romanhn

Not joking at all, this really was generated. I have now wasted hours amusing myself and others with epic poems, rap songs, limericks, short stories and such. This thing is pretty incredible, especially how it has context about referenced objects/concepts, and can alter and evolve its output based on further input. All in mere seconds.

Prompt: create a rap song about a guy named Roman writing .NET APIs

Sure, here is a possible rap song about a guy named Roman writing .NET APIs:

  Verse 1:
  I'm Roman, and I'm a code king
  I write .NET APIs, and I do my thing
  I've got Visual Studio on my screen
  Writing code that's clean and lean

  Chorus:
  Roman, Roman, writing .NET APIs
  Roman, Roman, coding all day

  Verse 2:
  I'm a master of C#, no doubt
  I write APIs that always work out
  I'm a whiz with classes and objects too
  I can handle any challenge that comes my way

  Chorus:
  Roman, Roman, writing .NET APIs
  Roman, Roman, coding all day

  Verse 3:
  I'm a pro with ASP.NET and Web API
  I can build a server in a jiffy
  I know my way around REST and JSON
  I can make your data flow like a river

  Chorus:
  Roman, Roman, writing .NET APIs
  Roman, Roman, coding all day

  Verse 4:
  I'm a rockstar with Azure and the cloud
  I can make your apps run smooth and proud
  I'm a wizard with microservices and containers
  I can help your business grow and prosper

  Chorus:
  Roman, Roman, writing .NET APIs
  Roman, Roman, coding all day.

  Outro:
  Roman, Roman, the .NET API man
  Writing code that's always in demand
  Roman, Roman, the code hero
  Writing .NET APIs for the win.

Sounds like a great example of dysfunction that you'd want to catch early in the interview process. And to be clear - this is definitely dysfunction.

If the hiring manager can't answer this question, that's as clear of a sign to stay away as you can get.

You have submitted multiple comments in separate threads with links to your post. This type of self-promotion is not welcome on HN.

The "cry it out" / Ferber method taught our kids how to fall asleep on their own and saved our sanity. It used to take hours to get a baby settled and one of us had to be there the whole time. By letting them cry for a bit (occasionally showing up to reassure that we're still there), it took like a few days for them to go to sleep on their own. It was an amazing change, and one I wish I had put in place much sooner.

The idea (from what I remember, it's been years), is to put them down and leave the room. Then come back for a bit, and then leave for a longer period of time, say double, etc. It's gradual and, in our case, was ridiculously effective. Nothing works for everyone when it comes to kids, but it's totally worth trying after they pass, say, 6 months.

Once they get this down, it is important _not_ to walk on eggshells while the babies (and when they're older) are sleeping. Get them used to being able to sleep when there's noise. It'll make your life so much easier in the future, and you'll be able to bring kids into social situations, or bring social situations into your home, without the stress of kids unable to sleep due to noise.

Final word of advice - you will be showered with metrics and progress reports, statistics on how your child compares to others, etc. Ignore all that. Kids normalize over time and these deviations become way less significant. You'll have to make a conscious effort to ignore this noise, because fears for your kid are natural and will inevitably bubble up to the surface. Be the best parent you can be, and ignore the mountains of contradictory advice you'll get from friends, relatives, media and strangers on the internet ;) a lot of it is bullshit, so don't sweat it, your kid will be fine!

This is fantastic, thanks for sharing. Ben makes an argument that stock values are set by market activity (continuous buying and selling), rather than amount held. While the latter may be large for index funds (though apparently smaller than many believe), their activity represents something like 5% of total, so a minuscule amount overall. At the end of the day, stock prices are set by active investors, regardless of how much buying index funds do.

I think you're underestimating the complexity and surface area of the suite. There are hundreds of teams and 1000+ engineers (likely thousands) contributing to the Ads Manager alone. It's a beast, and considering how critical it is to the business, everything requires layers of approvals and is one of the few areas in the company where "move fast and break things" doesn't fly. That said, when I was at FB I saw a lot of churn in Ads teams (meaning whole teams created and dismantled all the time), so it wouldn't surprise me if there is a bunch of unowned/unmaintained code left over that still hangs around in production

I have an Oculus and am fully aware of what it can do, so seeing the bland Metaverse graphics is jarring. I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but a juicy one just popped in my head. What if the current Metaverse implementation is bad on purpose? A distraction, meant to diminish public excitement and therefore serious competition from the rest of the big tech, while Meta continues to improve on core VR capabilities and really cement their edge. Then one day - boom! an entirely different experience that takes full advantage of the platform.

Probably not though. The impact-driven incentive culture of Meta is unlikely to allow that sort of feint. The company is going all in on VR because they need to control the hardware layer, having missed the mobile phone boat. Being at the whim of Google and Apple has caused many issues for FB/Meta, so this is existential.

You're missing the point of leetcode practice (as stupid as the practice is, to begin with). The idea is to recognize patterns in different types of problems and general solutions to those patterns. Brute forcing your way through hundreds of problems with the goal of memorizing solutions is absolutely the wrong (and incredibly time-consuming) way of doing it.

Generally speaking, underperforming for two halves (so, a year) is very likely to result in a dismissal. Even earlier, if it's particularly bad. Senior Engineer (level 5) is considered terminal, i.e. you won't get fired for not growing, but at that point expectations are high, so coasting is not really an option for most people. Lower levels have a ticking clock, with the expectation of reaching senior by a certain time at the latest. Not doing so will definitely result in a dismissal.

