pavas

Luckily my company doesn't have much prescription about commit process, so its up to each team to determine what works for them and we've been pushing for small atomic commits (probably what you'd term micro-commits).

The idea is that each commit should be small enough to fit in one "page" of PR review, with source lines and test line diffs <150 each, and everything should be one integrated and independent change with unit tests all passing and deployable to prod, etc. Honestly, I can't see a downside to this, other than maybe taking a while to internalize this process and to properly decompose commits.

Have you considered advocating for a change of company standards? Sometimes thats a sisyphean task, but if the only argument against it is "that's how it's always been done" it might be a worthwhile endeavor.

I consider myself a git noob, but I do find myself using rebase several times weekly. It seems to get easier the more I use it, along with all other git tactics.

Why bundle all changes into a single commit? How can the commit message be meaningful at that point? Why not just submit multiple atomic commits?

Our team has been pushing for and implementing small, atomic commits on mainline. Honestly, I'll keep fighting for it and never go back. PRs are easy to review, commits are easy to reason about, what's not to love?

Why squash commits to begin with? Unless you're getting too many commits per package per time period, then maybe that's an indication that you should modularize your codebase.

Let's agree that status is about what people think (other people think) about you. Are all people's opinions equal, or are some people's opinions worth more than others? Furthermore, does it matter how many people think you're high status vs low status? Is your status a scalar measure, and if so how is it calculated?

If you accept all of this, you'll get the following surprising results:

1. If status is about what other people think about you, then your status can change extraneously without you making any changes, by a single person's opinion about you changing based on new info they receive. If status is a discrete or binary measure, then apply marginal status change along with the intermediate value theorem and there will be a point where your status changes by a single person's arbitrary flux in opinion about you or people like you.

2. If status can be modeled as some sort of scalar dot product (as a weighted measure of people's opinions about you), then your status can change extraneously without you making any changes, without any other person's opinion about you changing, simply by having another person get to know you (and thereby tipping your status scale in one direction or another).

3. If status is also about what other people think that other people think about you, then your status can change extraneously without you making any changes, or anyone that knows you making any changes or changing any opinions, simply by having their status change according to someone else's opinion of them (and you may not even know this person). Which leads to the counterintuitive result that you can be in a room with everyone you know having a great time, but you suddenly go from high-status to low-status because someone outside of that room changes their opinion about someone else inside that room.

4. If status is a global measure (everyone's opinion of yourself and everyone else matters), then your status can change without you making any changes, without anyone you know making any changes or changing any opinions about themselves, and furthermore, without anyone else in the world making any changes or changing any opinions about anyone else in the world. This would happen if aliens were watching us and had opinions about our status.

A rebuttal might be that status is not a global measure, but a local one--only certain people matter within a certain space-time boundary. Fine, then if you stop caring or thinking about what those people think you can stop worrying about status.

If you take the localization principle of status to its conclusion, the only person's opinion of your status that actually matters is your own. So if you stop caring or thinking about status, it doesn't matter.

A rebuttal to that might be that status determines what you can do among or get from other people (i.e. what your boss thinks about you determining your promotion). Fine, then try and associate with people that don't care about status and it won't matter.

A rebuttal to that might be that regardless of whether people think about status, you'll still be judged on SOMETHING for your compensation, raises, promotions, etc. At this point I would concede that your ability to get things done, to be a likeable person, to add value, to communicate, to organize, to bullshit, etc all matter. But there is no simple measure of this (like how well-dressed you are, whether you look rich/poor and are actually poor/rich, whether you counter-signal, etc), except maybe for beginners that need a simple model of social interaction to get started.

My own belief is that status is nothing more than a game that only has meaning when you are playing with others who are playing the same game as you. It does not have any global meaning in and of itself (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_game_(philosophy)). Sometimes I play it for fun and sometimes I don't, but I don't place any real value in it. Maybe doing this makes me a (low|high) value individual. Who cares?

I view the reliance upon the idea of status as a low-status activity. Low status or high status only emanate when you're playing the status game, but it's not a game that you necessarily need to play.

And if you're not playing the game, low-status or high-status doesn't matter; they're just different colors.

Nothing wrong with playing the game either.

There were 485 murders in NYC in 2021. What is the difference between those and these ones, other than the murderer being homeless?

