salomon812

Oh thank you for sharing! I had tried describing this earlier in my career and had call it "The complexity shell game" as in attempts to hide complexity only serve to move it around and to trick yourself it's gone. I would much rather use an existing standardized term, so I'm switching to Waterbed Theory, thank you!

A sentence remarking this concept was implemented in a different media.

----

Title of the song

Naive expression of love

Reluctance to accept that you are gone

Request to turn back time and rectify my wrongs

Repetition of the title of the song

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ

I almost completely disagree with this post. The only thing I can consider that you should probably avoid embarrassing names.

A descriptive name is terrible if you're slightly off. Or if the library gets repurposed. Or if the project doesn't turn out how you expected but it's still helpful. With everything going on, a nonsense name forces people to learn about it instead of having them guess at it from a three word description that might be misleading.

The author probably never had a project where something got named the oscilloscope-controller but there's no oscilloscope in sight, but we used to have one and then we tweaked a few things and now it runs something else and but the name was everywhere.

And all of these are abstract concepts. Getting data from point A to point B. FIFO? It's an acronym. Pipe? Doesn't really suggest it can buffer data. Buffer? Queue? Both sound like they might slow down data. Precise technical names would be good, but then the chances the purpose changes goes up!

You know, my honest but also meta answer is that I don't know the answer to your question.

There's a lot to unpack here and I don't know you well enough to give personalized advice. But this problem kinda requires personalized advice.

> in a way that doesn’t make it seem like I can’t be trusted that I know what I’m doing.

Why do you feel this way? I can think of several possibilities:

1.) You really really want the ability to know the answer instantly. While your mind know that's not reasonable, your heart is disappointed. As a result, your body language sends the message you don't know what you're doing.

2.) Verbal interactions are tough and you're looking for the right canned phrase that will give you time to think. However, that canned phrase sounds practiced, and people mistake it for a canned i-dont-care response.

3.) You want to people to understand why you don't instantly have an answer. As a result, you provide far too much justification, which winds up sounding guilty.

Personally, I have had great success with encounters where I absolutely don't know the answer, and I barely know where to start. Charlie asks me a question. I reply "I don't know, but Bob might know!" We ask Bob, and he doesn't want to be bothered, but he does know that Fred should know the answer. We then go to Fred, and I pay attention as the other two talk. I learn about Fred, a new topic, and Charlie winds up thanking me the most. In the future, Charlie comes to me first instead of Bob or Fred, and I wind up learning more than Bob and Fred put together.

It wasn't about how I said it, it was about putting in the effort to be present. And then people remembered I'd actually put the effort in.

I know this puzzle as "Star Battle" where I play it here: https://www.puzzle-star-battle.com where my favorite difficulty for a nice medium difficulty is "Normal 10x10 2 stars"

The LinkedIn Queens seems to be a much easier version of this puzzle.

You can see the Cracking the Cryptic folks (of Miracle Sudoku fame) take on the puzzle here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KGraaDXP_0

I wish they hadn't used "physics-defying" in their press release because I'm certain this is an important discovery for water condensers, but claiming it doesn't need an external energy source is massively negligent.

I'm fairly certain they've created some form of a Brownian Ratchet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_ratchet

People love to claim there's no external energy source, but then when you look closely, you'll find a hot-cold differential, and then you need external energy to maintain that differential. I'd put a large sum of money that either the material is colder than the ambient environment or the incoming moisture is warmer than the ambient environment. It might even be a differential within their material, and the lab lights are warming one side! There's a lot of passive devices that rely on the hot-cold cycle of day and night, that still counts as energy input from the sun.

The article even mentions they tried to rule out a thermal gradient by increasing the thickness of the material, I'm not sure I understand why that would rule it out... the gradient would still exist.

I hate this, because if they aren't intentionally supplying energy, it's probably really efficient (assuming they aren't taking samples out of the freezer or something) so it's still a big deal and important but apparently we have to claim something is a perpetual motion machine to get attention among the public.

Since I think I'm the person you're referencing, I really do want to give good feedback, but experience has shown it's really perilous (discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42533899)

And I know how adversarial the process has become. I have friends looking for jobs plus I try to get to know my candidates. And I have my recent hires and their stories.

I want to make it a better process but I'm so burnt out figuring out how to make it better. Some people talk about professional 3rd party recruiters but I've been burned by those as well. When it comes to dating and hiring, both can be pretty brutal.

Oh geez, I see my math mistake. But even at $5k/mo, the point still stands.

This. 100% this.

I can't believe any company would look at this story (which I've heard variations on from multiple peers) and go: "we should save money by not flying candidates out for an on-site and use terrible AI tools to sort our candidates."

Okay, so the original argument is about whether or not it's worth it to fly people out for an on-site. Hotel and airfare: $2000 absolute max. Salary at $100/hr for one month for me to figure out it's not going to work out, then pull the trigger to fire: $24,000.

