it_does_follow

It's a bit more subtle than that. The real issue here is that the ambiguity of this statement depends a lot of the cultural context. There are plenty of communities in the US where that statement reads as an absolutely unambiguous request for a lawyer.

It's obviously not a conditional "If you think I'm guilty, then I want a lawyer" (as the parent is attempting to parse it). But a statement of "You really think I did this? I didn't so I want a lawyer".

The issue is that in communities like HN and most important where the judge and police come from, this can seem more ambiguous. The real issue is, is this misreading of ambiguity in bad faith or not.

> my slightly-less-early-stage business is doing $900 per month in revenue... from ads.

It doesn't take much to convert him either!

Initially I thought his argument was "I thought using ads doesn't bring any revenue, but now I'm paying for ads and making a net $900" which at least would argue some evidence that using advertising is not useless.

However it seems like he's just getting paid $900/month to run ads... so in this case he could have been correct in the beginning and just changed his mind because he's on the winning end of a scam. Not saying that advertising doesn't work, just that his position provides no evidence for that.

I had a similar transition from public -> private, but much earlier in my career.

My advice is to find meaning outside of work, and then go work in the private sector.

One of the things I miss the most about public sector work was you can actually spend time worrying about what's the "good" thing to do, rather than just optimizing a KPI. However, in practice I saw what it sounds like you are seeing now: you don't really serve the public you serve the bureaucracy.

At this point in my career I'm making close to triple what I would have if I stayed in the public sector, and my work life balance is better than it was back then. This means that I have time to work on projects and things I find meaningful and actively contribute to communities I care about. Ultimately I have a bigger impact on people's lives with extra income and free time than I did when I was supposedly working full time to help people.

One caveat: try not to work for any direct to consumer companies, especially startups. It's okay if private sector work isn't meaningful, but when you are actively working to rip people off while your PM cheers about how you're making the world a better place, it feels gross. B2B, in my experience, tends to have less repulsive practices.

Isn't the methane in permafrost produced by microbes? It's basically wet lands that ended up being frozen, and as they thaw they go back to releasing the methane being processed by the breakdown of organic matter from microbes.

That should be the new HN tagline, I'm honestly a bit surprised to see this article still on the front page. Usually concerning facts get flagged pretty quickly.

While Methane has a shorter half-life it is also a much more effective GHG. The common way to look at this is Global Warming Potential, which is measure in CO2 equivalents. You can find this on the wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_potential

Notice that you can look at the GWP potential over time spans. For methane, over the next 100 years (which is the period that will impact most HNers the most) it is at least 20x as impactful as CO2.

The reason this matters is because the biggest unknown with climate change is positive feed backs. A classic example of this is that as the arctic has less ice it also reduces the albedo of the oceans allowing them to absorb even more heat faster.

Another, methane related, theoretical, positive feed back is methane clathrates which are essentially frozen stores of methane deep in the arctic ocean. If the ocean were to warm up enough this might rapidly release methane leading to a catastrophic runaway warming scenario, leading to what is suspected to have caused rapid climate change in the Quanternary period [1].

It is currently believed by many researchers that, in the specific case of the 'clathrate gun' firing, it is unlikely to happen. The trouble is we don't know for sure. That is just one unknown, potentially devastating positive feed back.

If you read Peter Ward's work (and some others as well) it looks like at various times in the history of the planet there was very rapid, very destructive climate change that was caused by a cascading series of positive feed backs. We don't know exactly where these are, but the more methane we release (and CO2) and the faster the planet warms the more likely we are to find these.

It is important to note also, that these positive feedbacks are not factored into the IPCC report (just like the potential collapse of Thwaites Glacier is not) because the is no way to effectively model this and make predictions about them. It means that if you think the IPCC report sounds bad (or even if you don't) there is a lot of potential risk not mentioned in the various pathways there.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis

> It assumes that every book has an equally likely chance of being good.

