aylmao

Those particular cases have benefited by the shortcomings of the USA actually. I know some big tech companies send workers who weren't able to secure US immigration specifically to offices in Canada, the UK or the EU. For example Meta and Google [1][2].

One can expect the company then grows an interest in developing full engineering teams in these sites. One can also expect some people might simply decide to not come back to the USA.

With the general rise of China's tech scene, recently there's been a trend by which the USA doesn't retain Chinese international students and they instead opt to return home. One has to imagine the very, very long immigration process they have to go to has to do with this [4].

[1]: https://www.teamblind.com/post/Does-Meta-relocate-you-to-Can...

[2]: https://www.quora.com/Is-it-difficult-to-relocate-from-the-G...

[3]: https://news.cgtn.com/news/2024-08-29/The-return-wave-Why-80...

[4]: https://www.statista.com/chart/16528/long-wait-times-for-gre...

Nope, what's that

I suspect most people that have a business that can generate $500k in their home country probably wouldn't want to move to the USA at all.

Unless their business generates way more than $500k, in which case they'd probably be moving as businessmen, not as skilled workers.

I worked many years under H1B, but moved out of the USA. Unsure if I'll come back, technically I still have time on my H1b, but man, it's just so stressful to lay roots knowing they're conditional on all sorts of ticking clocks and hoops to jump.

I like working at early stage startups— works pretty well with H1B but it makes the process of getting a green card via work complicated. Some people can deal with all that stress, I just rather not.

How is not having a per-country cap going poorly in Canada?

I wonder if this shortage has to do with the recent strong swing back to in-office work

This could be tricky for them, because just as OpenAI has smaller competitors, it also has bigger ones.

If Google/Microsoft adds these features to Docs/Word— why would you use Canvas to write documents instead of the proven office software you and everyone you work with already uses? The biggest differentiator for OpenAI becomes again in this case the quality of the AI.

EDIT: on this note, Apple's approach of commoditizing AI writing tools to the OS-level is also interesting. If AI writing tools are available on every text-box, there's no new product in building a new AI-powered text-editor.

When one is learning to program, one doesn't jump straight into learning coroutine management.

Similarly, wether they are React-specific idiosyncrasies or not, one shouldn't assume people need to jump straight into Actions, Transitions, etc when first learning React.

SwiftUI is to UIKit what React is to the DOM.

I think the big difference right now is React has been released for 10 years vs SwiftUI's 5, so people had had the time to shoot themselves in the foot much more with React. IMO it doesn't take away from it still being much better than what it replaced.

Huge +1 to this. Looking at python 3.13 release notes [1]:

> asyncio.as_completed() now returns an object that is both an asynchronous iterator and a plain iterator of awaitables. The awaitables yielded by asynchronous iteration include original task or future objects that were passed in, making it easier to associate results with the tasks being completed. (Contributed by Justin Arthur in gh-77714.)

"I’m pretty sure it’s a cool feature but, what a mouthful. Imagine you decided to start developing python scripts today, how do you even start?"

[1] https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.13.html#asyncio

I have 3 complementing theories:

1. Beyond self-learning, there's two types of education. Formal, college education that delves deep to both the CPU level and mathematical proofs of correctness, and coding bootcamps which teach how to do things, but little about how things work.

Frontend isn't taught in formal college education, so there's a big void in industry knowledge. Some people learn about compilers, interpreters, have used GDB and implemented malloc for school, but they aren't the ones doing frontend. Others are doing frontend but never think about memory usage, closure scopes, or garbage collection.

This leads to bad frontend code, that misuses resources.

2. JavaScript long had fame for being a "toy" or "joke" language. I noticed the tide slowly change by the mid 2010s— that's not that long ago.

Proportionally and compared to other technologies, how many engineers have had time to develop long careers, learn from mistakes, and become that serious, dress-shirt wearing, super-senior engineer sitting at the back of the room making sure young developers don't get too unhinged? This proportion is probably especially stark if you consider just how in-demand web development is.

This leads to bad frontend code, that misuses resources.

3. Finally, with the two above in mind, re-writes. Unexperienced teams are the first to opt for re-writes. It's a story as old as time; "we don't know how to fix A, so let's instead build a brand new thing B, which works differently to A and thus won't have its problems".

Re-writes always go well at first, because the fresh codebase will be smaller, faster, nicer and because everyone is especially cognisant of the problems A had, which are very much not present in B since it works differently.

Eventually of course, B grows bigger, and gets permanent hot-fixes, its requirements change, and bugs start to surface that nobody bothers understanding. A is also far enough in the past that nobody is thing about the problems A had anymore, and has more mind-space to notice the problems that are unique to B.

But before that happens, you get this sort of comments.

I can agree that there's people who preach tolerance but don't actually seem to mean it, yeah. Have yet to see egotistical egoless-ness, but I'd suppose it'd just look like empty speech in a smilier fashion.

I once had the pleasure of working with a guy who probably did have one of the hardest jobs in the company, but also had a very positive attitude towards everyone else.

