deepGem

I was fortunate enough to travel in a Lufthansa 747. I have never felt so joyously overwhelmed by any other vehicle. The newer A350s and A380s unfortunately don’t carry the same appeal for me personally.

The A380 looks real ugly for me resembling the beluga.

747 looks beautiful, majestic and aesthetically very pleasing.

Sad to see this plane approaching the end of its life.

I didn't catch the question but I will attempt to answer based on what I understand.

Role of a manager that will change significantly based on where the team is sitting - The ability to convey meaning and emotion over written comms and over video calls, to drive the team forward without being too mechanical about it.

Two main problems

1. Middle and senior management who don't want to lose control or be rendered less effective. 2. Engineers who are not trained in written communication and largely cannot autonomously move a group towards a goal without a lot of supervision.

If you solve for no 2, then that acts counter to no 1 - because middle management will be questioned - why do we need you ? If a group of engineers can function on their own towards a common goal, then the manager's role is more or less rendered redundant. Sure there may be a need for psychological support but you surely won't need the current ratio of engineers: managers.

There is a deep rooted old school interest in staying physically connected. This won't go away anytime soon. I am not debating whether that is right or wrong, but the general notion that 'we are better if we are physically together' still persists. I don't know if this is a genuine feel-good-together feeling or just a made up emotion to mask point no 1 above.

I am flummoxed by how executive leadership is simply blind to these facts in most companies. I mean the CEO can declare a fully remote constraint sort of like the exact opposite of what Musk did at Twitter and drive productivity higher. The cynic in me says execs can't force this decision because the senior management simply will come back and say 'we cannot be this productive with a fully remote team anymore'. I don't know but I for one cannot understand the irrational exuberance behind RTO.

"Whether one is outdoors or on a treadmill, walking improves the generation of novel yet appropriate ideas, and the effect even extends to when people sit down to do their creative work shortly after."

This is actually quite profound. I actually associate walking with the surroundings. It's always pleasant to walk in a forest, or where there is lush greenery. If the surrounding does not matter, then I should stop finding excuses to not walk. An urban environment seems to make no difference.

Subtract your age from 180. Run at that heart rate. Another formula 0.7*(HR max — HR at rest) + HR at rest

If you don't believe in formulas, run at a pace in which you can hold a conversation or speak a few sentences without losing your breath.

Benjamin Franklin had this amazing idea of having ball bearings in his hand while solving and thinking about hard problems. The thinking would eventually make him fall asleep and as he fell into a slumber, the ball bearings would roll off his hands startling him up. It is at this precipice, the fine line between awake and asleep states that most of his ideas came to life. He would start penning down his ideas in this state.

So it worked then, it works now. A 20 to 30 minute nap during the work day has a ton of benefits, including stress reduction. I don't know why it is frowned upon. I have fallen asleep many times at my desk and have been made fun of, but who gives a damn. I would rather be stress free and have some good ideas come about.

I am one such person, or at least I was when I began my career writing software way back in 2000. Oh well, write software is a loaded term, let's say I began writing programs. Simply for the reason you state above, more money than anywhere else with one caveat. There was this hunch that software is the future and there were more exciting stuff happening in software than in the world of let's say mechanical engineering, even in my backyard in Bangalore.

But, over time I got to love writing software and the entire industry as such. About 3 years in, I couldn't think of doing anything else. So yeah, there's no harm in pursuing something for the sake of money, because the odds are you will eventually fall in love with that path, assuming some of your qualities are suitable for that career.

But, not everyone finds happiness or satisfaction in a path that they chose for money and I think majority of them will be wishing they never had to be in that career.

Well, it's hard to game the system over the long term especially on a platform like HN, where not every positive comment is rewarded. If the model uses any temporal aspect, then gaming it is gonna be pretty hard.

This could be a great tool for introverts who are borderline intimidated by behaviour questions in interviews. Even though this assessment is not accurate, I don't think it's complete BS either (at least based on my personality guess ). This is better than sitting through some Myers Briggs 30 minute exercise IMO, especially if you have a long commenting history on HN.

This gets exacerbated if you are using a different language, like we Indians do. Type Hindi/Kannada/Tamil in English. Your autocorrect/predict word steers in the direction of most frequently used language and screws up all your pure english comms. Can still live with autocorrect but absolutely hate this ML based predictive nonsense, and I have completely disabled it.

"taking the easy way out" Please don't ever. I have suffered from similar thoughts but largely have managed to get over them. Can you possibly take some contracting gigs ? It doesn't seem like you hate C++ but just hated the low paying job. If so, then there are quite a few consulting gigs you can grab just based on your C++ skills, especially in the financial world. Please try reaching out to some recruiters in the financial space. Is this something that would interest you ?

One other option is this company called crossover, it's a real shitty company and they monitor your every move and shit like that but they pay reasonably well, 100K+ and you can get in if you are reasonably good with code. I wouldn't recommend this, but since you are under a lot of debt, the money can be a lifesaver.

