aronowb14

I asked around my network recently - in the last month or two basically every large company has put in spending limits per engineer. Curious what their S1 will look like when they go public.

why is it a great idea though? My question was basically what are the actual pros of doing it in space? I still haven't heard a good explanation.

https://arena.ai/leaderboard - I’ve found this company is a pretty good ranker - not sure their exact methodology but during day to day programming with Claude / gpt models I’ve felt qualitatively what they report

Yeah curious what would happen if they asked for an additional big feature on top of the original spec

A bit ironic that the website complaining about UI has virtual snow on it making reading hard.

Agreed. I think this Anthropic article is a realistic take on what’s possible (focus on prototyping)

https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/58284b19e702b49db9302d5b6f135a...

When I first graduated I read a bunch of tech focused books: they’re all helpful but I think practice and learning from more senior engineers is the most effective road to mastery! You can probably get away with not reading any of these books if you have good coworkers :).

That being said, these have been my favorites:

- designing data intensive applications (a great way of understanding systems + the basics of SRE)

- the senior engineer (I love the prototyping process he lays out)

- the effective engineer (lots of good gems for approaching prioritization)

- debugging (by David agans)- a great resource for a formalized debugging process if you don’t have one

- on writing well (I’m halfway through this, but it has been indispensable for writing tickets + messages at work)

I think these groups are out there, but unfortunately they are informal (not listed on the web or through a company), and also are not for a beginner level. For me, I’ve been learning how to surf and cook. I found at an absolute beginner level no one really wants to go out surfing with you, or do dinner parties. I did find once I showed enough commitment, and reached a beginner-intermediate level, more people were willing to join me in learning, and form informal learning groups.

Therapy worked wonders for me.

Therapists are trained to help and give you custom things to do based on what you need. I found one that gave me a lot of structured “assignments” and questions to ask myself and I’ve never felt better than I do now.

It's funny how hyped up stable diffusion is on HN right now: reminds me of when style transfer first started making it's rounds in 2017. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13958366

I think as technologists we want to think that code can "solve" some of the problems in the art world... but I think we still have a really, really long way to go. I tried to get style transfer adopted at work (worked at a creative technology firm in NY) but frankly I think deep learning methods for art generation tend to be really unpredictable, which make them pretty hard to use for professional applications. Imagine deploying production code that only worked 85% of the time... would be a nightmare. I felt, and feel similarly about deep learning approaches to art. They're just so finnicky and unpredictable, for example, add a single extra pixel to that example in this article and the output would look completely different.

Either way, cynicism aside, stable diffusion is awesome :).

As someone who took their first software engineering job as a junior during covid, I have to say I definitely struggled to learn and execute on tasks in a way which I know I wouldn't in an in person setting.

I found asking for help as a junior is definitely harder when you don't have people around (walking up to someone's desk vs slack message with ~20-60 minute delay then zoom call): and I often found myself blocked on tasks.

I found learning is generally harder remotely for me as well: the sheer amount of information + resources + help you get from serendipitous conversations with other engineers should not be understated. It's the same reason people got so angry over paying so much for remote university: it is objectively a worse learning experience.

I think this is just my personal stance: but I think in my perfect world I work in office for the first 5-10 years of my career to optimize for learning + relationship building, and then once I get more senior (or have kids) I transition into either hybrid or fully remote.

I’m a programmer, and my dads a doctor, and for ten years I’d always tell him that something like 20 questions could do his job.

After about 5 years he did this graduation speech and in it he referenced that: “yes, AI is getting great, your phone is a supercomputer, but the truth is that a computer will never be able to hold the hand of a dying patient and tell them it will be all be okay.”

honestly, not too bad :). I don't really use it as a "follow this as a guiding design pattern" piece of advice, but I think the philosophy is really useful when dealing with relationships with people, and taking risks in life. Over the past years, thinking "how will I aestheticize my life" has led me to some really interesting + fulfilling relationships and let me experience a lot of life. Sure, I have gotten burnt quite a few times, but in hindsight I regret nothing. I think the pain and joy and people I've met from just putting myself out there have given me a lot of perspective on life.

That being said, I'm getting to the age where I think I'm ready to settle down a bit: this philosophy I think is most useful if you're young or lost and also don't have much responsibility.

I wrote this back when I was 18, in response to the question “what kind of life do you want to live?” but I always come back to it. Something about it still resonates with me.

“What kind of life do you want to live?”

“A life full of color. I couldnt bear to have a boring life: I want my days to be full of joy and pain and laughter and success and failure and broken hearts and love. To be honest I don’t care where I end up, I just want to look back and smile at a life I painted with all the colors I could find.”

love this question: especially about the distributed systems.

Something I've been thinking about, not necessarily in the interviewing world, would be to have a simulation of distributed systems for non-production code: in theory I think you totally could have a simulation layer for databases / server loads and test how your code performs in such environments.

I guess it exists in production: but haven't seen it for either a) learninga bout distributed systems, or b) for interviews

I agree, I climb a lot IRL and yep, VR can't come close to touching that experience :). But yeah as far as what VR is good for, there are definitely places where it sings: and where people tend to make a mistake is thinking that it can be a 1-1 with reality and is supposed to replace existing experiences, like climbing or skydiving. I think it's more of a creative medium that will need a really long time to develop (think film, which has had over a century to get its feet under it).

Anyway as an example: this video is kind of the inverse of skydiving, (360 camera on a balloon floating into space), but definitely an interesting experience that can't really be replicated on traditional media.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCve1w1GFOs&ab_channel=Seeke...

Another really interesting one: https://tenderclaws.com/theunderpresents

Agreed. I’ve done generative art for many years now: and I have found generally (with a couple exceptions of course), the most successful artists in the space all have a strong foundation in drawing/painting/graphic design.