Some stats I pulled up: - Minimum wage in NYC is $15/hr, coming out to ~$30k/yr pre-tax @ 40hrs/week and 50 weeks/year, or $22,752 yearly after tax.

- At 30% of income rule for rent, that comes out to $568/month for rent. At 80 hrs/week that's ~$1k

- "The Bronx neighborhood of Bedford Park has the lowest median rent in the city—$1,558 for a one bedroom"

Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding something, but how is this not a problem of lack of affordable housing?

I live in Seattle, and I would say that homelessness there is also reaching a state of crisis. Sometimes I see people in pain, sometimes I ask them about how they are doing or if they need anything or if there would be something that can help them; sometimes I can help them a little. Most of the time I don't understand what's happening.

You've obviously thought about this a lot more than I have so I'd like to gain some insight from you. I won't ask you about what the solution should look like since you didn't claim to know what it would be, but I'd like to learn more about what you think it would look like to actually address it as a serious problem?

Honestly I don't even claim to understand what the problem actually is, just that there seems to be some sort of problem and it seems to be growing rather than getting better. Could you write a little more about this? I'm curious about your thoughts here.

Here are some contrasting viewpoints I consider:

- Some believe that the US does not have much of a social safety net; some believe this to be by design; some believe this to be beneficial

- Some believe the US to be an individualistic society; some believe this to be beneficial in that it promotes the strong, the efficient, the productive, etc, to outcompete the weak, the wasteful, the lazy, etc.

- Some in the US believe that everyone should get therapy, psychiatry, etc under the guidance of a licensed professional; some in the US believe that psychiatric issues are just excuses made by the lazy to avoid work; some in the US believe that religion will save you and it's all the work of the devil; in some well-to-do places in the US, waiting lists for psychiatric care are months-long even with really good insurance; some believe that we are also in a worldwide pandemic that has had deleterious mental health consequences for everyone, and that many have been pushed to the brink

- Some believe we should increase taxes and have the government do things for people, or force people into doing things for themselves; some believe in reducing taxes and government interference; some believe people should fend for themselves and if they are losers, so be it; some believe in charity and doing good deeds; some people donate to virtue signal, some use donations for tax write-offs, and some people donate anonymously and never tell anyone and nobody else ever knows of what they did

- According to some studies, the US ranks #1 in charitable giving, or generosity towards strangers; contrast this with other countries that some believe have better safety nets and more direct government action, though perhaps higher taxes

- There's a saying that goes something like "charity begins at home"--some take this to be a call-to-action for your daily interactions with others you come across, including strangers since that would have the most immediate impact; some believe in a utilitarian mode of action where energy/time/money should be directed where they'd have the most effect or return the greatest value; some believe charities to be scams; some believe charities to be ineffective

This kinda sounds like a copout.

We can escape the fatalism of Dunbar's number and in/out-groups through leadership and recursively hierarchical structures. See any large (>~200 persons) company, collective action (civil rights, wars, social movements), nations, etc.

I was asking a rhetorical question tbh.

> if only we could all just band together, we could create world peace and end hunger

I mean, that does sound like a true proposition. So why is it that we can't band together?

> The problem is the lack of jobs, or safety, or some other thing people want.

From op: > But it's totally doable in the new work from anywhere future

If you truly believe in the concept of a collective consciousness, then would you not also be forced to conclude that there are others that have considered these questions as well, and possibly that they have answers for them?

Just curious, do you believe there is some greater organism or what have you with the ability to integrate human consciousnesses (something like Gaia theory)?

If so, what do you believe that organism/being (or whatever it is) would feel or think about what humans are doing now, acting in the world?

Wasn't the point that change itself caused productivity to increase?

There are nuances, but at it's core either it was valid for them to make that appeal and it is valid for us to request their credentials (which is essentially an appeal to authority--"who has the better credentials?"), or it was not valid for them to make that appeal and it is not valid for us to request their credentials. I lean towards the latter view.

Logical mistakes don't weaken a person's entire argument (we don't want to just see who's "winning"), or even weaken the line of reasoning they were invoked to support -- they just fail to provide evidence.

One of the parties called into question the validity of a paper the other party posted, and the other party rebutted by implying that as the director of an established institution, the paper's author has something to lose. I find that argument weak, but the initial questioning of validity also provided no evidence or made any strong arguments as to why the paper was not valid.

Appeals to authority are useful not as logical arguments but as a way to avoid wasting time on drivel, and I don't believe that to be the case here.

