Between rebuilding an engine and disassembling a bumper to replace a lightbulb most mechanics would genuinely rather be doing the lengthy but interesting work of rebuilding an engine than the lengthy and fucking boring task of disassembling a bumper to fix a lightbulb.
ChatGPT, write me a 2010-style Hacker News front page essay about how software maintenance is just like automobile maintenance, and why nobody wants low-value maintenance work to be arduous, failure-prone, and boring.
Why is it that the only people willing to testify against the cartel are murderers, drug dealers, and bank robbers? These are not trustworthy witnesses.
This place discusses SpaceX technical things all the time. But SpaceX is not a research lab. It's a company. That does business. And is going public. Taking a little time off from arguing about thrust and payload to talk about their business paratices, lobbying and late-stage capitalism is not only appropriate here...
Look around you. This may be called "Hacker News," but it is run by and for the benefit of a business, YCombinator. Speaking bluntly, if you come here only to talk tech, you're only getting half of the HN value proposition. The value of HN is that it mixes business with pleasure, so to speak. Many people here will either work for a tech business or found one. You can find technical discussions everywhere. Business discussions tailored for tech? That's actually very, very valuable.
Hiring can remain irrational longer than you can remain unemployed.
One manager no-hires you because you don't post enough. Another doesn't like what you post. A third thinks you post too much. A fourth is pleased you seem to pay more attention to shipping products than hot takes. A fifth loves your hot takes.
So you get a call and are asked to do a coding thing. One person no-hires you because you wrote fizz-buzz by hand and didn't use Claude. Another wants to see that you know how to code by hand, but although your solution is fast, compact, and correct, it isn't the solution they had in mind.
At the end of the day, it's a highly inefficient, mostly irrational process dominated by social factors rather than objective feature detection.
> Turns out being a Jesus nerd was a secret requirement. Wish they could just put that in the job requirements.
Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act, in making religious hiring discrimination illegal, sometimes just drives it underground. Over the years it's done more good than harm, but at a certain point it may be time to let those who want to hire only Jesus nerds self-select.
Depends on seniority and market, but my experience has not matched this. In my recent search I even had a company change their process at my request. Too many companies just copy the FAANG approach without considering if it suits their team(s).
We have some responsibility as candidates to tell HR departments and recruiters that some stuff doesn't fly.
Now, what we’ve been told about models is that they’re only as good as their training data. And so languages with gargantuan amounts of training data ought to fare best, right? Turns out that models kind of universally suck at Python and Javascript (comparatively). The top performing languages (independent of model) are C#, Racket, Kotlin, and standing at #1 is Elixir.
Generous of you to assume that someone who walks in, sees something somebody else has written and immediately calls it shit... Has something of value to say.
If they did, why did they hold it back just to speak so contemptuously of a subject that is actually interesting and reasonably well explained?
I think I see where he is coming from. Using math to prove that you can’t tune stuff, will to some, sound like using a laser leveling tool to prove that you can’t make a perfect pizza.
There is a quantum of earned generosity. Someone saying, "This doesn't seem right" has jumped to a conclusion, but they aren't getting personal about the author or the work.
Whether it's testes or testy language, getting personal and insulting does not meet my personal standard for assuming good intent and being worthy of an open-minded attempt to create constructive dialogue.
But I applaud you for wanting to lift the standard of discourse!
And the late Jaco Pastorius with the bass harmonics song that would have broken the Internet if we had had the internet when he released his first solo album:
Speaking as a person who owns basses... I like the sound of harmonics on a bass better. I think it's something to do with the longer strings giving more play to the overtones.
Last year my team had to remove all the phone numbers from 50,000 Amazon web page templates, since many of the numbers were no longer in service, and we also wanted to route all customer contacts through a single page.
Let's say you're on my team, and we have to identify the pages having probable U.S. phone numbers in them. To simplify the problem slightly, assume we have 50,000 HTML files in a Unix directory tree, under a directory called "/website". We have 2 days to get a list of file paths to the editorial staff. You need to give me a list of the .html files in this directory tree that appear to contain phone numbers in the following two formats: (xxx) xxx-xxxx and xxx-xxx-xxxx.
How would you solve this problem? Keep in mind our team is on a short (2-day) timeline.
In Yegge's case, he explicitly does NOT want a hand-written program, he wants the candidate to suggest a CLI tool, e.g.
These questions aren't good or bad unto themselves, but when the person asking is engaging in "Guess the answer I'm thinking of," don't beat yourself up if you guessed wrong. Your answer might be prized by someone else with an enormous amount of experience hiring engineers.
A former coworker was evaluating the cleanliness and structure of some non-free GeoIP data that took the form of several large CSV files. He was writing nested loops in Go that parsed the CSV and evaluated the predicates that interested him, and it was arduous and not going as quickly as he would like.
I told him to slurp it all into a sqlite database and to express his data integrity questions as SQL queries.
It was still a pain in the ass for him, but leveraging that tool made things go a lot better.
A few of the remaining newspapers I'm aware of run business awards (Best restaurant, etc), and the way to win is via wining and dining them, even though the paper claims it's based on people's votes.
Is that how it works where you are? Because over here, the best way to win an award from a publication is to advertise in that publication. Advertise enough, and you'll also become their go-to when they need a quote about anything vaguely related to your restaurant or other business, and once a year or so they'll print some hagiographic article about the amazing things going on under your leadership.
A very famous application of QuadTrees was Bill Gosper's HashLife algorithm for computing Conway's Game of Life. The Life universe is implemented as a quadtree, taking advantage of precomputed smaller squares to compute larger squares.
I have nothing to say about Quadratic Programming, so you tell me.
What I can say is that every reference I've found to Bill Gosper's algorithm describes the data structure as an immutable quadtree with canonicalized nodes, id est, there is extensive structure sharing in a Game of Life quadtree. That in turn facilitates heavy memoization.
ChatGPT, write me a 2010-style Hacker News front page essay about how software maintenance is just like automobile maintenance, and why nobody wants low-value maintenance work to be arduous, failure-prone, and boring.
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