No it doesn't, it just has to assume that

P(good|obscure) > - P(popular)/(P(popular)-1)

Or, more practically, when P(good|obscure) is just a hair more than P(popular)

Let's say all popular books are good, so

P(good|popular) = 1.

Then we'll say 1/1000 books are popular.

This means P(popular|good) == P(obscure|good) (i.e this is when the number of good books that are popular equals the number of obscure books that are popular.) when P(good|obscure) = 1/999. This true if we assume that P(good|popular) = 1, which is the highest value it can take. If this number is lower than this constraint is reduced, so we can take this as an upper bound of the relationship.

So knowing nothing about the rate of goodness among popular books, we can assume as that there is a huge number of obscure books, and a book is just reasonably more like to be obscure and good, than it is to be popular, the we can confirm that there are more good obscure books.

This constraint is much less demanding than assuming all books are equally likely of being good.

> Do you think Nike would be happy if their vendor just said, “yeah everything drives positive lift”.

It's fairly known in the industry (worked in a range of different ad-tech/marketing companies for around a decade), that more or less this is what makes Nike happy.

> They are employed by neutral third parties who make money regardless of the outcome of the study.

This is a bit naive. Same is true for home appraisers, funny how it always works out that the house appraised for just over what you offered (even in insane markets).

This issue is you might get paid this time for being honest, but you won't get paid again.

> completed by literal data scientists and statisticians.

I'm both of these. Saying that "adtech is bullshit" is absolutely too reductionist but you are wildly too naive about the reality of the industry.

Take A/B testing as an example. I've helped people run A/B tests for many years. I establish rigorous testing setups, make sure people understand confidence in the results, distribution of possible outcomes, etc. I'm honest in my work and so are the people running the tests.

But the truth is that A/B test on customer populations are not controlled experiments. One thing that literally no one in the industry does is go back and review the results of the past years A/B tests. The reason why? People don't really want to know. However, it's obvious these results can't be quite right because teams will run 10 A/B tests in a year, each claiming a 5% improvement in conversion, but clearly you don't see this cumulative impact of a >60% increase in conversion over time.

No one want to know this though, because knowing this helps nobody. Nobody is outright lying, but nobody wants to ask. The one time I worked outside of adtech but saw a problem where model results were almost entirely random noise I got in huge trouble for pointing this out.

Same is true across the board in the adtech world.

Someone else recommended "Subprime Attention Crisis by Tim Hwang" and I very strongly recommend that you read this. It's very well researched and was so inline with my experience that I found it so obvious as to almost be dull.

> literally phrased as a grand narrative

Can you point me to one serious postmodern theorist that holds this view? There are many different views of the postmodern, but rejection of meta-narratives (academic speak for "grand narrative" here) is pretty much universally accepted.

One small thing regarding all this that I think you should toss around as a hypothesis:

Generally, people with a background studying modernism and post-modernism (especially the later) will agree that it is the events of the world that create these, not the other way around.

There is this common, mainstream belief that somehow post-modernism created a crazier world, when the vast majority of artists and thinkers labeled post-modern are describing they crazy world they see, not arguing for it's existence.

Of course there are many perspectives on exactly what it is that creates these trends, for example their are plenty of theorists who posit post-modernism as a reaction to the horrors of WWII and a complete rejection of any claims Western culture has to truth or value (whereas the Moderns are generally considered to be making a last ditch effort to salvage Western culture), while other theorists view post-modernism as largely the result of late stage capitalism.

So whatever your opinions about the condition of (post) modernism, it's worth double checking your causal assumptions.

What all of this points out is that Facebook never really solved the "MySpace/Friendster" problem, they just had the better product at the right time and were able to get a few more years of safety by acquiring threats (which is not a long term strategy).

It's wild that FB has become such a highly valued company despite the fact that they have always been resting on rather shaky foundations.

We can also start to see Goodhart's Law in action at scale. Running your company by constantly optimizing for metrics (as so many startups mimic now) eventually does catch up to you. The vitriolic content that initially got them massive engagement eventually gets more and more people repulsed by the service.

