q-big

> The average HN reader is highly overrated for other reasons.

Possibly ... ;-)

> Don’t show me the random code you built that makes a users like history load 500 milliseconds faster, talk to me about how to make the product better/more engaging/monetized!

Honestly, if I were the CEO, I would ask for the former if I were looking for the good programmers to keep since these are the things that make the technological base of the company run.

The answer is of course likely different if I were looking for the managers to keep ...

First: there is of course an incentive not to admit this.

Second: I do believe that many people on HN really deeply care about technology/hacking topics and have detest for office politics. On the other hand, the people that the article discuss are good at office politics/marketing themselves and often don't have such a deep knowledge about programming. Thus, I would indeed assume that the typical HN reader/writer less likely fits into the "highly overrated people" pattern of the article.

> I think you are vastly overestimating the willingness and capability of volunteers and underestimating the effort needed to coordinate such an effort.

> And having any kind of manual intervention required will almost certainly reduce the reliability of the testing.

Perhaps I am underestimating the necessary effort, but the willingness and capability problem can in my opinion be solved by sufficiently streamlining and documenting the processes of running the test procedure.

If the testing procedure cannot be successfully run by a "somewhat experienced Linux nerd", this should be considered a usability bug of the testing procedure (and thus be fixed).

> Although some kernel driver developers have testing clusters with real hardware (like GPU drivers devs), there is no effin way Linux could be effectively tested without someone paying a lot of money to set up real hardware and people to keep it running.

Just crowdsource this testing: I am sure that there exist some people who own the piece of hardware and are willing to run a test script, say, every

* night

* week

* new testing version of the kernel

(depending on your level of passion for the hardware and/or Linux). I do believe that there do exist a lot of people who would join such a crowdsourcing effort if the necessary infrastructure existed (i.e. it is very easy to run and submit the results).

My experience differs.

Perhaps the reason is that the scientific textbooks that I love to buy are often "long-tail business", i.e. textbooks about very specialized topics.

The situation is even more biased towards Amazon if we are talking about used obscure textbooks in good condition for a fair price.

> Enough people say it wrong it eventually becomes right. There's nothing definitive about language except for usage...

This is a view that is common among English speakers. Among many German native speakers it is instead common to love to analyze words and tell why some word is wrong even if it is actually in common use sometimes for decades.

> Amazon is unusable at this point, and I don’t get how they have so many customers.

At least in Germany, using Amazon is often the easiest way to buy copies of foreign-language (often, but not always English) textbooks about scientific topics.

> Should I try to build my own car? Or my own CPU?

Become a hacker and learn how to crack this kind of DRM.

> This happens in other markets just fine, one that springs to mind is oscilloscopes. Often you will find that a the hardware in one model is the same as the hardware in scopes in the same "family", what differs is software / locks set.

There exist quite some makers who solve this "oscilloscope tiering" by installing a hacked or alternative open source firmware on the oscilloscope.

> and so that begs the question why not make twice as much working as a software developer and not have to sort out these types of messes?

You partly answered your own question: perhaps you pay the librarian/documentation writer too little? ;-)

Seriously: letting the documentation to be written by such a person won't be as much a cost-reducing measure, but instead mostly an approach to improve the documentation quality.

He is influenced by multiple feedback loops: one that is encouraging this behavior (from the respective website) and one that does discourage it. In this case, the former one was stronger.

> Well, even from that perspective, "society" is giving him some strong feedback that this is not acceptable.

With the same reasoning, you can argue that people in this kind of internet forums gave him a strong feedback that the "society" is wrong here.

> If I search for flights from February 24 to February 24 I don’t expect the empty interval.

The expectation depends on how you define "from" and "to" :-D

Since the HN community is quite mathematically-minded, I'd expect there all four possible kinds of definitions in the inner minds of HN members. :-D

> You have the same predetermined behavior you'd have all along - the care is incidental, would have happened or not happened anyway.

This is correct, but this does not mean that, say, education is useless. It is just predetermined whether we give education or not.

> In a world without free will "care and education" don't matter.

The fact that care and education cause change in the behavior has nothing to do with any "freedom" as in "free will"

> You can't disprove free will and still be concerned of what you should do morally or strategically etc, as if its your own mind to make about it.

The same as for free will can be said about God and the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Why do most people what they do? Because their are conditioned/brainwashed by school and society to believe in specific morals for their behavior.

Similarly, as bilekas suggests, the fact that "'trolls' are seen as cool in the online world" gave this man an active feedback loop for reinforcing this behavior.

> Philosophers have been talking about justice and morality for æons, something so small isn’t going to turn our thoughts on justice on their head.

