bulatb

7 ms·

61.
by bulatb 2y ago
Absolutely, "quality" can often be descriptive shorthand for a set of traits. It's also, independently, always a normative judgement. I think mixing them is where the disagreement up and down this thread is coming from. Someo
62.
by bulatb 2y ago
"Doesn't break" and "actually turns screws" are obviously properties of certain screwdrivers, which maybe you don't get with modern ones. I didn't need to say the screwdriver is "quality" to say
63.
by bulatb 2y ago
"Quality" is what we call the difference between what we like and what's objectively successful, not a property of any object. It's the name we give to one of many ways we confuse "is" and "ought." Th
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by bulatb 2y ago
Moral fiber is important. Choosing ineffective, superficial actions that feel righteous over unrewarding slog that leads to moral good seems like the opposite of that.
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by bulatb 2y ago
People want to think in terms of people and their actions, not in terms of systems and their structures. That's the problem. Show a programmer a system that requires constant on-call burning out the team—they'll tell you (if they&
66.
by bulatb 2y ago
Standing in the wind won't stop the storm. You only get blown over. "If everyone just" stood in front of the storm, they'd all get blown over, and the storm would go on. No one wants to hear that individual heroics aren&
67.
by bulatb 2y ago
Some apple-pickers think the point of picking apples is to prove how good you are at climbing trees. They'll never not be mad at pluckers who just pluck the nearest apple, and the people who reward them for the apples, and the world th
68.
by bulatb 2y ago
There's a complex of these passengers you can't discuss because it wakes them up and they reflexively defend themselves. They wrap themselves around your sense of truth and it's impossible to get them out. Sleep tight. :)
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by bulatb 2y ago
I've been the guy who nailed it, and I've also been the guy who proves that frauds are everywhere and resumes are meaningless because he can't do FizzBuzz.[0] I'm not doubting there are people who apply and just aren&#x2
70.
by bulatb 2y ago
These companies are following the universally efficient strategy for life, to be as bad at everything as you can get away with. Interviews like this aren't good at anything they're meant for, but the companies that use them keep s
71.
by bulatb 2y ago
I meant that "you" like the general you, not iambateman you. Sorry if that wasn't clear. I couldn't figure out a better phrasing at the time. Hopefully it's better now. I'm nobody to lecture people. I don'
72.
by bulatb 2y ago
Skepticism should begin with the skeptic's own motives. A skeptic's second question (after "Really?" or "Why?") should be, "Why am I asking?" Do they want to test the claim to learn something, or to d
73.
by bulatb 2y ago
The hardest part of this is fighting Goodhart's law. You have to really be the skeptic that you say you are, not just declare yourself a skeptic and take the day off. You have to care about the truth of your positions, not how good it
74.
by bulatb 2y ago
Yes and yes. Comparing to a tennis court communicates the scale, not the size, which is more important to the vast majority of readers. It's a big thing, close to very big, but smaller than huge. So for a mirror, it's gigantic. Do
75.
by bulatb 2y ago
My battery ran out before I could delete. I had another sentence there at first about "unless you call respecting rights an obligation," but I took it out because I didn't want to make a mess. To me an obligation in this cont
76.
by bulatb 2y ago
Only for positive rights, and not always for those either.
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by bulatb 2y ago
Autosaving means you often save a state the user didn't want to save, sometimes one they wanted not to save, erasing one they probably wanted to keep as a savepoint. You can give them back the point-in-time or known-state recovery wi
78.
by bulatb 2y ago
"All people are not trained" can either mean "no people are trained" or, less commonly, "it's not true that all people are trained." Using it the second way can be confusing because it doesn't really
79.
by bulatb 2y ago
If the process being broken doesn't hurt them, why would they fix it? If they don't need to fix it, what makes it broken? I've been critical of hiring in tech for years and years and years, but hiring has only gotten worse (f
80.
by bulatb 2y ago
They were covering what happened every week as if the war was happening in real time. They also covered tactics and equipment, key events and people, spying, and war crimes in specials and side series, and followed D-Day and Pearl Harbor ho
81.
by bulatb 2y ago
"Serverless" means there's no stateful application server in your architecture. No instance, just callable code. Shell script, not daemon. You write narrow business-level functions that take inputs, do their business, and giv
82.
by bulatb 2y ago
I've always heard that tech employers value all the things you'd expect them to value, but I've only ever seen them value LeetCode.
83.
by bulatb 2y ago
Sorry for the snark. That was unproductive. My point is that if Alice has what she wants, Bob will not convince her that she doesn't by explaining that she ought to want what Bob wants, which she doesn't have or want. Especially i
84.
by bulatb 2y ago
> You see other breathing humans ...who will cheerfully explain to you that you're unhappy, your hobbies are empty, your choices as wrong, and how much happier you'd be if you'd just value what they value and like what t
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by bulatb 2y ago
> lobs it randomly onto the lower part of the front page That is where it was. So the process posts a copy of the article and comments with the current date? But gives it the old URL?
86.
by bulatb 2y ago
This thread with all these comments (the ones up when I wrote this) was posted three days ago. Here's a post that referenced it then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41211151 Why is it back on the front page and p
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by bulatb 2y ago
Computer science is for studying what computation means and how we can describe it, the questions we can frame in terms of computation, how they might be answered, and what that can tell us. Applied computer science and computer engineering
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by bulatb 2y ago
> I know I lose points for not being an ultimate shell dweller You don't lose a single point for using tools that fit your needs, no matter how much any gatekeeper says different.
89.
by bulatb 3y ago
I must have misread "plop that kind of library" as "plop that kind of binary" about five times. My bad.
90.
by bulatb 3y ago
Smaller boundaries are likelier to need less maintenance, but nothing stands still. The reason you can run an ancient simple binary on newer systems is that someone has deliberately made that possible. People worked to make sure the environ

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