In the end, just like MySpace and Friendster, there is nothing that really prevents users from exiting from the platform extremely fast once the tide of the network effect turns the other way.

Except that this description of war seems to paint every US military intervention post WWII extremely well.

There's also no point in positing counter-factual scenarios regarding WWII. If you want to imagine a world where the US rushed in and "saved" Europe early and prevents Pearl Harbor, you also have to imagine a world where US domestic support for Germany ultimately wins out and we end up supporting them.

People did notice. Pre-pandemic this was the major reason most people got flu vaccines: it's nice not to get the flu, but even nicer not to kill grandma when you visit the nursing home. Bad flu seasons were heavily reported, and people were aware that, while mild to most, the flu can be very deadly to at risk populations.

In pre-pandemic years if there was a flu as contagious as omicron people would be in a panic.

I'm sorry you don't like reality, I've never been a huge fan myself, but what's happening is happening.

> We have vaccines. Take the damn win.

Unfortunately it's still not that simple. If you look at the death rates in very high vaccination rate states/countries you see the same pattern. For example, VT has the highest vaccination rate in the country, at >90% with at least one dose, and is experiencing this as it's worst wave [0].

There's no doubt that vaccination helps and reduces overall severity, but it is by no means an "easy W"

Additionally we are starting to see diminishing returns in Israel's 4th round of shots [1]. It is increasingly looking like, even if we're will to do a life time of booster shots, this strategy may not be effective.

0. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/vermont/

1. https://healthpolicy-watch.news/israel-fourth-covid-booster-...

Because it's not an "easy W" and treating it like it is causes more deaths.

Have you even looked at the current situation we are in? Death's are continuing to climb and we're soon to be what is in the second most severe wave of the pandemic [0], and in a week we'll see if we start to compete for the worst wave.

I don't know how people can rationally talk about this being a "mild variant" and encouraging people to get on with their lives.

Since the beginning we've known that Omicron is both less deadly and more transmissible. I don't know how anyone with an engineering background can not see the problem here.

There is a balance where less deadly x more transmissible == more deadly x less transmissible, ie the total deaths during a wave are the same. We can't really control the death rate of omicron, but we can to an extent impact how transmissible it is. If we fight to reduce the transmission rate we have a much greater shot at lower overall deaths. But if we actively encourage people to ignore safe behavior and "live their life" we end up increasing the transmission rate therefore increasing the total number of deaths.

0. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailydeaths

> stuff like fiat money, gold, fine art and so on.

This comment is a great example of how little bitcoin enthusiasts tend to understand about investing. One of this things is very much not like the others.

"Fiat currency" is virtually never used as an investment asset. Even in the FOREX market you purchases pairs of currency rather than just a big pile of dollars. In your 401k when you want to go all "cash" you very often end up choosing investment vehicles that track cash.

The entire function of a currency is as a medium of exchange, it only has value in the process of exchanging. It makes no sense, at the individual investor level, to 'hold' dollars.

If you don't understand how a fiat currency differs from gold and fine art then you absolutely should not be "investing" in bitcoin.

This really confirmed visually for me something that I started to think was just in my head: I miss working with adults.

Since I've been in tech over 35 was "old", even among "senior" leadership. I had memories of when this wasn't the case (I even worked in a old style office where literally everyone had their own office with a door), but I thought maybe it was just a function of me being much younger then.

What's remarkable in these images is that there is a range of ages and at the same time it's obviously not a gerontocracy. I can't remember the last time I worked with someone that had gray hair.

The last several teams I've worked with I remember a constant sense of everyone trying to figure out what to do. When you look at resumes you can see why, nearly everyone has worked at one or two places and only worked for at most 5 years. On any of these teams everyone would still be considered "kids" with a lot to learn about patience and how to solve hard problems.

I seriously wonder what has happened to older people in tech, and sometimes wonder if one day I'll be taken out back and find out.

