CTmystery

Hard disagree, but obviously our mileage has varied. I find that junior devs are the most hungry and will comb through endless poorly organized docs and source code before asking a question that makes them look like they "don't belong".

Fun list. The only nitpick I have is for Spark. I would not consider it easy at all. From my experience, team members that needs to come up to speed on Spark usually take about a month to do so.

I would add that it's human nature to fall into a mode of complacency when it works 99% of the time. We've got a story on the front page about "the rock says" heuristics working 99% of the time. The rock says TESLA DRIVES CORRECTLY, and it's mostly right. So we relax, and there's a dead cyclist.

> From my perspective, everything went right here.

Holy smokes. Did we watch the same video?

> Is this not what we should expect from a beta?

Is it OK for a beta software product to nearly kill another person that has no agreement with the company putting the product on the road?

People have the right to do whatever they want with their own stuff, fine. But putting others at risk comes with huge responsibility, and must be weighed against the desire to do what you want. In this case the balance clearly falls IMO to Tesla being selfish and negligent by employing their drivers to be the safety backstop in a clearly buggy system.

Here's a comment in another part of the thread, I see now what the phrase "skewing smarter" means to you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30258409

I no longer have a horse in the race. I wonder why categorical claims really get the blood moving :)

> I hope I haven’t done some elitist gatekeeping bullshit that discourages people from trying new things.

Sorry for "saying it out loud", but that's exactly what you did.

This sort of post obviously irks many people. I think the reason is that pros have seen many many dimensions of what "being smarter" means. You can't claim that there is a correlation until you specify on what dimension of 'being smart' you're attempting to correlate against.

Further, it perpetuates this super annoying egotistical myth for a collection of folks: they think that they themselves are much better programmers than everyone around them. When they write crappy code that can't be maintained, it's the team's fault. The team is obviously not up to their level of genius. Etc.

Edit: removed an unnecessary bit for something hopefully more constructive.

Perhaps most of us in this forum have only the most basic exposure to biology? I say this because with any serious exposure you can't help but be dumbfounded by the complexity and "creativity" of nature. Everything is amazing! The fact that the pieces fit together is just wild and scary and awesome. To think that gradient descent and backprop will give us general intelligence, one of the great mysteries of nature, is incredibly hubristic, IMO. It's statistical inference at scale, with some heuristics up/downstream. It's a cool and useful tool for sure!

Amazing stuff for sure. Looking at the example on page 59, though, I certainly see a description that contains sufficient information to implement against. I read this, and then I jump back into the tech spec that I'm writing to find:

(1) The product specification and use cases are so poorly defined that I need to anticipate the use cases, design a system that is general enough to accommodate them, and implement it in a way that is easily changeable to accommodate the future departures from my assumptions.

(2) As I do this, I need to consider the existing systems that I'm building on top of to ensure there is no regression when this feature rolls out

(3) I consider the other teams that are doing similar work and make judgement calls about whether to write independent systems that do one thing each, or to collaborate on a general-enough system with multiple team ownership.

(4) The tech that I use to implement this must be within the narrow slice of company-sanctioned tech.

(5) I weigh constant tradeoffs on speed to market, maintainability and ownership.

I'm sure there's more, but this stuff is _hard_. If autonomous driving for white collar work is coming, as put forth by comments here, I'd like to see indications that the actual hard part of the job is in jeopardy of being executed effectively.

Maybe I don't want to believe it, so I can't see it. I'll grant that. But I truly do not see it.

With that description, I can't help but think of "the entertainment" from infinite jest.

Well, you are wrong. I am in no way "conceal[ing] the truth or avoid committing oneself". I am fully committed to the position that you are incorrect, and I've used clear language to show you why.

Looking at the definition of equivocate, I see "use ambiguous language so as to conceal the truth or avoid committing oneself". I don't see that I have done that.

Perhaps "broadened" would be better. I have in fact broadened the definition of "search results" to capture the common usage and expectation of a user that punches a query string into google, taps "search", and is brought to a page of results.

From the expecation of the user, the page that you see after punching the 'google search' box, _is_ the google search results page. Ads in the top position of this page are clearly in a better position than organic search results. So advertisers have bought a better position in search results, against the claim of this google doc.

I don't think the author was proposing that classical mechanics is something sacred. Rather, are there prohibitive consequences to a world where our invented model of classical mechanics perfectly matches reality?

