throwaway277432

I care. It's frustrating sometimes, but I still can't help myself.

Working with people that also care (and are empowered to do something about it) is the greatest thing. I've worked in several such teams over the years and it's absolutely awesome.

On the opposite side, working on a team that doesn't is the worst.

I've actually been reprimanded by middle managers for caring, because caring sometimes takes more time than planned, and an arbitrary internal deadline wasn't met. I've come to realize they do in fact care, just not about the software but only about their own promotion. And the core issue is that they don't actually know why their own deadlines and feature requirements exist, they just get them handed to them.

This is different when you work closer to and with a customer directly. They know exactly what's important and why they need X or Y. When someone actually has to deliver results and deal with the users, they are more invested in having a working system. Here, caring involves finding the "right" person (usually not the one in charge), talking to them and figuring out what they really need (not want) and how they're using the system.

In such a setting, caring and building stuff that truly works is also reflected in performance reviews as everyone including the customer is happy.

You really have to pick your battles. I've had to make some concessions myself: some stuff turns out to be more complicated or unclear than it is at first glance, and sometimes you really don't have and can't make time for it. And in really large companies, there are sometimes so many people involved that you often can't get the answers you need or access to the person you need. Or you end up at legal which is more often than not a dead end.

I contributed well-researched answers already when I was ostensibly a very junior dev, and even before that during my CS studies. Stuff you can lookup or simply try out is doable, of course questions where you need experience aren't a good fit.

When I was in high school I read the docs, and learned C++ from books and MSDN. Granted my access to the internet was rather limited back then, but it also never crossed my mind to bother people for things I could easily lookup myself.

Growing up in a RTFM, "search the forum first before asking" environment is seen as toxic today, but it really helps keeping certain behavior in check thats a drag on society as a whole.

One of the best mentors/bosses I ever had never answered coding questions directly, but always in the form of a question so I could look it up and learn for myself.

I try to do the same with my junior devs today, unless there's time constraints or they're under stress, I try to let them figure out the final answer themselves.

> the founder/CEO has stated in no uncertain terms that we'll never be sold out to investors

Ha! Heard that one before. Company was sold. Founder got filthy rich, bean counters came in, you know the rest.

Unsolicited advice: Try to get someone to review your resume and other materials (grades, cover letters, recommendation letters, official documents, etc). Ideally by someone like a recruiter, the schools career center if there is one, or even just a personal friend. Preferably someone with recent experience.

No judgement, but you might be missing something or doing something "wrong" without knowing it. Being ghosted absolutely everywhere sounds strange regardless of how the market is doing. CS as a field is not dead yet.

As for the field not caring about you: nobody owes you anything. That doesn't mean you should just roll over and give up. And it also doesn't mean you should take shit from abusive managers "working you to death". There are good people and companies out there, but you need to go out and find them. I work only 4 days a week, prioritize my family, and my employer accepts that.

Compared to so many other jobs CS is still a lot better than other options and will continue to be viable for a long time. You're absolutely not too late.

Last time I did the gauntlet at Google I was able to solve all the problems.

However I wasn't as fast as others as I didn't recognize any of the questions and had to work through them. Interviewers expect you to be fast, or at least compare you to people who seem faster. Doesn't matter who studied or not, or who will actually perform better on non-leetcode tasks.

Also having kids is a real issue, it absolutely crushes the amount of time you have to anything besides working.

Honestly Reddit has never been that great for me. In my experience a lot of content even in niche hobby subreddits is regurgitated opinions presented as authorative facts or baseless speculation disguised as professional insight.

In the few hobby subreddits that I frequented, non-mainstream opinions or new ideas were often drowned out by the hivemind and people with less experience or knowledge. In short, a real discussion rarely came up or was even possible.

And in the case of questions I realized that so many people have no clue but still feel compelled to answer.

I'll omit my rant on career advice subreddits here.

For my hobbies specifically, I've reverted back to forums. You can have a relaxed discussion over the span of weeks, and interesting threads might remain active for months. You can get to know the users by their signatures, and the average age of users is also higher. Some of the users might even be professionals instead of just hobbyists, where I feel that was rare on Reddit.

StackOverflow has the same problem, prioritizing question askers instead of answerers.

As a result, the site is now "welcoming" to new users asking low-quality questions, but actively hostile to what the answerers and mods would like. While they're the ones left to clean up the spam.

And when the low-effort questions are closed that then drives away the question askers too, because all the "nice" onboarding didn't tell them their question should actually be well-researched. Their expectations of getting help now clash with reality and they end up hating the experience.

But all this drives views and "questions" in the short-term and management is so clueless it's hopeless. See e.g. the recent mod strike due to the AI policy issues, where they initially wanted to prevent/ban mods from deleting low-quality AI content from serial ChatGPT spammers.

Is the author still adding the "cite me or pay 10000€" notice to the output? And calling that GPL?

And still answering every xargs Stackoverflow question with "you should use GNU Parallel" instead of answering the question? That really gets old quickly when googling for xarg answers.

