cwp

That'll only be a problem if you're up against significant number of candidates that have both experience and a PhD. HR will certainly filter resumes based on something as clear-cut as a degree when they can. But they can't just filter everything out and tell the hiring manager he's SOL. So you don't have to check all the boxes as long as you check enough of them, and you're competitive with the other candidates.

At the same time, nobody is going to do all that well if they just apply online and cross their fingers. You need some kind of human contact, either though an introduction to an insider through your network, or through a recruiter of some kind. It takes a bit of time to develop the relationships, but it's quite doable and worth it, even for introverts. Best to start before you're interested in changing jobs.

Nah, you wouldn't have to quit. If you've got 5 years experience, even on non-cutting edge projects, the PhD won't matter. Sure, you won't be able to get any job you want, but there are lots of ML jobs that list a PhD requirement that will nevertheless jump at the chance to hire someone with practical experience.

Yes and no. Yes, because Turing completeness. But no, because if you tried to do something like the Nix package manager with a language like Python or Java or even Scheme (yeah, I'm looking at you Guix), you'd end up with a worse system.

What's great about Nix the language is that its design matches beautifully with its purpose. Nixpkgs is a single giant program, the output of which is a set of 70,000 package definitions. Since Nix uses lazy evaluation, you can specify one of the attributes of that set, a single package, and the Nix interpreter will evaluate just that one package expression. Of course, if that package depends on other packages, those will get evaluated as well, because they're needed as inputs to the package you care about. So package dependencies emerge naturally as computational dependencies between function invocations. This is really powerful, and over the years, Nixpkgs has evolved more and more sophisticated ways of defining packages - package overrides, the overlay system, and most recently, flakes.

So yes, using an imperative language would technically be possible, but I doubt that you could use it to build the largest and freshest package repository with a fraction of the contributors that other packaging systems have.

That's gotta tank the share price, though, right? Some shareholders will sell to avoid the dilution, and others will buy, but from the company rather than the market. So the market sees a bunch of sellers and few buyers.

Yeah, it probably won't be triggered; even Musk would wince at that kind of loss. But that's exactly why we have to wonder, or I do at any rate.

The poison pill seems suspiciously like a free lunch for the board if you only look at the 1st-order effect: Musk is diluted, and loses billions. That right there is enough to stop a rational investor. But it's partially a bluff. The board doesn't hold much stock (except Jack) and the assumption that all the other shareholders will pony up cash to double their exposure is probably wrong. Many will, perhaps most will. But the share price will take a hit, and Musk is free to acquire as much stock as he wants. Maybe he can't get every last share, but he might be able to take control.

Again, I agree with you that it's unlikely to happen, but if there were ever a time to question the conventional wisdom, this is it.

I'm kinda curious about what would happen if Musk triggered the poison pill. Yeah, his existing stock would be diluted. But... how much? What would it do to the share price?

The poison pill is essentially a gun to the head of all the other shareholders: you're either with us or against us. Help us fight this hostile takeover or get diluted along with Musk. How will people react to that?

Some will jump at the chance to buy discounted shares. Others will be unable or unwilling to buy more, and sell to avoid dilution. But they'll have to sell to people who aren't currently shareholders, because shareholders have a better option. That'll drive the price down, and also reduce the discounted price for shareholders. Will investors that buy in after the poison pill is triggered also get the discounted price? Will existing shareholders wait to buy discounted shares until after the exodus lowers their price?

There are so many feedback loops and non-obvious motivations here. It's possible that Musk could trigger the pill, stand back and watch the stock crater, then buy it cheap. And if the stock does crater, will he then have to compete with other takeover bids?

I stand corrected. Clearly being private is not a factor if public universities are leeching off the public even more. That amounts to corruption in university governance. <sigh>

The problem is that many US universities are private. So when the government puts money into loans and grants for students, the universities just raise tuition, rather than expanding to accept more students. In the end it's just a transfer from the public to university administrators. To really expand access to education we'd have to have many more public universities.

And anyway, the problem with education isn't that it's not available to enough people. Smart, motivated kids can get a university education even if they're poor. We have enough academics and highly-educated workers for our economic needs. The problem is that it's become a class marker. Many, many people don't want more degrees out there, because it would make their own degree less valuable. Others are desperate to get a degree at any cost, not because it improves their career prospects, but because it confers high status. So taking on huge debt for a useless degree is fine, and in fact good, because it's conspicuous consumption. Of course, debt sucks, so once they have the degree, loan forgiveness is very much in their interest, but not publicly-funded university.

On the larger question, I think it's a cultural thing. America was settled by people leaving stifling societies to go it alone: Europe at first, then the American establishment on the east coast. The frontier is gone, but that value system persists, and self-reliance and independence are hugely important to many people in the US. There's a pretty good argument to be made that American democracy arose because the wilderness was right there and if they didn't get a say in government, people would just move beyond its reach. That culture is has served us well, but we've run out of frontier, and we're starting to feel the social pressures that Europe has had for millennia. There's no escape from the state, so the way to get ahead is to work the system, get a larger share of the pie rather than growing it, and so on. The pushback to that is to demand more fairness from the system, ie, a welfare state.