Reasoning doesn't require credentials, please let's keep it that way.

I'm not talking about growth though, I'm talking about marginal cost per service rendered. To serve twice as many people in a restaurant you need roughly twice the servers. You don't need twice the amount of programmers (and other workers) to serve Netflix to twice as many people.

The fish are swimming because they are in water, that is what is actually happening. If they do not know they are in water, they ascribe some other meaning as to why they are moving their bodies (swimming).

A company that uses software automation to increase efficiency and improve margins at scale (thereby scaling non-linearly).

E.g. a company that uses people to calculate taxes is not tech, whereas a company that uses people and software to calculate taxes is a tech company if their use of internally-developed software gives them a significant competitive advantage over other companies in that market.

EDIT: Thinking about it a little bit more, a vegetable growing company is not a tech company unless they use software to drive down expenses so they can compete better, allowing their investment in software to give them a greater rate of return than a comparable investment in additional people/other capital. Typically the automation system is also licensed for sale externally at sub-linear marginal cost. This means that tech companies benefit from a faster rate of growth than a traditional capital-intensive business, while driving up productivity in their market.

I'm going to go ahead and say it then, this is suspicious as fuck.

It would have been slightly less suspicious if the response to "this is a security concern" would have been "oops yeah we see that now, let's disable that requirement until we gain some trust first".

I do not trust a company that brands itself as privacy-oriented when they insist on peddling a security vulnerability to their users "because Google is evil so trust us". Google may be selling my data but at least they have a lot to lose so they are likely to abide by legal guardrails.

Especially since there is no value-add to the extension. It's whole purpose is to make it harder for less tech-savvy users to stop using the service.

Isn't it actually as simple as "how much do you get paid per year in total"? The reason being that you can convert cash to stocks (and pay capital gains taxes on its growth) at any time.

So $100k salary + $50k cash bonus == $100k salary + $25k cash bonus + $25k vested stock. You can discount any future inflows of cash or stock to present value and compare offers quite easily. Some offers will be more but that has nothing to do with whether compensation is made up of stocks or cash.

Hire for Ө.

This is something that would be really cool to have and I think it would work if you could set up a proper incentive structure so it doesn't get gamed.

Some comments I had on this a little while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20282606

Yeah there are definitely other reasons but this is one of the biggest in my opinion.

There's always a tradeoff between security/bureaucracy and speed in delivery so as to remain competitive. This does matter even at large scale.

I would agree that if one were purposefully trying to cause as much damage as possible, that impact would be contained by these processes.

But one can still make mistakes or be a drain on the team's energy and focus which increases the chance of mistakes team-wide. At scale, even minor mistakes are costly, not just in terms of direct impact but in terms of the opportunity-cost of developer effort that could be better spent elsewhere.

Of course, my direct knowledge has sample size of n=1 here so it likely does not apply uniformly across all large companies.

I would love to hear contrasting opinions on this topic. I've spent a lot of time thinking about what would help developer teams increase their productivity w/ regards to adding value.

In case you want a real answer here:

> What difficulty of questions will be asked? Easy? Hard?

Easy to medium depending on the position or any number of factors. MAYBE hard if you've done really well and solved the questions quickly.

> Do people actually want to "hear the thinking process" or do they just want an optimum answer regurgitated quickly?

Thinking process is far more important than getting the optimum answer. You have to talk your thought process out loud. Think less "find the best answer" and more "gather requirements and optimize within the given time window". It's far better if you treat questions as applicable to real world scenarios where you only care asymptotic complexity as a tool, because you have real resource/network constraints. It is still important to know how to analyze asymptotic complexity. It is not important to get the most optimal answer, but it is important to be able to optimize on the trivial (brute-force) answer which you should always state to begin with. Depending on the interviewer, they'll ask you go further and maybe prod you with hints. It's really really important to communicate and make sure you're solving the right problem and that the interviewer is on board; this is also a skill that you pick up. It also very much applies on-the-job "I did exactly what was asked" is probably the wrong thing to say if you're not taking ownership to clarify the issue and solve the root problem, because that's what's ultimately important. All of this can be learned with practice, and it is 100% expected that you study and practice.

> Do I need to practice "regular" interview questions also ("What's your greatest weakness?")?