Theologists have been talking for æons about the essence of God and what the role of Jesus in the holy trinity is. Try to convince atheists that this æons-talking should turn their thoughts on religion on their head.

But this is a minority view among investors.

> If a factory increases efficiency resulting in idling of the machines for 2 hours thus decreasing costs, yet at the same time keep the prices of its output same - that would never ever considered stealing.

I disagree: the shareholders of the company clearly would consider it to be stealing if the machines were idling for the mentioned 2 hours (i.e. they are not used to produce more money to the shareholders) if there does not exist a good economic reason for this decision (e.g. the downtime of the machines is used for better maintenance of them making the production process more reliable; not spilling the market with the products enables the company to demand higher prices for the product (artificial shortage)).

> You're kidding right? Having a desktop PC in the pre-internet days was a scary experience. My smartphone and iPad are both cute and work unblinkingly every time all the time.

I beg to differ:

- no scary golden cage

- no fear of being surveilled

- it was possible (DOS) if you were seriously to understand at least huge parts of the whole OS that ran on your PC

- it was possible to understand the bare-metal software interface to the hardware; you had to, because if you were writing, say, games for DOS, you typically accessed the hardware (e.g. your sound card) directly.

> My theory is these designers dont have family members or they dont care about them.

Or they don't have family members with bad eyesight.

Or they actually do have family members with bad eyesight, but those are not active smartphone users.

Or they actually do have family members that both have bad eyesight and are active smartphone users, but they take the advice to simply buy a device a mobile device with a larger screen.

kllrnohj already wrote that Vulkan has no predefined source code language for shaders. I can imagine that the SPIR-V code of these shaders could have been hand-optimized by some team at AMD, so a textual reprsentation of this binary code is the version that the engineers at AMD work on.

Also: the license of the repository is MIT license, so you are free to reverse-engineer these shaders and port them to a high-level language of your choice.

> I hope they improve ROCm, and add support for normal GPUs, instead of only 6800xt+.

Also, AMD should finally support ROCm under Windows. Currently, the only application known by me that uses ROCm under Windows is Blender, and they use a beta version of ROCm from AMD with Windows support for building the respective Blender releases that is not available publicly.

> This argument is applicable to all digital things, but for some reason it is usually only applied to books. It seems that a lot of software being free would be much more beneficial than free access to Harry Potter.

The problem with distributing illegal copies of software is the (depending on the crack website possibly rather small) risk of malware/ransomware, and additionally the risk that the software contains phone-home functionality to detect illegal copies (BTW: my personal opinion is that one should avoid software with such phone-home functionality (even if you obtain your copy legally) like the plague if possible).

These are, I think, plausible reasons why the software scene is more biased toward FOSS.

> Doing actual rigorous proofs a computer can verify is enormously tedious and many Mathematicians dislike it for that reason, because the inherently subjective "elegance" and "beauty" gets lost in translation.

Couldn't we also interpret this fact that computerized proofs are currently often very unelegant as strong evidence that not a lot is understood about this topic and thus doing such "ugly" computerized proofs is the best we can (in most cases) currently do?

Science at the boundary of human knowledge is often quite ugly; as our understanding of it grows, it often becomes more beautiful and elegant.

> What's the utility of being able to disable virtualization ?

I consider the option to disable (or rather: enable this function manually if you need it) virtualization to be quite useful because if this feature is disabled, malicious software cannot install a virtualization rootkit, i.e. a rootkit that makes itself a hypervisor and moves the current OS instance into a virtual machine running under this hypervisor.

See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Pill_(software)

A geek reference for visual novel fans (Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward):

MEMENTO MORI, IF THE NINETH LION ATE THE SUN.

In my personal opinion:

The reason is that there exist so many ways of programming. Programming is not a single skill, but a multitude of different approaches to get the computer do what it should.

To give an example: what an ABAP (SAP) developer does is very different from an embedded developer which is again very different from a frontend web developer, database developer, ...

So, learning programming is rather like learning to write great belletristic literature. What is the "best"/"correct" way to write a belletristic book? Read a lot of of great literature and find your own style. The same holds for programming.

Also, the problem is that actually quite employers value good programming; they value people who can put together some application based on the current in-fashion library fast. Understanding the current in-fashion library from ground up leads to the situation that in most cases, when you come a little bit nearer towards understanding it from ground up, the library has become horribly obsolete.

> You would think a message board called "hacker news" would be more open to blue sky thinking.

On the other hand: a site called "Hacker News" will likely point out business scams involving technology. ;-)

If you desire this openness towards blue sky thinking, we should unmask all those cryptocurrency con men so that the only people who stay in the cryptocurrency ecosystem are those who really are into the mathematics behind it or love blue sky thinking.