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bwy

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I think you're wrong, in the same way that folks on HN were wrong about Dropbox–HN: why would I pay for something that provides so little value, it's just slightly more convenient file storage?

Just because open source models are almost as good, doesn't mean you can underestimate the convenience factor.

Both can be true: we're in an AI bubble, and the large incumbents will capture most of the value/be difficult to unseat.

From https://nshipster.com/uncertainty/ recently: "Working in software, the most annoying part of reaching Senior level is having to say “it depends” all the time. Much more fun getting to say “let’s ship it and iterate” as Staff or “that won’t scale” as a Principal."

IIUC, author is a Staff SWE, so this tracks.

See also "Worse is better" which has been debated a million times by now.

I wonder how many of those "sour grapes" commenters have actually read the thing–my guess, not many.

Then on the first page of the "silly little book," where I already have the question: "why should I read this? Why would an employee spend time reading this?" Immediately he addresses that: "if you read this book and pass a quiz I’ll give you $1,000." And if you've seen MrBeast videos, it's not inconceivable that everyone who's read the manual has actually received $1,000.

Corporate leaders would do well to learn from just this. What are you saying in the all-hands meeting that takes 1,000 SWE-hours that's actually worth that much? What value does your employee handbook/documentation provide (in my experience, a lot of documentation provides negative value by virtue of being so out-of-date, confusing, or just wrong).

Jimmy has probably done the math (in a intuitive sense; I don't think he has strong math skills), and it's worth the employee-hours for him to pay them $1,000 to read this PDF to avoid having them waste time or make mistakes they've already made. It's probably worth a lot more than $1,000.

From my anecdotal experience with a few Googlers: many will micro-optimize expenses this small. I think (hope) they enjoy it.

They spent 2 years at the senior level at one FAANG. Why would they switch to another for anything less than the staff (senior + 1) level?

(Not saying anyone "deserves" that or that's how it should be, but that's just how it is here in the valley.)

Dynamicland 5 years ago

This project on a quick glance reminds me of the teamlab Borderless Museum in Japan. Interactive shapes, colors, and lines on real materials.

I agree with you that the review seems to have misunderstood the author on this point. I wrote a comment on the blog to explain more. I think the review mixes up the words abstraction and specification, especially once I dug a little bit into the correspondence on the draft he posted for the book author's feedback.

I can't believe you can say this seriously. Have you not played an instrument or drawn before? Art is in many ways relatively, but objectively, quantitatively more people enjoy listening to Mozart than Cage's 4'33", and more people enjoy Picasso than a 5 year old's finger painting.

Those art things require training just like any other profession.

Intermediate Python 11 years ago

Just read the entire thing, good stuff! Interesting to see what's considered intermediate vs. basic and advanced.

Feedback: maybe add a feedback section to the site? Haha. Dissect is spelled with 2 S's, and there's a broken link at the end of the virtualenv section.

Thanks for your work! Learned a few things for sure.

Inside Amazon 11 years ago

Plenty of anecdotes like this, I'm sure, which is why the article. I also had a friend who interned at Amazon who did not want to go back.

Yeah, I mean that's what I was saying I thought the definition was in my original comment. But taken the way the OP apparently meant it, it does mean something similar to "praise highly" or "very excited about." The meaning's evolved.

This makes more sense. He's basically saying, "I love this, but let's not get too carried away." I now see where that comment's coming from!

Thanks. Nit-picking again, but drinking the Kool-Aid does mean "unquestioning, ... without criticism" implying that those who are drinking wouldn't have such reservations. That's what I was confused about. Oh well. Language is evolving, what else is new.

OT: At this point, I am so confused at what "drinking the Kool-Aid" even means. People on the Internet seem to use it for every meaning possible. I was surprised to see that it has its own Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_the_Kool-Aid.

And it seems like you mean exactly the opposite of what you've said, based on that definition - you're not drinking the React Kool-Aid, or drinking the anti-React Kool-Aid.

I'm not trying to impose grammar OCD on anyone by any means. Like I implied, I'm probably one of the more ignorant people about these phrases. I just think it's confusing when people say things like "could care less" and "drinking Kool-Aid" when they actually mean the complete opposite. It's very bizarre to me but OTOH I guess it's fascinating that English is just that flexible.

CS for All 11 years ago

Beautifully written text. I also really like the idea of an intro course but am, probably like many others, struggling with how to present the topics in an interesting (and practical) way without missing the theoretical beauty of computer science.

This course reminds me a lot of the Berkeley course posted a month ago, if anyone wants to see the discussion there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9838196. From what I can tell, the coverage is almost the same, except that the Berkeley course pretty much trades computer architecture for declarative programming and some other briefly-covered topics like machine learning, map reduce, concurrency, etc.

I'm probably just ignorant, but I don't know too much about power (Is my light bulb usually around 80 W-h? 200W? 100kWh? I have no idea.) I think you're right, but I do also think the main point was the relative expenditure, a 30% increase.

Umm. I have no clue how you can say this. In JavaScript, JSON is unquestionably the easiest format to use.

It may or may not be the same to parse, say, JSON and XML.

But how is

xmlDoc=new DOMParser().parseFromString(booksXml);

newatt=xmlDoc.createAttribute("edition");

newatt.nodeValue="first";

x=xmlDoc.getElementsByTagName("title");

x[0].setAttributeNode(newatt);

as easy to use as

JSON.parse(booksJson).title.edition = 'first'

?

Of course, there's many areas that I didn't even mention. Another thing in the same vein for upvotes that I sometimes think about is, what is the meaning of upvoting? Does it mean, "I like this," or can it also mean "I think this submission should be higher?" Maybe I think too much but I've refrained from upvoting posts I like because I don't think they should be higher than their current position.

What I always thought was that there really should be some user-based weighting system. Like, if a user upvotes 90% of the things he sees, his upvotes are probably worth less than upvotes by someone who upvotes only 1% of the posts he sees.

Same thing applies to things like Yelp reviews. Maybe a user with close to a 5-star lifetime rating average should have his reviews "renormalized" to 3's because his standards are probably just lower than the guy with a 1-star average.

The problem is that there are so many other factors here (maybe the 5-star average person only visits (? or just reviews) really good places). Maybe the crazy upvoter just spends more time reading each page on Reddit. These are complicating factors that are hard to predict and if the simple case is working, why try? If there were a simple, clearly better way of voting/rating, it would be done.