This is quite interesting, what’s the extension called?

make doing the right thing easier and the wrong thing harder.

I’ve never heard it put so succinctly! In the realm of breaking social media addiction I’ve tried to block all feeds on my laptop using chrome extensions, logout on mobile. To be honest: it’s the “make the right thing easier” that has been tricky for me. I’m trying to read more, but frankly post work tiredness does make diving into good books kind of tricky. Not 100% sure what the right “right thing” to replace social media in my life is yet.

Nice! I love local bookshops and anything that supports them over Amazon is great. I plan on getting “Evicted” and and “Streetfight” based on your recommendations too, thanks for making this site!

Yep, as a long time unity user I really think Unity is just spaghetti all the way down to it's core. The number of strange memory leaks and graphics bugs you find once you really get into the engine is appalling. Frankly, it's probably the worst software I've ever had to develop on, and was a huge reason I ended up leaving VR/AR development and just went back into regular software engineering.

This is a tangent, but I have been thinking a lot about why Unity is valued so highly and maybe it makes sense. I wasn't quite old enough to even stand at this point, but based on what I've read, Unity does actually seem similar to .NET + Microsoft early monopoly on certain software stacks. That is, it was horrible to use, but did address a niche.

Great article, reminds me of an older hn post about thinking by inversion. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23905221

coinbase one is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26815403

My comment is kind of unrelated to the content of this, but just wanted to say this is the type of stuff I love seeing on Hackernews. The business and tech stuff I find on the platform is nice, but I find this type of really specific passion work is what keeps me coming back to hackernews. It's great to see this stuff get bubbled up to the front page. Yesterday this got to the top: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29031488 (55 GiB/s fizzbuzz), which was such a good read, and just so specific and niche.

I guess it's just nice to see people so passionate about things.

This is awesome!

Probably wouldn't sign up for a course at the moment, as I am focusing on honing BE and FE software engineering skills at the moment, but definitely will bookmark just in case the stars align. (meaing when I have time and see a live course that I like. As a side note, it would be a cool feature to see some upcoming courses on your site too).

Best of luck on this though! Really want to see something like this succeed.

I built a process for myself when self teaching coding that generalizes pretty well (have used for it for coding, basketball, 3D art, and most recently cooking).

Revolves around Dr. Strange quote: “mastery comes from theory and practice”.

I start by finding books/resources for absolute beginners. Examples: (Salt fat acid heat [cooking] blenderguru [3d art] Murachs intro to Java [coding].

Next I go through the entire resource cover to cover, and as I learn I add interesting projects to an ongoing list. I find the more I learn, the more interesting the subject gets and the more I want to learn.

The key to getting this cover to cover completion to work though is habit building. I force myself to do the activity every day for at least ten minutes. It sucks in the beginning, but after 2-3 days it becomes super duper easy and I find myself working for hours over that ten minutes.

Once I finish the intro resource: I find the next resource that suits my level… rinse and repeat after that :).

Other stuff that helps/optimizes the process:

Focus on meta learning. Figure out what works for you as you learn. Reflect often.

Surround yourself with experts on the topic if you can.

wow amazing work!!! Upvoted basically every single one haha.

The "End of Everything" is beautiful. I don't know why but it filled me with melancholia.

How long do you normally spend making these?

Art is quite subjective. So hard to say what is "garbage" and what isn't. I assume this comment will get downvoted due to that. That being said I do agree with you :). After staring an GAN art for a year I find it is extremely "empty" and essentially all looks the same, with very similar visual artifacts that make them look bad. I view style transfer and GAN art generally as "trippy artistic filters". I don't think it's more than that at the current state of the art. Even in images linked above me: they are cool, but do just seem to be trippy distortions of existing things. If you like that that's fine, but I don't think it's more than that.

Looking at ML as a type of artistic filter though is interesting: and does open up some interesting use cases. I created a project in college using style transfer filters to make a short film. I think it achieved an effect that would have been unachievable without the ML. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfZ9-9tH_uE

Is anybody else getting tired of the constant stream of inflammatory posts ragging on San Francisco or the Bay Area? I feel like I've been seeing one every one or two days that make it to the top of HN.

These types of posts just seem to fit into this ongoing narrative that SF (and relatedly, silicon valley), are all falling apart due to poor governance. It's beginning to feel like a strong echo chamber in here. What really irks me though is on this and the recent post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27241085 the associated comments and discussion don't really seem to have any real substance to them, and seem to revolve around one side saying "I visited and it is horrible!!!" vs the other side saying "I visited and it isn't horrible!!!".

This type of pure anecdotal arguing irks me because I really do love Hackernews as a source of interesting and rational discussion, and keeping ourselves to that standard would be super amazing, especially with complex topics like this one. Homelessness and crime in SF are not single cause topics, (it's not just bad governance that causes them) and the tech exodus does not mean the city is dying.

Totally agree with the sentiment in this post. I've been working in VR for about 5 years now and came to this conclusion a couple weeks ago. There simply are better alternatives to mostly every VR application.

Also, I do think the "Killer app" for VR has already been found: education. The US Military, Airforce, and NASA has been using VR for decades for training for example, and will continue to use them. There are several startups working on adapting VR education to other high-end use cases like surgery and enterprise training as well. I think those will still be niche, but will probably make for a couple companies with longevity in the end.

There are some unexplored but interesting pieces to the VR puzzle that also haven't been either invented or put together yet: better hand tracking, better haptics, better eye tracking, better displays, and lighter headsets for example. Potentially some combination of these will result in a 'must have' application for VR. Who can say when this will happen though.