msteffen

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91.
by msteffen 1y ago
For a long time I held a sentiment similar to the parent comment, and then my brother sat me down, took out his phone, put chatGPT into conversation mode, and chatted with it for about five minutes. That was the second time I was truly amaz
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by msteffen 1y ago
IIUC, it does have code generation—the ability to generate strings at compile-time and feed them back into the compiler. The argument that the author of TFA is making is that Zig’s comptime is a very limited feature (which, they argue, is g
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by msteffen 1y ago
Here is, I think, an interesting example of the kind of thing TFA is talking about. In case you’re not already familiar, there’s an issue that game devs sometimes struggle with, where, in C/C++, an array of structs (AoS) has a nice syn
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by msteffen 1y ago
If I understand TFA correctly, the author claims that D’s approach is actually different: https://matklad.github.io/2025/04/19/things-zig-comptime-won... “In contrast, there’s absolutely no facility for dynam
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by msteffen 1y ago
I think it’s self-sustaining, in that the needs of people without kids and the needs of people with kids are super duper different. If all your friends don’t have kids and you do, you feel ostracized because they’re not going to rearrange t
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by msteffen 2y ago
Yes! I wrote my own response, but your post made me realize the most important piece of missing advice: if you want a great offer, interview at a company with lots and lots of money
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by msteffen 2y ago
It’s funny, I switched from engineering to management a few years ago, and as part of learning to be a manager I really had to learn to negotiate (Avery Pennarun, founder of Tailscale, describes Eng managers as professional negotiators, whi
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by msteffen 2y ago
“Think about how many people enjoy gardening, fishing, carpentry, cooking, and even computer programming just for their own sake. What if that kind of activity could provide for all our needs?” As someone who programs for fun, I think what
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by msteffen 2y ago
Hopefully this doesn’t mark me as a troublemaker among the founders here, but this is a good way to negotiate your salary. As in “I’m valuing your equity at 80% of its 1xPP price at your last round, which makes my total comp 100 + (grant x
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by msteffen 2y ago
Another great comment noted that historically society made women do all the childcare and didn’t record what they thought about this, which, yes. It was probably always the case that non-parents knew hilariously little about kids, but back
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by msteffen 2y ago
Parenting threads always raise my hackles, and I’ve been up since 1:30 this morning with a sick kid so can’t not take this bait. In my opinion the issue is social, and it’s this: kids are essential to society but, these days, non-parents ha
102.
by msteffen 2y ago
I hope not, three-month-olds are supposed to sleep 14-17 hours a day. Also, what happened when they dropped naps? Night sleep typically worsens right beforehand, as the residual nap pushes their lengthening wake window into night sleep. How
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by msteffen 2y ago
I had to do a lot of googling before I sort of understood this, so for future readers: these people figured out how to create tiny lenses using the same photolithography machines that are used currently used to create microchips (I-line ste
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by msteffen 2y ago
I mean, Chinese people should be allowed to post videos for Americans, the issue is editorialization. Like how newspapers and other media can use editorial discretion to create the impression that “all reasonable people” hold some opinion
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by msteffen 2y ago
Not just trade reciprocity, but ideological reciprocity. The argument that the US should allow TikTok because “free speech”—while China bans American platforms because of censorship and also dictates content on TikTok because of censorship—
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by msteffen 2y ago
I mean HPC people already call them accelerators
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by msteffen 2y ago
I wonder about the river barriers. I buy that the ocean buoys aren’t effective, but it seems like plastic would be a lot more concentrated in the rivers that feed it into the ocean, and the rivers themselves are a lot shallower. I would be
108.
by msteffen 2y ago
Lot of comments observing that Apple is doing much better than Palm these days, but IMO they miss the point. Steve is dead, and I don’t think he got to take any of that victory money with him. Palm is dead too, but its investors and employe
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by msteffen 2y ago
Yes, I also found the first child much harder than the second, which I wasn’t expecting. I’m one of those people who had a strong feeling of falling in love with my child right away, but even so the toil and sleep deprivation ground my sani
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by msteffen 2y ago
I agree, and in general I am very pro-estimates (they switch your team from cooperative scheduling to preemptive scheduling, and they’re an important tool for managing the chaos of development), but the statement “we expect this project to
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by msteffen 2y ago
If you haven’t seen it (and need something to show the “what about bridges” crew), Hillel Wayne’s “crossover project” series of posts[^1] on this is brilliant. I like to show people this quote from it: > One person talked about how frust
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by msteffen 2y ago
> I've also experienced things you mention, but it was always in orgs where everything, including any small feature, was treated as a "big bet": unsupported by metrics (no matter how imperfect), but instead wishful thinkin
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by msteffen 2y ago
Yes! In my last role, I aggressively pushed the concept of “technical risk” to try and get people used to this idea. Sometimes the computers don’t work the way you thought they did at the beginning. This is a normal and ubiquitous form of r
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by msteffen 2y ago
I basically agree (I think) in that I don’t think there needs to be a separate “cutting scope” phase—one should it as soon as they realize they need to. And I certainly agree that it’s incumbent on engineering to invent alternatives and pro
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by msteffen 2y ago
When I switched from engineering to management, I spent a long time thinking about software estimates, read about many different approaches, and argued with many other managers (I’ll try to write up my own blog post for the next time the
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by msteffen 2y ago
From the manager’s side, when one of the engineers on my team was senior and looking towards staff, the way I would explain it was “staff engineers are leaders of their teams, in practice whether or not in title. So you have to understand w
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by msteffen 2y ago
My former employer (Pachyderm) was acquired by HPE, who built Frontier (and sells supercomputers in general), and I’ve learned a lot about that area since the acquisition. One of the main differences between supercomputers and eg a datacent
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by msteffen 2y ago
That is just not always possible. An example that should be familiar to HN: I worked for a period at startup, and used my email at that startup (my only work email at the time, as that’s where I was working!). Then the startup ran out of mo
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by msteffen 2y ago
Wait, does F# not support mutual recursion? Can one not write eg a recursive descent parser?
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by msteffen 2y ago
Interestingly, I was at Google during I think the very end of its golden years (2011-2016). I loved it and when I heard about how sclerotic it had gotten was pretty surprised. Looking back, IMO the seeds of its downfall had already been pla

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