These are just some of the reasons I'll never use parallel. xargs is perfectly fine for most usecases, and it can do everything I need it to.

The exact opposite happened, contrary to this often repeated meme. Both SO and Wikipedia became what they were because of their strict moderation and RTFM-implied attitude. It's what drove professionals like me to the site. I'm just a regular user BTW, but it felt like SO people were my peers.

But SO (the company) wanted it to be more accessible, easier for newbies, "nicer", there was a huge uproar over them publicly blasting a moderator over a disagreement on a unilaterally imposed new code of conduct, and recently they even (again unilaterally) effectively reverted the ban on LLM-generated content. This has been going on for years, and moderators have less power than they ever had. Imho this whole thing started much earlier, I think it was 2017 when they tried the SO documentation project and let everyone keep their rep where I first thought they had jumped the shark.

The company has been on a bender for the last few years, and high-ish rep users like me just don't see the value in answering anymore. With recent blog posts it seems even more clear that they are on the direct path to enshittification, against their own actual users and moderators.

Recently it feels like all the actual professionals have left and what remains are "students" asking low effort questions in bad faith while an army of spambots tries to pounce on these.

While this means boosted engagement numbers short-term, it spells death of the site long-term. SO cannot survive on low quality spam, even if other sites (like Reddit) may be able to.

YouTube is very easy to cancel and not at all scummy, you just need to click one button and it works. Easy 4$ saved per month. I cancelled and then resubscribed at least 5 times this year and it was never an issue (I'm trying to cut down on YouTube which is why I cancelled so many times).

That's very generous. Yes they're moving faster than before, but for a while it seemed like they didn't have any developers at all. Instead they spend an insane amount of money on marketing.

And for a long time (I'm an early v1 user) what they did deliver was miniscule, ignoring a lot of the feedback from core users about basic issues. Some of the "new" features being released recently even existed in early v1 releases, e.g. the screen sharing which used to work fine locally, but now doesn't anymore because it "needs" to go via their cloud.

The break stuff unintentionally too though, so you're right there. For a few releases they even broke the core writing feature - lines and drawings would be drawn all jaggy - and the fix took forever.

The marketing worked and tricked me into buying one, but it's clear to me now that reMarkable is first and foremost a marketing company, tech and users come second. I won't be spending any more money with them.

> who do I give it to?

No one, you do it yourself. Here's what works for personal devices.

- Hard drives: Open them up with a screwdriver, then physically smash the platters with the pointy end of a hammer. The platters easily shatter into a thousand pieces, very little force required. Use a plastic bag to contain the pieces. For newer models, also smash the cache chips on the logic board.

- SSDs / flash storage: disassemble the case, then smash the memory chips with a hammer.

- CDs/DVDs: break them a few times, ideally use a shredder if you have one that's strong enough. Make sure the metal foil is sufficiently destroyed.

- Tapes: take out the tape itself, then carefully shredder lengthwise or just burn it.

- anything with batteries in it: remove the battery first.

- anything with device specific cloud service accounts: delete the data and close the account if you won't be using it anymore, so it can't leak data if it gets hacked in the future.

>Would ethics or liability prevent salvage operations from harvesting personal data?

Physically no. Especially don't trust anybody telling you you can trust them. You have to do it yourself or at the very least watch it with your own eyes. There are commercial services that physically shredder hard drives and documents, these should let you watch so you can verify the destruction yourself.

He wrote a great response. Not many people I know would stand in front of a online mob and say "It's code that I wrote". And then fix it on Christmas!

While I'm glad this got resolved so quickly, I'm slightly ashamed of myself and the HN community for how we handled this. In hindsight the outrage was wildly out of proportion for a simple bug.

I'll make a mental note to do better in 2022.

Thank you. So these are in fact all mistakes.

I looked at some of the other forked repos (95 out of 4.5K repos) and all the human commits from MS I saw seem to care about getting the licenses right. So it really is just a broken bot.

I hope the bot can be fixed soon and I'm going to put my figurative pitchfork down now.

You're right. Saw the reviewer on that PR but you were too quick and I couldn't delete my comment anymore.

(deleted)

This is their process. Very hard to argue these are all mistakes:

ippsample (Apache -> MIT) https://github.com/microsoft/ippsample/commit/938bff17c72868...

huggingface-transformers (Apache -> MIT): https://github.com/microsoft/huggingface-transformers/commit...

health-cards-tests (MIT changed) https://github.com/microsoft/health-cards-tests/commit/5649b...

CUPS (Apache -> MIT) https://github.com/microsoft/cups/commit/ad69bcc78bdea3fea3f...

Credit to this reddit comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/roa9xz/comment/...

I requested my data back in March 2020 when they were on HN, never got an answer.

They wanted me to upload a photo ID to verify my identity and I was stupid enough to comply.

One commenter said:

  This is a case of 'never click "opt-out" on spam'. Clearview is not to be trusted. One should not go through their process. They are not likely to delete the data, and if they have none, they are likely to create a profile for you.

I should have listened, lesson learned.