Every such event reminds me of that celebrated fraud of an academic who argued that corporations exist to maximize profit within the applicable legal framework and that it is how things should be.
The fact that corporate entities actively shape the legal framework to suit narrow interests that frequently undermine collective welfware somehow escaped him.
When intellectual dishonesty and amoral behavior reach such systemic levels society crosses boiling points
If WASM+WASI existed in 2008, we wouldn't have needed to create Docker. That's how important it is. WebAssembly on the server is the future of computing.
”It has been a struggle for me. I have a voice at the highest levels here, so it feels like I should be able to move things, but I'm evidently not persuasive enough. A good fraction of the things I complain about eventually turn my way after a year or two passes and evidence piles up, but I have never been able to kill stupid things before they cause damage, or set a direction and have a team actually stick to it. I think my influence at the margins has been positive, but it has never been a prime mover.”
It is simply stunning that the seasoned direction and counsel that someone of John Carmack’s caliber is capable of delivering was not being followed.
VSCode is one of the greatest pieces of engineering of our time. It's really only when you compare it with Atom that you realize how great it is. Atom was built by incredibly smart people, who had full control over the platform and several years of head start, and they were still out-engineered by the VSCode team at every turn.
VSCode did almost everything right: The choice of TypeScript as the base language (with which VSCode has a symbiotic relationship), the limited, slowly expanding extension API, LSP, the monorepo, the monthly release cadence, the built-in terminal, and the list goes on and on. They turned Electron's strengths into super-strengths, and deftly engineered around Electron's weaknesses. VSCode is the greatest productivity tool in the history of software engineering, and it fully deserves the dominant status it has today.
This is how I move fast and break nothing. By having fullstack type-safety from database all the way to the frontend with auto-completion. My current stack:
+ SvelteKit (could be Next, Nuxt, Solid or any other TypeScript framework)
+ tRPC (typed calls between frontend and backend, https://trpc.io)
So the poor and middle class have to go beyond comfort and make concessions every day while these billionaires are free to burn the world at a 10000x rate of a normal person because “there’s not enough of them?”
Great logic. By that strand, I suppose they could also be allowed to abuse people, I mean it’s more important that we make sure the general population doesn’t abuse right? That’s what truly moves the statistic, not the crime perpetrated by a few billionaires?
What I really like about ElonJet and Sweeney's other accounts is they included emission estimates. Really blew a hole in the idea that you could ever consider Musk or Gates to be environmentalists. A recent Musk flight between Washington and Miami emitted 9 tons of CO2 [1], which is nearly double what a fuel inefficient car would emit each year. How can you tell me I'm the problem with my single truck and couple of commercial flights each year when you've got multiple Teslas and hundreds of private flights each year?
Many people have been trying to get the point across that legal, unlimited free speech can put people in harm's way. Elon is happy to say that he's willing to trade harm to those people for his free speech principles, but as soon as his family is the one facing the repercussions, he's happy to change policy and sue.
I am burnt out (but recovering!) with web dev and htmx is what I am using for my project.
Django, DRF, Postgres, tailwind and HTMX.
I am so tired of all the front end frameworks and all the complexity that gets added. At some point I think you need it and you get returns from it but hearing more people in the industry recognize and talk about how JS everything isn't always the answer gives me hope.
I like what HTMX has to offer and I am excited to see it continue to get air time.
Speaking from experience, you can get away with not understanding Redis for a while. Then one day you'll wake up and everything will be on fire, because you used Redis wrong, and now your main and replica are in a death spiral DoS'ing each other trying to pass a 1TB replication log back and forth.
You don't need to learn your tools for doing simple stuff under normal circumstances. You need to learn them to do bespoke surgery on live data while everything is on fire and the customers are threatening to fire your company. Or better yet, so that you can avoid doing that altogether by anticipating limitations during design.
That being said, doing everything in Postgres is also going to bite you if you have moderate scale. This is really the same mistake again. Postgres looks like a big truck you can just load up and load up, until you wake up one day and there are cascading failures across all services that touch that database, because you wrote a dumb query that took a lock for 5 entire minutes while it did an HTTP request. It's robustness will lull you into thinking something is working well when it's actually barely working.
(Before you object, yes, it is a better idea not to have multiple services talk to the same database, I hear you. And no, you shouldn't ever hold a database lock while doing an HTTP request, believe me I know. These things can happen.)
My favorite antipattern is, you can just leave a script that does an event loop running in the foreground, detatch tmux, and voila, you have a 'server'. Works great in a pinch or when you just don't need to finish it.
Well fortunately Tesla has a laser-focused CEO that is devoting his time to making sure a feature which he clearly stated was absolutely critical is being responsibly developed and marketed.
Really grateful for that—I’d hate to think this publicly traded company that had a sky-high valuation that was, in part, based off this promise was being led by somebody who is off in the weeds worried about social media or something.
The article, and study, refer to several kinds of jobs with variable pay including sales people who get commission.
The disconnect is hn users writing 3 full paragraphs about gig workers without apparently reading beyond the headline of what they are ostensibly responding to.
I started trying to use ChatGPT instead of google for a lot of my queries. The tricky part is unlearning how to search.
For instance, I had a timestamp 2022-11-27 00:00:00.000 and wanted to display it in local string. The problem was (depending on your time zone) if you do new Date("2022-11-27 00:00:00.000").toLocaleString(), you get 11/26/2022
So I would have googled something like "pass timezone to toLocaleString", which would give me this answer [0]. But its still a lot.
