kitanata

Anyone have a non paywalled link? Back in the day when we posted and shared links among each other the links would contain… you know… actual content. I miss those days.

I’m not against folks getting paid. My question is how does one build an entire company selling a slightly better version of a widely used open source tool? Ruff is not strong enough to build a company from.

A faster version of black is not a strong enough value proposition for an entire company. Ruff should remain an open source product. What is the point of making every half decent Developer tool a whole startup?

I say we put ‘em all on a rocket ship and send em to another planet. Middle management are the ones who want to go back (mostly). Let ‘em go. Won’t be long before they are using tree leaves as currency.

If I remember right there is a famous movie among programmers where a group of developers becomes so frustrated with a printer they brutally destroy it with a baseball bat.

When AI spits out verbatim the works of an author which it is trained on, that is not transformational, that is plagiarism. Whether it is done by an AI or a human is immaterial. Now we can argue over hundreds of hypothetical situations where AI does produce transformational work that isn’t a derivative, and we would agree that AI can and often does produce transformational work, but that is not what we are arguing over today. We are talking about the cases where AI isn’t transformational and where it is producing derivative works. To claim that AIs never produce derivative works or that all output from an AI is only transformative is foolish when we have countless counter examples popping up every other day.

If your AI is capable of reproducing part or whole of a bit of content it was trained on, then your AI is subject to copyright. Training an AI to create derivative works, does not absolve you of violating the copyright of the authors your AI is building derivative works from. If this is too much of a legal burden for you, then don’t train your AI on work it may create derivative forms from.

It’s a pretty simple problem. The folks claiming it is not either are being intentionally disingenuous or honestly do not understand the legal definition of derivative works in copyright. It’s settled law.

You could… you know either a) don’t train on works you don’t have a license to or b) use some sort of adversarial training to ensure that the AI doesn’t replicate the work it is trained on.

If they want to counter with a SLAPP or disparagement lawsuit they’ll only dig their grave deeper. I am not the least bit worried. The laws and the facts are on my side.

I was fired from Panorama Education for being autistic after being told I didn’t belong there because I have trouble controlling my tone. The same people shouting off diversity initiatives and renaming “master” branches to “main” because they care about inclusivity ignore and marginalize those around them when it actually matters. It’s performative at best. Despite being very “out” as on the spectrum, despite presentations and knowledge sharing on neurodiversity and despite organizing and participating in a resource group they stood by nothing of what they preached. And yes, this is legit and yes I am suing them and yes my attorney is working completely on contingency. Panorama Education, a company dedicated to and attacked by the GOP for being “woke” is itself an ableist organization. Even the emperor wears no clothes.

Most of these companies don’t actually care at all about any sort of DEIB initiatives… even the supposedly “woke” ones. It’s all a sham.

Edit: This was a few months back. I lead an entire engineering organization now for a company who despite having no DEIB program is truely the most inclusive work culture I’ve ever seen.

Fine them $1500 per account breached, per PII attribute taken. From the other posts it looks like at least 4 attributes were taken. So that is $1500 x 4 x 37M = $222B. I think $222B is a paltry sum compared to the amount of damage that was probably caused by this, but let’s settle for $222B anyway. Breaches like this should end the company forever and the C-Suite should go to prison for criminal negligence. I am sick and tired of this.

10% is under investing and this is a bad methodology. How do you know what to work on? Is tech debt just the stuff that annoys you or is it actually bad?

What you need to tackle tech debt is a quality program with metrics. I’m talking code coverage, cyclomatic complexity checking, linters and scanners, DORA, SAST, DAST, etc. Quantify your quality. Then quantify the risks and costs of not improving it.

Then you need to target the areas of code your tools tell you to and you need to make a conscious effort to solve those very specific things. “Module A’s complexity score is 26. Our standards say this needs to be 10. Therefore this is considered a quality item. Therefore it goes into the sprint as a strategic investment.”

Software and business leaders, when developers talk about tech debt… they are talking about managing complexity. (Shit breaking all the time because you don’t have tests in a complex system. It’s failing because of the complexity.) High complexity is expensive. If you do not balance the need to manage complexity against features and you do not act intentionally about your quality your software will eventually fail or if you’re lucky it will just reach a stage where you can’t maintain it anymore and you’ll scrap and rebuild.

Investing in quality makes you go zoom.

Want to know the secret to interview developers? Here are the only 3 questions you have to ask:

1. What do you do for fun when not at work? … dig into to questions from here. 2. What is the coolest thing you ever built? How did it work? How long did it take to build? What language? What architecture / framework? What was hard about it? … you get the idea. 3. What are your biggest pet peeves when it comes to reading other peoples code?

