sixstringtheory

>> variable names (a hard part of computer science)

>Naming is for software engineering, not CS.

I figured they were referencing the “two hard problems of computer science”, those two being naming things, cache invalidation and off by one errors.

Everybody knows the hardest problems in software engineering are assembling promo packets and building consensus on number of spaces per indent.

Your last paragraph is the perfect rebuttal to GP. Computers don’t exist in a vacuum. They still require mineral and electrical inputs, repair, orchestration… sounds an awful lot like our bodies!

They’re the only ones you mentioned, so I participated in the conversation you seeded.

Care to weigh in on the other 98% of my response?

As much as I might like people like Jello Biafra or Hunter S. Thompson, those shouldn’t be the _only_ people informing you on society.

You can completely wreck your credit and still bounce back and even prosper. I’ve seen it happen with bankruptcy and have fixed my own credit after a charge off in my youth, and now own a home, with paid off cars and student debt, and a solid cushion in savings. It takes time; everyone wants everything now, which to me is a sign of poor reasoning leading to poor decision making.

I think an important difference is: are you in dire straights because of poor decision making, or bad luck? If you consistently make poor decisions, you’ll eventually wreck your life and may not be able to get out of the hole.

If you make sound decisions, bad luck can just as easily turn into good luck. You just have to be executing when the opportunity arises. This is of course no guarantee, I definitely believe there are good people out there who were never able to make it. But that doesn’t mean that nobody good will ever make it.

To me, that is what the American Dream aspired to be. Something other than a caste or feudal system, or religious monarchy, that pretty much keeps everyone in their place, with no motivation to innovate or take a risk to try something new, and then propelling general society upwards with each breakthrough.

I don’t know if it’s 0 for me, but it’s definitely way less than 10 hours per week.

I have ETFs and a HYSA that I basically never look at. That’s passive.

OK, but TFA is about the work part, not the passive part, despite the title. Even having a “portfolio of revenue generating products” will require work to maintain. Maybe full time or more so, depending on if you used log4j or an SSL cert from a provider that screwed things up, say. Or built on a fickle platform like reddit, twitter or Apple that changes the fundamental rules every so often. Just because you don’t have a boss that will fire you for not waking up for on call during an outage, doesn’t mean that outages won’t happen or need to be fixed.

It reminds me of people that consider buying a second home and rent out the old one to gain “passive income”, not realizing how much work it can be to be a good landlord.

Live on the wild side. Turn off the autocorrect.

Read the alt text. I can’t grab it on mobile, but it basically boils down to: never say never, and in service of that future possibility, we actually should explore it until such time that conflicts of interest naturally resolve.

If your tech friend says everything sucks in tech, then why should their judgement even be taken at face value? They’re part of the problem!

Investigate anything hard enough and it’ll tell you whatever you want to hear. Hard to imagine any result to that investigation that would be universally accepted.

Why not apply a little bit of technology to the problem so we can verify our vote was counted, and that only legitimate votes were counted?

That kind of thing happens to people that do lock their doors all the time. So clearly, the usage of locks and lack thereof are not the issue.

Who here believes Trump will pull punches because the election wasn’t satisfactorily legitimizing?

If you get killed on the high ground, you’re still dead.

I’ve long been of the opinion that you can’t love others until you love yourself. Between the NPC comment and breaking up with his girlfriend, I’d say he has a long way to go, if he ever gets there at all. Hope he does.

Ugh how long until a new freemium model comes out where you can either pay with money or pay with microphone access…

This should be the top comment. OP is looking for confirmation bias and got plenty here, but they really need to introspect on how to be a more appealing coworker.

Linking to Jack Posobiec’s tweets and complaining about being called a racist on hacker news, on your linkedin account, just makes you look radioactive. And dumb: linkedin is for hustle porn; 4chan, twitter and their derivatives are for online political warfare. Your inability to distinguish between these shows that you will likely act inappropriately in a professional environment. It shows you don’t know your audience at all, which are the people whose money you want.

And then there’s the age-old question of whether you want to be right, or be liked. It’s not really your responsibility to educate your coworkers on socio-economic-political realities, and they likely don’t come to work to hear others’ opinions about it. But you are shaping an online persona that advertises such a service.

I’ve gone through long stretches of looking for work and fear another in this market environment, so I do sympathize. But you gotta button up. And don’t just shape a better image of a pleasant coworker–actually be one. I’ve worked with too many this-is-your-brain-on-social-media types, of all political persuasions, and it’s miserable.

If you look at the problem as a swiss cheese model and not just a teleological propagation from one root cause, then there are many things that need fixing, not just a cobbler being short one nail.

Hopefully they’re discouraging students from sending lots of fragmentary messages interspersed with superfluous nonsense like “hey” “i mean” etc

Not everything runs on electricity today. You can’t just snap your fingers and replace millions of cars, stoves, boilers, etc

I’ll just start by saying it’s bad that you or anyone else ever felt so vilified. That kind of behavior is the first place my mind went to when I saw just how complete this election victory was. It’s a referendum on the rhetorical atmosphere.