Yes, behavioral questions are also important as long as you can pass the technical portion. The idea here is to understand how you would deal with situations. You answer these in a STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) or SAR format, and you should have these STAR format answers prepared for any types of questions they would ask. Depending on the company's guiding principles you would formulate your answers to display how you exhibited a particular principle in each of your stories. Don't be humble -- use "I" language rather than "we" language here (I had to practice this). Data based answers are best here ("grew user engagement as measured by replies by X%" vs "grew user base"). Impact is important but unfortunately that's not always within your control. The end-result isn't necessarily important but your learning is (e.g. if the project flopped, what important things did you learn that you'll never make the mistake of repeating again, and how can you pass that knowledge on to your team).

Lastly, these interviews are designed to weed out false positives so even if you're more than qualified luck still plays a part and it can be a numbers game, so keep trying.

I would be wary of new teammates whose motto is "think different" when it comes to operating services at $B scale, because if they break something, someone else on the team will have to work all day and night to get things fixed and it won't be them.

That does probably depend on whether you're doing greenfield work or not, but even then these costs are there but just not immediately visible.

The interview process for FAANG companies is primarily focused on preventing false positives because of the damage that can be done by individuals when working at scale. Unless you have a really large sample size I wouldn't take any of that personally because for each interview, luck is involved.

Furthermore, the process is partly about how good you are at being able to learn, and partly about how well you are able to keep yourself motivated to grind something out, or a combination of the two. Given enough time, FAANG interviews are 100% something you can study for, and furthermore, it is expected that you spend the time to study for them as that is also a signal of something in itself.

On the job, you'll either have to be smart enough to pick stuff up quickly or spend the time to grind out the work (working overtime, etc). You also can't fuck things up too much because the fallout can be really expensive, so it helps to be able to do things right the first time. I think what is generally tested in the interview correlates with these requirements, and prevents false positives (and probably lots of false negatives too but you can just study more and try again at that point).

I guess the next step of the argument would go something like "we can formalize certain forms of interesting* knowledge in the relationships among prime numbers, which are infinite" (e.g. Godel's work). After which point we can get into a very long conversation about what constitutes "interesting" and what constitutes "knowledge" .

It would certainly be a feat to formalize any of this, and we'd still be debating definitions and assumptions if we could formally prove anything.

> Learning the next thousand thousand prime numbers is not very interesting if you already know the first few million, and of very limited practical use.

Maybe your intuition here is right but my hunch is that if you were able to prove this conjecture, it would absolutely blow the socks off the mathematics community.

I look at it as a Pascal's Wager w/ regards to knowledge: either there's more to know that we don't know we don't know, or there isn't. If there is, we'll likely only find it out if we believe there is more knowledge to uncover and spend our time trying to uncover it.

My overall hunch here is that a lot of our current knowledge is constrained by our mental semantic structure, which is bounded by the working set of objects we can mentally manipulate at an instant in time. That set is probably O(10) for most of the population, and likely O(100) for everybody. We can increase the number of semantic objects we can operate on by working on them temporally using logical rules, but those rules themselves are bound by this O(100) limit, and so on for any meta-rules.

I would find it very surprising if all interesting things that could be stated were relationships between O(100) semantic objects, however abstract.

You've given a much better explanation of it than I have. I was trying to think if there is some interesting property of the generalization of this (generalize the quotients/generalize the directions) or if it is all just a trivial consequence of primality.

I guess the generalization here is choose a set {primes}, create a shape (I believe that would be called a prime lattice or something?) w/ Product({primes}) sides and all primes > Product({primes}) are of the form {Product({primes}) + Set_of_Primes/{primes} mod Product({primes})}. I'm not sure how to get the inductive proof that these moves converge within the lattice for all {primes}.

Am I missing something here?

Choose any infinite sequence of binary numbers {0,1,0,0,...} and map the natural numbers to it. For any number not divisible by 2 or 3, go left if it maps to 0 and right if it maps to 1.

Doesn't this property still hold? That is, it's nothing to do with prime numbers and something to do with the quotient of {2,3}.

> it seems likely that "relevant" knowledge is not infinite.

Does it? At the very least, the relationships between prime numbers "seems likely" to be infinite, and that's only taking into account patterns in a countably infinite set, which likely have measure 0 as a subset of patterns in any uncountably infinite set (and there is an infinite progression of such sets uncountable sets such that each is of measure 0 compared to another).

This attitude seems very "all science has been discovered and it's only a matter of precision" to me.

You're describing memes.