Yup, this. I think a big part of this is that Eelco is really only interested in NixOS. Nix is a large community and there are plenty of people that do care about other platforms, so these things do tend to get sorted out. Still, the core devs will choose to avoid short-term, medium-painful transitions for NixOS even at the expense of killing all the other platforms.

Back in the day I had some dealings with Joyent, and I pitched them on Nix for SmartOS. I couldn't get them to take me seriously, because they were old-school Unix heads, but damn that would have been a great system.

Define a zone with a Nix derivation, the Nix Daemon installs all its dependencies into a shared Nix store, which then gets mounted read-only into all the zones. It would have eliminated all the copying things around they were doing with pkgsrc, speculatively installing a bunch of stuff in case you need it, Manta etc. Alas!

That demographic advantage was twenty years ago. Today China has a terrible demographic structure—more old people than young people and a fertility rate well below replacement level. The One Child policy worked too well. And yes, much of the Western world has the same problem, but two notable exceptions are the United States and Mexico. We'll end up there eventually, but we've got some time.

I don't think all manufacturing will come back to the US. Much of it will go to South-East Asia and India as we're seeing in the article. And a bunch will surely end up in Mexico, which has lots of young people and an obvious geographical advantage.

But regardless of where they go, Apple really, really has to get out of China as quickly as possible. There are a lot of cracks showing in the Chinese system, and things could fall apart there very quickly. The demographics alone are staggering - the Chinese population could fall by half in the next 30 years, and the effects will be felt long before then.

Also in the manual:

https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/command-ref/opt-common.h...

Yeah, frustration on both sides here. On one hand, I can see how the nix evangelism can get annoying, especially here on HN. On the other hand the nix crowd is seeing a parade of ad hoc, informally-specified, niche implementations of way-less-than-half of nixpkgs. This is an important problem, maybe one of this most important problems the tech world is grappling with right now, and there is already a solution.

The reality is that the docs are fine. The reference material is comprehensive, and there are some very good tutorials and introductory essays to get people started. The problem is that it's difficult. Nix is very, very different from what people already know, and it takes quite a bit of effort to learn how it works. Most people just aren't prepared to do that much work just to install some software.

If all you're interested in is getting a good job, you don't need a degree at all. The information is available for free in a variety of presentations and formats. The source code to just about all the software you'll use is available for free as are all the tools. You don't even need a bootcamp, just time and energy.

I always had this problem with Mexican food.

  - Burrito... ew
  - Alambre. huh?
  - "al Pastor" ok, that must be lamb... it's PORK??? WTF???

And then I order "papas con cuero" thinking this must be yet another poetic name for food, and find that it's exactly what it says on the tin[1]. /facepalm

[1] "What it says on the tin" is a reference to canned food, where the label on the can is important, because you can't see inside. Of course, the cans are made out of steel these days, but we still... ugh, never mind.

Dunno about the merits of this, but it does seem to be part of the overall effort to rethink how to organize large groups of people working together. With the internet we can afford peer-to-peer communication, and we don't have to organize into hierarchies. But we can't just do full-mesh communication either, because that's overwhelming to individuals, as anyone who lived through the initial slack-and-zoom remote work of early 2020 can tell you. (Though lots of people are still living through it, unfortunately)

So what kind of communication structures are good, and in what circumstances? How do we structure work so that we don't have to communicate about everything? When do we fall back to ad-hoc video chat or even in-person meetings? These are the kinds of questions that 21st-century management has to answer. It's fascinating to watch people grapple with them.

Count me as one of those against it.

I'm all for not changing our clocks anymore, but DST is stupid. If you want to get up earlier and have more daylight in the evening, great, do that. If you want to get up later so it's not dark when you leave in the morning, sure, makes sense. And if you want to change your schedule as the year progresses to adapt to the seasons, I'm with you.

The real problem is that we have this weird idea that our whole society has to operate synchronously. And hey, I get it, some groups of people do have to coordinate with each other. An assembly line won't work if people show up whenever. But most people aren't in that situation and even that assembly line doesn't have to be synchronized with all the other assembly lines in the country. Heck, it might even be a good thing if we didn't all drive to work at the same time...

We have to agree on what time it is so that we can coordinate, and as long as we're doing that, let's agree on something that's not a lie. If we're going to meet at noon, the sun should be straight over head, damnit.

Maxed out? No probably not. But by the end of 2022 they will have spent 680 billion Euros on the transition. All the low hanging fruit is gone, so getting another 40 percent of their power needs from renewables will cost more than that. They're going to have to do things they haven't been willing to do so far, like building wind turbines near residential areas. And that still only gets them to 80% of consumption.

