hideo

Assuming you're asking in good faith

Based on this and your last couple of posts, I can sense you are struggling. Please don't rely on the advice of strangers (mine included).

Some things I would suggest

1. Find someone in real life that you would like to emulate. See if you can talk to them about being mentored or coached regularly.

2. Consult a qualified medical mental-health professional. This is easier said than done. But if you can find the right person it's completely worth the few weeks of effort it would take

3. Consider that your value system might not necessarily be the same as the value systems of the authors of the projects that get on HN front page, or get commented up.

4. We live in increasingly a winner-take-all society. That's not a judgment, it's a matter of fact. The stuff that gets upvoted here gets upvoted more. That means you may be seeing something that's not reflective of the general population

I know this is cliched but be kind to yourself.

PS: If you're LARPing, you have a flair for writing.

Why are there so few Shazam alternatives? Does it have something to do with licensing perhaps? The algorithm itself is fascinating but I don't get why this space seems to have just one player - i.e. Shazam

What you described is the present of tech, not the future.

i have the inexplicable urge to whip a llama's ass

You're missing GPs point. GP is not arguing to remove the concept of LLCs.

GP is arguing that the entity in charge of all your medical information should not be an LLC. LLCs in general are great.

This company probably shouldn't be LLC.

That is an absolutely massive number. I wonder if openAI or anyone has published their retention rate.

Those examples help, thanks. I misunderstood your original post and thought you were planning on doing something to _change_ policy.

I see now your thought is more about helping people navigate existing policy. I do think this can be very helpful.

I'd be willing to pay actual money for a "one stop shop" to navigate all the H1B issues that unifies all these things :)

Ah, that makes sense. So the focus is on helping people navigate the policy, not changing the policy. I can see how that can help.

Maybe I’m missing the point - all these issues are because of various governments’ policies. how could startups possibly address immigration policy problems? I can’t think of any way a startup could e.g. help someone waiting months for a visa appointment.

I have great respect for John Carmack but this feels like a very unnuanced take.

Lead time isn't about "startups", it's about code complexity, side effects and blast radius.

The time it takes to push code when you have 10 use-cases and 1,000 users, is very different from the time it takes to push code when you have 1,000 use-cases but 10,000,000 users. At that scale, it takes A LOT of effort to keep fix times small. It isn't going to occur naturally.

Some times the effort to keep that fix time small may not be worth it, some times it might.

> Unless everyone in the org works the same three days a week in-office

Amazon had a culture of small teams (≤15 people) being somewhat independent. I would imagine that you don't need _the whole org_ there, you just need the whole team there.

LLM n00b here.

My 2c - Prompts are the input that you send to LLMs to get them to give you output. In general LLMs are large black boxes, and the output you get is not always great. The output can often be significantly improved by changing the input. Changing the input usually involves adding a ton of context - preambles, examples, etc.

A lot of the work of prompt rewriting is like boilerplate generation. It is very reusable so it makes sense to write code to generate prompts. Prompt Engine is basically a way of making that prompt rewriting work reusable.

Code Engine seems to be a way of rewriting prompts for LLMs that generate code in response to text prompts

Chat Engine is the same for LLMs that generate chat/conversational responses.

> If you've worked on a large Python or JS codebase, what was it like to work in?

Rife with footguns.

Things broke all the time until we eventually re-added some form of static type checking.

> How did you make small refactors for example?

We'd write tests first to validate that _wrapped_ large chunks of functionality, commit those, then refactor. The key was to write these tests even if the existing code already had "unit tests" because we often found issues this way.

Wayfair is a major player in e-commerce and a very "tech heavy" place. They offer work and salaries that are highly competitive outside of the FAANG bubble. Chewy is another similar company that people often disregard.

E-commerce players in specific verticals (furniture and pet supplies, respectively) are large. We just don't see them because of the absolute fucking behemoth that's Amazon.

I'm genuinely curious if there's a wall this was written on. Does anyone have links to articles/websites that predicted the size and timing of the layoffs?

It is incredibly weird.

I can only speak for CS academia and industry. It is very different in the industry.

In my industry jobs, there is a lot of structure. New grads are often given very close direction and very specific tasks to complete for at least 3-6 months. Then over the next 1-2 years what's expected from you becomes less and less clear, gradually, until you can function somewhat independently. A new grad complaining to a skip that they were not given clear tasks was a Major Fail for their manager/TL. Your manager/TL is required to do this for a new grad, or they were dinged.

