kotxig

قبل 3 سنواتdiscuss

If the outcome of all of this is that Altman ends up at Microsoft and hiring the vast majority of the team from OpenAI, it's probably wise to assume that this was the intended outcome all along. I don't know how else you get the talent at a company like OpenAI to willingly move to Microsoft, but this approach could end up working.

kotxig

قبل 4 سنواتdiscuss

"should probably be reconsidered" isn't exactly outrage is it? We can have sensible discussions about appropriate naming without being extreme one way or the other, as much as the internet seems to hate moderate discussion.

kotxig

قبل 4 سنواتdiscuss

I think brainf*k is a great example of a potentially offensive name that actually conveys meaning and doesn't harm adoption by its intended audience.

kotxig

قبل 4 سنواتdiscuss

Let's just put it this way, I'm not advertising in anything associated with my professional credibility that I use "lunatic", for the very obvious reason that it's possibly offensive to some people and that the word offers nothing to convey meaning. I don't have to find it personally offensive to not want to associate with it.

kotxig

قبل 4 سنواتdiscuss

definition of "lunatic" - "a person who is mentally ill (not in technical use)."

I didn't say it was offensive. If it was called "autistic", the word is not offensive but... why? It's just a really strange choice.

kotxig

قبل 4 سنواتdiscuss

I mean, I had to think about it. Whether it's hugely offensive or not isn't necessarily the right question here. With the whole English language to pick from there are probably better choices that are less ambiguous.

kotxig

قبل 4 سنواتdiscuss

I wish they had called it something else. I hate to be that guy but you know, it's not that hard to be maybe just a little bit more thoughtful.

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17997413

kotxig

قبل 4 سنواتdiscuss

If people in science really do understand that correlation is not causation, why are they publishing papers in journals that show meaningless correlations without doing the actual work of uncovering patterns of causation? If you really understood this point you would be embarrassed to publish a paper on it. These results should be confined to a searchable database in the same way data sets in lab experiments are.

kotxig

قبل 4 سنواتdiscuss

It's good for climate change because it will gross enough of us out to stop eating meat all together.

kotxig

قبل 4 سنواتdiscuss

You can compute an autocorrelation with FFT's by applying the convolution theorem which IIRC the audio api can do the FFTs for you. I also found the the YIN estimator is a lot better as a time domain estimator http://audition.ens.fr/adc/pdf/2002_JASA_YIN.pdf and some years ago I worked out how to compute that estimator with FFTs also.

kotxig

قبل 5 سنواتdiscuss

I am surprised to find in these comments that using the debugger routinely and by default isn't a popular idea. I couldn't do my job as well as I do without having the reflex to use the debugger. I shouldn't be surprised though, the last time I watched a coworker roll his face on the keyboard trying to debug something the conversation went something like:

  - Me: Just use the debugger...
  - Him: But it's hard and annoying to use the debugger
  - Me: It's hard and annoying not having the skills or reflex to use the debugger by default
  - Him: ... ok I agree ... continues rolling face on the keyboard and add print statements everywhere

I think much of the sentiment in these comments is sounding like "that's not how I work so I will defend myself". Just learn how to use your debugger and integrate it into your work flow. You don't need a special IDE to use a debugger in most languages if that's the perceived problem.

kotxig

قبل 5 سنواتdiscuss

The reason debuggers are often hard to use in these environments is because people who don't routinely use debuggers to do their job do not see the value of them, and so organizations do not prioritize your ability to do this. The tone of the comments here in general is sceptical of the use of debuggers and this is exactly why you can't use them in some FAANG's - it's not a popular belief even though to anyone who does use them routinely this is such a fundamental thing. I feel like I am so much more capable with the ability to use a debugger and to routinely use it by default during development. This is how vim users must feel explaining to all the sublime text and vscode users what they are missing out on. When you have it, it's a productivity superpower.

kotxig

قبل 5 سنواتdiscuss

It's easier that the US blocks it for diplomatic reasons than the UK. The UK will almost certainly block it if the US doesn't. It could be interpreted as a snub if the UK interferes with the deal, so the US has first dibs on blocking the merger.

kotxig

قبل 5 سنواتdiscuss

I refuse to ever work for facebook or have a facebook account. I regret having a whatsapp account, created before it was acquired. Still migrating friends+family onto signal. I get it, Facebook has scale and some cool hard problems to solve, and comp packages that are hard to ignore. I'm sure slavery looked pretty attractive too (don't get me wrong, I'm not equating the severity of these things). I just can't imagine having to explain to people in 20 years time how or why I put profit and personal gain ahead of legitimate social issues. How is it defensible? I probably clocked the issues a bit earlier than some, which is why I never created an account. Please just leave facebook and delete your accounts.

kotxig

قبل 5 سنواتdiscuss

Is there a list of companies that fall into category 3 that offer fully remote positions? I worked at a tier 3 company in the bay area and have since settled into what's probably a tier 2 company in Europe. I am considering moving back to the US after covid and doing another 4 years at a tier 3 company, but I would much rather find a job that pays $300k fully remote from Europe (even if that means working on an east coast timezone) than relocating back to the cesspit of San Francisco for $500k.

kotxig

قبل 6 سنواتdiscuss

> Providing customer value is a business model, and it's rather independent of the license underneath.