I once lead a team through a massive layoff during the pandemic, fought with leadership to save their jobs (and succeeded), and focused on making sure their work was balanced enough to keep them distracted from what was going on but not a source of stress. My top priority was to ensure that they did not suffer undue stress during the incredibly difficult period of early pandemic coupled with layoffs, focused on making their work as meaningful as possible for them. We still posted some record revenue months.

I was fired for this, ultimately because I was not aggressive enough with the team.

You get toxic managers like this in toxic companies because it is the only way to not only get promoted but to survive. I recognized early in the pandemic that I could either be the person I wanted to be, the leader I wanted to be, or have a job in 6 months. I chose the former, but don't blame people who are forced to choose the latter.

edit: I should clarify that I do mean forced to choose the latter in that last sentence. There is a difference between a 30k/year worker being moved to a 45k/year manager role and needing to keep that job to survive and a 200k/year software engineer choosing to behave this way for a 250k/year job.

This is such a kafkaesque comment. "See this horror you are gazing upon? the trouble with you is you refuse to see how this horror is indeed a good thing! It is you who suffer from a sickness, and until you see this horror for the good thing it is you will continue to be unwell"

Make sure to get your causal arrows in the right direction. A favorite quote from Mark Fisher:

> “Instead of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill? The ‘mental health plague’ in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high.”

OP is not finding work dissatisfying because they are depressed, if they ever were depressed it is because software engineering today is a meaningless, valueless trudge ultimately to shift around some investor's money.

If the situation doesn't depress you it's only because you don't see it, but seeing it and reacting to it as the OP does is the only reasonable reaction. It is not a symptom of the sickness of the individual but of sickness of the larger system manifested in the individual.

To the OP: as a general rule I wouldn't seek out advice like this on HN, more comments will be undermining you and your observation of reality than will give you any meaningful advice.

What has worked for me is finding work that isn't repulsive (e.g. not actively and directly contributing to individual or ecological harm, of course they all do in some sense but many do it so directly you can't even look away without extreme cognitive dissonance), for a team of people that treat you as a human (no company will do this, but there are teams). No work is meaningful because we are in a bubble (not just finance) of unimaginable scale, in some capitalist fantasy land detached from reality (we aren't even really generating profits any more rather than shuffling around surplus value).

Acknowledge that you need a job to provide income, not meaning. Find other sources of meaning in your life (think Candide's garden), and try to keep sane.

> these tanks

> those solar panels

> these batteries

The problem with these "self-sufficient" narratives is they're always tethered to industrial society. Having the limit of your understanding be a "solar panel" is no different than it being a wall socket. The "world" itself here, the boat in this case, is manufactured in a factory.

That's not to say I don't also find this stuff interesting, but don't confuse being able to hold your breath a long time for having gills. I find free diving fascinating, but there is no need in that community to claim that they have found a way of living free from the constraints of air breathing.

Checking 1 week later:

We've seen record hospitalization for the pandemic (which today looks like it may be peaking): https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#new-hospital-admis...

The record daily death so far is 2,997 which surpasses all waves with the exception of last winter's which was the largest on record so far: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailydeaths

You still have a reasonably good chance of being correct but I think at the very least you should reconsider writing off the risks as "shtick". The number to beat for daily deaths is 4,069. Either way right now we have the 2nd worst wave of the pandemic as far as deaths go, which is very far from the "mild" claims that were aggressively circulating a few weeks ago.

I'll check back in two more weeks.

Even if all of this were true (which I don't think anyone seriously believes anymore), there is still no way startups can compete right now without remote offerings.

The only reason I would consider working in an office full time (and I already live within commuting distance of a major tech-hiring metro) would be for $450K total comp or higher. Plenty of big companies can offer that these days, but startups are still going to mostly pay $200k as an upper limit (since they have no RSUs to throw on the pile).

There are plenty of companies that offer remote and total comp in that former range, there is absolutely no way you're going to hire any talent as startup now without remote as an option, even if remote were sub-optimal for your long term development.