Instead in ChatGPT I would ask:
> assume i'm in EST timezone, en-US
> const d = "2022-11-27T00:00:00.000Z"
> const dd = new Date(d)
> How can I print out local string as Sun Nov 27 2022?
But the answer was actually wrong, which is fine! Easy to test
> This actually prints out 11/26/2022, 7:00:00 PM. Try again
To which it replied:
> The output you are getting is correct, because the date you provided is in the UTC time zone, and you are formatting it using the Eastern Time (ET) time zone...
It was pretty incredible and much better than stackoverflow as now I don't have to worry about generalizing my answer or implementing the answer to my particular use case. ChatGPT tends to be verbose but the code is clearly noted and you can often ignore the words for simple tasks.
"Programmer-archeologist", to borrow a term from Vernor Vinge. I imagine the job would entail refining the prompts and doing some work yourself to chain together modules or legacy software, sorta like splitting the tasks with the AI assistant. Pair-coding with the AI, if you will.
Bitwarden is better, but Vaultwarden (the self-hosted version written in Rust) is the absolute best option. Host it yourself on a free tier VM in one of the clouds, configure a backup solution, and never worry about it again. And you don't need to trust anyone with your passwords.
Use tailscale if you want to get fancy and keep it off the public internet or go the easy route and install fail2ban and expose it via public IP.
I've been called a 10xer before, and I'm the only one in my company currently at that level. We're a data company first and software second.
Trainings don't work. What does work is pair programming but you have to do this effectively. Say you have 3 buckets, frontend, backend and infrastructure. Ideally, you want to pair someone who has very full infrastructure and backend buckets, with someone who has an overflowing frontend bucket. Mix and match. There's no value in pairing two more backend oriented engineers together.
There's also no value in categorizing things in frontend and backend, if you just have a frontend engineer that throws things over the hedge to the backenders garden, you're going to have a shit shoveling contest and this doesn't work. Of course, you should still have people specialized in certain domains, but you should try to share knowledge within your team as much as possible and try to broaden's people experience instead of having people work on their own little islands. Pair someone with a backend background on a big frontend ticket with an experienced frontender and before you know it you'll have two full stack engineers that'll possibly grow to become a "10x" or whatever that means.
Code reviews are critical and it's important to have someone in your team that carries a big stick and isn't afraid to use it. This is a sensitive thing I've noticed, I've worked at companies where I wasn't the only 10x engineer, and the code reviews there were a joy because I was getting very valuable feedback. It wasn't so much that my code was wrong, but more something like `{} as MyInterface` could also be written as `<MyInterface>{}`. There were a lot of style related comments. What I notice in my current team is that people feel like this is unnecessary, but I always felt like it is valuable when another engineer suggests something like "maybe you could abstract this?" because it introduces a bigger picture that I may not have thought of before. It's very loathsome to carry the big stick, but I feel like if I dont, we're going to go back to the old patterns of not writing tests, not thinking about architecture.. Those kinds of things.
If you are job searching and reading the comments on this post, there’s a >90% chance that "An Engineering Leader's Job Search Algorithm" may help you:
I got frustrated by interviews where I told them I've been doing this for over 25 years and they're like "ok how do you show the list of files in this directory at the bash prompt"
I've had the "what the hell job are you hiring for?" response in my head many times
I've got no interest groveling my way up some kind of hierarchy to eventually get to a position I thought I was coming in to do in the first place.
This has turned out to be a perfectly acceptable shortcut.
You could say it's more like petitioning for a job as opposed to applying for one
Find a company whose open source projects you are interested in. Dive in and and start fixing things. Then if you really like it after a couple weeks start nudging around for a job. If you do good work they'll just give it to you, no bullshit funnel required.
I like this method because you aren't just doing l33t coding exercises to work on some sight unseen codebase that makes you suicidal and throw you into existential crisis.
Plenty work for companies that contract with the DoD, even if they are non "defense contractors" in the historical/industry scope sense. Google and Amazon, for example, do brisk business with the DoD.
And, to be clear: I don't have any particular problem with that, at least any more so than anything about the general business of defense! I'd just prefer we be a little more honest about the financial structure.
"Despite all its flaws, the DOD is putting on a clinic on superior training, logistics, discipline, technology and power projection. I shudder to think what the world would look like right now and in several years without the DOD. Europe would be getting steamrolled if not for the DOD and NATO and it wouldn’t end there."
For every bit of good the DOD does it kills, destroys and spreads enough suffering to AT LEAST nullify it if not vastly put it in the negative. That is without considering how all the money the DOD wastes on killing people and overthrowing other governments could be used to massively reduce suffering if it was put towards something more useful like infrastructure or healthcare.
Exactly this! And the part I want to impress: jobs programs are good! Essential national defense is good! I'm not against these things; I'd just like it if we could (1) be a little more honest with ourselves, as Americans, and (2) maybe cut out the middleman and just admit that we'd like a healthy middle class.
When you remember that the DoD is really just a $800B jobs program for segments of the population that would otherwise blush at accepting welfare (including many of the fine commenters on this website), it becomes easier to understand why it's culturally incapable of passing a financial audit.
The fact that corporate entities actively shape the legal framework to suit narrow interests that frequently undermine collective welfware somehow escaped him.
When intellectual dishonesty and amoral behavior reach such systemic levels society crosses boiling points