zug_zug

Yeah it's an interesting question. Of course these days since it's public domain you could have chat GPT give you every sentence with a modern translation alongside.

It's sometimes hard to tell when people advocate for something esoteric if they are being hipster (e.g "Goldplated audiocables on a record player") [i.e. advocating for something monetarily/intellectually inaccessible as a form of flaunting wealth/intellect] or if it's a genuine recommendation.

I bet a clever person could come up with some ways to test each hypothesis.

I agree with the first paragraph, but I think your math is wrong.

If you invested in Nvidia in 2006 it'd be up 46% a year every year on that investment.

My personal wish is a compromise -- there should be a universal button that we designate as the "SHOW ME WHAT I CAN DO" button.

It would show scrollbars, enumerate every shortcut, hilight everything clickable, indicate everything draggable, indicate everything right-clickable, etc.

Then perhaps an OS-setting to keep it permanently active.

Both Mac and especially newer windows has a huge number of weird hidden shortcut options that I still haven't learned after 5-10 years.

Same with phones, weird things like holding the spacebar on the IOS keyboard to scroll through your prior typed text.

I'm really surprised that 300ms at startup would result in 25% fewer pods.... What % reduction in the total startup time is that?

Is it possible the prior measurement happened during a high traffic period and the post measurement happened in a low traffic period?

You're welcome to flag, but it looks like maybe you're the minority opinion on this. Looks like more people prefer a TL;DR than are upset by it.

> unlike Triplebyte, we interview you only if, conditional on you doing well, we have a job you'd be interested in

That sounds really prudent.

> What you're saying, in essence, is "you should lie to me and tell me you're bigger than you are if you want to get off the ground".

I'm not asking you to do that, I'm glad you're being so honest. You're right the network effect is challenging and fomo/dishonesty is a common attempt to try to circumvent it.

There's probably no easy legal way to do this, but if there were a way to give like $50 bucks of stock to each serious resume uploaded, or double that to anybody who recommends you to their current company [not sure what's involved with that] then it might create more of a sense of "rooting for you"

To be fair, the article is only promising diagnosis, which doesn't care about the direction of causality.

I mean good for them. I guess before I'd make a profile (either for my employer or myself) I'd want some basic stats:

- How many fully remote jobs paying over $200k base do you have in your pipeline? Basically I have no interest in making a profile to be a sales object to help a startup, I want the company to show value to me first [Now maybe somebody who has no current job is in a different situation]

- My current employer is largely hiring non-US. What countries do you hire out of?

Basically why before I give away hundreds of dollars of my time, what am I getting and how likely? It's not even clear to me to me what types of roles they place (e.g. SREs?)

Lastly I want to throw in a tidbit that it's my personal belief, at the later stages of a long career in tech, that technical skill is really not that important to most employers nor even most roles nor getting promoted (as compared to things like Jira-fu, making your manager look good, handling conflict). As a thought experiment consider otherbranch itself -- other than the interviewers (who could be consultants) how many engineers if any would such a company even need? Seems like it could be wordpress + coderpad + salesforce.

I'm not sure I believed in sugar as an addiction at first. Then I tried this keto diet because I had seen my friend try it and he lost a lot of weight.

And then I had this phenomenon that was so strong that I still remember it years later - I started having fantasies about soda/milkshakes in the middle of a workday. Like so intense/ongoing that the only thing I can compare them to is a teen's sexual fantasies. Mind you I wasn't even somebody who drank soda every day or week.

I found some voice in the back of my head saying "We could literally go get a cherry coke in under 4 minutes, there's a CVS around the corner, or a root beer? Or a root beer float? Dr pepper? We could get two." I ended up drinking diet soda for a few weeks (which I normally find disgusting).

Anyways after a certain point (3 months?) the cravings died and never came back the same way. Your mileage may vary.

> So are we ready to ban bread?

You're arguing in bad faith. Nobody said banning, the article said that there should be warning labels.

So yes, people should be aware that when they get a wonderbread sandwhich it has more sugar added to it than a dumdum lollipop. Some other breads are much less processed though.

> So Lays potato chips (only Potatoes, Oil, and Salt on the ingredients list) don't need a warning label?

