xenotux

29 ms·

1.
by xenotux 1y ago
Coding as such is seldom a bottleneck to begin with. How many times have you been in a conversation along the lines of "we have every detail of the product figured out, but we need another month for the coders to finish writing the cod
2.
by xenotux 1y ago
> There's been a strong theme recently here on HN of confusing programming (the act of writing code to meet specifications) and Engineering(the writing of specifications, and the oversight of said process, along with overview of tes
3.
by xenotux 1y ago
Nah. Every company has its lore about what makes a good candidate and they try to test for that. The lore is often rubbish (as in: there's often little correlation between interview performance and on-job performance), but there is sti
4.
by xenotux 1y ago
> One great piece of advice and informal mentor gave me long ago is that there is no information in a rejection. I mean, there might be, in two ways. Sometimes, you just mess up in some obvious way and can learn from that. But you also g
5.
by xenotux 1y ago
It's moving in the right direction, but I'd still say that CSS has more quirks and misbehaviors than the common subset of JS...
6.
by xenotux 1y ago
So... how is it useful? You're trading one oracle for another. Either of these oracles can be manipulated or compromised. I think one could argue that it's more elegant from the point of view of blockchain maximalism. But I don&#x
7.
by xenotux 1y ago
I've been in engineering, TLM, and management roles in multiple companies. In terms of output, TLMs are not held to the same standard as full-time engineers at the same level, period. Their engineering contributions are dissected only
8.
by xenotux 1y ago
Look, I'm trying to describe reality; you seem to be expecting me to defend it. But briefly: > Inevitably because why? Because proven, effective managers are always in short supply, so when you hire new people, or if any of the exis
9.
by xenotux 1y ago
> Role power is by far the least effective. To be frank: it sounds nice, but I don't think that's really true. It's the power of "who's going to decide my promotions", "who is going to advocate for my t
10.
by xenotux 1y ago
In big FAANG-style workplaces, I don't think that middle managers without the TL- prefix have the kind of influence or leverage you're talking about here. It changes at VP level, but ultimately, most of the corporate management hi
11.
by xenotux 1y ago
The original ethos was that you didn't want the company ran by MBAs, so you wanted to build your management team by tapping into talented engineers. Of course, this can backfire in many ways. You end up wasting engineering talent, and
12.
by xenotux 1y ago
TLM roles are a trap, but not in that sense. There's no expectation that you do two jobs at once. It's just a way to ease unsuspecting engineers into management. If you don't suck at management, your team inevitably grows (or
13.
by xenotux 1y ago
I'm surprised this is aliased to char*, not const char*. The benefit of the aliasing is convenience, but the main risk is absent-mindedly passing it to a libc function that modifies the string without updating the SDS metadata. Const w
14.
by xenotux 1y ago
> Toxic expert here! I hate when blog posts try to teach complex subjects. It's almost always a non-expert doing the teaching, and they fail to do it accurately. This then causes 1) the entire internet repeating the inaccuracies, an
15.
by xenotux 1y ago
Such is the curse of blogging: when writing a series of posts, authors naturally assume that the readers are as engaged and as familiar with the previous discussion as they are. In reality, even regular subscribers probably aren't, and
16.
by xenotux 1y ago
I don't think there's anything that would put some new, esoteric math concept in your mailbox every week, although there's plenty of books that cover recreational mathematics in an accessible way (Martin Gardner, Ian Stewart,
17.
by xenotux 1y ago
You can say that about 99% of the tech that people use today. Windows and MacOS don't serve you. Your browser doesn't serve you. Heck, Hacker News doesn't serve you - it serves a bunch of VCs! But the reality is that most of
18.
by xenotux 1y ago
> I don't understand why we would ever want an agent to buy stuff for us. Why not? Offload the entire task, not just one half of it. It's why many well-off people have accountants, assistants, or servants. And no one says &quot
19.
by xenotux 1y ago
There is a downvoted comment that reads "ah yes the totally new math of exponentiation". The snark is uncalled for, but that's actually the essence of this article: it talks about repeated exponentiation as if it were some pr
20.
by xenotux 1y ago
The main difference between democracies and secular autocracies isn't that they have a vastly different approach to run-of-the-mill moral vices, such as prostitution or porn. It's that democracies tolerate a much wider spectrum of
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by xenotux 1y ago
I think a simple way to take emotion out of this is to ask if a computer can beat humans at math. The answer to that is pretty much "duh". Symbolic solvers and numerical methods outperform humans by a wide margin and allow us to
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by xenotux 1y ago
> While the park trees contained lead isotopes normally associated with air pollution, the street trees had isotopes found in lead water pipes, which were made with metal from geologically old deposits in nearby mines. I don't under
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by xenotux 1y ago
> I think it's fascinating to follow her trajectory. I think it's a lesson that we all consistently fail to apply to ourselves. It is so pervasive on social media - HN included - yet it's something we only attribute to oth
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by xenotux 1y ago
> What's the point of surveilling the movements of average citizens' money? The most important is taxation. People pay their babysitters or gardeners under the table, or transact with friends and family without reporting income
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by xenotux 1y ago
Eh? With the "anonymous" models that we're pushing for right now, nothing stops you from handing over your verification token (or the control of your browser) to a robot for a fee. The token issued by the verifier just says &
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by xenotux 1y ago
Another factor is that it's easier to do it underwater than on land. The mammalian diving reflex is what helps.
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by xenotux 1y ago
> IMHO this is going to be part of a broader trend where advancements in AI and robotics nullify any comparative advantages low wage countries had. Then why hasn't it yet? In fact, some lower-wage countries such as China are on the
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by xenotux 1y ago
I think that's an odd way of viewing creativity: unless you can pull off the whole thing, you're not really creative/ What about people who are not native speakers? Who are dyslexic? Do we deny them the spark of creativity
29.
by xenotux 1y ago
I think this is similar to AI generated images: it puts a new creative tool in the hands of people who might have had good ideas, but didn't have a mastery of the medium. In that respect, it's cool: if you had a great idea for a s
30.
by xenotux 1y ago
Yes, although it's not very likely. But keep in mind that final assembly and packaging is typically happening in large, air-conditioned halls with vinyl floors, conveyor belts, plastic office chairs, disposable coveralls, etc. There&#x

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