Thanks for reiterating that clarification, it kinda got lost on me in the chain of replies. FWIW, I agree with you about the state of discourse today and also feel the heat from both sides (check my comment history to see where I’m coming from) although I’ve been spared any direct vilification of that sort, but I’ve definitely felt my radar spike when listening to nearby conversation in past workspaces.

My best guess is that someone sees the worst rhetoric from “the other side” somewhere on social media and imputes that onto everyone they perceive as being on that side. Then they break after being exposed to too much of it, and lash back out with something equally reprehensible. Then someone on the other side sees that. Repeat ad nauseum…

I’m sorry to hear anyone would seriously suggest forced castration on you, that is just absurdly despicable. I don’t know how this country can rebound from this. Not even one but both or all “sides” have to be vulnerable with the others to apologize and commit to behaving more respectfully. It sounds comical to even suggest that is possible given the litany of things I’ve seen and heard over the last 30 years.

I’m wracking my brain to figure out how I can personally make a difference. Because what Democrats and liberals and those on the far left are doing ain’t working. I say that as a Democratic party voter, albeit one that has to hold their nose too often. Do Republicans have to hold their nose when they vote for Trump, or are they actually voting with joy? If so, color me envious.

We’re so close to understanding each other here. People have validated your experience, and then said hey, we feel it too. Yet when they try to have the same conversation and seek validation of their own experience, you decide that’s the time to shut the conversation down.

> Stop murdering children first.

Of course, Israelis and their supporters will say the same thing.

There is no one party to this state of affairs still alive that threw the first stone. There was October 7, before that there were settlements and annexations, before that there were intifadas, before that there were mandates, civil wars etc, all the while punctuated by stray killings, bombings and rocket attacks, on and on reaching back millennia.

I think plenty of people are tired of the simplistic, reductive, one-side treatment protesters give the issue, as you’re showing here. They think they can dictate to everyone how it should be solved. Condescension like that just never plays well.

Comparing the Israel-Palestine conflict to Nazi Germany is both a qualitative and quantitative error. The degree to which Israel has killed Palestinians is dwarfed by the numbers the Nazis put up. The Nazis invaded many countries, occupying a total area over ten times the size of modern Germany. All that in the span of a decade or two, depending on when you count the start; compared to a conflict that in modern times alone is measured in a hundred years, with a small fraction of the impact. With multiple countries committed to their destruction.

It’s a disappointing comparison and I can’t help but think it’s made deliberately to provoke an emotional reaction.

> "I am resigning from NPR, a great American institution where I have worked for 25 years," Berliner wrote in an email to CEO Katherine Maher. "I respect the integrity of my colleagues and wish for NPR to thrive and do important journalism. But I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged by a new CEO whose divisive views confirm the very problems at NPR I cite in my Free Press essay."

I dunno, "blast" doesn't seem like the right word, but I'm sure it'll get the clicks.

More discussion from the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40050844

But this tool doesn’t know what is weird and what isn’t. What you’re talking about is something more like a fuzzer or static analyzer.

> Parts of the code probably rely on the bugs

The combination of pieces is what should be tested then, not the behavior of each individual piece “just in case something needs it that way”. You’ll never be able to change anything with that approach. And why shouldn’t bugs be fixed anyways?

Brilliant distillation of this insight, I've never heard it put in those words before but it's perfect. It cuts both ways too, if you have lots of tests but most of them aren't really exercising the external API, then you're worse off.

This articulates the problem I’m having right now in an interesting way. I’m fine writing unit tests that validate business logic requirements or bug fixes, but writing tests that validate implementations to the point that they reimplement the same logic is a bit much.

I want to figure out how to count the number of times a test has had to change with updated requirements vs how many defects they’ve prevented (vs how much wall clock time / compute resources they’ve consumed in running them).

I think “knowledge work” refers to work that solely requires knowledge with no physical labor component and no physical object manipulation (other than a keyboard, mouse, and writing utensil, I guess).

Every job that requires physical labor requires knowledge of how to accomplish the task at hand.

> you can cross-reference multiple windows without them overlapping another

This is what people always say about this, but you can’t look at two different monitors simultaneously.

Your fingers are already on the keyboard. Once you get the two apps together on alt-tab order, they are one kepress away from each other, and you don’t have to move your eyes or head at all if they are overlapping or just next to each other in the same monitor.

I do this as well as using a tiling window manager than can be completely controlled from the keyboard, and I am much faster at getting information between different windows than colleagues who have multiple monitors. They spend a lot of time trying to remember where they put the other window, looking back and forth between many monitors many times, looking for their mouse pointer, and also, they too still have to alt-tab.

The farther apart two windows are, like on two monitors, the harder it is to copy text from one and paste it in the other, etc etc.

> farmers absolutely want their tractor to work when the cell network doesn't

Sounds like it works exactly the way you say it should:

> Farmers who don't get a good cell signal of course do work without getting data uploaded

> John Deere collects a lot of opt-in data from tractors

How are you getting requirement from this?

Please stop spamming the same link. If you have something you'd like everyone to see, just make it a top-level comment on the submission. And a bit more substantial commentary on why we should visit it would be nice.