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ntr--

> Most of us do it in our free time.

I used to believe this but after my most recent position I no longer do. A lot of the developers there didn't code outside of work hours, or if they did it was just using the same technologies as the day to day.

When asked what tools we could use to filter for higher quality candidates in open roles I responded:

> Ask them to show you a personal project they're proud of, that will tell if they have any passion for the job.

Maybe it was just the company not being very attractive to talented coders, but after some time of candidates having nothing to show the company gave up and outsourced. There are simply a lot of uninspired developers who are just in it for the money now.

Maybe some kind of confirmation bias / no true scotsman argument, but if I got that question during an interview my response would be something like

> Which one would you like to hear about first?

> competitor can't afford to keep buying you out forever

Not saying this is in fact the case, but with trillions of dollars of QE and the Cantillon effect it seems entirely possible that in some industries they could.

I'll give you 1kg of wheat for an ounce of gold right now.
It was once pointed out to me that French derived vocabulary is avoided in received pronunciation, compare:

- Napkin / serviette

- Lavatory or loo / toilet

- Graveyard / cemetery

see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English

It's baffling to me how many "senior web developers" don't have their CV hosted on a website. Regardless of whether it's plain HTML on a CDN or a hectic fully 3d WebGL demo, a senior dev should have a domain with a https secured connection expressly for showing that they can in fact deploy and maintain a production instance.

The recruiter needs a PDF? Have a version linked to at the top of the document, or let them know that they can just press CTRL+P and your beautiful hand crafted css media queries will lay out an equivalent copy ready to be printed.

Like a lot of the other comments here, a LaTeX resume signals to me that the applicant probably spends more time code-golfing than implementing practical solutions.

what do the actual rules of the road say the braking point should be for an 8 person minivan with 5 passengers in dry weather? what about 8 passengers in the wet at night with ice on the roads?

old argument i know, but if a human gets that wrong and plows a pedestrian they wear the consequences, will an auto manufacturer do the same?

my guess is no, and the result of that is that even if we can get a majority of cars to be self driving they are probably not going to be pushing the limits of road capacity any time soon like GP suggests, more likely they will continue to drive super conservatively and fail fast like the videos in the linked article.

you are 30 minutes from home for a 15 minute appointment and do not like waiting for your car.

do you:

- send the car home

no, it would only get halfway home before the end of your appointment

- send it on a rideshare journey

let's say (conservatively, and according to some minimum regulations from the rideshare service) it gets assigned a job after 5 minutes to drive somebody 10 minutes away. it finishes its job at the same time as your appointment ends. you have to wait 10 minutes for it to return to you. again no.

- send it to a parking lot

assuming the parking lot is 5 minutes away and you can tell it to return 5m before your appointment ends this seems reasonable

- drive circles around your appointment

all the benefits of sending it to the parking lot but requires even less effort as you no longer have to remember to tell it your appointment is finishing.

now apply this logic to the general public. what is the most likely outcome?

Re:There's something off about LED bulbs on Thursday March 30, 2023 @08:25PM (#35380738)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30311830/

> Further analysis of these 15 reports indicated that a two-hour exposure to blue light (460 nm) in the evening suppresses melatonin, the maximum melatonin-suppressing effect being achieved at the shortest wavelengths (424 nm, violet)

> The melatonin concentration recovered rather rapidly, within 15 min from cessation of the exposure, suggesting a short-term or simultaneous impact of light exposure on the melatonin secretion.

Re:Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter on Wednesday March 29, 2023 @08:46PM (#35366165)
> you cant take all the money!

A cursory reading of the list of signatories shows mostly academics, so your summary of their motivations appears to be incorrect.

> not like that, not by democratizing it, but under OUR CONTROL

I also don't know how you came to that conclusion, from TFA:

> Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders

Re:Incompetent but Nice on Wednesday March 29, 2023 @08:25PM (#35365986)
I can't imagine how much time you must have available to be able to respond to an error with:

> Could there be a mistake here?

in place of simply correcting and then getting back on track with actually solving a presumably difficult problem. <<The Zone>> is a fleeting thing, especially with two programmers. Such nebulous, passive language seems like a guaranteed way to disrupt any kind of flow state.

Re:I_suck_and_my_tests_are_order_dependent on Friday February 17, 2023 @12:47AM (#34831247)
don't tear down the entire db for each test, make utilities that create the base objects you need to operate on and chain them together
Re:Image Compression with Singular Value Decomposition on Thursday February 09, 2023 @07:09PM (#34733663)
I worked on a very interesting project aligning point clouds using SVD, for a pair of point clouds of the same scene that are not aligned:

- select 3+ pairs of matching points in each cloud (tops of trees, edges of a building etc)

- calculate the vector to the centroid of each cloud

- use SVD to calculate the rotation that gives a minimum distance when applied from the source to the target

- translate and rotate the source cloud to the target

I did this using the rust nalgebra^1 crate after reading a very helpful paper^2 detailing the process. I had planned to build the rust lib into WASM so the process could be run alongside the browser based point cloud visualiser we were using, but had limited time and instead used Neon^3 to build a native binding for our nodejs server to use.