Question #1 breaks the ice and gives permission to the candidate to be themselves. Look for common ground. Connect with them. Learn who they are as a person.

Question #2 gets you to see their passion. Talk to them on their ground. Give them the benefit of the doubt. Ask them hard questions, but don’t intimidate. Just go deep. The candidate cannot fake this. It’s not possible. People without the experience they claim are painfully obvious here.

Question #3 gives you two things. 1. Is this person openly critical of things looking to improve them? And Is this person a jerk? I call this the Jerk Trap. Jerks jump right in to being Jerks. After all you just kind of game them permission here! — I would ask though you be careful about excluding neurodiverse people who may not be able to control tone or navigate social situations well. These people will tend to be direct. Don’t confuse directness with being a Jerk. They are not the same thing.

I’ve interviewed a lot of engineers in my career, and tried a lot of things. This methodology has yet to fail me.

EDIT: It’s sad I even have to point this out, but in #1 you are looking to connect with the person on a human level. It’s not bait them into talking about coding outside of work. If you do that or think that way you are being discriminatory towards people who can’t code outside of work… you know like single mothers. And people wonder why we don’t have more women in tech. Stop equating passion with > 40 hours a week. It’s bullshit. Stop.

How to completely destroy your reputation as a company 101. Just keep doubling down on the hostility, gaslighting and and narcissism Filmora. I am sure it will work out eventually. /s

I had such a bad experience with Filmora in the past that I am not the least bit surprised by their lack of honesty and integrity here. I’m also consistently disappointed by the number of folks on HN that are so quick to defend clearly fraudulent actions on the part of a company. It makes me really sad because these are the same kinds of people applying for YC or who call themselves “entrepreneurs”. It’s terrifying how fucking spineless some of you really are.

Retribution is part of criminal Justice. We have no problem “rehabiliting” companies (except that it often fails), and we have no problem using retribution as an excuse to send poor black people to jail for long sentences. Why do we struggle with conceptualizing retribution for handling corporate malfeasance? You have a duty as a company leader to your fellow citizens. If you fail, you should be held accountable. I support prison time for the business leaders at Hertz who caused this problem to occur. Lock em up!

Welcome to the world of science where critique, positive criticism and open questioning is encouraged! We’re glad to have you finally join us.

I would suspect significantly reduced eye contact between autistic and Nuerotypicals and between autistic and autistic social pairings. My central question would be in high masking autistic individuals does there masking ability relate somehow to eye contact? And if so… by how much? Similarly in autistic-autistic pairings how much eye contact is required for autistic people to communicate well with each other? In my experience, and in some recent studies we see that autistic people can communicate seamlessly with other autistic people without the need for eye contact.

This study asserts that eye contact is required for good social engagement and communication. What I am challenging is that that finding is probably only true in Nuerotypical samples and is probably not present in autistic people.

… in Nuerotypical populations.

This study mentions but provides no data or analysis for how their study is impacted by or was affected by the differences between nuerotypical and autistic samples. Which is a shame because as an autistic person who doesn’t like eye contact, I think those findings would have been much more insightful and potentially groundbreaking. My hope is the authors have plans to look closer at that.

I am a Staff Engineer leading a large engineering organization. I am also “on the spectrum” and openly autistic. My co-workers know that I am autistic.

I have found that communicating to business folks and leaders is a skill like anything else and can be taught. Your assumption that being autistic somehow completely disqualifies one to speak competently to others is ableist and harmful.

While it is true that people who are autistic struggle to communicate with non-autistic people I would argue it is also difficult for non-autistic people to communicate with autistic people.

It is also ableist to assume that just because someone lacks communication skills that they are “on the spectrum”.

What is true is that communication as a skill is not often taught to developers.

We’re talking about kids dying because we think that is a fair sacrifice for gun ownership in this country… and you’re arguing about immigration and promoting tired, old, disproven racist, stereotypes of immigrants?

Come on man. You white supremacists are so transparent at this point as to be comical. Where is the evil mustache, and diabolical laugh? If you’re going to commit to the trope then commit bro!

As a developer, as a data scientist, as a designer, as a business leader, you are responsible for things like this. Do not make excuses. Do not disclaim liability. Acknowledge the mistake and fix it. We can do better.

Anytime the government spends money on anything it prints money to do so. This is how governments work.

You aren’t against the government printing money. You are against why they are printing money.

It makes sense to print money and spend that money into the economy to accomplish a task if the result of that has a positive ROI.

Can we debate the ROI of the activity, rather than “inflation bad”, “printing money bad” or “politician bad”?

Using monetary policy as your point of disagreement is intellectually dishonest when your actual problem is with what the government is spending money on… and not the fact that the government is spending money at all.