In my academic life, you had about as much structure as your advisor provided. About half the advisors did have a plan and genuinely cared. The other half just expected their students to figure it out. It's the students of the former that "succeeded" - i.e. went on to do novel meaningful research. The rest either muddled through till something clicked, or quit. A new student couldn't complain to anyone. There was no structure beyond your advisor. Your entire future is basically in the hands of one person.

I think its a distinction between the type of person that says "I want to build a business, I think building product X sounds like a good way to do so" and the type that thinks "I want to build product X, I think building a business sounds like a good way to do so"

My goals from 1-1s are asking for regular feedback and preventing surprises.

I keep a running list of things that I need to talk to my manager about. I pull top 2-3 things off this list for each 1-1. And once a month I talk about career progress. Basically closing "gaps" especially if you're in a BigCo there's often a list of expectations that might be surprising (e.g. must do N interviews) and i'd like to see what I can do to close them.

Things on my list might include - Things I did that went well, and didn't go well. - Venting - Ideas I'd like to bounce off him. - Things that frustrated me (but dont block me yet) and seeing if he can help. - Ideas for new things me or my team could do. - Questions on who I should talk to for X thing.

My golden rule is never, ever use a 1-1 for project status updates. I'll provide one if asked but otherwise this is time for me.

On a long enough time scale - all of my decisions to reuse vs reinvent were wrong. At a given point in time though they all seemed fine.

About 15 years ago I was trying to debug a pesky timing issue and couldn't reproduce it.

I wrote a script to capture and replay network traces from Wireshark (then called Ethereal) that included keeping the timings intact. Caught the bug reliably every time.

I still think that's the best thing I every did.

What's really awesome about this is I think you independently discovered a huge trick in performance optimization. "Zero copy" solutions for eliminating the overhead of moving frames around are very popular - if you look up that term you'll see it pop up everywhere. Companies/teams of engineers spend months coming up with this solution and its a reliable way to reduce overhead of moving data around. It works across all layers and in fact entire hardware architectures are designed to allow for this kind of stuff. Kudos :)

The problem, I think, is that only the people who don't like reading this leave comments.

So here I am, commenting that I feel exactly the same way as you. This is the reason I went back to the office

I used to think I was someone who did NOT like the light social interactions in the office. After the pandemic lockdowns I thought I'd continue working from home. After six months of that I realized that I did enjoy the office.

Turns out I don't like small talk, but I like having a small group of people I can bond with over a meal or whatever. Its a lighter interaction. It's still professional, but it helps me.

And before anyone asks I do have that outside of office. That wasn't enough for me.

I know nothing about Airbnb's numbers but the thesis just doesn't make sense to me. It seems like this is a whole article around a hashtag.

The easiest explanation is that not everyone is mad at it. Assuming that airbnb is growing, and the ratio of bad experiences to good stays constant, the absolute number of bad experiences is also growing. Both hosts and guests that have had bad experiences are being more vocal. The viral hashtag probably helped aggregate all these experiences together but there's no data in the article that shows that the ratio of bad experiences is growing.

I consider myself a 'Solver'/'Fixer', mainly because that's the title others gave me, and I mostly disagree with this.

Specifically the problem with me is I don't have deep expertise in any area. This is fine in most cases but there are areas where expertise is important. And more often than not titles and levels are a reasonably proxy for expertise in a large organization. Turns out asking "who's the expert in X" really, really doesn't work once you disregard titles and levels. Disregarding titles and levels is a good way to turn engineering into a popularity contest so "who's the expert in X" becomes "who do I know best who recently said something like X to me"

> This stuff is complex. It requires some careful, thoughtful approaches.

Is this comment allowed on the internet?

Without getting into too much detail some of these are software/hardware (e.g. niche libraries and tools used in very specific industries) and some are non tech (maintenance for specific types of vehicles, animal care, etc)

They are not experts in the process of moderation. They are experts in a field and also mod subs in that field.

I'd wager this is an extremely low estimate about the value of that labor. From the paper it seems like they compared with freelance moderators on upwork.

I'm a part of a couple of super niche subreddits where there are moderators with deep expertise in the area. I know that IRL some of these mods are often billing $100s/hour for their work but on reddit they do it free, and they freely dispense the same advice.

Yeah I didn't get it either. Perhaps a reference to the time AirBNB allegedly farmed craigslist to grow listings? https://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-harvested-craigslist-...