idrios

You're missing a 4th and unsettling option:

D) Going to be "solved" by catching someone unfortunate who seems plausible enough and lacks an alibi.

Regulations are like lines of code in a software project. They're good if well written, bad if not, and what matters more is how well they fit into the entire solution

Which brings it full circle to engineers saying no to product releases after being burned too harshly by being scapegoated

Sometimes the employee is in a low-revenue generating area where their department head is asked to cut headcount by 40%

Now we just need Rigtoy, Animtoy and Rendertoy and we'll be able to make beautiful 3D animations in the browser

Congressmen should be required to complete the Factorio tutorial before taking office

Not sure what polish you're looking for but it's been great for me. Smart autocomplete algorithm and good chatbot that acts like a personalized Google / stack overflow. It's not good enough to vibe code full products or debug hard issues, but that's just limitations of AI.

Also it's all Microsoft, they made both the AI and the editor. I appreciate that they don't do anything extra in the editor to favor their own extensions.

The wealthy do use public schools. They pay huge amounts to live in upper class neighborhoods with wealthy peers, where a lot of tax money goes into the schooling system so the kids can take all sorts of extracurriculars and AP classes. It gets the same results as private school but the cost comes from living in that neighborhood rather than paying the school directly

It's not at a point yet where I can recommend it to non-technical people but it's getting close.

I can play almost any steam game that I can find on it, but usually need to manually enable proton-experimental. Some Unity games have weird bugs and there are some other games I still can't figure out how to run at all.

I've run into weird errors due to incompatibility between Nvidia GPUs & their drivers with my OS. Haven't encountered the issue in 4 years but having your graphics driver break means you need to fix your crazy issue with only a terminal (hope you have another computer for googling).

My dad was becoming more pro-privacy so I got him Linux Mint, and something broke that put him in GRUB and it frustrated him so he asked me to change it back.

But Linux seems to be getting better as fast as Windows is getting worse so I still recommend trying it to anyone remotely interested

Anecdotally, a friend of mine works for a state department of transportation and has been trying to get a developer and a DBA to replace some people who've recently left.

He's been having an insanely hard time finding anyone for the role, and not because of salary requirements. He's required to vet candidates through approved sources and so his department uses a recruitment firm that keeps sending him resumes from people who are substantially lying about their experience and maybe also their identity. I tried recommending someone I knew who I knew had a lot of db experience and was job searching, and he said he wouldn't be able to interview the guy because he wasn't from an approved source.

His best recent hire was a woman who understood the system well enough to create her own firm, get it govt approved, and then get herself hired as a consultant.

Bear in mind I'm just recounting what my friend told me so I may have inaccuracies in this story.

I didn't know create-react-app was abandoned. What was wrong with it?

Not yet but there's a precedent for incredibly perverse incentives caused by sports gambling -- most iconically the White Sox throwing the world series in 1919.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sox_Scandal

If a stranger told me "All of my cars are red" and then I learned that they didn't own a car, I wouldn't call them clever I'd call them a liar.

Looking at that smalltowntruth website reminds me of someone I met in 2015.

I stayed at a guy's airbnb in Denver. He was in breach of his renting agreement by hosting the airbnb and had previously spent about a year in jail (forget for what). He said he had 2 websites that he was promoting on Facebook and were making him money. On one website he posted lots of pro-Trump content and on the other he posted lots of pro-Bernie Sanders content. This was during the primaries so these articles were largely in opposition to Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton. He said he didn't care about either candidate but both websites were making him good money in ad revenue. He was not actually affiliated with either party.

I wouldn't be surprised if he or someone else like him had scaled up their efforts.

Another for you:

Map of an Insect’s Brain - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35111371 - March 2023 (119 comments)

That was cool! Yeah this is exactly the kind of thing I'm working on too. I don't have it that you can draw like he does, but it does let you view an object in a similar way & it can stream data to a server connected over wifi so that you can see mirrored behavior on a desktop app. But it's missing so much still, you can't interact with anything yet.

Heck yeah! I don't have a newsletter but I'll let you know how my progress goes on it.

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-roberts-4bb20644

Discord username: idrios_

Feel free to add me on either.

Cool! Didn't know about the pen, though I've seen clips of similar tech being used.

I've got a long ways to go with this app though so it's still just a pet project. The position tracking is very suboptimal right now, so I need to switch to a better library. And then I need to start adding actual actions because right now the app is just a glorified object viewer.

I'm insanely flattered that you think it's interesting though. Very motivating to me.

I've been learning how to use Blender. For a long time I've thought that working with things in 3D could be made simpler by having an app where your phone is a sort of 3D cursor, and e.g. for modeling you could use your phone as a sculpting knife by moving it around in the air.

So I spent some time trying to make an app that allows you to do that, but can't shake the thought that such an app would work better as a Blender addon/plugin rather a standalone app. And I also am trying to figure out how people work with 3D currently, to see if such a tool would even be an improvement over existing tools.

I hate this article. It's a very smug way of blaming the dev who's just trying to make the app better when it's probably the culture that's the problem. Bad refactors usually happen because the person doing the refactor is getting a ton of pushback on it -- they probably underestimated the effort involved and are getting chewed out for taking too long on it, so they cut corners that might accidentally lose functionality, or they don't finish the desired abstraction / clean code they were going for which leaves the code less readable.

