whack

To use coding terminology, there's a major distinction between "refactoring" vs "rewriting". Refactoring involves many incremental and iterative changes to an existing system. Whereas rewriting is discarding all incremental changes, and instead building a new system from scratch.

Refactoring is generally the most reliable way to improve a system. But rewriting is the best way to get promoted, and do work that feels personally "fun" and "impactful". I suspect this is the decisive factor in a large fraction of UI overhauls

From my reading, it punishes "racially aggravated harassment" directed against a specific individual. You can choose to express generic racist opinions and that wouldn't be prohibited by this bill.

I don't see very many "free speech fundamentalists" complaining about anti-harassment laws, so I don't see why this would be an issue.

Interesting hypothesis but my money is on the opposite direction of causality. When you're surrounded by dishonesty on a daily basis, you get de-sensitized to it. You start to see it as "normal" or as "everyone does it". And then you start to think "Oh, what's the harm if I just fudge a little bit here and there. It's not like I'm profiting off of this. Unlike all these other millionaires who do far worse"

Sure, it's easy for us to think "I would never do anything like that, no matter what others around me are doing". But as someone who has lived in multiple countries, trust me - the vast majority of the things we do are simply a reflection of what we see other people doing.

>> And she’s tied to the Effective Altruism movement

> ah where SBF was involved. what an achivement

At least she wasn't a vegetarian. Hitler was a vegetarian. That would have been the final nail in the coffin

Interesting idea, but I think Pete is suggesting a bad solution for a very real problem. Code reviews tend to be slow, and reduce development velocity. But the solution isn't to merge un-reviewed code into master. The solution is to create a culture where people prioritize unblocking one another and doing code-reviews promptly.

I once worked in a team where people did code-reviews within 2 hours of a pull-request being published. We moved so much faster as a team than any other team I was a part of. I bet there is a high correlation between team velocity and code-review latency

> List of things that you should know about how it works

> How the computer works, from electrons to transistors, to CPU, assembly, and high-level programming languages.

> How the internet/network works, how you send some information from one computer to another, all OSI 7 Layers.

> How browsers work, how DOM works, how CSS renders, how JavaScript is loaded

The fact that this article is so popular on HN is absolutely mind blowing.

I know a ton about "electrons to transistors, to CPU, assembly" but only because I wasted many years of a life in the hardware industry and a EE degree, before finally switching over to SW. I probably know more about these topics than the author does. These domain-specific trivia have provided me approximately zero value in my career as a SW developer.

I also know nothing about about any of the other stuff mentioned above. And yet, I've had a very successful career as both a principal developer and startup founder who built a complex SW product from the ground up.

Job titles are nothing more than a noisy proxy for how much value your employer thinks you are contributing to the business. Contribute enough value, and you will earn and deserve a "senior developer" title. And unlike what the zealots and fundamentalists may believe, there is no "one true way" to deliver value. It is entirely dependent on the business, team, and circumstances you are in.

If you're not sure, ask your manager or more senior developers. If they tell you that you can provide more value to the business by knowing things like network-transport protocols, do exactly that. If not, don't waste your time studying a bunch of stuff that some online blogger insists is "the one true way."

Joe Rogan has made tons of money off talking without providing factual information. Hollywood has also made tons of money off movies "inspired by real events" that hallucinate key facts relevant to the movie's plot and characters. There's a huge market for infotainment that is "inspired by facts" but doesn't even try to be accurate.

This is a hilarious read but I think the author is too optimistic about the state of humanity. Marl isn't the "marginal" user, Marl is the "average" user. If the average user actually cared about deep and meaningful content, then any A/B test that throws her under the bus in order to please Marl will show bad data, and the proposed change would be killed.

Yes, the author tries to hand-wave this away as "product is sticky", but I really doubt this is the main reason.

No, the truth is far more scary. The average user doesn't want deep and meaningful content. The average user is Marl. That is why every product, no matter how noble it starts off, eventually degenerate into Marl-fodder. Because that's where the money is. The only way to escape this is to take on a huge pay cut and work at a company that doesn't care about growing profits. Go ahead, you first.

