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atom_arrangeron Japan moves to tighten rules for foreigners

Per capita. GDP is not meaningful for the average person most of the time. Norway has a very high GDP per capita, but a lower GDP than Canada. Would it make life better for them if they suddenly had double the GDP and double the population? Probably not really, might be more crowded.

Canadians might be able to produce more innovation if there wasn't so much inflation and tax burden due to high immigration.

atom_arrangeron The senior engineer death spiral

Sometimes to look like a genius you have to look incompetent for a bit.

In a place operating with SCRUM you're often expected to be shipping things every sprint, and sometimes with a large and important piece of work the experimentation, and the building of the thing, doesn't fit in a sprint, and if you tried to ship incrementally you'd just be shipping junk.

So you're going to end up giving some standup updates that do not inspire confidence for a bit. "I tried this thing, didn't work out", "still working on X, tried another thing", etc.

It's possible at the end of it you figure it out, and the result justifies the time investment.

The spiral is friction with a system that disincentivizes taking on ambitious goals.

I wouldn't just blame the engineer for not shipping smaller things, being less ambitious, talking more instead of working, I'd blame the company culture for disincentivizing deep work and ambitious goals.

Obviously there's a limit to this. You do need to ship something useful eventually. It's possible you spend extra time and still fail to accomplish the thing you wanted. It might be damaging to your reputation. You win some you lose some.

With AI there's less time between having the idea to do something or try something, and it being done or ruled out, so I see this being less of an issue now. The main barrier is knowing what to do and describing it.

atom_arrangeron Nvidia's Risky Business

That's a good point. It's just kind of surprising, there's been a lot of incremental progress towards rendering and simulation for a long time. If you'd asked 10 years ago if we'd have AGI or realistic realtime rendering and physics of a single room first I think most people would have answered the former.

atom_arrangeron Nvidia's Risky Business

Another interesting discrepancy is that people think current GPUs are maybe capable of running AGI but they still can barely manage photorealistic rendering of a single room in realtime, or simulate something like a shirt thrown into a pile of laundry. They can generate a video of it based on millions of existing videos, but not do a real simulation of light and physics in realtime.

atom_arrangeron Not hiring junior engineers won't solve the problem you think you have

The other challenge with real people is the emotional aspect. Easier and faster to tell ai the code it wrote is terrible and needs to be redone completely, or maybe you just end the session and use a new model. Trickier to do with a human.

atom_arrangeron The startup's Postgres survival guide

I don’t have a lot of experience related to this so I’m just noting some things.

Some people in this thread don’t seem to think it’s that hard or overcomplicated.

When reading Designing Data-Intensive Applications my main takeaway was that event sourcing can make it easier to solve a lot of issues like performance, scaling, consistency, auditability, etc.

It would be interesting to look into what a low overhead way of implementing CRUD with event sourcing in Postgres would look like, then decide if it’s too complex.

atom_arrangeron The startup's Postgres survival guide

Can you elaborate on 4 a bit, are you saying to always use event sourcing, or something like it?

atom_arrangeron What happened to nerds?

I'm not claiming everyone uses the terms this way but for your consideration:

Geeks - Obsessed over fictional world(s). Nerds - Obsessed over the real world (or a specific part of it).

Comics Geek Math Nerd

There's a decent amount of overlap though.

atom_arrangeron Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says

Breaking and entering is to immigrating as pickpocketing is to taking my stuff.

Sometimes immigration is legal. Sometimes taking my stuff is legal.

There’s often overlap between legality and what people support or oppose, but not always.

“I oppose something that’s already against the rules” is a simpler/easier argument, rather than saying “I oppose the against the rules thing, and some of the stuff that isn’t against the rules currently”. I think that's why people make this argument of "only against illegal immigration". I agree it could be deceitful, taking the easier argument. It’s also not a tactic that works long term though if it just results in the immigration they were against being made legal. A stronger anti immigration stance, legal or illegal, would be a better starting point.

To be fair there may also be some people who a couple years ago really did only oppose illegal immigration but were then exposed to new information, and changed their mind to oppose some or all legal immigration as well.

atom_arrangeron Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says

a. Opposed to someone taking my money against my will and the law just because they want to, “for a better life”.

b. Not opposed to someone taking my money in exchange for goods or services I want.

a. Opposed to someone moving into my country against my will and the law just because they want to, “for a better life”.

b. Not opposed to someone moving into my country because I married them and want them here.