For a dev that's a new hire, refactoring the code is also a way for them to feel ownership over it. The PM should be happy that they're thinking about the way the code works and the way the code should work. It's on the company to have review & qa processes that catch problems before they lead to downtime.

I don't disagree that some of the examples given are bad refactors, but in regards to adding inconsistency I see that happen a lot more when rushing out new features or bug fixes than when refactoring; usually the refactor is the effort trying to establish some kind of consistency. And example 5 isn't a refactor it's just removing functionality. If that was the intent, the person should be told not to do that. If it's an accidental side effect of some larger refactor effort, then just add the functionality back in a new PR. Accept that mistakes happen, adopt some QA controls to catch them, and build a culture that encourages your developers to care about your product.

I think the word "easily" is carrying a lot weight here -- for a company the size of Disney, keeping all internal communication records in secure offline storage sounds pretty hard from both a technical and operational standpoint. Certainly doable, but I doubt it'd ever happen unless it were required by law

Same, still able to download videos with the yt-dlp cli but NewPipe isn't playing videos

And God (PM) forbid, if you ever find yourself with some extra free time you might even reduce the size of dragons over time.

Honest question, what is the company like where you can do that? Everywhere I've worked (only been working in industry for 6 years) has had such rigid agile development that even when I do find myself with free time, there's no flexibility to work on things that haven't been assigned to you and the best I can do is work on profiling/debugging tools.

The best rejection letter I ever got was a personal note from the person hiring, saying "You were good, but we just needed someone who is stronger with [x], [y], and [z]". It felt actionable because it told me things I could improve on.

Aside from that one, the rejections that were the least self-esteem-damaging were ones that said "we've decided not to fill the position". Even if not true, it's a good "it's not you it's me" type of rejection.

Rpgmaker, super easy to build a game with all the default assets that come with it, but also quite customizable, especially once you start exploring with downloading plug-ins or writing your own

I've noticed I can't see the road very well when I drive at night when there are lights from other cars on the road. I thought it was something wrong with my windshield, until my dad said he has the same problem and had thought it was something wrong with his eyes.

So I think maybe you're right, it's actually gotten harder to see pedestrians

It's MRI not CT. No radiation, just a ludicrously powerful magnetic field.

lashing out at groups that have nothing to do with you

You make it sound like I'm lashing out against H1B holders. I'm not. It's the "There's not enough talent in US, so we have to seek elsewhere" sentiment from hiring managers that I strongly disagree with. There's tons of talent here, they might just be harder to find because hiring is so broken.

I know nothing about your company or interview process, but I'm speaking as someone just coming out of a long and painful job hunt.

I'll agree only that there are a lot of bad candidates who come out of bootcamps. There are a lot of good ones too. A lot of bootcamps run on the model that they train the bare minimum for a student to get a job, so they can take a cut of the paycheck. What you get is socialites learning just enough how to code to pass an interview, and good developers being aggressively trained in how to pass interviews. Some people love bootcamps because it's what got them a job, or got them a cheap candidate, I personally dislike them.

But I did hackathons, game jams, and went to meetups enough while job searching to say that there are a lot of incredibly talented people who are just not getting hired. If anyone is having trouble hiring a quality candidate, it's their hiring process that's broken. Job applications have become so gamified that it's impossible to filter signal for noise. Recruiters post insane expectations like "must know Javascript, React, Postgres, API's, C#, Python, and <obscure technology nobody has ever heard of that is specific to that company>" for a software engineer role. A competent CS fresh graduate won't apply to that position because they might only know Python from that list, even if they've written their own compiler, written ML algorithms from first principles, and have a deep understanding of what the computer's doing under the hood. That student is smart and would be so easily trainable, but they don't apply because the requirements are so high. So the people who do apply are those courageous enough to apply to a role they meet 30% criteria for, those shameless enough to flat out lie on an application, and bootcamp grads who have spent 2 weeks learning all of those technologies at surface level; and then if you quiz them on anything in any amount of depth they flounder.

But those bootcamps advertise themselves as entry-level roles, and so the fresh CS grads apply to those instead of to the companies that have 900 "sea of trash" applicants, which wants an expert in every technology ever invented. The bootcamps often just turn around and have the applicant rewrite their resume into something that's nearly a lie, and then aggressively apply to jobs. Result is companies keep seeing fantastic resumes with not fantastic candidates, and ignoring modest resumes with trainable candidates, and company concludes that the requirements were not high enough to filter out the trash so they add yet another job requirement.

And let's not kid ourselves, CS graduates aren't competing against H1B hires.

Yes they are. I have great respect for all of the foreigners on H1B that I know, but almost all of them obtained their H1B fresh out of grad school, not after a long career overseas.

I don't even think this was true when people were saying it 5 years ago, but it's definitely not true now. Literally yesterday I met a kid doing sales at Microcenter with a CS degree who couldn't find a dev job after 1.5 years of searching. Go to any programmers meetup in your city and there will be dozens of people trying to network into a dev job. Look up any video online of "I applied to 500 jobs" from people trying to break into a software role. Look at the reddit page for any bootcamp to see all the CS grads asking if it'll get them a job. American CS graduates aren't starry eyed for FAANG jobs, they're starving for any jobs