Finally, let's be honest. Marl isn't some obnoxious bozo. You and I are both Marl. That's why we're here in the HN comments. You are Marl, I am Marl, the world is Marl, and it's getting Marlier every day.

> it is morally impermissible intentionally to punish the innocent or to inflict disproportionately large punishments on wrongdoers.

> What if harming Hitler’s baby was the only way to save the world? As a moderate deontologist, I reluctantly endorse this implication

So the author believes that it is not permissible to punish an innocent person, regardless of any positive benefits that arise from its deterrent value. But he also believes it is permissible to harm a baby if it confers tremendous benefits. Clearly there is no logically coherent moral philosophy here.

I'm sure there's some juicy details behind the curtains, but people are too professional to air it publicly. Here's some fun but baseless theories:

1) Typical big-company guy fails to adapt to startup life. A year ago, Flexport's tech team was 400 people. That's minuscule compared to what Dave's used to at Amazon. He came in, insisted on a bunch of unnecessary hiring, bloated the tech team with deadwood, internal kingdoms and politics, and a "move slow and don't break anything" mentality. Founder got fed up and showed him the door, though presumably they were gracious enough to let him hit his 1-year cliff

2) Almost-CEO-of-Amazon tries to build the next Amazon. Makes a bunch of wildly risky investments into random moonshots, because he doesn't want to settle for a single-digit-billion company. Founder is initially taken in by bigshot's vision. But after 1 year of minimal progress and changing market conditions, founder tells CEO to get back to basics and focus on freight logistics. CEO decides that's not sexy enough for him. Waits for his 1-year cliff, then resigns

Exited to hear more wild theories from others.

Google does indeed deserve kudos for being an early adopter of great benefits, WLB, cool offices, etc. But I'm not sure how much credit they deserve for "sky high" compensation. I had a classmate with competing offers from both MS and Google back in 2007 - the Google offer was pretty close to MS's offer, both at the time and over the prior decade.

A big reason why silicon valley comp rose so much in the last decade was because major companies were previously colluding to suppress worker wages. And yes, this includes Google. It ended in 2009, and that's when tech compensation really exploded. See link at bottom.

If anything I would give Facebook far more credit. They were willing to pay more than any other major tech company. And more importantly, they also refused to participate in the aforementioned cartel, which resulted in a ton of poaching atcivity which drove up market wages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

That's the beauty of the free market. Farmers are paid to put food in someone's (your?) belly: it is not their job to care on whether that's the best choice for you. And yet, they make my life a whole lot better.

I've noticed that the most lucrative jobs are seldom "alertable" public postings. And even if they are publicly posted, submitting my resume through a jobs-portal has an extremely low chance of producing an interview. The best ROI for my time has always come from responding to recruiters who message me with a comp range that fits my expectations.

> Their plan was put on pause through the end of the year as Covid-19 cases ticked up once again throughout the U.S., so EY leaders used that time to ask employees about their reluctance to come into the office. Common threads stood out to Frank Giampietro, EY’s chief wellbeing officer for the Americas: Employees weren’t sure what to do about pet care or child care.

> In response, EY announced a fund in February 2022 to reimburse up to $800 per year for commuting, pet care and dependent care costs for each of its 55,000-plus U.S. employees. The fund, which is ongoing, had an immediate positive impact on employees’ in-office attendance, Giampietro adds. Since EY first rolled out this benefit in February 2022, EY has seen a 150% uptick in office attendance across the U.S. “It didn’t take a complete rehaul of our return-to-office policies to make employees happy,” he says. “We just needed to listen to our people and understand what, specifically, was problematic for them, and offer resources to address that.”

This is hilarious. $800/year comes out to ~$70/month. That's a tiny fraction of commuting/pet-care/childcare costs. And that's peanuts compared to the average salary for someone working at a big-4 company. We're supposed to believe this is responsible for a 150% uptick in office attendance, as compared to any number of other factors in play in early 2022?