So sure, renewables are great, and it's good that Germany is doing so much to reduce carbon emissions. Because that's the point of renewables: reducing carbon emissions. And if that's the point, why on earth would you shut down nuclear power plants and switch to burning lignite???

You'd think. But there are a lot of people talking about "doing more" to help Ukraine.

The idea of a no-fly zone is being bandied about. They wave away the nuclear concern while advocating shooting down Russian planes (killing the pilots) and destroying anti-aircraft weapons (killing the soldiers operating them) in Ukraine and just over the border in Belarus and Russia. People are asking if we should "do nothing" while a 40-mile column of troops and equipment is heading for Kyiv.

And by "people" I don't mean randos on Twitter or even media personalities. I mean sitting US Senators[1] and former NATO commanders[2].

  [1] https://www.nationalreview.com/news/republican-senator-urges-u-s-to-impose-no-fly-zone-over-ukraine/
  [2] https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/02/27/breedlove-nato-commander-russia-ukraine-war/

It's poor thinking even if you leave geopolitics out of it. Solar power in Germany is a terrible idea from first principals. Wind is a bit better, but there's not enough energy there to power the country. A legit criticism of nuclear power is that it's expensive to build plants, but Germany is shutting down plants that have already been built. The net result, they're burning a lot of lignite and imported natural gas. The result, higher energy costs and much higher carbon emissions. For genuine environmentalists it's a disaster.

It could be geographic considerations. The USSR/Warsaw Pact had pretty secure boarders, but that ended when the Soviet Union fell apart. If Putin can get control of Ukraine, that would put the Carpathian mountains between him and an invasion from southern Europe.

Northern Europe is still wide-open terrain, but if can get control of the Baltics and eastern Poland, he can constrict land invasion routes to the bottleneck between Kaliningrad and Slovakia. Getting control of Kazakhstan (which, not coincidentally, is also suddenly awash with Russian troops) would similarly give him the ability to dominate other formerly Soviet countries and put mountains between Russia and invasion from the south.

Funny, I've had the opposite thought. If registers are a certain width, and all memory access is aligned anyway, why do we need pointers that can address arbitrary bytes? Heck, why are bytes even a thing in a 64-bit machine?

Heh, yeah. I think that falls under "lose everything you invested". If you invested more than you have, well, you lose more than you have. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Well, the downside is capped at "you lose all the money you invested". I think. Did I miss something?

I can't speak for the GP, but here's my answer:

I don't feel I'm owed anything. I just refuse to consume ads. Sometimes that means I pay a subscription fee. Sometimes I read it with my blocker on and the creator goes without revenue to get their message out. And sometimes the creator won't serve up their content unless I disable my blocker, so I shrug and turn my attention elsewhere.

The problem for creators is that there's a glut of content online. It's just way more than anyone needs. The best creators can afford monetize directly, the good ones can do custom ads integrated into their content, and the rest have to churn out clickbait, top 11 lists, and ludicrously "optimized" content laden with ad-network garbage. It sucks to be mediocre, but I don't feel I owe anyone that revenue stream.

Well, if you're comfortable with functional programming, that's great. Seriously, awesome! But you're in the minority.

Hard disagree on the "decent programming language designer", though. Nix-the-language is beautiful. It's tiny, with a minimum of concepts to learn, and very simple, regular syntax. At the same time, it's not so spare as say, Lisp or Scheme. It's really good. The implementation of that language could use some work - interpreter speed and debugging tools come to mind rather quickly.

I think the problem you've encountered is nixpkgs. It's a huge, sprawling code base with a lot of legacy code and a number of paradigms that were enthusiastically adopted and then later supplanted. In contrast to the language and tools which are well documented, there's basically no documentation, and what little there is hasn't been kept up-to-date as things change.

Still though, I think the biggest issue facing nix users is that the rest of the computing world works on the assumption of mutable software installations. The way pip assumes that the python interpreter and the python packages that have been installed are locked in a death grip drives me nuts. Even if you don't go full nix-store, could we at least separate those things? Even node gets that right.

The trouble is that it's the foundational ideas that people find weird and difficult. Functional programming is still niche and so both immutable package installations and nix-the-language don't build on what people already know.

I hope that'll change over time, because yeah, the foundations are /so/ powerful, even today.

I once had a girl ask me if she looked Indian. I said no, she got pissed off, and it was quite a while before I realized she didn't mean "from India." Turned out she was from Whitehorse, "full blooded Indian" she said.

First Nations is what they say on the CBC, but "Indian" hasn't been stamped out completely.

Minnesota with "Darth Blader"!

No, that means it's likely very useful for coding instead of English. You just need a custom dictionary. Code has a smaller vocabulary than prose, even with the domain-specific words that get used as identifiers . You could probably do pretty well with a dictionary that just has all the keywords in your favorite language, plus some common variable names. Heck I bet it'd be a win just to make the punctuation used in code have convenient chords.