There’s a whole spectrum between a and b, but I think most people are against a.

Legal pickpocketing is taxes you’re opposed to, or wages being garnished.

In theory people who say they’re only against illegal immigration are saying they completely agree with all policies regarding legal immigration, now and maybe into the future. Likely not what these people actually believe because while possible it would be a silly position. They’re probably just saying it to try to find some common ground with very pro immigration people. Likely a fools errand.

atom_arrangeron Elon Musk has lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI

An alternative chain of events might be one where OpenAI, Inc. only operated through income and donations, which would probably lead to them scaling more slowly. They could also take on loans.

Having thought about this whole thing more I believe that non-profits should not be a separate type of entity that gets special tax treatment. People have different ideas of what constitutes legitimate non-profit activity. It just opens things up for tax avoidance and scams.

atom_arrangeron Elon Musk has lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI

The interested parties would be taxpayers. I think some groups are trying to look into it.

The issue is that they did R&D as a charity, donations to which are tax deductible, there may also be other benefits to being a charity during R&D but that’s a big one, then once the thing works, setup a for profit, sell ip at “fair value”, get some investment, then things are ready for business.

I read there’s no statute of limitations on a tax issue like this, so I guess it might be hanging over them indefinitely.

I’m not a big taxation and government fan, they’d probably just waste the money anyways. It does seem unfair OpenAI gets to use this loophole though, unless all companies can make their R&D investment tax deductible, and get any other benefits of this setup.

atom_arrangeron Elon Musk has lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI

Aside from the disagreements between these parties, what about the precedent of running a non-profit, and then transferring all IP to a for profit when it’s convenient to do so?

I wonder if the government or taxpayers have a case to bring regarding that.

atom_arrangeron Pirate library operator arrested, study canceled for 330k members

The anti piracy stance would be making it illegal for a surgeon/person to copy the procedure another surgeon invented without payment. Copying does not require additional labor from the inventor.

Obviously we would like the inventor of the procedure to be compensated, but is it worth depriving other people, or potentially them dying, to protect "intellectual property"?

atom_arrangeron Stellantis declares bankruptcy in China, with $1B in debts

Tesla was built on American R&D and manufacturing and is competitive in terms of cost and features. It’s probably easier to not innovate and go for almost guaranteed short term profit by relocating existing manufacturing processes though.

I don’t think there was no alternative. I think it was an easier, more short term, and more selfish (in relation to fellow countrymen and descendants), choice.

atom_arrangeron Your Prize for Saving Time at Work with AI: More Work

This kind of specialization can be bad for factory workers as well. Doing the same motion over and over can lead to repetitive stress injury.

I think it's true for any worker that performing the same activity over and over can lead to issues that wouldn't occur if work was more varied. That isn't necessarily in a companies interest though since for them it's easier to train people on one task, and they're easier to measure or replace.

The predictable and measurable thing for developers is thinking and cranking out features.

atom_arrangeron The economics behind "Basic Economy" – A masterclass in price discrimination

That’s an interesting point, I do often hear about being near a rail line as being a benefit for property values, but you don’t usually hear the same thing about being near an airport. Although this might partially be because a rail line is something people would use more often than an airport.

I don’t have much of a personal opinion on this. I just thought it was interesting. You’d think this train with a fixed route, tons of seating, traveling multiple times per day, would be cheaper than a plane, but somehow it isn’t.

The pollution and noise pollution is an interesting point, that could probably be improved somewhat for air travel while keeping the benefits, if electric planes could be developed. I was in India at one point and the noise of just being anywhere near roads was terrible day and night, it wasn’t even necessary people just love to honk there. There actually was a kind of luxury hotel city (Aerocity Delhi) near the airport there, I guess if they’re already used to that much noise being near an airport can be valuable.

There is some advantage for cars and planes in that you don’t need to develop the whole land between the two points you’re interested in traveling between as much as you do for rail, maybe that’s where the price difference is coming from.

atom_arrangeron The economics behind "Basic Economy" – A masterclass in price discrimination

I would have thought this as well. Looking at a trip from Fukuoka to Tokyo though. Shinkansen takes 5 hours and costs about $200. An economy flight is around $50 and takes less than 2 hours, although it’s possible there’s a lot more overhead to that time.

atom_arrangeron I cut GTA Online loading times by 70% (2021)

https://www.rockstargames.com/careers/openings/position/5761...