I have to admire the the "Chief Wellbeing Officer"'s chutzpah. I suppose that's the kind of PR spin that lands you a plush C-suite job

I've had a similar experience with tax preparers. I once decided to hire two different tax preparers, both of whom had good reviews and strong credentials. I naively assumed that I would spend an hour tops comparing the two returns side-by-side, and examining any small differences between them.

What ended up happening was that both returns were so dramatically different, along many different dimensions. It took me nearly 40 hours to catalog all the different decisions made by each preparer, and which of the two decisions is the better one. Through this exercise, I realized that both preparers had made some major errors - and by reconciling them, I ended up saving more than $10,000, while also making my tax returns more resilient if audited.

I'm convinced that for any non-trivial decision in any field, the best way to make them is to hire multiple independent professionals, and cross-check their independent recommendations. And yes, this applies to software engineers as well.

> Rather than each of K startups individually buying clusters of N gpus, together we buy a cluster with NK gpus... Then we set up a job scheduler to allocate compute

In theory, this sounds almost identical to the business model behind AWS, Azure, and other cloud providers. "Instead of everyone buying a fixed amount of hardware for individual use, we'll buy a massive pool of hardware that people can time-share." Outside of cloud providers having to mark up prices to give themselves a net-margin, is there something else they are failing to do, hence creating the need for these projects?

> If the promise of AI means I can do 1/2 the amount of work and maintain my high quality life, then I'm all for it. However, every advancement that has come in the last 100 years that improved efficiency has only meant we're pushed to work more and do more. So I am now expected to do 2x the work.

If you're content to live at the same quality-of-life that people had in 1923, you can certainly achieve that by doing half the amount of work. The cost of living that quality of life is dirt-cheap - median household real-income back then in today's dollars is less than $30k. The average person back then had a life expectancy of ~60, barely traveled long distances, had minimal electronic gadgets, and lived in houses that have none of today's modern amenities.

If you're content with that kind of lifestyle, you can easily achieve that by either working as a freelancer for 20 hours per week. Or by working a high-paying job, saving most of your money, and retiring in your 30s/40s.

Most people don't do this because ... they don't want to live like someone in 1923. Our own life expectations today are far higher, and hence, we push ourselves to work 40+ hours/week to meet them.

The risk of hyper-income-inequality is real. Fortunately we also live in a democracy. Billionaires like Murdoch will be able to exploit wedge issues like guns and LGBT for only so long. Sooner or later a critical mass of people will demand sharply more progressive tax rates, and even things like UBI, if too much wealth is concentrated in too few hands.

Is it really rude to ask an OS maintainer when they plan to release X, and explaining why they care about this topic? Emphasis on ask - not demand. The maintainer is well within his rights to ignore or refuse the request. But going on twitter to put someone on blast for "may not be the best way to introduce yourself"? I have no idea who Maximilian is, but he doesn't come across well in this exchange.

The language maintainers have already decided to slow down string-construction by calling StringUTF16.compress(value) which checks if the input can be converted into LATIN1 and if so, creating a LATIN1 byte-array representation from the ground up.

Compared to this, I wager that the incremental cost is small to verify that the coder matches the content.

Also, depending on the implementation of string-interning and StringUTF16.compress, it's possible that the verification step is only needed for non-LATIN1 strings. Which according to the JEP is only a small minority of strings seen.

If there is a cheaper solution, I'm certainly all for it. I'm just spitballing ideas here. But I don't think it is acceptable to allow "hello world".startsWith("hello") to return false.

I didn't think it was a bug either till I got to the "Spooky action at a distance" section. The fact that the following code:

"hello world".startsWith("hello")

can return false in any circumstance, is a bug in the language. The fact that some other code in an entirely unrelated part of the codebase can intern a broken string and thus break string-comparisons for the entire codebase, is mind boggling.

Fortunately, I don't think the fix needs to be too expensive. After a defensive copy of the byte-array is made, just before returning the newly constructed string object, verify once again that the chosen coder matches the string contents. If it doesn't, that would imply a race condition, and the broken string instance should not be returned

> The moral of the story is that data locality matters, and it can pop up in the most surprising of places. Using random is typically the worst thing you can do for locality, so if you want to use UUID’s, try to use a sequential variant. UUID v7 is a good option

The author isn't suggesting abandoning UUIDs, he is suggesting using something like UUIDv7 which preserves locality. For most use-cases, this seems like a very reasonable recommendation with no significant downsides I can think of.

