capitalsigma

It's supposed to be a joke, comparing the process of drift in the codebase with physical disintegration. Much like technical debt is not literally a balance owed to another party, or an object is not literally a physical lump of mass, and a class doesn't have a literal parent because it was never born.

> Two days of actually trying allowed me to accomplish more on this particular goal than 7 previous months of cowardice had, and (maybe) about as much as a full semester college course would have.

The article then goes on to explain that OP basically spent a weekend writing a book report about some pop science YouTube videos. What a joke.

I mean, yes, of course OP should be aware that they are on the clock during the day. I just feel like you are really misrepresenting the scale of the worry here.

A senior candidate has a serious, revenue-generating side business, maybe in a competing product area? Yeah, that seems like cause for concern: this candidate's potentially-dropped cycles working on their business could mean a significant loss in team productivity, we might worry that they're on the verge of quitting to focus on their own product, whatever.

An intern candidate has a side hustle? Awesome, sounds like they're not totally clueless, likely they'll be able to ramp up quicker than someone with less experience. Ideally they put it on the back burner for the internship duration but nothing is going to collapse if they're not functioning at 100%. I feel like it's a much bigger risk that you hire someone with a weaker resume and get nothing from them even when they try their best.

I mean, the NY transit system will take you pretty much anywhere in an area with a population of 8M. For scale, note that New York State alone is about 4x larger than Taiwan. I agree that having walkable cities is a good thing but it's not like all of the US is one giant suburb, and it's not like the US has anywhere near the density that would be required to justify "high speed rail across the whole country, just an hour away"

I really don't think this is an issue for an intern candidate, imo having a serious project under your belt would significantly outweigh any concerns I have for an intern, it's not like they're going to be responsible for mission-critical stuff anyway

Believe it or not, Amazon is not a charity. I don't know why you expect them to hold on to employees who are evidently a loss to their bottom line.

Gold also loses value due to dilution, when more gold is mined.

Tesla should have logs that show the driver is responsible for the braking, if so

A model takes a fixed length input and returns a fixed length output in finite time, it's not Turing complete

The idea of working with a distributed data pipeline implemented via makefiles is nightmare fuel

Neither did I.

> generate regexes in seconds that take seasoned developers hours

Who on earth is spending hours writing a single regex?

C++ has a much more complicated (Turing complete) type system than C# and Java.

The year of the decentralized social network is right around the corner, just past the year of the Linux desktop

Not super clear to me how useful computer vision algorithms are to the military. The important thing in the private sector is replacing (say) the lab tech who would otherwise be paid minimum wage to look through your data. If you have plenty of low skill labor available, what advantage do you get?

Understaffing doesn't justify crime. You probably understaff your home security, leaving it empty all day while you're at work. Do you deserve to be robbed?

< 7% of Americans work in retail: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2020/09/profile-of-th...

Why would I want to replace ls of all things? What if I need to use another machine, ever?

Do you think subsistence farmers had better work life balance?

Enough developers want to hack on their own tools that the market is smaller than you would naively expect, counting the number of developers and how many tools they each use. It's a bit like asking "how come we're having so much trouble selling our extended warranty to professional mechanics, even though professional drivers buy extended warranties all the time?"

Because developers want to be able to hack on their own tools: fix bugs, add features, whatever. Graphics designers do not have the skills to hack on their own tools, so there isn't a huge population of them sitting around going "damn, I wish I had feature X -- I know, I'll build my own editor and open source it!"

Would you say that it's also ableist to ask people to "just resist fascism"? After all, many people are indeed conditioned to accommodate fascism. Or pick another -ism you prefer.

I'm confident that this is not secretly a way to find the high performers, because it's just jerking people around. You enable the high performers by trusting them and giving them latitude, not by repeatedly, publicly demanding that they say "how high?" every time you yell "jump!"

"Get here in 3 hours or you're fired" is just trying to humiliate people, it's not even pretending to be a technical challenge.

There's no way this stuff like "office closed lol nevermind 3 hour deadline to get to the office" is anything other than him either: (a) throwing a tantrum because something has pissed him off in this process and he wants to publicly exert authority, or (b) intentionally trying to push headcount down to 0 so that he can say something like "welp, guess I'll just have to fold Twitter into Tesla and have the FSD people maintain it as a side project"

Also, like, it's plausible that working long hours and pushing hard for progress kind of makes sense when you're doing cutting edge stuff, pushing the boundary of what's possible, etc. It's unclear why you would need that attitude to run a mature social media site.

I think the point was actually to demo self supervised learning techniques (which is LeCun's schtick) in a way that was a bit flashy and accessible to the public. Fun, easily shareable on social media, generates some buzz about FB AI, etc.

Clearly pitching it as an actual, authoritative source of info was not the right call

Packages don't deliver on time if they don't hire enough people to work on AWS? Hard to imagine that day to day performance of their core business is really related to headcount.

> Even languages with rich type systems like Haskell do require some types - even implicitly - to infer everything else.

If the Haskell compiler is spitting out "ambiguous instance of +" or whatever that error message is, it's a sign that the author doesn't understand what they're asking for. Taking a language whose value proposition is "I refuse to compile your code if there is the slightest indication that it's not perfect" and slapping a fuzzy ML model on top of it to suppress a class of errors is not a good idea.

Type systems exist as a way of ensuring that the programmer's mental model matches the code. Offloading type annotations to something else removes that safety from you.

> no priors

Sure? I don't see how that changes anything. My point is just that we already have very high quality summarizers of code, but software development is still hard. Making a model that attempts to approximate the summarizers of code that we already have isn't going to help much, no matter how good it gets.

Type inference really doesn't require ML (and is probably better done without it in order to be robust).

I think the Kolmogorov complexity of serious production codebases is very high -- in order to convey what the codebase does, you have to transmit roughly as many bits as the codebase itseld. In most companies, you already have a way to get a "compact, human-readable description" of what the code does -- it's called asking your coworker, or reading your internal documentation. Ramp up is still hard.

Yes, it matters. The quality of education is better. Lower ranked schools don't dole out the same kind of punishingly hard material that higher ranked schools do. The content of the degree is meaningfully different (based on my experience doing undergrad in a well ranked school and going back to mess around in part time classes while working.)