TL;DR, it is a high-performance culture and ignoring it is hardly realistic. People do get let go. Folks usually leave on their own before it gets to this point.

That's fair, I probably should've said "might thrive". That said, I've seen some impressive feats of cutting through the red tape or stepping up in areas outside one's expertise to get their project delivered. Those tended to be the folks with impressive career trajectories. But luck certainly played a factor as well.

This was my experience as well. Left a highly functional agile group (yes, those exist) and joined FB as an engineering manager. It was a culture shock, to say the least. The culture is that of individual performance, and all incentives stem from that. If you're a go-getter that can operate autonomously and drive things to completion no matter what, in a high-pressure, deliver-or-perish environment, you will thrive there, with fast promotions, ridiculous money thrown at you, and ever-increasing responsibilities and expectations. For the rest 95% of us, it's a stressful treadmill with unrelenting pace, poor work life balance, and "impact" worship. The teams are just collections of individuals doing their own thing (I'm simplifying a bit and there is collaboration, but it's very... "stay in your own lane"). I eventually realized I was not a fit for that culture and vice versa.

I imagine its wide use is residual, due to how prevalent jQuery was in the past. It is hard to describe how much of a godsend it was back when client-side coding meant dealing with quirks of major browsers and their different versions. It became absolutely dominant in an era right before the explosion of JavaScript libraries that we're still dealing with. Calling it a "big failure of the past" is nonsensical - it solved a very real problem in a very elegant way, and it was a must have for any modern (then) developer. It's no longer nearly as relevant because the browsers by and large addressed the underlying problem, but it does not surprise me that it is still entrenched in many a codebase.

This is similar to saying "Facebook is fundamentally built on data collection, and social networking is just a side effect." Technically true, but not much consolation for all the social networks that didn't go all in on advertising and perished.

Wish you the best of luck either way, this is an exciting area and more competition is great. They definitely are competition though.

I'm not a lawyer, but if I'm reading that link correctly, while the COVID vaccine is indeed mandatory (good), the flu vaccine is opt-out. It seems participation in the two vaccination programs is required, but in case of influenza vaccination, I think it's saying that opting out explicitly constitutes participation in the program (basically meaning that you can't just ignore the program and need to either vaccinate or inform them that you won't).

The email seems to be more strongly worded than warranted, if my interpretation is right.

This is a good one. Just be aware that it is clothing-optional.

There's a video link under the picture, appears to be real. Though what they're looking at has that 90s CGI quality.

And just to make sure the aliens lose whatever shred of confidence they might still have in human civilisation, we should introduce them to time zones: https://youtu.be/-5wpm-gesOY. My favorite video on the topic.

Not just you. I felt like Black Swan was utterly forgettable and could be summarized as "shit happens". The name dropping and snobbery put me off reading anything else by him.

In the article they theorize that he might have been considered a plague spreader. A burial would be a much better way to contain further spread compared to many of the other alternatives (though one might wonder why they didn't just burn the body).

I wouldn't put too much stock in politicians' quotes. Based on some of the congressional hearings, it's clear these folks don't understand even basic smartphone operations, I suspect most modern technology is unidentified phenomena for them. And looking foolish has never stopped them either.

PHP (and JavaScript for that matter) historically did not have a good implementation of OOP, nor a culture around it. As far as I know, things have changed on that front, but it certainly does not surprise me that you were able to deliver a PHP product without touching it.

Doesn't mean that you're dumb or that other people lost their minds. My guess is you haven't given it a serious go, which is fine if you don't have a need for it. I personally find OOP fantastic for large codebases with multiple people working on them. Makes code a lot more maintainable and easier to reason about. The downside is that folks without a strong sense of architecture can get carried away with enterprise patterns and end up with abstractions on top of unnecessary abstractions. The basic tenets of OOP should be easy to understand if you just spend some time on it, though benefits can be hard to see if you haven't experienced procedural spaghetti code.

The show Silicon Valley had a great bit that mirrors this advice (on why you don't want revenue): https://youtu.be/BzAdXyPYKQo

When I was there 20+ years ago, the intro course (CS61A) was definitely known to knock the unprepared/uncommitted out of the running. Back then it was taught with Scheme out of SICP.

As someone writing a .NET-based API hosted on AWS Lambda, I assure you, startup time matters a ton. I spent a bunch of time getting cold start time down to a semi-reasonable number, but there's still a ton of room for improvement. I for one am very much looking forward to progress on AOT Native.

Random host? Jon Stewart was huge, he defined political comedy for over 15 years. His audience though likely didn't overlap much with JRE due to different political leanings (well, that and age).

I recently spoke with the tech lead of a team that is all in on .NET for web development, as well as using Xamarin.Forms to develop cross-platform mobile apps. While this achieved their goals, the lead felt that the complexity of dealing with platform-specific edge cases slowed them down enough that developing using native tooling would have taken the same amount of time. He would not choose Xamarin again if faced with the same choice.

The image above is a tweet showing just that (after the outline drawing). Perhaps your browser didn't load it properly?

If you haven't read it yet, I think The Manager's Path by Camille Fournier is probably among the most practical books on engineering management out there.