"Potato chips are made through processes like frying, adding artificial flavorings, colorings, and preservatives. They are designed to be convenient and hyper-palatable, fitting the definition of ultra-processed foods."

What I am saying is that stores should delineate products that are solely a source of calories from those that meet our nutritional needs. A red/yellow/green system would be useful. Or warning labels.

Imagine a future where all food stores have 3 sections:

- The Green section (Food) - Natural food our ancestors would have eaten.

- The yellow section (Food-derived) - Things made partly from food, but in a factory, with huge servings of sugar, salt, and other artificial flavors -- granola bars, tomato sauces, etc.

- The red section (Calories) - Products that have calories but no nutritional value, no or negative impact on microbiome, indefinite shelf-life, >50% calories are refined sugar.

We can, but it's going to be technical. The layman's definition is -- "things we eat that bear little resemblance to the food we have evolved on" but wikipedia says that Nova defines it as:

Industrially manufactured food products made up of several ingredients (formulations) including sugar, oils, fats and salt (generally in combination and in higher amounts than in processed foods) and food substances of no or rare culinary use (such as high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, modified starches and protein isolates). Group 1 foods are absent or represent a small proportion of the ingredients in the formulation. Processes enabling the manufacture of ultra-processed foods include industrial techniques such as extrusion, moulding and pre-frying; application of additives including those whose function is to make the final product palatable or hyperpalatable such as flavours, colourants, non-sugar sweeteners and emulsifiers; and sophisticated packaging, usually with synthetic materials. Processes and ingredients here are designed to create highly profitable (low-cost ingredients, long shelf-life, emphatic branding), convenient (ready-to-(h)eat or to drink), tasteful alternatives to all other Nova food groups and to freshly prepared dishes and meals. Ultra-processed foods are operationally distinguishable from processed foods by the presence of food substances of no culinary use (varieties of sugars such as fructose, high-fructose corn syrup, 'fruit juice concentrates', invert sugar, maltodextrin, dextrose and lactose; modified starches; modified oils such as hydrogenated or interesterified oils; and protein sources such as hydrolysed proteins, soya protein isolate, gluten, casein, whey protein and 'mechanically separated meat') or of additives with cosmetic functions (flavours, flavour enhancers, colours, emulsifiers, emulsifying salts, sweeteners, thickeners and anti-foaming, bulking, carbonating, foaming, gelling and glazing agents) in their list of ingredients.[22]

Agree 100%. I pretty much discount everything everyone says until we start running hard science experiments.

One way to measure scientifically is to ask somebody to picture a room. The the experimenter keeps describing adding items to the room until the experimentee can no longer recall. By defining positions for all these items one could verify it is indeed visual memory by asking location questions.

I don't know if other people have thought of this and started doing it yet, but they should.

Did you read the whole article?

Because it turns out the manager just starts giving away the coffee for free, so whatever numbers somebody was pulling from the sales system were obviously incorrect.

The problem with "running numbers" like so many other metrics is that they are usually run by MBA types who have a weak grasp of math and don't really understand the customers' psychology (often work in corporate offices that are nowhere near the stores).

I guess this is why most places change prices more gradually. If they made it 1.10 for 3 months then 1.20 for 3 months etc I bet people would have dealt (assuming it's still the cheapest coffee around).

I think this is conflating two things:

Proof of exertion (work) and proof of impact.

An engineer making many commits is just proof of exertion. An engineer closing many tickets is proof of impact.

A manager can also do a lot of exertion with no impact - has 1:1s and listens and forgets its all within a year, talks to everybody like they have a shot at promotion even when he knows he has a fixed budget, makes 0 tough decisions around the product and obeys everything their manager says no matter how terrible.

But if you ARE making big swings at work (e.g. preventing whole bad projects from happening, or driving entirely new projects that were your own idea, contradicting your manager and being right, recruiting great connections, etc) then you should be able to find a record of your relevance [and if you can't then that's mentality thing].

Powerful stuff. Really helps make it feel more real by drawing comparisons to knowable reference points.

Is wax paper not a viable substitute?

> Additionally, feelings are fine for personal behavior but legislation requires a higher level of evidence.

This I can agree with -- but I think it would trivial to get that evidence by asking 10,000 teens if they agree with the following statement "Some of my social media apps feel addictive -- they don't bring my enjoyment but I can't seem to stop using them."

