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throwaway35777

85 karma · joined March 22, 2024

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throwaway35777··on Did we lose our way in making efficient software?
What we don't teach or reward today is the behaviors and engineering process to write high quality code.

A surprising number of inexperienced developers do the following: "once I get any working solution I should immediately open a PR" and let the senior engineers tell them what's wrong with it.

When the big money leaves this field I hope there will be more pressure for people to adopt good engineering practices. I love to work with folks who put good effort into trying to make high quality changes. Personal initiative and ethics are how high quality software gets written.

throwaway35777··on Cost of developing new drugs may be lower than industry claims: trial
Don't successful drugs also have to pay for the failed trials?
throwaway35777··on Wisdom from Marcus Aurelius
Stoicism was philosophy marketed to and practiced by the Roman elites, so that Logos reinforced the social hierarchy is not surprising.

That being said, the philosophy has many practical lessons to teach. Meditation and philosophy helped me personally through a long illness.

throwaway35777··on Ghost Jobs – it's not your fault that you are not getting hired in 2024 [video]
Wow! What do you work on? Is the problem the ability of the candidates -- do you think it's possible for a "good" engineer to get productive on six months?
throwaway35777··on Ghost Jobs – it's not your fault that you are not getting hired in 2024 [video]
They shut down in 2023. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35184546
throwaway35777··on Ghost Jobs – it's not your fault that you are not getting hired in 2024 [video]
There also used to be Triplebyte. It filled a niche of talented people who have bad resumes and don't know anybody. Found a great job through them when I was starting out.

Real shame there's nothing to replace it, there's huge arbitrage in the market of good people who don't know people. If I were starting out now I don't know what I would do, how do you even meet people.

throwaway35777··on Biden signs TikTok bill into law, starting clock for ByteDance to divest
What exactly is their intention?
throwaway35777··on The man who killed Google Search?
Are there any places like it nowadays?
throwaway35777··on Why you can't get a restaurant reservation
Living in a city is like being in a trance. The experience reminds me of Insomnia.
throwaway35777··on Never struggle to give feedback again
> I recall feeling like it was mostly a guide on manipulating people, and it didn't make a great impression on me, personally.

Any action will affect other people in some way. What matters is how you choose to utilize that capability.

throwaway35777··on Never struggle to give feedback again
There is an excellent old book on the subject, How to Win Friends and Influence People. I was lacking in this area and my career improved greatly after reading it.

In general, people are cautious when giving criticism because it carries implications.

Say a manager gives negative feedback to a subordinate. The subordinate now believes the manager doesn't like them. The subordinate follows the standard advice: start looking for another job. Manager now has the larger problem of hiring a replacement.

It's best to reinforce positive behavior. Little trick I learned: compliment people. Find an reason to say "nice work" on every code review. DM people and say "nice presentation", "great design". It works.

throwaway35777··on Senate passes reauthorization of key US surveillance program after midnight
{Montana, North Dakota} --> {Washington}?
throwaway35777··on U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades
> by the end you're far more systematic, plus a little bit numb to the effect your decision is having

Maybe decision fatigue is supposed to bias humans toward the optimal solution for the fiancee problem [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem

throwaway35777··on U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades
I was a grader once. I guarantee if someone gives a good answer they'll get full marks even near the bottom of the stack. For BS answers I'll admit I got less generous as the hours went on.

No one's getting hurt by this system if it's randomized. It's a matter of graders giving out partial credit for wrong answers which is discretionary. Rarely students are granted a small mercy. Seems OK.

throwaway35777··on 'Eat the future, pay with your face': my dystopian trip to an AI burger joint
> Until the robots can do all of the tasks above and quickly switch from one to another and be highly adaptable in real time based on the needs of the restaurant

Ideally if your robots cost less than $20/hour you can buy enough of them to do one job each.

throwaway35777··on I keep a WTF notebook (2021)
> I like to be on teams for which, if new to the team, mostly you notice things being done sensibly (in context), and the 3 things you see that you don't understand, you can just ask about them, because everyone on the team just wants to work well together to achieve the genuine goals.

I've observed this kind of culture mostly at startups. Once places start to make a lot of money -- things become political.

So if you want to work at the highest paying jobs, you'll have to deal with politics. Because once they make enough money to afford you, the company also makes enough for savvy gatekeepers to entrench themselves in a core system and carve off a piece of that revenue for themselves.

throwaway35777··on Why We Practice Magic
What is the error there?
throwaway35777··on The FCC needs to stop 5G fast lanes
> but you're still getting slower speeds for higher prices than you should

And what is your solution to that?

throwaway35777··on The FCC needs to stop 5G fast lanes
It's like $50/mo for 200/50 I think. Why, what are yours?
throwaway35777··on The FCC needs to stop 5G fast lanes
> The biggest single reason why the USA's (and to a lesser extent Canada's) internet is shite...

Speak for yourself, but I live on the west coast and my Internet connection is great.

Edit: downvoters, what are the problems with U.S. internet?

throwaway35777··on Man creatively sneaks onto Delta flight, but gets caught
That's true, but you'd still need to find the unauthorized passenger already on board. Without a picture you'd have to flush the plane and reboard.

Given there are thousands of security cameras in an airport, I don't think anyone would mind if one was used to record who got on the plane.

throwaway35777··on Man creatively sneaks onto Delta flight, but gets caught
Why did the system securing the plane let the operator override the error and allow an unauthorized passenger on the plane?

Should be easy enough, UI shows the picture of the guy who scanned the first ticket and system tells operator you go and check his ticket. If you can't find him on the plane he's hiding in the bathroom, call security to get him out.

throwaway35777··on Man creatively sneaks onto Delta flight, but gets caught
Easy mitigation, don't let the same barcode board twice.
throwaway35777··on The UX of UUIDs
And there's no "forward secrecy" - if a normal word becomes a swear, then it's often hard to go through and change all uuids.

Which is why the standard has been base16 (or base10) for so long.

throwaway35777··on The UX of UUIDs
It's also trivially easy to reroll ids until they don't contain a swear.
throwaway35777··on The UX of UUIDs
> resistant to swear words

No it's not.

Edit: downvoters, a tame example is 0x72b5473d5a567200.

throwaway35777··on The UX of UUIDs
base58 is case sensitive which hinders readability. When devs work with uuids they typically remember the first few letters ("this is guid abc", "that one is guid 1ac"). Hard to do that in base58.

The coarsest encoding to have this property is Base32 where it remains easy to memorize first few letters without needing to memorize case.

throwaway35777··on Anyone got a contact at OpenAI. They have a spider problem
Single handedly extending the lifespan of all humans by however long it takes them to crawl 6,859,000,000 pages.
throwaway35777··on Faces.js, a JavaScript library for generating vector-based cartoon faces
The faces are amazing! I hope if he finds an artist they don't get changed too much.

I absolutely am looking for an excuse to use faces.js somewhere.

throwaway35777··on Starbucks is raising prices almost every month now
Until writing my comment, I never realized people thought Starbucks coffee is bad.

Where can one get good coffee? I want to try!

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