Yes, my argument and tl;dr is that flooding the market with free software has created an environment where superior for-profit alternatives (open or not) have no value to the majority, so software developers have got to go much much further to create a sense of value. There is of course intrinsic value to the software being used and it took skill and expertise to produce, it's just the perception of value is near zero due to the abundance of free alternatives and the culture of expectation that it should be free.

===

To support yourself financially when building a new library of some sort, you either require a commercial sponsor (someone who values this as part of a broader intent, thinks they will get kudos, free maintenance and hiring opportunities, but doesn't devalue their own business by open sourcing it), a derivative business from the software (support contracts, saas, book sales, bs enterprise features that should really have been there to begin with), or is run as a charity (donors or you simply just have to make $0 and lap up the praise for doing it out of the kindness of your heart).

The bottom line here is charity. People routinely work on software for no personal gain and people routinely expect all generic software to be free, to the point where a one off $5 per head charge is considered excessive and will never be considered.

If we imagined a world where people did place value on generic software, that is to say people expected to pay $1-$5 for a compiler or a library, that opens a lot of opportunity to individuals to compete and produce higher quality software and would give me the opportunity to work on things that I find interesting and care about.

kotxig

قبل 6 سنواتdiscuss

Yes they have been successful and continue to be. I still think they have made a mistake, I don't see why success would invalidate that. If amazon are eating into their profits their mistake was to not protect their business against that threat from the beginning. The mistake cost them whichever rewards amazon are reaping. That doesn't mean they have failed entirely, and clearly far from it.

kotxig

قبل 6 سنواتdiscuss

> Like it doesn't make sense to code a complete OS from scratch every five years

No but it does make sense for us to pay for using an OS given that it's fundamental to what we do. The free as in free beer model means that the entities that produce operating systems do not extract any significant fraction of the value they are responsible for generating. It also perpetuates this idea that we shouldn't pay for software at all, not even $5 for a compiler.

So with that in mind, I'm saying that we should be careful about what software we opensource, and ideally we should at least be commercially sponsored to produce the software that we do open source if we want careers in building these high quality components or if we want to breed a culture whereby employers do invest engineering hours building these things.

> And I'd argue it makes technology a lot more valuable

Yes it means that businesses are able to produce a lot more for a lot less, but it also means that my skills are valued less. Companies value engineers by their hours of input not by the commercial value of the code. For example, I think Electron is terrible for desktop app development. It's great for prototyping but it's bloated and inefficient, I think we can do a lot better. There is no real market for an alternative because we have QT on the high perf C++ side and we have the trash web code on the other. If we had a culture of expecting to pay small amounts for software it would be more likely that I could write a high quality middle ground based on Golang or something, which is less approachable than web dev but more approachable than C++, and we would have higher quality and better performing code produced by it. For us to have this thing I either have to build this thing for free also or I have to come up with some fairly contrived business model, hope that kind people donate etc. The backdrop of opensource culture has devalued this implementation beyond the point of viability, so we will not see it unless a commercial sponsor has a specific need for it or I'm feeling particularly charitable.

kotxig

قبل 6 سنواتdiscuss

Elastic made the mistake of building a whole business on open source software by relying on the poor experience and artificial overhead to launching that software independently and in a production ready fashion. It's no surprise then that people in the community identify that this value is somewhat artificial. If you bridge that gap (either cloud providers providing it or someone contributes containerized/terraformed single deployment scripts), the value of having someone navigate the artificial complexity for you vanishes, and thus the value to the customer.

You have to question what value Elastic is offering its customers on top of the opensource project. Why is it that people complain about AWS devaluing the commercial services of Elastic but none of you complain about opensource devaluing the development of code in general. I can't for the life of me find a job that pays to write a new framework or some piece of interesting software because opensource completely devalues code. I think the proliferation of opensource is probably worse than some of you imagine. I'm not writing any opensource that isn't sponsored because I refuse to spend my time devaluing software development. The vast majority of the profits from opensource all end up in the hands of massive tech companies anyway. If we could skew the commercial advantages to the developer our industry would be a lot more pleasant.

kotxig

قبل 6 سنواتdiscuss

1. The culture around equity should be changed. There are too many companies where employees are only offered equity if they ask for it, and people don't understand it. We can educate the SWE community about matters of financial literacy and normalise equity for all full time employees. I personally will not accept a job at any company without equity.

2. Focusing on salary. We need a european alternative to glassdoor and it needs to become popular. People need to know what they are worth. We are quite shy when it comes to discussing salary. TC info is more readily accessible in the US.

3. Europe needs to grow tech giants that demand top tier talent. That's the main problem with Europe, there isn't a huge amount of ambition to home grow 100bn+ companies that attract the best talent globally. Europe is at a disadvantage because it takes fewer risks and it's also more likely to sell out before reaching tech giant status. We are all using Google, Facebook (or some product of) and Amazon (in countries where amazon can effectively avoid taxes). And the UK sold off ARM, though there is ongoing discussion about that.

If you look at industries that are world leading (i.e banking in London for example), you'll find opportunities to double or triple your salary. Turns out that enough of us are turned off by the idea of working in the banking sector that it doesn't appear to translate into pressure for talent. We are also very well educated so it's not as hard to find people

Submissions

Vaporwave: A Cultural Autopsy [video]

Ask HN: How can I work with OG engineers?

comments