I'm only an indirect user of AirPods and I really do not like them: Every time my team does a google meet / hangout the folks using AirPods sound terrible to the point that it's distracting. I don't know if it's in the microphone, the bluetooth connection, or the interaction with a google product, but it is much worse than (a) wired earbuds and (b) the folks using Bose QC 35s (which the company gave out a while back)

> They aren't right, but I can understand the perspective.

How? I'm curious. If someone makes accusations that you know to be false, wouldn't your best defense be a comprehensive refutation?

What alternative do you see that would be more compelling?

I, for one, really appreciate this level of detail, because the most common alternative is to attack back mercilessly without evidence. This tactic being commonly employed by politicians the world over.

I'm somewhat sorry to say this, but don't you see the irony in tricking your non-technical manager into not improving your life at all? A competent manager can _make your life better_. If you are working 80 hour work weeks and sleeping under a desk, wouldn't it make sense to do some backlog prioritizing to get you under a sustainable workload?

Good list, thanks! For the projects in your post, how did you solve #3?

> After enough experience you realize that expressivity and convenience are antipatterns and don't actually simplify things but are harbingers of complexity, bugs, tech debt, even the downfall of organizations and products.

Suggesting that experience leads to jettisoning expressivity is at odds with my direct observations of experienced software engineers working in large teams. The more experience, the _better_ the engineer gets at picking the right level of abstraction to write code that can be maintained by others. Picking a single point on the abstraction spectrum (just above goto but not below it!) is far too rigid for the diversity of tasks that software engineers need to solve.

Perhaps we disagree on the definition of 'the authority of science'. Also FWIW I am not at all religious, in case you think I'm trying to restore scripture to it's rightful place of authority over science. I am just intrigued by this statement that science is the ultimate authority by definition, and that nothing could ever supplant it.

I believe the parent understood more than you are giving them credit for. You don't think you're being too dogmatic when you replace one authority (scripture) for another (science) while retaining the exact same language?

Sure, it's a great method for understanding causal relationships in the world. It's also a method that humans invented, and it's not proven that some future invented method could not provide as much insight into the world as the scientific method. Calling it the ultimate authority and saying that "here literally can not be a higher authority than it by definition" is hard to defend IMO. Science gets its authority from consensus, right now we all agree that science should be granted authority! But it is clearly lacking as an all encompassing tool for understanding: How does the scientific method teach morality? It's not clear that it even can.

> Science is the only and ultimate final authority

Junk science led to the American eugenics movement that included forced sterilization of 64k Americans in the early 1900s.

I love science, but calling it the only and ultimate authoritity leaves a lot of room to create a world we don't want to live in. This happens because scientists disagree themselves on almost everything. Recognizing the difference in science as an ideal versus science put in practice makes me not want to agree with your statement.

I get it, it can def be discouraging. For me, I really _want_ to know what the great problems of the day are that bitcoin/blockchain can solve (or assist in solving). I imagine many others are too. So far, from my cursory reading, I haven't seen anything that makes it click, especially when weighing off against energy costs to our planet.

Perhaps the downvotes were harsh (I was not one of them, can't downvote :), but the question was "what problem does bitcoin solve?". I'm having a hard time seeing any problem in the parent's comment. Instead of identifying a problem, poster is encouraging us to go on an adventure.

> Please no, this is how you end up with 20 different experiments and zero consistency in everything.

This comes from a lack of discipline in the org, not from the parent's (IMO) correct guidance that an org should undertake architectural changes with pilots in isolated parts of the code base.

I'm trying to understand this comment. Do you never use package managers?

In self rule, The goverment is us. We can take away any part of the bill of rights that we see fit, with a new amendment

> like 90% of the tests are catching things that would be caught automatically if we had used a proper language with strong types/compiler

It sounds like the tests are testing the wrong thing

> seems optimized for shoving crappy REST endpoints out the door as quickly as possible

Ruby is a general purpose language. Perhaps it is Rails that you have gripes with?

I'd also like to hear what you are doing that leads you to the conclusion that 'ruby is slow'. For most domains I would say ruby is fast enough to solve the problem in a way that customers are perfectly happy with.

What I find most admirable is not the complete fileting, but the humble acceptance of error on something that proof author had obviously put much effort into. It sucks to hear that something you've worked hard on is fundamentally flawed, especially on such public display

You start by saying the argument is annoying but then you don't refute it in the slightest. Illustrating that the gov also invests heavily in gov agencies does not sever the productive link between gov investment and private industry