Sorry to hear that. How did you end up in a situation where you're the only founder working full-time but the other founders have more equity and control over the business?

I've taken both the Underground and the MTA and you're overstating the difference. Aesthetically, the Underground is far better, no question. But most commuters are focused on functionality. And functionally the MTA is just as good, if not better.

The trains run extremely frequently - every few minutes during the day on weekdays. The parallel local-express tracks give the MTA a big speed advantage. And the inside of the MTA trains are extremely spacious compared to the Underground.

> It might not be wise to accuse people of having an "agenda"

It would be wise to read the comment more carefully before replying. I explicitly did not accuse or suggest anyone of having an agenda, unlike the person I responded to.

> The debate around culpability is vast, nuanced and cannot be settled with reductionist claims like "Churchill was the reason millions died".

I had stated "Churchill's active role in causing the famine" and linked to a guardian article headlined "Churchill's policies contributed to 1943 Bengal famine". There is plenty of supporting evidence supporting both statements in the linked article. If you disagree, I'd be happy to see your supporting evidence, as opposed to unsubstantiated accusations of reductionism.

Your comment excludes all mention of Churchill's active role in causing the famine. One would be tempted to conclude that your comment has an agenda of its own, but I'll assume in good faith that is not the case.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/29/winston-church...

> The Bengal famine of 1943 was the only one in modern Indian history not to occur as a result of serious drought, according to a study that provides scientific backing for arguments that Churchill-era British policies were a significant factor contributing to the catastrophe.

> Mukerjee has presented evidence the cabinet was warned repeatedly that the exhaustive use of Indian resources for the war effort could result in famine, but it opted to continue exporting rice from India to elsewhere in the empire.

> Rice stocks continued to leave India even as London was denying urgent requests from India’s viceroy for more than 1m tonnes of emergency wheat supplies in 1942-43. Churchill has been quoted as blaming the famine on the fact Indians were “breeding like rabbits”, and asking how, if the shortages were so bad, Mahatma Gandhi was still alive.

> Mukerjee and others also point to Britain’s “denial policy” in the region, in which huge supplies of rice and thousands of boats were confiscated from coastal areas of Bengal in order to deny resources to the Japanese army in case of a future invasion.

> One of the most salient archetypes of our current period is called “success to the successful,” which fairly well describes twenty-first-century capitalism or the late stages of the board game Monopoly

It seems a stretch to describe this as "One of the most salient" archetypes. This would only be true if "resources" are "one of the most salient" factors for success. If two companies are almost identical in every other way, then sure resources are a great tie-breaker. But if one company is significantly better than the other in some way, I would expect that company to overcome a resource-deficit. See Google winning search over other earlier and larger search engines. Facebook winning social media over other earlier and larger social networks. OpenAI leading/co-leading the AI race despite being outgunned by so many other companies. AMD surpassing Intel in valuation despite an enormous financial deficit a decade ago.

In fact, an abundance of resources can actually negatively impact success. See the resource curse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse . Highly relevant in big tech companies that are so much slower and bureaucratic compared to startups. Today's world might possibly be the most startup friendly in history - there is far more VC financing available than ever before for any company that can demonstrate any form of competitive advantage in a lucrative market. Financing that provides just enough resources to avoid being handicapped, but not so much that startups are lulled into complacency the way more established companies are.

It's easy to pick one model that seems intuitive, and use it to make sweeping statements about "twenty-first-century capitalism". In the real world there are many different models all operating at the same time, and the one that is most intuitive may not be the most salient.

Half the people reading this would be fired if they followed your suggestion

Yes they would. One of the protesters even talked about this in the article.