I mean, being a manager is hard, but putting in the time and money to hire and then putting in the time to make sure your team doesn't have a morale drag, it's worth it.

> I think it's very scary when even manual review is still yielding you results with horrible technical screenings.

It was bad. It was starting to affect my life outside of work.

> I wonder at that point if your technical review is very hard

My technical review is very hard, but it is directly applicable to the work I'm doing. And I've seen some candidates just do outstanding based entirely on their natural curiosity to look a bit deeper. I've been using a form of it for five years, so it's well reviewed.

There's a difference between layoffs and firing. To fire an individual, the company must have documentation to ensure it's not a wrongful termination. Ironically, it's easier to lay-off 100 people because all you need to do is demonstrate their division's project is cancelled.

And that documentation takes time as a manager, which costs money.

But I admit not knowing completely because I haven't had to fire anyone yet. I have talked to legal about the process regarding someone not on my team.

It's not the lawsuit, it's about the time wasted as a manager and salary to the person as you work out if it's actually time to fire. Performance Improvement Plans, a bunch of back-and-forths. I'm not going to be the kind of person that fires quickly, so there's a bunch of sunk cost we have to take. Plus, fast firing creates a cooling effect among everyone there.

And for what? To save money on hiring? Not worth it.

> The kicker? These are 100% remote jobs - the interviews are being performed at shared workspaces. That's the world we live in now.

Nah, if I was running a 100% remote job company ten years ago before all of this, I would still absolutely want to meet each of my hires in person before inking a deal. Maybe I'm old-school but I've been very successful and lucky with hiring.

> A scary number of candidates did not take rejection well and tried to use my feedback against me.

This happened to one of my bosses. As a result, I've never attempted it.

Except once, a candidate realized at the end of a technical screen they had done poorly and demanded feedback. I gave an initial bit (shouldn't have, my mistake) and instantly turned it around on me.

I know the on-site is time-consuming and expensive, but so is firing people (at least in United States it is.) I've had a few on-site interviews where having them on-site made us realize we could never work with them. Given how much time they will spend with you, it's totally worth it to spend your resources on hiring.

God, I wish I could respond to denied applicants like a human, but the threat of legal action prevents me from giving good feedback. I know it sucks, but I'm not sure what to do about this, and I'm already so burnt out from the hiring process as it is, it's hard to work up the strength to do this fight as well.

Not to mentioned I spend forever doing it, there's so many and I wouldn't want to do it halfway...

I'm a software manager that has been doing some form of interviewing/hiring for 13 years.

I did two rounds of hiring software engineers last year, one in spring that seemed normal, and one in the fall that was was brutal. The fall hiring had a flood of applicants, and in retrospect, most seemed like AI was used in some way.

For the fall round, I suddenly had a higher percentage of applicants that qualified after resume screening and initial phone screen, but they all collapsed when I did a technical round. And failure rate on the technical was much much worse than usual.

We have a full-time recruiter working with us, and I'm not 100% sure what tools he used, but I switched to manually reviewing each resume, and given that it was 100s, it took a long time, but I still had my problem of great initial screen, terrible technical interview.

Then, I decided to throw out anyone who heavily mentioned AI, LLM, or data science. After all, with almost a thousand applicants, I needed to sort some how. (To be fair, our use case is more esoteric, we're not writing Javascript or parsers, so it's not as much of a time-saver.) Large chunks of applicants dropped and the process felt more normal.

I also switched to only on-site interviews. My initial technical screenings are still done remotely. Before COVID we were 100% on-site interviews, but did hybrid after COVID. Now, I'm back to enforcing on-site for my group.

> Anyway, drugs authorities have already approved drugs based on software simulations

The simulations you have linked aren't on the same scale. The paper uses the phrase "are powerful tools that COMPLEMENT traditional methods for gathering evidence"

And I'd argue this is more like detailed analysis rather than a simulation. It's like hoping you've found an immersive computer world like The Matrix, but it's a 2D side-scolling video game like Mario Bros.

I'd also question "approved drugs based on..." and instead argue they "didn't reject drugs based on..."

And not just any worm, but a C. elegan, which always grows the exact same way every time. The whole reason those worms are so well understood was due to ease of analysis. Hell, it always has 302 neurons which always wire up in the same way. It couldn't be easier to simulate, and it's really hard to simulate!

Hi! My professional job is to write emulators, my wife is a molecular biologist, and as a kid I had dreams of writing the exact software you are referencing, so I think I have a decent handle on this question.

We are no where close. We are ludicrously far away.

Let's define the exact scenario: we want to replace clinical trials with a software simulation of the human body. If the simulation shows ill side-effects, we can deny approval of a treatment.

