One small thought — having the search engine be configurable, so that the user can specify which sources to give priority to (e.g., Reddit, NYT Wirecutter, Wikipedia, etc.), would be an incremental improvement.
Performance reviews definitely feel like a flex of some kind, apart from any legal CYA. I have never wanted a performance review. It feels pretty easy to know where things stand just by assessing the quality of communication and where things are going with the team and the department.
Stack ranking is not my cup of tea at all. But, yes, I'm kind of leaning against performance reviews as well. It's an open question in my mind. I appreciate that big companies might have a challenge on their hands, and I don't have a lot of answers, here. But in my experience, performance reviews have not added anything obviously positive to the workplace, and they're invariably a source of friction. Which seems willfully obtuse when a company has an attrition problem. And I say this as someone who is not considered a low performer.
That sounds pretty depressing. I do not think I would ever want to work at Amazon, or at a place like Amazon. The whole performance review thing feels like a proxy for something else I can't quite put my finger on, but feels creepy nonetheless. And it strikes me as a particularly American preoccupation, although I don't know if this is the case.
The discussion around "boring" technology is an important one. Where to draw the line will be pretty context-dependent. An aerospace firm will put the line here, and a tech startup focusing on a low-risk use case will draw the line somewhere else. And the developers and other stakeholders will be relevant as well. In this context, the checklist at the bottom is interesting food for thought. But I would be wary of relying on it for choices around what technology to adopt, because such decisions will always need to be considered in context. In that sense, the checklist feels well-meaning and even insightful, but a little too concrete.
Adjacent to what the author is doing, I manage my bookmarks in a web app. The main principle is that it should be possible to add any link, no matter how trivial, and have a good chance of finding it later on. (Eventually, in the far-off future, search-engine numbers of links.)
Oh, man. There's some bad code out there with my name on it. It took me years to move beyond the stage where my opinions meant more to me than those of my teammates. I am sad that I was such a boor for as long as I was.
I haven't seen a lot of the problems you're seeing, but I definitely have seen this one. Not only is the touch pad hard to use because it's very sensitive, just using the builtin keyboard can accidentally cause the touch pad to be activated. I've read up on ways of fixing this in Linux, but I haven't quite found the trick to make the touch pad behave as well as the Mac touch pad, which is what I'm used to. I haven't even really found a fix yet, so I type very carefully, avoiding resting my hands on the laptop, when I'm not using an external keyboard.
It's definitely an arms race. Sort of like tax avoidance. As long as you have search engines ordering results, I guess you'll have people who seek to game the results. The question for me is whether what Google does can be improved upon. I think we can do much better.
This is the kind of recipe I see most often when searching for recipes. I wonder whether GP was a little lucky with his/her three links. (The lasagna recipe was an example of an SEO'd recipe.)
> I think building search vertical that are hand-curated would be very interesting to see.
That was my inspiration behind a side project I made a few years ago — a decentralized, hand curated "search engine" [0]. Never got beyond the side project stage. But I see promise in this in the future. Eventually we'll figure out that moderated crowd-sourced curation is better than the best machine learning. The filtering capabilities have to be pretty sophisticated to make it work, though.
I like much of what the author is getting at. Not all dictionaries are not equivalent, and you can really see the difference when you start paying attention. But his prose is overwrought and distracting.
The best acting doesn't draw attention to itself as acting; you just see the character. The best music, in my view, doesn't draw attention to itself as music; you're just immersed in it. The best English prose doesn't draw attention to itself as writing; you're just immersed in a description of something, or a story about something, or an account of something. It's understated to the point of being easy to underestimate.
And honestly, I've been toying around with an Actix web server written in Rust, and the experience is not bad. As someone new to Rust, the main pain points have been along the lines of figuring out how to type a parameter to accept both a database pool and a database transaction (which turns out to be quite hard to figure out). Other than that kind of friction, the experience has been nice.
I'm new to Rust and am far less along than you are, as evidenced by this project. I noticed that in the few files I spot checked, there aren't many/any tests. Without any context or opinion, I'm curious whether unit and integration testing are hard for a project like this.
I can relate. When I lived in the Bay area, I started getting nervous in my late 30s that it would become harder and harder to find my next job in software development. I've since discovered that this seems to be a regional thing. I have not had trouble finding remote work in other parts of the US. Now that I'm 45, I still don't worry too much, because I'm seeing businesses with a good mix of people, including a lot of people in my age group.
I used to have a similar impression. Gradually my view has changed. I now see it as one of the best sources of information on the internet on specific topics.
Reddit is one of the sites I use the most. I hope they can figure out a financially sustainable model without becoming obnoxious or, eventually, being bought up by a private equity firm.
> a more general overview of why any proof that P=NP will likely show up first not in an academic journal, but in a catastrophically massive security breach that lays bare all of the secret information from multiple organizations simultaneously?
This is probably what I was looking for. Is there a good discussion of this topic?
Can someone in the know unpack what's going on here for a less-informed audience? I know vaguely about the outstanding question of whether P = NP, and how it's generally thought that P is not equal to NP. But beyond that most of the context here is unknown to me.
Kind of going in the same direction, I wonder whether it would be good to have children start out learning math in the context of accomplishing concrete, real-world tasks that require mathematical problem solving, and then only gradually abstracting from this concrete starting point if an individual seems to have an aptitude for math.
Example: learning statistics in the context of gathering information about the health of people in a village.
Technology, surveillance and privacy in China is an ongoing topic of interest here and in news outlets. (Obviously it's a topic that's of interest in relation to other places as well.) The excesses of one generation can lead to the reforms of a subsequent one, and I'm curious whether there will be a counter-reaction among young people in China if at some point they perceive a line to have been crossed, and where that line might be.
In the US, I prefer walmart.com over Amazon for groceries because they do their usual price vetting, whereas you can end up paying three times the normal price for something on Amazon if you're not careful.
One of the hard problems of comment sections and forums is ad hom, incivility and lack of decorum. In cases of trolling and borderline behavior, it seems fine to just ban the offenders if there's a signup process. It would be nice to see more consensus around this. There's something to be said for freedom of speech when considered in context, but the manner of expressing oneself is largely orthogonal to what is said and has a lot of bearing on whether a conversation thread is fruitful or painful for the participants. It seems to me that in most cases a collaborative search for truth doesn't need to be painful.