> Gareth Sella was blinded in his left eye when a police officer in Bogotá shot him with a rubber bullet at the protests. He argued that hiding the identity of protesters makes sense to protect them from ending up in jail on inflated charges. “As the UN has documented, the state has continued pursuing protesters and more than 100 are in jail, many with disproportionate sentences, such as terrorism, to make an example of them. Hiding our identities seems sensible to me given that two years on we continue living in the fear that we could be jailed at any moment or even that they come after us on the streets,” Sella said.

People in first world countries often underestimate just how dangerous political protests are in other parts of the world. It's not just about getting arrested or injured at the event itself, but about being identified and targeted many weeks afterwards. The protesters are certainly willing to risk a lot, but they are taking every step possible to not martyr themselves.

I once volunteered as a special advocate for foster children, and went through 3 months of training. During training, I saw numerous PR/awareness/fundraising posters about the work that the organization was doing. Given that this was a program focused on foster-children, the posters featured numerous children. At the end of the training, I was told that for privacy reasons, pictures should never ever be posted publicly (social media etc) of any foster child that identifies them as a foster child. Notably, this policy applied even to the organization's own posters. Not a single child in their poster is a foster child - that would have violated their privacy policy. The children in all their posters are just random kids.

We all laughed when we learnt this, but didn't think it was a big deal. Their privacy policy makes a ton of sense - if I was a foster child, I wouldn't want that to be advertised publicly. And the organization would have hamstrung itself if none of their posters featured any children. People don't donate or volunteer based on facts and logic. They do it based on empathy. Not having children's pictures at all, or only blurred photos, would be disastrous for fundraising and getting the foster children their much needed resources.

To be clear, I do not endorse lying at all. Lying makes things much worse in the long run. But the above non-profit wasn't lying in any sense. They simply showed photos of average looking kids in neutral settings, displaying neutral expressions. There was no misinformation in any of their photos. I haven't met a single donor to date who felt lied to or betrayed by their posters.

I can see the parallels between what Amnesty Intl did and the above. They have a very credible reason for not using real photos. The people protesting themselves have requested hiding their identities to avoid life-changing persecution. And Amnesty states that they explicitly labelled their images as having been produced by AI. They have clearly been acting in good faith.

In an ideal world, non-profits wouldn't need to rely on AI generated images... and people wouldn't require pictures to mobilize and get involved. But let's be realistic - there's minimal rationality in people's engagement with non-profits. I skim through the news everyday, and didn't even know there were protests happening in Colombia. The only possible way for organizations like Amnesty International to get their message out there is by using attention-grabbing images. And as long as they make a good faith effort to portray them realistically and label their images as AI-generated, I don't have a problem with it.

> To avoid misleading the public, the images included text stating that they were produced by AI.

> Gareth Sella was blinded in his left eye when a police officer in Bogotá shot him with a rubber bullet at the protests. He argued that hiding the identity of protesters makes sense to protect them from ending up in jail on inflated charges. “As the UN has documented, the state has continued pursuing protesters and more than 100 are in jail, many with disproportionate sentences, such as terrorism, to make an example of them. Hiding our identities seems sensible to me given that two years on we continue living in the fear that we could be jailed at any moment or even that they come after us on the streets,” Sella said.

To be fair, the playbook does warn about this as well:

> They are decisive, which is hard when you’re running a startup—you will get a lot of conflicting advice, both because there are multiple ways to do things and because there’s a lot of bad advice out there. Great founders listen to all of the advice and then quickly make their own decisions.

The rule of thumb I follow is that if you're not sure what to do, follow whatever mainstream advice is out there. But if you're feeling confident that you should do X, then just do X and don't bother listening to anyone else

> Amazon has poured over $7 billion into its India operations over the last decade and competes aggressively with Walmart-backed Flipkart. Amazon is lagging Flipkart and struggling to make inroads in smaller Indian cities and towns, according to a report by Sanford C. Bernstein. Its global rival Walmart, in contrast, is doubling down on India and has spent close to $2.5 billion in the country this year alone.

I wonder to what extent this is driven by Amazon recognizing that it is losing to Flipkart in India, and doesn't want egg on its face. I remember when Uber finally threw in the towel in China and conceded to Didi. I wonder if Amazon is planning a similar move in India.