1. We can barely emulate other computers. It's tempting to look at something like a Nintendo emulator and think "oh this isn't that hard" but it is. Most video game emulators get about 90% of the emulation right and it's good enough for most games. But a common practice is to carry patches for all the software to patch the software. Hilariously, this is sometimes because the software is working around a hardware quirk or bug, but then it turns out difficult to emulate that quirk or bug, so we patch out the hack. If you want a perfect emulator it's really hard [0] If you're testing for bad drug interactions in a human simulation, it's exactly these quirks/bugs you want to accurately simulate!

2. The software of cells is DNA and the genes contained within. And genes encode for proteins which are amazing at doing a huge amount of varied tasks. But these are the basic building blocks, and we've only begun to scratch the surface. We made huge progress but we barely understand. [1] Imagine trying to work on an emulator of a microchip, but we don't quite understand how transistors work.

3. There's mind-body feedback loop with the endocrine system [2]. On top of everything else, we need to simulate the brain. Sure we can use a simplified model of that, but animal models are also simplification. The whole point was to try to get more accurate, and how accurate do you need to guarantee results? I know this argument is a bit absurd but it's to point out there's no finish-line, only more and more difficultly as higher accuracy is demanded.

4. How would we develop this simulator. Let's suppose I have my initial prototype. I've simulated various known drugs and got results, and I've tuned my parameters. But this is a massive complex system. Once I run a new novel drug, the point is that it's doing something new! So, if I have a bad reaction, is it a bad drug, or a simulation bug? Each scenario is new and poses to surface incorrect modeling between complex subsystems. You can argue that we'd build our confidence over time, but that means we'll see the long path to simulator development. There have been some attempts but they have appeared to not provide predictive results [3]

5. When asked to debate whether or not we could simulate the human body, the pro-simulation side invoked fantasy: "Exascale or quantum computing will enable algorithms that we are yet to conceive of" suggesting that we are very far away if it is possible. [4]

[0] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-...

[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-ai-revolutionized-protein...

[2] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-brain-body-conne...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Physiological_Human

[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8638236/

I was disappointed the article included these phrases without more context, because they seem understanding on the surface level. But this was the same person who pushed to delay her maternity leave, so in practice he doesn't understand. A boss sending mixed signals of "work harder" and "take it easy because you're a mother" is pretty bad. I will admit it's extrapolation of the events on my part because the article confused me as well.

Yes! This game is a lot of fun. My only gripe with it is that the red area is small and the green area is huge, and that's really minor complaint. With the right people this game is amazing.

For those that love this game (as I do) I recommend "I Love Hue" for mobile.

I've been a bit disappointed by the AI. I'll admit going in with low expectations (I know about the whole AI summer/winter cycle) and I was blown away that ChatGPT could play Jeopardy! with just a prompt since I remember being blown away by Watson and AlphaGo. But then I had it help me write a letter, and by the time I got it to do anything useful, I basically had to write an outline for it, and then I realized I had already done the hard part. I asked it to write some boilerplate code for an interface to the Slack API in Python, but it used a deprecated API, and it assumed I had a valid token. Turns out Slack has lots of different kinds of tokens and I was using the wrong one, and the AI couldn't help me figure that out. After that, I remembered the story about pain point for radiologists. They don't need help diagnosing cancer, they need help with their internet connectivity.

I was a undergrad senior at Caltech during that time, and as luck would have it, I was taking an art history course. Caltech humanities courses tended to have visiting professors that would come for a single night a week. I mentioned to my professor that I did not think Serra's piece should be considered art and it turned into a debate that spanned several weeks. At first, I was worried I was taking a harsh stance but the professor was so excited that Caltech students took an interest in art and we happily debated for a while. I told her I hated Serra's Tilted Arc but conceded I did like his Sea Level and The Matter of Time.

While I was not one of the students that put up Eigenvectors, I would have gladly helped if I realized they were doing it. I argued to my professor that Eigenvectors was art because it stood for something and my professor could not have been happier about the situation.

Another protest piece that occurred was dumping a bunch of indoor and outdoor furniture on the very lawn that was going to host Vectors and then placing a sign on it that read something along the lines of "Invoice: Qty 1 art installation. Price: $1,000,000" in protest of the amount Caltech was going to pay Serra.

If I recall, while the students won, Caltech never admitted it was due to the outcry. The official statement argued that a geological report of the area deemed it unsuitable for such a heavy art piece.

I just looked online and it looks like they ripped up the entire lawn in a last few years to create another building and parking lot.

"Prefer duplication over the wrong abstraction."

This feels like another wording of the motto from a great blog post by Sandi Metz:

"Prefer duplication over the wrong abstraction"

https://sandimetz.com/blog/2016/1/20/the-wrong-abstraction

I find myself reaching for this all the time after my first instinct is DRY. Makes me thing hard about if I should couple things or not.