Another option is with database companies that are still on C and C++. ScyllaDB, Aerospike are a few options. They are hiring and if you need a referral at Aerospike, feel free to email me, email in profile. I worked there.

Lastly, weeks is not really that long to get a job. Some of the interview loops even at FAANG companies last for 4-6 weeks. So don't lose heart.

Am not saying it's better, am saying it's inevitable.

When rates fall, pensions take huge paper losses because the present value of liabilities moves inversely with interest rates

Lets say my liabilities are 1000 at interest rate 10 Now interest rate is 5 so my liabilities value is 2000

Now I don't look good, so what do I do.

I buy a swap ( which I equate to a put option) which is valued at 100 on the basis of my liability being at 2000 If my liability drops to 1000, the swap goes to 200 (thereby I'm screwed)

Now the interest rate is 20 So my liability is 500 and the swap is at 400. I am really screwed. However, my liabilities are also proportionally down, so I am basically at break even.

Is this the correct math ? If so, then there shouldn't be any reason to panic.

Going by the current inflation and unemployment trends, the economy won't stabilize for a year at the very least. We have a very difficult situation. Inflation is high, unemployment is low. In 2008, we had low inflation and high unemployment, but not this time. So, with the tightening of interest rates, unemployment has to go high. With unemployment increasing, prices of goods will fall due to decrease in demand. At that time, hopefully inflation will go on a downward trend.

The expected inflation in US is around 2-3% and until we see inflation heading towards those numbers it's hard to say economy is stabilizing.

For comparison, the expected inflation in India is around 8-10% and that's why you don't see the pinch in the Indian economy right now even with the tightening of rates.

I am no predictor of the future, but more likely the US interest rates will hit the range of 10% before we start seeing any easing in inflation. Once we see unemployment numbers going up consistently for a couple of quarters that will be the sign of economic stabilization I think.

Spring cloud ecosystem is headed in this direction. Most of the common needs for micro service development such as Service mesh, service discovery, circuit breakers are getting incorporated into the ecosystem so as to reduce repetitive development. Not sure how many devs are actually using this.

They are building upon Netflix offerings.

https://spring.io/projects/spring-cloud-netflix

But why won't Apple possibly build a device like comma.ai to basically fit into the car's OBD port and also bring in some self driving abilities and eventually full self driving, just by a completely new device that pairs to the iPhone. They can possibly strong arm autos to make the plug and play real smooth. It's not that far fetched. They might actually be able to do something using mixed reality, given how either pure vision based or lidar based self driving approaches are still not reaching the levels they were supposed to years ago.

This could be under the usual AI umbrella like other companies, but the fact that there is an AI DR to Tim Cook makes me think self driving is big on the agenda. I"m not sure which other AI effort is so valuable to Apple to warrant a SVP. https://www.apple.com/in/leadership/john-giannandrea/

This is unconventional and in fact real wisdom.

If you can't code LC medium, then the odds of you being a good programmer are pretty low. That's the conventional wisdom. Everyone is playing safe and adhering to conventional wisdom.

I don't think an area such as AI can be called a specialist area. There is simply too much breadth once you start getting into the nitty gritty of building an AI product. If your goal is to be a well versed product builder in AI, then you need to master software engineering, building deep learning models, training on large clusters, deploying on the edge - man it's a lot.

A data scientist or a deep learning engineer - yes that's somewhat of a specialist role. It again depends on what you want to accomplish. If your goal is to research deeply in one area such as NLP then yes that's a specialist role.

OR,

If your focus is purely on infra, like building and enhancing Pytorch or Tensorflow, yes that's specialist knowledge in fine tuning a loss function etc or building a new loss function altogether.

As far as I am concerned, yes I do sometimes wish that I had stuck to one breadth area such as AI or mobile app development or AR/VR instead of somewhat dabbling across all these areas. No regrets though.

I think these comments come mostly from engineers who have just started their software engineering journey or somewhere in their early stages. When you are at that stage, your odds of coming across an inspiring figure in other areas are very low, unless you have a natural proclivity to other areas in your life.

As you grow, you do realize that software engineering is a piece in the overall puzzle and you mellow down and start to learn the interfaces with other functions. Even then your superiority bias won't away but will mellow down for sure. This is simply because your success as a mid-senior engineer is no longer a function of just your engineering skills. Its a function of how well you can sell your ideas, how you can articulate your messaging so that every other function can work with you, how do you get buy-in from competing parties etc. But again, engineers will brush these aside as 'politics' unrelated to software engineering :)

I seem to have misunderstood Spanner by and large. I thought their achilles heel was the atomic clock since it is this clock which makes consensus at scale possible and there by transactions. Cockroach and Yugabyte both work on similar principles but they use these hybrid logical clocks. The hybrid logical clock is a function of NTP and a monotonic local clock so I guess this works ok for Raft consensus.

https://www.yugabyte.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Distribu...

From Jepsen - "yugabyte seems mostly resilient to clock skews' - this is a very safe but at the same time a vague statement. What does mostly mean ? Good for 99% of practical use cases ?

