modern papers and see if that gives you ideas of what more to investigate.

Can we not treat Hacker News like some Reddit thread, making low effort political jokes in an attempt to curry upvotes? If that's not what you were doing, and instead were being serious, then do note that Canadians ape American culture more heavily than any other nation I can think of, so this characterization is not correct.

Maybe we're just in different circles, or perhaps have different definitions of system design, but that's not been my experience. Usually I see developers being very excited about system design and quite good at understanding system design questions - nothing's more fun than architecting a new system and thinking about stuff like scalability.

Where people tend to fail is when they have to implement these systems, and they've planned for all these high level building blocks but then actually have to configure them. Redis, RabbitMQ, GraphQL, Docker, NGINX, the list goes on - there's so much to configure and you really don't truly know how they work unless you dive into the source code, so you inevitably get bitten by subtle bugs and errors where your expectations of how something should work based on the docs are violated by how it actually works.

Should a SWE have a deep level understanding of all this stuff? I'm not sure. Usually you can still hack it into a working system after a little bit of firefighting, and that's likely more time efficient than understanding source code or rolling your own infrastructure. But I definitely think there's room for more comprehensive and transparent documentation to bridge the gap between the source code and barebones docs.

On the other hand, iMessage is a vastly inferior user experience to Messages, WhatsApp, or Discord. Which is why I leave it disabled, despite having an iPhone. I leave group chats and media sharing to the platforms that are built for it, and use texting for logistics while out and about.

Oh neat, thanks! I'll have to practice that a bit, but definitely see it coming in handy.

I'm not sure what the dissonance is? It's much easier to cheat in that sort of interview process than it is to cheat in a more free-form discussion interview. Of course you can simply lie in the latter, but assuming the interviewer is worth their salt they'll be able to ask questions that will be hard to answer if you don't have the experience you say you have. Whereas for algorithms and coding trivia questions you can search for answers online, have someone watching your screen and sending answers, do this bluetooth embedded approach, etc.

Even the mini is too large to use with one hand unless you have very large hands. Probably half of American men and the majority of women are not able to use their thumb to reach the top and bottom of the screen while holding the phone in one place securely. I'm pretty surprised that this doesn't seem to be a concern for most people, I guess everyone's content to use two hands on their phone whenever using it?

Even if you hire an accountant, it's what, $1000?

This reminds me of the argument (always given by people in HCoL areas) that it's not bad to earn less in LCoL areas because you might get paid 50% less, but also rent is 50% less. Forgetting that most other expenses are the same, and even if all living expenses were 50% less, that's only equal if 100% of your income goes towards expenses.

Salaries in tech in the US are so far off the rest of the world that a few more expenses really don't matter.

Perhaps health insurance costs FAANG employees several hundred thousand dollars, but if it doesn't then it's hard to imagine it being better elsewhere.

In my part of Canada, a decent dev salary for a new grad is about 45k USD. After taxes you'll be left with about 32k USD. Rent for a 1 bedroom apartment within a half hour drive of the city is about 1k USD, food for one person for a month is 200-250 USD if you don't eat out but do eat reasonably healthy (frozen vegetables, ground beef or pork chops, pasta, stuff like that). After internet, power, car expenses, telephone costs, etc. come out, you're maybe left with 10k USD to spare each year.

If a new grad in California making $180k+ is left with that little after the same expenses in the USA, I'd be impressed.

Granted, other things become more expensive later on. No doubt childcare is more expensive in California, as is housing. But it's not cheap here - a cheap house within a 30 minute drive of the city here costs about 500k USD, while that might be, what, 1-2 million in California? But a senior dev salary here is about 80k USD, vs 300k+ in California. And sure, the ratio might seem not too bad - 80k vs 300k is like a ~4 times difference, 500k to 2 million is like a 4 times difference. But after you deduct living expenses, you're looking at a much different ratio - unless every living expense is 4x more in California. But I'd be shocked if, for example, 1kg of medium ground beef that costs $10 USD in Canada costs $40 USD in California. Or if a $100 internet plan for 100 Mb/s up/down here costs $400 in California.

Same thing you do with knowledge of more people having died in anything, say "damn, that sucks" and continue living your life, unless you're in a position to do more than that.

As for the mortality rates of bubonic plague and covid, it is quite a bit more sensible to be concerned about covid right now and want to avoid catching it.

Eh, just because it has the pixels doesn't mean it has the resolution. Often 1080p content from high quality systems still looks more detailed than 4k content from smartphones, even fairly modern smartphones, as the pixels can only record detail that gets through the optics and isn't marred by noise. With phones having relatively low quality lenses (for the size of the pixels they must resolve) and smaller sensors, this can quickly become an issue. With that said, it is great to see 4k becoming standard for productions!

Yeah I used the SE for years till it started failing internally. No case or screen protector, dropping it was never a concern because it was small enough to firmly hold in one hand.

Have the 12 Mini now which is the next smallest phone, but feel much less secure with it because I can't reach both the top and bottom of the screen at once with my thumb while holding it securely in one hand. Have to always be sliding up and down to reach what needs to be hit, which makes it much more likely to be dropped. Would kill for a proper small phone again.

I honestly don't know how people use new Reddit. On my 2017 laptop with a quadcore i7, SSD, and 16GB RAM, using Ubuntu 16.04 and either Chrome or Firefox, and with a 100Mb/s fiber connection, it just loads glacially slow and causes my fans to come on at full speed. And that's just with a single tab - with Reddit I usually end up scrolling through and opening quite a few tabs.

If they kill off old Reddit, there's no way I'll be able to tolerate using the site. Surely I'm not alone in this, or perhaps 99% of the traffic is mobile users on recent phones?

I suspect it very much is a practical skill. I'd be shocked if genetics are the sole determinant in your wit - surely other aspects such as linguistic ability, social skills, knowledge of pop culture, confidence, etc. all contribute to wit. And those can all be trained.

It would take time, of course, and a lot of practice rather than just having it explained to you. But I don't see why it wouldn't be trainable.

Indeed, this seems a little misleading (or perhaps I have too broad a view of deliberate practice). The submission talks about learning to ride a bike by first gliding for short periods, then longer periods, then pedalling. Is this not deliberate practice? Or identifying that you struggle with understanding software design, and then working on create designs and getting feedback to improve them so you can develop your own intuition for how to design good software - this also seems like deliberate practice to me.

I'll assume the best in the author, that he simply interpreted deliberate practice differently than I did such that it was not useful for most things, and now he's trying to share the method that worked for him. But to me this is exactly what I would expect from deliberate practice.

IMO if you want to end the commercialization of content, targeting copyright is not the most effective route. Big players will still be able to use their power to ensure that they have control over distribution, and will continue to profit off of content. Small players, such as the people coming up with new content, will find it harder and harder to make any money, to the benefit of the big players who no longer need to share profits with them.

The more effective approach would be to simply remove the economy entirely. In a post-scarcity or communist or whatever you want to call it society, you could abolish copyright entirely without hurting anyone, because no one's able to profit off it in the first place and spending effort on things that don't pay off is no longer penalized.