I don't drink to live a long time, I drink to make the time I'm hear a bit more bearable.

To add to this list: Richard Hamming includes a section on this in his n-dimensional spaces talk from "The Art of Doing Science and Engineering" lectures [0]. Stripe Press also recently re-published a beautiful copy of the print version of these lectures [1].

0. https://youtu.be/uU_Q2a0S0zI?t=1716

1. https://press.stripe.com/the-art-of-doing-science-and-engine...

> Whereas I've never seen a frequentist book dismissive of Bayes methods

Nearly every Frequentist book I have mentioning Bayesian method attempts to write them off pretty quickly as "subjective" (Wasserman, comes immediately to mind but there are others), which is falsely implying that some how Frequentist methods are some how more "objective" (ignoring the parts of your modeling that are subject does not somehow make you more object). The very phrase of the largely frequentist method "Empirical Bayes" is a great example of this. It's an ad hoc method that somehow implies that Bayes is not Empirical (Gelman et al specifically call this out).

Until very recently Frequentist methods have near universally been the entrenched orthodoxy in most fields. Most Bayesians have spend a fair bit of their life having their methods rejected by people who don't really understand the foundation of their testing tools, but more so think their testing tools come from divine inspiration and ought not to be questioned. Bayesian statistics generally does not rely on any ad hoc testing mechanism, and can all be derived pretty easily from first principles. It's funny you mentioned A/B tests as a good frequentist example, when most marketers absolutely prefer their results interpreted as the "probability that A > B", which is the more Bayesian interpretation. Likewise the extension for A/B to multi-armed bandit trivially falls out of the Bayesian approach to the problem.

Your "likelihood" principle discussion is also a bit confusing here for me. In my experience Fisherian schools tend to be the highest champions of likelihood methods. Bayesians wouldn't need tools like Stan and PyMC if they were exclusively about likelihood since all likelihood methods can be performed strictly with derivatives.

> I really hope you are wrong in this prediction.

For the record I also hope that I am wrong on this. I very much believe that we really don't know at this point (unfortunately rising hospitalization data, and uptick in deaths has me concerned).

The trouble is the media chanting of "it's mild!" has meant people have basically ignored Omicron when we didn't have enough information to say "it's fine!" being mild and highly contagious can easily mean more deaths, and we haven't had enough data to say where the balance lies.

As someone who has worked remote long before the pandemic, this is a myth in my experience. I have had at least as many friendships formed with remote coworkers as I have in person office workers.

Occasional get-togethers do help with this quite a lot, but it's not necessary.

What I find strange about this reasoning is: doesn't every hacker have friends from around the world they've never met in person? From various software projects, open source contributions, online community connections etc I have a fairly long list of people who are very important to me that I've never met in person.

> Once the pandemic is over

Pandemic is not really going to be "over". The hope that it would just become endemic is fizzling out. We'll certainly continue living life, but it will never go back to the way it was.

My money is that Omicron will bring record deaths that we'll start seeing a few weeks. People will realize wishful thinking doesn't do much to fight pandemics. Most people will think Omicron will make them immune forever, and we'll get new variants periodically, sometimes they'll be short and mild sometimes they'll be awful. People will start realizing that it's waiting for an end that's exhausting, and getting on with life, even if that means things are never quite the same, is preferable.

"Back to office" will increasingly seem like a liability. Employees are already getting sick of the perpetually moving "back to office" dates. After 3 years of perpetually moving back these dates more and more companies will realize it's much healthier and more productive to just move forward as things are.

> In-office is much more efficient and it will be immediately evident once it is enforced.

People may hate remote work during the pandemic, but I have seen very few people find that their teams are any less productive and plenty that have found them more productive. I've worked for successful remote teams for years prior to pandemic. The only issue in the past that remote startups really had was that VCs didn't like the look of not having an office in SF.

Plenty of internal hires come with a pay bump and level bump as well.