"Scrum", "Agile", "Lean".

The devs were may have been too busy "sprinting" and getting their assigned tickets done to think about higher level concerns like "is this good? can we make things faster or better?".

I think your points also stand though.

atom_arrangeron Uber Joins the S&P 500

I’ve never thought much about it, always consider it’s just a percentage. I am in Canada but it’s pretty much the same. Googling “tipping buy one get one” turns up this snippet from a Quora answer:

> The amount of effort the server devotes to your ordre is the same regardless of what the owner charges for your meal. So tip on the original, undiscounted price. And tip at least 20 percent.

Kind of funny, when it results in a higher tip I should consider the amount of effort.

I expect if I said I was only tipping $2 on a $100 bottle of wine at a restaurant because it isn’t any extra effort to grab an expensive bottle the poster might not agree.

atom_arrangeron Uber Joins the S&P 500

They calculate tips after fees and before discounts, so customers are tricked into tipping more. First noticed this after getting a buy one get one free deal and seeing a tip calculated at 2X what I'd expect

atom_arrangeron $20k bounty was claimed

What should Prettier should do in this case?

I think we can all agree there should be a line length limit, it has to enforce it eventually. You could say “it’s just a couple more characters” until the line is 200 characters long.

Semantic diff is maybe the solution.

atom_arrangeron OpenAI has hired an army of contractors to make basic coding obsolete

I was with you until you said “make me Facebook for dogs”. I think a sufficiently pattern recognizing AI could probably make a somewhat useful/accurate application from that prompt, because most social media apps follow a set of patterns. Users (dogs) have certain attributes that go on their profile, they can share things with their friends, notifications should work. Where it gets tricky is the details, but maybe AI could get you a rough version at least by knowing social media app conventions. This is also how a motivated programmer would go about it, instead of asking the “idea person” a million questions they would just assume things.

I say this as someone who has looked at AI generated code and was not impressed though, so this is probably still a long way off.

atom_arrangeron We invested 10% to pay back tech debt

I usually tend to do the refactoring without asking permission. Just spend 20% of my time on it, get it done, definitely pays off. I tend to be pretty productive generally and with this refactoring I'm not doing something like saying "give me a week to refactor from X to Y", instead I just do a little bit every day or two, so I've never had much problem with this from management.

If you're delivering features quickly it shouldn't matter if you spend some of your time making sure you'll be able to continue doing so in the future.

atom_arrangeron Ask HN: Is TypeScript worth it?

IMO TypeScript nudges you away from bad patterns. If it’s a mess to type it, it’s probably a mess in general.

If you are in a very rare situation and think you know better then there’s “any”, although at that point you really need to think “I’m risking runtime errors and this code is confusing, is it worth it or is there another way?”

atom_arrangeron Names should be cute, not descriptive

I tend to jump to the opposite conclusion. If a name is cute I assume it’s something open source, named for marketing or SEO. If a name is descriptive I assume it’s probably internal.

atom_arrangeron Names should be cute, not descriptive

Could not disagree more.

atom_arrangeron The IE 11 user-agent forced Mozilla to freeze part of its user-agent string

Potentially can’t notify either if you don’t have a UA string

atom_arrangeron Ask HN: Software architects – what’s your typical day look like?

  - Keep your code reasonably clean
  - Use strong typing
  - Make sure your tests don't test implementation details if possible
    - e.g. using more integration like tests written with react-testing-library
    - e.g. using visual regression tests
  - If you sense something is off about the tech stack make a POC of partially migrating to something else as soon as possible
  - If the thing you tried is better come up with a plan to migrate and do it as soon as possible
  - If you've followed all the bullet points above then switching to a better solution shouldn't be that difficult

That's how I try to deal with it. Also if you're not sure which thing is better do POCs with both solutions. Alternatively if you're working on a greenfield project and a week in things don't feel right don't be afraid to try rewriting it with one of the alternatives you were considering, it'll be a slight hit to productivity for a day or two but it'll pay off long term.

By following these guidelines I've never felt on a project that I've painted myself into a corner with the tech stack, or chosen something very bad that is not reversible.

atom_arrangeron High-documentation, low-meeting work culture

Agree. If possible the documentation should live in / be generated from the code as well.

I'm not checking confluence, write it in a ".md" file in the repo if you want me to see it.