Wow their statement about not participating in benchmarking wars is alarming. In this day and age, when benchmarking tools are so inexpensive and almost everything is very transparent, why not participate.

Or even better engage with a neutral third party such as Jepsen to get on an even playing field and duke it out.

Thank you. I oversaw the aspect of what happens until the motors reach max power and all the other aspects you have mentioned.

If you use 1 motor per wheel, at full torque you don't have double the power but the same power as one motor on the axle. This is the fundamental disadvantage of using one motor for each wheel, which is probably why Tesla engineers didn't pursue this route.

In addition, the extra weight also adds up, no matter how tiny the motor is. Essentially you are making each wheel heavier, adding to suspension woes.

The greatest advantage of individual motors is in cornering when you can precisely control how much power each wheel gets, and obviously on icy surfaces when you can lower the power on the slipping wheel or disengage it completely and drive power from even one wheel which still has traction and grip. Nearly the same result can be obtained by torque vectoring, which is what Tesla employs. So for may be 20% less accuracy you can do away with the individual motors.

I keep singing all the time. In office, while walking, while driving and especially on long flights, in a very low tone. It is super relaxing. Am not sure about all the benefits but a couple of our friends get together for drinking and we sing a LOT. This is not some random singing, my friend is a trained classical singer so it is a lot of effort to sing with her but I love the experience.

On a lighter note

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HG2w0_WyOU

The fraud protection aspect is spot on, but I think most people are not risky buyers. Like most of my purchases happen on Amazon or other high trust merchants. I have never ever raised a dispute and the only time I did it was when I accidentally bought a powerball ticket online with recurring option. So for most single time purchases, the fraud protection on a CC is an overkill IMO.

The recurring option, yes I wouldn't give out a bank account or a debit card for recurring payments even with high trust SaaS merchants, even if they accepted one ( most don't ).

The main impediment for this approach is still the battery pack. Unless you can reduce the cost/kwh of batteries the corolla of the ev world won't happen. Battery costs per Kwh are on a downward trend. Tesla is probably around 100-110$ per KWh translating to about 7-8K for it's flagship 70 KWh battery pack.

7-8K in about 30K of manufacturing costs. https://electrek.co/2018/05/31/tesla-model-3-teardow-materia...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2021/12/01/ar...

So am not sure a low margin approach would fly right now, simply because of supply constraints for volume production. Probably at a 10M/year run rate, the economies of scale would tip in the low margin high volume favour.

How would you solve this conundrum. Can you just stick to a low margin approach from day 1 ? Focus relentlessly on cost reduction in all parts of the cars except the powertrain and the battery since those are the key reliability aspects.

OR

May be a conventional 5 seater car is an overkill for most usage and can you instead build a version with a 35KWh battery pack but a 2 seater like a Miata. No frills, fast and safe car at nearly half the cost but am not sure if you can maintain the same range.

The principles behind the auto industry are primarily driven by the last motive. To pump up the price for some shitty upgrade that not many really want. It's the same core, with a few upgrades that are super cheap to manufacture. Like a dashboard change or change a knob to a button etc.

It's like selling a new iPhone with just a few changes to some superficial apps such as I donno, Numbers.

Agree with you on a modular car where you just let people customise and build whatever the heck they want. I even think you should be able to customize a 2 seater v/s a 4/5 seater with plenty of options.

I see this sentiment everywhere outside the tech first ecosystem. In the generalization of 'workers'/'engineers' v/s 'supervisors'/'managers', programmers are often seen as just workers. For whatever reason, an MBA or even a BBA is seen as an officer/supervisor.

Even product teams at tech first companies tend to represent this dogma. There are exceptions but the programmers are workers dogma is prevalent in this world. This is the main reason for suppressed pay for programmers and software engineers in all other industries except tech. Because of this, these other industries will never be able to catch up on the areas of hardware/software interfaces, let alone pure software craftsmanship. On the contrary, the software craftsmen are now learning the tropes of the non-software world and turning craftsmen in those areas as well.

So yeah, Ford might make a fast car, they will almost never be able to build a software driven car, which is the car of the future.

Wish more people understood this. We spend a lot of time changing tools and it's as bad or worse than context switching. Every tool has a learning curve and if you keep switching tools, you are always stuck in the initial part of the learning curve. I think this greatly hampers learning.

Hyper productive people who I have seen as well exhibit similar behavior. They just stick to tools that they are comfortable with and focus on the task at hand.

Also another anecdotal observation - some of the best chefs I have seen don't usually switch tools, be it knives or utensils. They mostly stick to the same tools for a very long time. So they invest in tools that can last and can be maintained. Not sure if the analogy holds true in other fields as well.

Pen and paper as a form of expressing streaming thoughts works for me as well. It also works because I write a lot slower than I can type. Ever since I have started writing pretty consistently over the last 4-5 months, the format of pen and paper doesn't really matter to me. I can write using any pen and any paper. I have found fountain pens to be particularly cumbersome to maintain and also my kids just take whatever pen is on my table and run off. As a result I just have a 100s pack of the same cheap pen. One went missing, pick up another one.