rhines

Sure, but a big company can absolutely find some little-known creator's work, spin off their own products with it, and use their size to absolutely dominate search results, marketing, and distribution.

While it may no longer be legally considered theft, it does seem to be a shame that a creator has a window of only a couple years to find success with their work before they're at risk of it becoming worthless to them. In creative fields it often takes many years to build up a portfolio and a following, if you've not been picked up by a major promoter.

CLI for EC2 works for me, but not ELB.

The challenge with that is avoiding companies manipulating results. IMDB works reasonably well with thousands of people going on and rating any given movie - it's harder for a company to mess with those ratings because they'd need a lot of accounts. Plus there's no real incentive to - people don't just go and watch the highest rated movie, they watch multiple movies and often don't even care about the ratings if it has an actor they like or is in their favourite genre or whatever.

With something like exercise bikes, the calculus changes. You're going to have much fewer ratings, and people tend to only buy one bike every 10+ years, and they'll want to buy the best one they can afford. Now there's a real incentive for a company to manipulate the ratings, and it's also much easier to do so.

I totally agree though that the current inability to answer the question isn't new. And I don't think that will change - I don't really see a viable alternative to the current situation. But if someone comes up with one then I'll be very excited to see it, as the current approach of using lists from big sites to go find higher-quality reviews from smaller sites is not the most efficient. But maybe that's not the worst thing - I like that there's still value to small independent reviewers.

You're not going to find people doing unpaid work reviewing the best exercise bikes, or other expensive items. Very few people can afford to go out and buy 10-20 exercise bikes, and fewer still people can afford to do so every time a new bike is released. And yet fewer will then go and write up their experiences and keep their list updated over time.

For stuff like this you will only get spec comparison articles or comparison articles from big sites who get gear sent to them or make so much from affiliate sales that they can afford to rent/buy gear. It's simply not likely for anyone to put so much time and effort into it for a passion project.

However, where you can still find independent reviews is if you look up a specific item. Granted, they may still put an affiliate link in, because why not try to make some money when you've put in the work of making a good review, but at least they'll have bought the gear themselves and are using it because it's what they like best, and can speak to the pros and cons of the equipment in detail.

So the big lists are still useful - check out a couple "top 10" lists, read the specs, and get an idea of what's suitable. Then look up the promising candidates individually, and find more "real" content about them. I find this usually gives results which are better than just reading Reddit discussions, at least for higher value items.

Unfortunately Google would make the Gmail team very grumpy if they did this - Gmail's by far the worst offender in my experience. Every single time I open my email I have to remind myself to wait for a moment before clicking on my newest emails, because most of the time there's going to be a couple ad "emails" popping in and shuffling everything else down a few seconds after all the real emails have loaded.

I'm not sure I see how arguing for goodness as an overarching quality promotes more discussion than arguing for goodness of various qualities. Perhaps you get more disagreement, as people who may agree about each individual quality will argue about the value of each quality, but the comments about the art itself will be unchanged - it's merely the discussion about the relative value of each quality that flourishes when we feel we can measure goodness as a whole.

Now, perhaps this is the discussion you would like to see survive. If you feel that making arguments for things like why novelty is more valuable than technique is important, then I can understand your perspective and agree that we lose those conversations if we use a multi-axis approach. But if you care about articulating why a technique is impressive, or why a piece speaks to you, then I don't think we need to be able to rank all art on a single axis to have those discussions.

Hmm, I'm not sure this necessarily follows.

Just because we may not be able to concretely define what makes art "good", does not mean we can not discuss why we like it.

If one person enjoys a piece because they appreciate the technical mastery of the brushwork, another enjoys it for how accurately it mimics reality, and another finds it special for the feelings evoked by the composition, each of those people can articulate why the piece speaks to them. They can describe why they like it, there's no reason anyone should suffer any sort of explanatory atrophy.

Now, can any of them convince another that the work is better than another? Probably not. The person who enjoyed the brushwork may find an even more masterfully painted piece, which they think is better. But perhaps the new piece doesn't demonstrate quite so much clarity in portraying reality, so the person who enjoyed that from the first piece still prefers the first. Who is to say whose values are more important?

For this reason, I think the multi-axis view is more constructive. Rather than spending our time arguing if technique or novelty or emotions or whatever else are what matters most, we can focus on appreciating each aspect as we see fit. And we can certainly articulate what a piece does well on any axis.

Hmm. I have trouble with this view. I don't deny that you can find beauty in things, and have tastes for things, but I question whether there's any value in assuming some objective standard for goodness, such that we can judge art to be good or not and say that those who are calibrated to this standard have good taste.

In order for this to be a valid take, it requires that we have some way to measure goodness. Else how can we determine what is good and what is not, and then judge peoples' taste? But I don't think anyone's yet proven any such measure to exist. Certainly many people have offered their personal viewpoint, but how do we know which one has the best taste? We're in a bit of a deadlock - we need to be able to measure goodness to say who has good taste, but we need to know who has good taste so we can know how to measure goodness.