He was in platform engineering, ensuring the server fleet was it top-shape etc. It wasn't over him to debug OS-level bugs. Very smart guy; if something was broken and nobody else could fix it, you went to him. He'd previously tracked product bugs down to the JVM garbage collector, or RHEL. He told me about the time he tracked a bug in a binary down to the OCaml compiler— if you read the x86 spec, it turns out OCaml wasn't using one of the registers properly and the binaries, under very specific circumstances, were technically buggy.

And on Fridays he hosted an informal get-together, open to anyone in the company, where anyone could go and chat about tech. Show something off, ask about a bug, bring up something cool found on HN— everyone was encouraged to pitch in (although often we wanted to hear him do the talking lol).

People like that are amazing, and I suspect he was that smart precisely cause he knew there was always more to learn; from the machines, and from other people.

> Need to keep that going as long as possible, and stay away from hiring managers who think their primary job is "protecting" the company from anyone who might make a mistake.

On that note, a quick shot-out because I've been lucky enough to see the opposite happen at a big company too. Performance cycles at the company very much disincentivized big bets. Some engineers really thought project "X" was important, but it was risky— if it didn't pay off by the end of the cycle, per the way the bureaucracy worked, it wouldn't be great.

The manager very much tried his best to protect them against this. In fact I don't think it paid that cycle, but the project remained active until it did eventually pay off. Shoutout to managers like this. The easy route is to act like a messenger for higher-ups, and never put your own skin in the game— but there's some out there that want to do what's best, not what's easy.

Claiming that the "egoless" crowd is egotistic, because "they want everyone to think like them" is like claiming the "tolerance" crowd is intolerant, because "they don't tolerate intolerance".

In my experience, It's both non-factual (ego-less people are the first to learn from others when poised with new ideas) and short-sighted.

fwiw, Etsy seems to have ~2.5k employees [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etsy

Musk aside, I personally don't think Twitter is working better than before.

On a technical level at least, there's times when it makes my phone warm up. There's random layout bugs, and things not rendering properly. At some point ads started opening on press-down, as opposed to a proper tap interaction (press-down, don't move, press-up). Now I accidentally open ads all the time.

Moreover, it's slower. Media and search specifically take longer to load. I work on web performance, so I very much noticed that suddenly one day things started loading more slowly for me. I thought it might be some temporary issue with their CDN or bad change messing up the way they schedule network calls, but it just stayed that way.

Perhaps you mean Twitter the company, in which case I don't know, maybe it's making more profit now and in that sense "works better"— but Twitter the app in my experience definitely doesn't.

I've worked at FAANG. Actual humans too.

Recently, I was thinking plenty about trust within organizations, and it resonated with me too.

I've worked at a few startups and have seen high-trust environments lead to a lot of productivity, comfort and success— and the opposite for low-trust startups. In general, I think startups tend to lean towards high-trust, especially when they're small and early, but I was part of a 15-person one that was quite the opposite, and it was terrible.

The hiring process wasn't great. Long take-home task, and that was the only technical interview. A lot of talking, but not much noteworthy signal on the rest. Very long wait times. Now I know this is a red flag for low-trust companies. If they're not building trust at the hiring-stage, it means even after joining the organization it'll take time to acutally "be part of the team".

Once at the company, I had no permission to poke around— everything was hidden by default. There was no space for discussion, I was expected to learn, not to comment. There was plenty of micro-management; after all, if they don't trust you, they need to keep an eye on you at all times. You're probably doing something wrong.

The chasms were deep too; the company was building a web team to spin a contractor's project into a full web product, and I was supposed to lead it. We were disjointed from the rest of the company though, and would only hear about requirements through the founders. The team had interest on being more involved with the main product, but management just wasn't interested in making it happen, and just had us loiter around for a few months until they gathered requirements, and then implement some rather disjoint features.

The project failed. I'm working somewhere else now.

tldr; low-trust environments kill projects

> Such is our baseline mammalian heritage, which we must each overcome with deliberate spiritual self-evolution.

Personally I don't see it through such an individualist lens— I think this is a collective issue that can't possibly rely on an individual's "spiritual awakening".

As such, I think the bigger issue is that (in some cultures more and some less) people are actively encouraged to compete and feed their ego. At a societal level, for example, it'd be easy to blame schools or parents for this kind of education, but I think they're just doing what makes sense in their economic environment. If the world is winner-takes-all, I can't blame parents for wanting their kids to be "winners", lest they are left with nothing instead.

Going back to the post and the way this played out at the company— it was upper-management with the wide impact their decision-making has on organization as a whole, its rules and procedures, that led the change. It wasn't individuals each individually overcoming their own egos that led the change here. Once the precedent is set up-top, and the policies are changed, the rest could follow. It was top down and systematic.

yeah, I wasn't hypothesizing this as something that should be added natively to browsers. Web is complicated enough officially supporting 3 languages (or 6, if you consider wasm, webgl and wgsl)

Though for what its worth, "no official agreed upon spec" didn't stop browsers before haha

On the note of embedding HTML in Markdown, I think it'd be cool if it were just as easy to embed Markdown in HTML. Something akin to a <markdown> tag.

