st1x7

> if you were given the choice of having two currencies

If having = "to personally own with the hopes that the price goes up", then you pick a currency with limited supply.

If having = "to have it be the currency on which your entire economy runs", you should pick a currency which doesn't have a limited supply.

Dollars were in limited supply too, and they aren't anymore for a very good reason. Here's Ray Dalio trying to summarize some of the relevant economic principles in a video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHe0bXAIuk0

That's really not how any of these things work. Bitcoin is completely separate from monetary policy, changes in interest rates are a useful tool and inflation isn't necessarily bad.

It's cool to be bullish on Bitcoin but this kind of reasoning shows a serious lack of understanding.

Thanks, I just checked renv out (I haven't had to work with R in over a year). Renv looks much better than packrat at a first glance.

Even if that's the case, using dates isn't a solution because dates don't give you the build that the researcher used. Date of publication is different from the date when the code ran and there is no guarantee that the researcher ran the latest version of every dependency that was available to them anyway. In fact that's very unlikely considering that some their libraries might require older versions. It might not even be possible to take the latest version of every package and use them in the same environment.

I don't think it's ironic, the quote directly addresses the many criticisms towards C++.

Framing this as passionate vs lazy is very beneficial to people who aren't you but benefit a lot from your hard work.

The real conflict is that

1) you need to set up some boundaries and have some realistic professional expectations about working hours

2) you're working in the type of company which thrives on doing the exact opposite and taking advantage of its employess as much as possible

So when you try 1) and it fails because of 2), look for a job at a company that isn't a startup. (Not being a startup doesn't guarantuee better respect for working hours, just increases the probability.)

Some other options are to give in to the pressure from management/peers and work for free (doesn't sound good to me). The other is that your additional time is incredibly well-compensated or that the success of the company has huge upside for you and this makes the extra effort worthwhile (seems unlikely).

The original quote is from Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator of C++. The quote also doesn't apply here. (You can't just use it to excuse any problem with software that you come across). The author of the article and the library in it just seems out of their depth in many ways.

> and it reconstructs how the program worked on that day.

It reconstructs how the fully updated version of everything worked that day which isn't necessarily the same as the researcher's environment. It's a horrible idea to use dates instead of package versions for this. The author's library doesn't solve the problem it claims to solve.

Either I'm misunderstanding or this is a non-problem. You can specify older versions of a package when you install it. You can also manage them with packrat. As long as researchers share their language and package versions, you can fully reproduce their environment. (And the base language is really stable, almost to a fault.)

This is just a bad way for the author to promote their own library for dealing with this. The way their library seems to approach this (using dates instead of versions) seems horrible too - on any given date I can have a random selection of packages in my environment, some of them up-to-date, some of them not. So unless all researchers start using the author's library (and update to the latest versions of everything just before they publish), it's only making things worse and not really solving the problem it claims to solve.

The problem isn't silos, it's lack of privacy. Signal solves that problem.

This just made me wonder about the engineering culture at the FBI. Do they have standups and roadmaps? What's their relationship with the rest of the FBI? Do they search stackoverflow like the rest of us? Are they in on all the latest programmer memes? Maybe it's just the secrecy but there's something fascinating about all of this.

I was with you until the third sentence. The better argument is that talented developers can get jobs at companies with similarly great engineering culture and good compensation but with better corporate ethics than Facebook's.

This is a great example of advice that might be true but is completely useless to anyone who is actually struggling.

You should really see what happens when you click reject on their terms and conditions prompt.

> But similarly, I can see some of these employers saying "Oh, you have a CS degree from Stanford? That's cool. How do you perform preorder traversal in a given binary tree? Whiteboard is over here."

I'm not sure why you're putting this out there like it's a bad thing. Surely, we want all candidates to be assessed against the same hiring standards and not give some people a pass because of the school they went to.

How do you guys think about the opportunity cost of learning dead/dying/new/unpopular languages? Even with newer languages that are gaining popularity and are likely to be used in the future, I struggle to justify the time investment. I could be wrong but some of my concerns are:

- my time is better spent getting deeper into some more popular language that I already know to some extent

- unused skills deteriorate with time so by adding a new language that you don't need professionally right now, you also need to add the future time and effort of practicing and maintaining that skill

- I could be wrong but I feel that it's a red flag to have too many of the more esoteric languages on your resume.

I do enjoy tinkering with a new language but very often it just feels like a distraction.

Thoughts?

She also works in a field that nobody can enter without the necessary education and some additional professional accreditation. Software is a lot more open, without hard requirements for a degree and without oversight bodies. Maybe this is because it's a much newer field, maybe it's because the industry has been consistently growing for the past couple of decades and putting hard barriers to entry would have slowed down that growth. Whatever the reason is, I'm glad that we aren't at accountant-level yet.

If only we had known that all of these Rust vs Go arguments could be resolved by learning both languages in 35 minutes.

Vaguely related question - what is the best textbook that you can recommend for studying complex analysis?

I don't think it comes close to 3blue1brown's video on the same topic - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sD0NjbwqlYw

Still nice of the video in the original post to give a bit more of a historical context, instead of focusing entirely on the mathematics. It could have done without the building analogy around the beginning though, that didn't come up later and was just distracting.

It's only valid for the criminal underworld if eventually there is a way to convert back to a legitimate currency and launder it efficiently.

Is it Amazon? Sounds like Amazon.

This is also #1 in Grey's "7 Ways to Maximize Misery" Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO1mTELoj6o

A lot of this comes down to company culture and size. In some companies it's completely expected and even encouraged to switch teams. In others you're treated basically like an external hire.

I don't think it's sad to prepare for the interview process. I see it this way - whatever you do at your current job might be very specific to your current tech-stack/product/problem-domain/team/company. When you're looking for a new job, you can't possibly learn the stack or problem domain of each and every company that you will interview with. In that sense it's great that you're assessed on more general skills like data structures and algorithms. Those few weekends of brushing up on skills you had anyway allow you to apply for a wide range of jobs. You then pick a new job and specialise in it until the next time you need to switch. Sounds healthier than most of the alternatives.

No, it's more complicated than that. It's an argument against putting your long-term foreign policy up to a simple majority vote on only one occasion and in a way that one of the outcomes hasn't been clearly defined which allows for anyone to claim anything they want about the potential benefits.

> I use Alexa on a daily-basis - which can be seen as a chatbot.

More general virtual assistants (Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri) are at a completely different power level from most chatbots. Most chatbots use cases that I come across are some company thinking that they can replace human support with a language model trained on their custom knowledge base. They expect something as good as Alexa but which also has knowledge about the company's product and the results are always disappointing.

The current state of chatbots is embarrasingly bad. I still haven't seen a chatbot use-case that can't be solved better with an FAQ section + documentation search and a human as second line of support.

Why does my grandmother have to force an update every time I restart her...

I just don't want to lose the web along with the ad tech industry though.