With that said, Paul Graham ultimately ends by saying that "There is definitely not a total order either of works or of people's ability to judge them, but there is equally definitely a partial order of both." Which is not particularly insightful, in my opinion. It's quite easy to see that a flawed attempt to replicate another's work is worse than the unflawed original. But no one really cares about such things, and no one is surprised by this revelation. All in all, the essay takes a long meandering road to make it sound like there is such a thing as good taste, then at the last moment redefines it to something different and uninspired, hoping that the reader is too invested at that point to care. Frankly, it felt disrespectful to the reader, a deceitful waste of time.

The way you've phrased this is rather beautiful, in that it suggests that good art is art which matches the intent of the author.

Some artists seek to recreate the world around them in great fidelity, and if they succeed in producing photorealistic paintings then for them, that is great art. Others seek to stir up controversy or draw attention to some cause, and if their work achieves that then that is great art. Others may simply seek to express themselves, or find peace with their feelings, and if they succeed in this then it is great art.

This is of course a different definition than Paul Graham would use. It does not allow for so much judgement and comparison. But for people interested in producing art, rather than consuming it, I think it's a much more useful perspective.

Very true, was looking at the GP which was comparing bootcamps to college, and maintaining that thread. May not apply to the parent who did not mention bootcamps.

Perhaps, yeah. Likewise there will be people who've never heard of Big-O notation, and when asked to explain the efficiency of their algorithm and justify why it's optimal they won't be able to, even though they're masterful algorithm builders and did get the optimal solution. Or people who know to build a solution that isn't optimal in theory, but harnesses caches, parallelism, and other real-world features of a computer to be the most effective. And they'll still get docked points on interviews, where a bored engineer is just sitting there looking for someone to regurgitate the right answers. If we're going to take a stand against database questions, I feel like it'd be disingenuous to not do the same against algorithms questions.

IMO there's not much difference. Like you aren't going to figure out how to do dynamic programming from first principles, or re-invent the Floyd-Warshall algorithm during a 45 minute interview. Or even come up with the idea of trees on your own. Almost all LC questions are predicated on having heard of and learned about various algorithms and data structures, which really isn't any different from questions predicated on having heard of and learned about various database concepts. We're just used to it because LeetCode is the standard, so everyone grinds it.

I think the idea with that is not that it's hard, but that you know it. You won't get a product person telling you to implement a DB in 3NF - so it doesn't matter how quickly you'd learn via Google, as you wouldn't Google it.

Same goes for Leetcode. Anyone can Google how to implement some algorithm, but you won't be told what algorithm to use in your project requirements.

Of course, an interview could just involve getting you to give general descriptions of things instead of implementing them, which would satisfy this to some degree. But then everyone with a bachelors would pass the interviews, so they had to make them more intensive in order to limit the pool further.

Usually then comes down to the issue of the company seeing a senior dev as someone with 10-15 years experience, but offering pay that would suit a senior dev of 3-5 years experience.

In my experience, the worst CS grads are worse than the worst bootcamp grads, but the best CS grads are better than the best bootcamp grads.

Bootcamps self-select for people who actually tend to have some interest, and force them to learn to graduate. So all bootcamp grads (or at least those from decent bootcamps) learn a decent amount during the bootcamp.

University often gets people who are just there for the degree. When I was in university I marked for many classes, and also helped students, and there are many people who simply have no interest in the material and do not learn a thing. They can still graduate by doing the minimum amount of prep for tests, relying on others for projects and assignments, and cheating.

However, university is also a 4 year long process where you can choose to take challenging courses in a variety of subjects, pursue cutting-edge research projects, and do whatever else you want in your free time. A motivated university student can graduate with not only what they learned in class, but accumulated knowledge from the books they read, courses they took, and projects they worked on outside of class. Plus a deep understanding of all the theory and such covered in class.

Which isn't to say they're better in any sort of judgemental sense - give a bootcamp grad another 3.5 years purely dedicated to learning, and they'd be just as capable.

Unfortunately, relatively few people actually make the most of their time in university, or even come close. (At least, in terms of learning - perhaps they value other things more, which is fine, but we're speaking of employable skills.) Maybe 10% of students at my university graduated with a level of skill equal to or better than a motivated bootcamp grad.

For many people it has - defining yourself by your quirks, or disabilities, or unique sexuality, or whatever else has become celebrated in many circles. Things that at one time might have been considered private or taboo are now used to differentiate yourself from the crowd and gain attention from people who may otherwise have ignored you.

Perhaps, but what would you propose?

Do we take the approach we take with opiates, and ban companies from allowing users to upload images?

Or do we take the approach we take with nicotine, and force companies to disclose the possible harms that can come from social interactions online?

Or is there another approach you'd propose?

Hopefully this doesn't come across too confrontational - I genuinely am curious as to what solutions are viable, and I do recognize the harm social media can cause. But it seems to me that as long as there exists any platform where we can freely post photos, we'll have toxic comparisons, and I don't see more education changing this - I don't think it's a rational choice that we make, to choose to compare ourselves to others.

In all the squat videos I've watched, knees go forward almost to the maximum that the ankles can sustain. For example, Jeff Nippard's tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEv6CCg2BC8

You need to do load testing to determine this - a request's time includes many delays that are not related to the work the server does, and thus it's not as simple as 1/0.03 - it's possible that 0.0001 second of that time is actually server time, or 0.025 - plus you also have to consider if there are multiple cores working, or non-linear algorithms running, or who knows what else.