Oh man. Reading this hit hard on so many points for me. I am also autisic. I don’t agree generally with some of the conclusions and approach of the author, but I suspect they are navigating a truely hostile (to them) work environment.

Now before you dismiss me, consider that autistic people are generally speaking… awful at recognizing situations that are actively hostile to them. And yes, Neurotypicals are sometime quite hostile to autisic people. I’ve been a victim of discrimination and outright campaigns to isolate and harass me. It happens. Sometimes it’s on purpose, sometimes it is a natural result of repeated conflict.

Now, let’s say for example that you had a co-worker who actually had it out for you; would actively undermine your work, sabotage your efforts… for whatever reason. As a nuerotypical you would recognize this behavior quite quickly and develop a strategy around it. Perhaps that strategy involves talking to the right people, executing some kind of trap, confront the behavior head on, or simply walking away. Since an autisic person has difficulty detecting negative intent, they would instead try to puzzle out why the “clearly wrong” person just won’t listen to them. From that they draw these conclusions about themselves and the world around them about their behavior because they cannot understand the behavior of Nuerotypicals (to be fair here NTs don’t understand our behavior either). Trust me, I’ve drawn some pretty wild conclusions myself at times.

To illustrate, I recently worked with a very Narcissistic and toxic personality. By all outside observers this was 100% dark triad kind of behavior in this person (I verified it with multiple independent opinions). Anyway, this person was so difficult to work with, so directly hostile, and so stressful to work with that I re-entered therapy where I, at 36 years of age finally learned two very important things.

1. Some people will want to fuck you up, just because they don’t like you. Not everyone is good or does good things. This is “irrational” but it is real.

2. Not everyone had the same capacity as you do… and you don’t have the same capacity as others. For those without your capacity you must teach, and for those that have capacity that you lack, you must learn.

These two “rules” have finally demystified some aspects of office realpolitik for me.

I suspect that the author, my fellow autistic, has yet to also understand this about people. Their intent might purposefully be to oppose you and undermine you. Ignore it, work around it, or leave. They will never be an ally to you. Stop trying.

I recently left DataRobot to join another company. I was there a little over a year so I don’t have much stake in this controversy. There are a lot of good people at DataRobot but I’ve seen quite a bit of turmoil in my short tenure there. I hope they are able to get through it and survive.

Just a minor myth busting here. Vincent Van Gogh was absolutely well known and well liked as a painter while he was alive. He didn’t make a lot of money at it, and rich people didn’t fawn over his paintings, and he definitely suffered from mental illness before he committed suicide, but the myth that he was a failure as an artist during his life while he was alive is just that… a myth.

The guy is the GOAT and while he was alive… many… many… other artists also saw him that way. His contemporaries absolutely adored him, and even tried to emulate him. His work was known to be important during his life to even the most financially successful of painters.

I suppose if you limit the concept of “success” to how much money one earns in their life, then fine Van Gogh was not very financially successful, but he was monumentally successful and recognized as such during his life by the only real measure that matters: Impact.

This is why as a journalist or a writer, it is important to confirm “what you know” before committing it to a piece. If you don’t verify everything you risk perpetuating myths instead of realities.

Selective enforcement is one of the principal ways that workers experience discrimination in the workplace. Remember that Amazon doesn’t fire people for unionization, or because they are black or transgendered. They fire them for disciplinary reasons that are completely “normal” and “typical” as under-performers. This kind of system of “feedback” is a weapon and it is absolutely used to that affect in every place where it is implemented to the degree that Amazon does.

Can we please stop be apologists to giant profit-driven organizations and start maybe… just maybe… empathizing with people instead?

I recently went through an interview process where to advance to the technical interview I would have to learn Go. I know a ton of languages. Haven’t done much with Go. Could I learn it? Sure, I could. But… I am not going to learn a new language where I am comfortable enough to do an interview just so that I have a chance to work for your pre-A round company. I am especially not going to do it when I have 2 job offers sitting on the table that I am currently considering. If you’re a startup founder recruiting other devs, don’t ask them to learn a whole new language on spec so they can interview with you. I’m sorry. You’re just not as hot as you think you are.

This is crazy. I just gave a nearly identical presentation for a series of interviews. One at AKASA, one at Scribd, and one at Panorama. Like I gave this presentation, with the exact same title 2 weeks ago to a bunch of junior engineers at these various companies. It is super timely. I’m consistently surprised how multiple people can arrive to the same point, via the same inspirational sources at the same time and reach completely different conclusions. I’ll have to write up a blog response to this article.

everything old is new again

He just keeps reposting. :/