gregorygoc

It shows the broken incentives of the lobbied failure mode. It does not say anything about the limits of regulation. In particular, regulation can say: you need to perform 100,000 failure-less flights across the globe without any passengers to approve the aircraft. I’m not saying it’s practical to do so, rather that regulation always has a headroom.

Good old “the capital has no nationality”. Yeah, sure. Offshore everything, keep a bunch of stooges as “head of the heads” in the U.S. and one day wake up with entire know how transferred to wherevere-was-cheaper-at-the-time.

Blood has been spilled. 737 MAX happened and it didn’t change the industry, so nothing will.

Well nobody sane claims that if carbon appears on a planet then conscious minds will suffer through ads and cookie banners.

There is the internet, there was a decision point to subsidize bunch of stuff with ads and here we are. It could’ve looked much different if, for example, Google decided to launch a subscription and market figured out it is viable path forward and people would refuse to interact with ads crap.

My observation is that in general smart generalists are smarter than smart specialists. I work at Google, and it’s just that these generalists folks are extremely fast learners. They can cover breadth and depth of an arbitrary topic in a matter of 15 minutes, just enough to solve a problem at hand.

It’s quite intimidating how fast they can break down difficult concepts into first principles. I’ve witnessed this first hand and it’s beyond intimidating. Makes you wondering what you’re doing at this company… That being said, the caliber of folks I’m talking about is quite rare, like top 10% of top 1% teams at Google.

I could never understand the proof allergy. To be honest I find it was easier for me to perform well in proof based classes rather than “here’s an algorithm, apply it” type. The main reason was that it was harder for me to make mistakes while constructing a proof in comparison to applying an algorithm and making calculations by hand.

I acknowledge high schools are notorious in omitting the introduction to proof techniques but it’s a one time hurdle and you end up with a good stuff in your toolbox.

I do agree they do complement each other… to some extent. My point was rather that if you write a good code, keeping logical arguments in your head should be reduced to the minimum. To the point that only testing edge cases and a happy path in your mind should be sufficient.

To give a more concrete example: I have recently seen a very complicated piece of logic checking whether a subsequent code should be even invoked, but it was hidden in a debris of core logic and other verification. It easily could have been separated and rewritten as a series of early returns and this is what a precondition is. I’m sure someone who wrote the code had it in their mind but was not familiar enough with the early return technique to embed this in code. Had they been, their brain power could’ve been utilized more efficiently.

Yeah, and I’m saying if your code is idiomatic you get necessary invariants for free.

No, appropriate abstractions are insufficient for my argument. For example: there’s one way to write an idiomatic loop in C and it inherits necessary invariants by construction.

I highly recommend reading the book, it explains concept of writing idiomatic code way better than I ever could.

Writing correct proofs is hard. Program verification is hard. In my opinion if you are hand weaving it there’s no benefit. Thinking about invariants and pre-post conditions is often unnecessary or greatly reduced if you write idiomatic code for the language and codebase. Check out “The Practice of Programming” by R. Pike and B. W. Kernighan. The motto is: simplicity, clarity, generality. I find it works really well in a day job.

On a slightly related note… Competitive programming is surprisingly good at teaching you the right set of techniques to make sure your code is correct. You won’t progress beyond certain stage unless you pick them up.

Wall Street doesn’t like Google. This is the only reason.

Is there a website with off the shelf prompts that work?

Saying live-streaming is a solved problem is like saying search is a solved problem.

Both Apple and Google are ruthless monopolies but when there was a post about an antitrust against Google you could’ve clearly seen a bias against them. Whereas Apple gets a free pass because their products are „cool”. This is a sad state of HN nowadays.

Programming popularized -> more people -> more cases of knee jerk reaction encountered.

Most programmers are really not that smart nowadays. I’ve seen too many cases of people throwing around claims without a second of deep and critical thought.

GDM works on internal systems? It’s the first time I hear this.

Having a final output as a single version of the product does not imply anything about the production process behind it.

This is not what he said.

> There are very different programming styles. I tend to see them as Mozart versus Beethoven. When Mozart started to write, the composition was finished. He wrote the manuscript in one go. In beautiful handwriting, too. Beethoven was a doubter and a struggler, who started writing before he finished the composition and then glued corrections onto the page.

At that times PM had no say in product direction TBH. It was all very SWE driven

> This is not only baseless but also flies in the face of reality, as other tech companies, including other FAANGs, barely offer any stock and still manage to attract top talent.

Which one?

You’ve described Amazon. Google and FB are different kind of beast.

After reading some comments I feel really sorry for my fellows across the Atlantic Ocean, clearly Reagan’s neoliberal propaganda has taken its toll.

Come visit any Nordic country. You’ll see how the happy, rich and fulfilled society looks like.

Because private developers optimize for their profit, not creating high quality area of living. You can look at what the full fledged free market is doing to largest cities in Warsaw. It’s a shit show.

Define “fine”. People want to start the family, but private real estate developers build shitload 40m^2, 1 bedroom flats (as they’re the most profitable). I’d argue the current housing market is definitely not “fine” for them.

Define “seek dominance”. Also, look at the EU. They force significant reduction of the carbon based energy by 2030 or something. Some countries (such as Poland) rely heavily on this energy type, but they signed an agreement to stop that. As you can see “humans” don’t have to seek dominance in anything, we just need to cooperate.

How about solving the actual root cause; making a sustainable economic system which does not exploit earth’s limited resources infinitely?

I think the key to innovation is to first know what’s out there. Then you’re able to combine, twist and augment known ideas.

Special theory of relativity did not come out of nowhere. Neither did the geometry, nor algebra. It was all about humans’ curious mind and joy of exploring what’s “possible” out there.

Come on, people may have 600€ in their bank account to survive a month and they receive some fake ass invoice, which is supposed to clear almost all of their savings. That’s the definition of “not cool” April fools joke.

I’ve seen lots of projects succeed in Scala, and I’ve seen some fail. The latter was usually caused by writing spaghetti code crap instead of language complexity itself. Obviously some programmers blamed the language, but the harsh reality is that competent engineers can make things work beautifully.

Great ideas must come from great minds.