Best way to figure it out is to use an application like Apache Bench from a powerful computer with a good internet connection, throw a lot of concurrent connections at the site, and see what happens.

Absolutely, and the gap is so deceptive - it doesn't look like there's that much of a gap when you watch the pros. Like I watch pro badminton players, and compared to the best guys at my club who've trained for 10+ years it looks like they both play the same. But the guys at my club have no hope of winning provincial level tournaments here - like they're lucky to even make the quarterfinals, 0% chance of beating the top few players in the province. And the guy that wins provincial level tournaments here has no hope of winning national level tournaments - he rarely makes it past the first round, 0% chance of beating the top 5 players in the country. And the guys that win national level tournaments here have no hope of winning high grade international level tournaments - they could maybe pull an upset on a top 10 player 5-10% of the time.

But from my position, it's easy to watch the pros play and think "wow, that looks doable in 10 years of hard work". Yet so many people have put in that much work and still are effectively as far away from those pros as I am.

You can still step through functional code an examine local variables, you just have the assurance that the values of any local state are purely dependent on the inputs to the function and not any other external state. So it's ultimately easier to debug - any values that affect the operation of a function are explicitly set when calling the function, and you don't have to worry about figuring out ways to ensure that runtime-generate state matches whatever it was when the error originally occurred.

The one issue with B&H is that if something isn't in stock, their estimates are nowhere near accurate. Currently been waiting 2 months for an item that was being stocked in "7-10" days. But if it's in stock they're a good option.

16-35 is pretty common for pros too. It's a very versatile lens - has VR so it's good for run and gun shooting at events, takes screw on filters so it's good for when you need to get fancy but don't want to lug around a huge filter kit, and has a zoom range that pairs well with lots of other lenses if you have a two camera set-up. It's definitely not the sharpest lens out there, but it's more than sufficient for all but the most demanding gigs - honestly it's probably amateurs that more often demand better, because they shoot to their own high standards rather than just meeting the needs of clients.

So I'm very surprised that Nikon's discontinuing it - the 14-24 meets a completely different need, and the 18-35 isn't nearly as versatile despite being sharper, due to the lack of VR and the missing 2mm.

I suppose on the mirrorless side the 14-30 f4 isn't a bad replacement, but for DSLR users it's a significant gap.

Would you be willing to talk a bit more on how you get into that kind of conversation? I feel like bridging the gap between the necessary discussion of "Can you deposit this cheque please? Thanks." to the personal discussion of "Oh wow you went to Sycamore high and played on the hockey team? Don't suppose you know Johnny?" is a real art if you don't want to sound like a probing weirdo, and I have no idea how to do it.

The trouble I have is that you have to start with a certain selfishness of wanting to improve your social skills even if it makes other people's days worse.

Like I'm not the most charismatic guy, and I know that if I try to make any sort of non-trivial conversation with someone I don't know well I will make them uncomfortable. Men will be bored or think I'm crazy, women will think I'm hitting on them, and I don't really feel comfortable using them as guinea pigs for my social development.

I'm all for pushing past my personal comfort zone to better myself, but when my self-improvement comes at the expense of others I can't help but hesitate.

It's just pointing out "yeah, if you're worried that I'll keep doing this, then feel free to just let me resign - but if you want me to stay, you'll have to live with the risk that I'll do this again". It's not assuaging the manager's fears at all, because there's really no way to do that.

Never heard it called the green book, usually just called by the acronym CTCI (Cracking The Coding Interview). Just commenting in case anyone else was confused.

Congrats on getting a good payoff on your work, and thanks for sharing the info about your process.

I think most people still see Hackernews as a website for people in the software industry, where IC is common knowledge. Plus comments aren't written to educate or sell a subscription, rather they're to ask a question, continue a discussion, or contest some point, so it's natural for the writing style to lean towards the informal and be less patronizing. And of course the search you show is a great example of why this isn't too big a problem - since HN is a discussion board, if someone is confused and they can't find the answer on Google, they can just ask for clarification in the comments, often getting a reply from the person who made the original comment that confused them. With a newspaper you can't really do that - even in comment sections authors rarely answer questions, and other readers don't tend to engage with the comments unless they have reasons of their own.

At one point I might have agreed with you, but after working on a few sites of my own I found that Javascript just enables a vastly better user experience. No need to refresh the page every time the user does something like liking a post or sending a comment, can load content more seamlessly with pre-loading or lazy loading, enables expandable menu bars to maximize space for content when the menu's not in use, things can be loaded faster and with less data usage if you send page diffs instead of full pages of markup, etc.

Javascript's terrible when it's used to generate pages from bloated frameworks that create 5000 DOM elements, add listeners to everything, load a dozen external scripts, and so on, but it's really valuable when used to actually improve the user experience.

Stunning birds, some of the guys in the photography forums I'm on go down and spend days shooting the sandhill crane migrations, and the photos they come away with are breathtaking. Would love to make it down there one of these years.