^1 https://docs.rs/nalgebra/latest/nalgebra/linalg/struct.SVD.h...

^2 https://igl.ethz.ch/projects/ARAP/svd_rot.pdf

^3 https://github.com/neon-bindings/neon

Re:Ask HN: How do you test SQL? on Tuesday January 31, 2023 @06:54PM (#34604156)
try not to cry, cry a lot, and then resolve not to vendor lock yourself to a black box data store next time.

jokes aside, redshift is based on pg^1, you can try an older version to get some semblance of it running locally.

1. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift/latest/dg/c_redshift-an...

Re:Is tipping getting out of control? Many consumers say yes on Monday January 23, 2023 @07:26PM (#34497238)
> Tipping is about making sure the people who are performing that service for you are getting paid what they’re owed

Here in AU we call that "wages".

Having to do quick maths while under social pressure and the threat of having your service quality degraded to make up for an employer or state being unwilling to pay workers enough to live might be called "coercion", but certainly it is externalising costs onto the customer.

I did this some years ago for a game and at that time many APIs were completely broken, the most important one being push notifications. Has that changed now in your experience?
Re:Perspective: Capsaicin Is a Psychoactive Substance on Monday November 28, 2022 @06:56PM (#33781668)
> He was full of pep; must have had his grande latte enema.
> So I'm not really sure what information the statistic that there are about 140 Poker millionaires in a year vs 75k Ivy grads conveys.

Poker is played competitively both online and in the casinos of every country all over the world 24/7. There are a phenomenal number of players compared to Ivy league students.

Unlike the lottery, it is also largely considered to be a game of skill based on a combination of statistics and social manipulation.

GP is generally implying that because the ratio of players to successful players is so small for a game so widespread that is is very difficult and requires a huge amount of skill to make a significant amount of money playing poker.

Re:“It would be career limiting “ on Tuesday November 08, 2022 @06:32PM (#33525707)
> In Wason's study, not even 10% of subjects found the correct solution.

I knew I was different, but I didn't think I was that different...

Re:The McMurdo Wastewater Treatment Plant on Wednesday November 02, 2022 @02:34AM (#33432027)
I've been trying to point this out to my colleagues repeatedly, somebody posted a react discussion about new suspense APIs, the only response I could summon was

> at last, we can make websites

Not the parent but I will offer you my opinion after I laughed at their comment because it reminded me of many of the engineers at my current work:

"First principles" in this context is not just reaching for the nearest/newest AWS service that seems to do what you want. ie. if you want a webserver, don't just run magic lambdas that abstract everything away from you, go and provision a vps and install your dependencies on it so you fully understand and control how the stack works.

None of the 12 engineers at my current company had written a test that actually wrote rows to a database when I arrived, they didn't know how. In fact none of them knew anything about how to run our databases on their own dev machines at all, they all shared one RDS PG instance.

Again, "first principles" here is: running a process, connecting to a service, asserting the whole thing did what you expected. To do that effectively you have to actually control the whole system, and to do that you have to know how the whole system works together. A lot of developers now just delegate the provisioning and maintenance of everything to a provider, even in development setups.

With what? a rear facing camera that runs the same object detection software?
It means

> Don't fuckin' come here and ignore the rules

Re:The Illustrated Stable Diffusion on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @11:02PM (#33090601)
https://docs.rs/ndarray/0.15.6/ndarray/

Rust to the rescue, as it always is for safety. (I don't know if this directly translates for tensors, I used it for manipulating point clouds and iirc it allows for arbitrary dimension containers)

I think what other commenters are getting at is that at some point you won't be interested in

* manipulating lists with functional programming * manipulating lists with OOP * manipulating lists with a non memory managed language * manipulating lists with a hard type safe language

and will start being interested in * guiding people to manipulate lists as simply as possible to MAKE SOME MONEY

Re:Flat-to-curved screens have an identity crisis on Thursday September 08, 2022 @10:05PM (#32774449)
Obligatory:

> The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely.

> The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.

- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949

Re:Run Stable Diffusion on Your M1 Mac’s GPU on Friday September 02, 2022 @12:53AM (#32686739)
Unrelated to stable diffusion, but I was showing DALL-E to my sister last night and a prompt with > Huge rubber tree set off the TOS violation filter.

AI alignment concerns are definitely overblown...

Re:Best practices for TypeScript monorepo on Thursday August 25, 2022 @06:32PM (#32600794)
typescript DOES support this out of the box.

https://www.typescriptlang.org/tsconfig#baseUrl

Re:Common tech jobs described as cabals of Mesoamerican wizards on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @01:01AM (#32575180)
> ...each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.

- Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, 1954

Re:Common tech jobs described as cabals of Mesoamerican wizards on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @12:57AM (#32575163)
> And in this sense of the word, science has utterly destroyed magic.

ahh good, so which interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct?

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