marta_morena

This article doesn't make any sense. It already fails at the premise. Airplanes and elevators have nothing in common with code written by normal software companies.

They optimize for a compromise between short-term gain and long-term gain. In essence, a startup can mathematically proof its software and go bankrupt before they even reach a prototype stage. Or they can shell out utter crap quickly, get some early feedback, funding and beta testers and slowly figure out what to improve first for the biggest bang.

Same goes for giants, like Google. They technically have the resources to prove SOME projects and they DO. For instance, Amazon proves their hardware virtualization software and other core pieces, where bugs would undermine the safety of the entire cloud.

I am getting a bit sick of "Why is software engineering so bad compared to XYZ". All the people asking are either not in this field or are junior engineers who just don't yet understand why things are the way they are and why writing bug-free, mathematically proven software is infeasible, unnecessary, impractical, undesired, etc.

Consider another analogy. When building a house, how expensive is it to decide that you actually want to have a ceiling with 5 meters high in the second floor, because the buyer of that floor wants higher ceilings? Simple: Tear down the building and start over...

In software? Usually it comes down to adding an IF-statement or some such. Software follows completely different economic principles and serves completely different needs.

There is at least one dimension though where this problem currently shines through: Self-Driving Cars.

I think auto-pilots in self-driving cars SHOULD follow the same rigor as airplane auto-pilots and they are most certainly not doing that, which will and already has resulted in lost lives.

It's a bit like saying "We found this store and it doesn't label kitchen knifes as potentially dangerous"... Nobody in their right mind would use this data set for developing a self-driving car and if one does, then they will not get a license to operate... And if by any chance they do it's still like stabbing other people with a knife snatched from the shelf a supermarket. You just don't do it.

Sorry but anyone who has worked in a professional high-tech environment should be aware of that an 8 hour days is not productive. You NEED to spend you entire day on this, you mind always needs to be on it to work on that level.

Einstein would certainly not have solved relativity by saying "Uh I guess from 9 to 5 I will work on this with a one hour break in between and then I am heading off to the fun stuff called leisure time".

No... Only if you think about these problems day in and day out you can work at in the top percentiles and this is the kind of people that get hired there.

What does Elon Musk have to do with this? He is just someone who takes existing working things and tries to produce them in some slavery sweat shop conditions for cheap. There is essentially zero innovation involved here, even less so any "sci-fi".

This sounds fishy. He probably pleaded guilty as part of a plea deal, so law enforcement has a scapegoat and some meaningless "media success" in exchange for him getting a drastically reduced sentencing. They always do that, threaten people with insane penalties if they don't accept so shitty plea deal and if you are not super certain that you can win, you will likely accept that one, just because it seems "safer".

There are a LOT of cases like this, just most of them don't gain this publicity. Actually, 95% of court cases never reach court because of this. Innocent people plead guilty because they don't have the wealth and resources to win in court. USA is a shithole when it comes to law enforcement. Medieval and sad. Land of the free (as long as you are rich, that is).

Ahh because these two are decoupled. I am sure smartphone usage contributes a significant portion to CO2 then.

Or the failure may be on your end, believing that "many people are sensitive to data collection" while in fact, most people don't give a dusty fuck about it and happily share everything for saving a few bucks a month.

Hackernews is NOT the people. HN represents a TINY TINY fraction of users.

SAP is the one of the few software companies who manages to consistently produce the worst possible user experience. They actually made it into an art form. There is nothing about an SAP product that is usable. Its a big steaming pile of shit. I don't even want to know how the code looks like.

This is just another symptom of why OpenSource often sucks. Instead of somehow coordinating and focusing their efforts, everyone seems to need to start their own spin off "inspired" by other projects.

When do people realize that building a new language is almost always going to fail and only very very few languages ever reach anything close to adoption.

Instead of spending all this time writing your own doomed language, why not try to contribute to a project like LLVM or Rust and add your provable subset there?

The same goes for Linux, which is the paradigm of wasted efforts.

Wow, this is just yet another display of regulators complete ignorance of technology. They just don't learn. Regulation is about 10-20 years behind the current and their solution is to say: "You have to use this method of doing things"

Yeah right, and next year? What do we do next year? Will we just wait for regulators to approve a new way of doing things every 100 million years?

Um that is kindof missing the point. A badge is nothing more than a number expressed in symbols, so you demonstrated just another variation of how to hijack the brain, even if you just read an article showing it to you with numbers...

If "improving individual performance" means to you that you perform better at your job, you are already lost.

Its quite a blow to the credibility of this article, if Elon Musk is listed second as "climate change billionaire". Since when is building electric vehicles preventing climate change? Where do people think where this energy comes from? If we even have enough resources to furnish every living soul with an electric car, the electricity for that is certainly not coming from solar panels or windmills.

Sorry but this is just false. Everyone has "cancer" all the time because these "mistakes" happen all the time. The reason why someone gets the medical condition, "cancer", is because for some reason, the immune system stops cleaning up these rouge cells. That could be a huge infection or injury, general decay of your body, etc, causing a cancer clump to form. Once cancer reaches a certain size, it will develop mechanism, like acidity, that will inhibit immune response regardless of whether the immune system would now classify the cancer as a threat. In any event, cancer is a very complicated condition, with many different causes. It's unlikely there will be a one-size-fits-all solution.

Cool, so people post their diary to an email service? Interesting. Why not just post on Facebook? It's about as public as it gets.

This article seems like clickbait and bad advice. This is like selling this ridiculous American dream to someone. Oh, come to us, work hard, wash some dishes and you gonna get far! What pile of garbage. Yes, it works for some lucky few, but that's about it.

The truth is that most startups fail and most people in startups that don't fail, worked their asses off and still only get scraps. Comparing today with 2003 is nuts. The times are so different that there isn't even a remote resemblance.

Yes founding a unicorn can make you rich. Doh! Who would have thought...

But also if you worked at Amazon in 2008, saved all the stocks, re-invested excess money in stock, even as an entry level engineer you would be a MULTI MILLIONAIRE ten years later... Its just crazy to give advise to people to prefer insane risk for a chance to get 200 million, over guaranteed few millions in a safe job.

Yes there are people who really can't work at big tech and who want to hack some startup code together. Go for it! Sure. For everyone else, big tech is preferable by a large margin. And there I can work on projects startups could never even dream of doing. The reason for that is that big tech works with economy of scale. What is profitable for Google and Amazon might very well be suicidal for startups.

And to top it all off, the author even says that Peter Thiel wrote him a yearly salary as check. That devalues this article even more. Anyone, yes ANYONE should have taken this offer. This wasn't about risk whatsoever. This was about a 23 year old guy who didn't understand how the world works. And that applies to literally anyone young.

Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy, just as work fills allocated time.

An extreme argument? If you don't care about security, perhaps you are right. In any other case, using a closed source endpoint from the company that promises you "encryption" is completely crazy. They "only" have the ability to decrypt all your messages, remove encryption altogether without notice, targeting ads based on your conversation history, and installing targeted decryption backdoors. Yeah not big deal at all, seems like something really trustworthy.

It's still better than nothing, although in the hands of Facebook it might actually be worse than nothing.