I'd bet about half of teens agree with that.

Eh, this feels like a bad-faith argument. I think most of us on this site first-hand feel that obsession to update a feed that seems to control us more than we control it.

I don't need the DSM's permission to notice that.

Whether the ban will work out, open question. But pretending there's no addiction here doesn't pass the smell test.

To second this theory with some real-world data. A few startups I worked at a NY scala shop that used tons of Akka (event-driven queuing scala thing). Why? Because a manager at his prior job "saved the company" when "everything was slow" by doing this, so mandated it at the new job?

What were doing that required queueing? Not much, we showed people's 401ks on a website, let them adjust their asset mix, and sent out hundreds of emails per day. As you would expect, people almost never log into their 401k website.

A year or so after working there I realized our servers had been misconfigured all along and basically had 0 concurrency for web-requests (and we hadn't noticed because 2 production servers had always served all the traffic we needed). Eventually we just ripped out the Akka because it was unnecessary and added unnecessary complexity.

In the last month this company raised another funding round with a cash-out option, apparently their value has gone up and they are still doing well!

Yeah, there will be some incorrect papers.

But there are errors in the other direction too. How many deleterious effects will never be proven scientifically because it's incredibly exhausting to get thousands of participants and quantify their subjective wellbeing in a controlled way?

Wouldn't that be ironic, if after years of doubting and mocking the proliferation of food sensitivities it turned out it was because there was literal plastic in us.

> If that has to be punishable, then job listings with false or misleading information should be too.

Currently, it's symmetrical. If either side lies, the other side can exit the contract with no notice, and may tell others their story.

> Also, saying you’re hiring when you’re actually not.

This would be nice and very actionable. Perhaps requiring a company to say how many resumes they've received, candidates they've talked to, and how long its been open on job listings could save everyone's time.

Hot take - all these articles (telling employees how to be) are crap for one simple reason:

If the management chain wants X, they need to incentivize X. In my experience 9/10 times, then management chain claims they value some set of values abstractly - but what they really mean is "Make me more money, and don't upset the order of things. There is no skill you can have in any quality that will ever make me think you should have my job or better."

If the management chain values kindness, let them communicate that request, then prove it by promoting people on that trait rather than nepotism/beauty/years/profitability/whatever.

Slightly off-topic, but slightly not.

I feel like customer support is one of the worst experiences in all of tech or maybe just modern capitalism. Obviously slashing budgets is a huge part of it, but I think the problem is exacerbated by lying with metrics.

One of the great challenges of trusting ANYBODY (even internal teams) with support, is that they have a huge incentive to lie to their management chain about the numbers in every way they can. And their manager or even multiple levels up may turn a blind-eye to these lies if it makes their life easier.

I don't know anything about this product, but I would never trust a company with anything of importance if I don't have a complete audit log of their requests and how they handle them which they send to us for review each month (even a 1%-.1% sample of calls will give a very clear picture into how the process is going).

Oh, thanks. There was an arcade game called Lunar Lander and I thought that this was the exact same thing, and I guess I didn't pay much attention to the pictures.

So by that reasoning, if I'm frustrated about global warming and I share an article without reading it I'm spreading propaganda?

And committing violence?

I don't think so.

It's interesting. The naive way to write this would be not use any special formulas, and just recalculate mass and acceleration each frame (based on the new mass). And to calculate intersection with the ground at each frame boundary.

I guess the idea is that the lower your frame-rate, the less accurate this approach is, or maybe the idea is it's fun to use the actual equations.

I'm curious how perceptible the difference is between the two at the original framerate.

One thing this article does that I don't agree with is presume that there are binary safe/unsafe limits that are objectively correct.

I don't know the exact numbers, but when I looked into once, I realized a huge number of chemicals that are deemed safe are later deemed unsafe or the "safe" dose is lowered by a factor of 10, 100, 1000 or even more.

And that's not too surprising because the FDA/EPA doesn't have any method (nor do they even attempt) to look at long-term (e.g. multi-year) effects of chemicals. They try a very high dose for a short period of time and hope that's a sufficient indicator.

And even if they did try to look, suppose a chemical caused anxiety, depression, and a 5 point IQ reduction... would we even notice this in rats?