Markdown makes it easy to write formatted content at the cost of initial compiler setup, HTML is 0-cost setup but takes some effort to write formatted content. With a <markdown> tag one could start with vanilla HTML at zero cost, use all its features straight away, but not have to type HTML for the simple, "content" parts of a site.

EDIT: there seem to be web components for this already:

- https://github.com/xan105/web-component-markdown

- https://www.webcomponents.org/element/zero-md

- https://www.webcomponents.org/element/@vanillawc/wc-markdown

In my experience;

- Learn other frameworks and/or programming languages. It gives you a wider and unique perspective on other "correct" ways of doing software. Through finding commonalities one can arrive at things that are good practices regardless of the tool being used. Through finding differences, one can better understand what might be dogmatic to a specific language/library/etc.

- Dig deep. If something isn't working, as much as possible, make it your goal not to fix it, but to fix it and understand why it was broken in the first place. Trying things until something works is a tried and tested way of fixing things, but digging through the abstraction layers and confirming why that suggestion one found online is very valuable. I think a lot of knowledge from senior developers boils down to having experience at lower levels of abstraction.

The state holds a lot of power in Singapore, it's very authoritarian. Sounds quite at odds to Milei and his libertarian idology.

I know a lot of people choose to draw lines, but I personally don't think it's necessarily a "line" one has to draw. I think this is best thought of as a gradient. A rabbit is more like us, than a carrot. It has eyes, a backbone, moms take care of their babies, etc. We look at a dogs and can clearly see loyalty, happiness, longing, etc— emotions we associate a lot with humanity.

Where these animals fall in the "they're similar to a human" gradient is highly subjective, especially since it may have an emotional component to it. But we don't have to all agree on the definition of this gradient when the consequences (what to eat) are very personal.

I will say though I admire this in humans. We have achieved plentifulness to the point we can attach moral and emotional meaning to our diet if we wish to. It's a pretty unique expression of our empathy.

I agree with both comments. ~500 can surely build some amazing tech, smaller teams have done more. I personally do think there's still a lot of relatively low-hanging fruit left, especially with the boom of possibilities due to AI, or simply what one can do with modern CPU/GPU performance, new browser APIs, modern tech factors, etc.

I also do agree and think leadership talent and vision in a lot tech companies is painfully lacking. This are the companies that could burn some money and use their wedge in the market to build some really cool things, but they wont. I guess to some degree, ironically, the money they're making might be part of the problem.

I have this side project, it's a DAW in the browser:

https://minidaw.aykev.dev/

If you don't know what a DAW is, think GarageBand. Ableton Live, Logic and Reason are other examples. It's fully built with React and a custom state-management library, that's been fun and challenging. It's starting to take shape, but there's definitely a long way to go.

> You can have more kids, but most people probably only get maximum one chance in their life to spend half a year in space

That's not generally how having kids works haha. As you mentioned Sunita Williams has been to space five times. She's also 59 and the only information I found on kids is that she was looking to adopt a kid in 2012. It doesn't sound like she'll be having any more kids.

> Sunita Williams (one of the two stranded) is up there for her fifth(!) trip to the ISS [...] I don’t think she minds being in space, even if it’s unplanned.

Personally, I've been many times to New York. It's a very fun city. But if I booked a weeklong trip that against my will it became a yearlong one, I'd mind it.

I also can't speak for Sunita Williams, just for me in this hypothetical NYC stranding. It could be a very fun year, for sure. I'd certainly try to make the most of it. But I'd mind it.

[1] https://archive.ph/20130126165056/http://articles.timesofind...

The return flight will be in February too— they'll be missing thanksgiving, and all the winter holidays oof

Looked up two definitions of rescue. First, is the default that shows on Google (via Oxford Languages) [1]:

> verb. 1. save (someone) from a dangerous or distressing situation. 2. informal, keep from being lost or abandoned; retrieve.

Per this one, if you miss the last train across the bay the the Uber _would_ indeed be "rescuing" you if you felt distressed. If we consider the informal definition, I'd say you're also being rescued since one could say you were abandoned by the train and thus being retrieved by the Uber. Next, Merriam Webster [2]:

> transitive verb. to free from confinement, danger, or evil

Similarly, if you understand "rescue" as freeing someone from danger, this isn't a rescue. The astronauts aren't in danger really— they have all the supplies and support they need. Nonetheless, they certainly are in confinement, so this could still be called a rescue.

I personally do see how the fact this mission was already scheduled, and the little danger around all this, can make "rescue" feel like a little much. It's the same word used in The Martian, after all. But nonetheless I would still call it a rescue mission. These two astronauts are confined up there not by will but by circumstance, and the taxi flight was modified to sending only two people instead of the usual four, specifically to make space for these two astronauts to come back [3].

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=rescue%20meaning

[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rescue

[3] https://apnews.com/article/boeing-spacex-nasa-astronauts-sta...