rewma

You're moving the goalpost on this. For me, as someone else stated, the separation between home life and work life is a bit easier with a commute.

The point is that separation from home and work life does not require or mandate a commute or even getting back to the office. That position is indefensible. Being forced to endure something unsavoury against your best wishes ever single work day is not easier nor the only effective way to get some separation between your personal and work life. That's something you do, not something that's done to you.

Some people are quite happy with a home office, some people opt to work anywhere. I have a team member that works by the pool, and another team member who worked while travelling through Europe. If you are not forced to be present on a specific cubicle in a specific building for X hours a day then you have quite literally the whole world at your disposal, and your imagination is the only limit.

And you know what? That reflects on quality of life work/life balance, and overall job satisfaction. Your life matters and enjoying how you live it matters. That's the whole point of working, not a whimsical position where a post happened to be moved.

So no, being packed like sardines along with dozens of depressed and tired and often smelly fellow drones in a train or subway or bus, of being forced to endure traffic jams or road rages, is neither the only way to separate work from personal life, nor the most enjoyable or even effective at all. There are far better things to do in life, and you're free to pick them all.

Government regulation is different because it forces everyone (...)

It really isn't. It just stops unscrupulous employers from abusing their employees. There are already plenty of tech companies that went full remote, and clearly they don't interpret that as a competitive disadvantage. The lockdowns also showed productivity increases and improvements in the quality of life and work/life balance. Therefore, returning to the office has absolutely nothing to do with productivity or company culture or dedication. At best, it's just lazy thinking enforced by strong-arming employees into positions that is overwhelmingly against their personal interests and quality of life.

Ex (multi) FAANG engineer here. I personally agree that a 30 minute commute home is more effective for separating work and home than just the clock. The data published (by MSFT) shows employees are working more hours now than ever before.

Current FAANG engineer here. I totally disagree, and the numbers support my case. My organization saw a jump in productivity when switching to WFO accompanied by a considerable increased in job satisfaction.

WFO, accompanied by flexible work hours, allowed everyone in my team to benefit from more personal time and also opportunities to research topics of interest, which already paid off in the product we developed.

If there are cons to the employer, that means I'm worth less and can demand less salary (...)

During the industrial revolution, some employers saw that there were significant pros in employing children and working them 12 to 14 hours a day for a fraction of a grown man's salary. Not being able to employ children was a significant con.

How did "the market" handled that?

There's more to life than what's convenient to corporations, and the despair of self-hating employees to think that self-deprecarion is a competitive sport.

why am I getting heavily down voted for discussing personal reasons why I enjoyed working in the office?

My guess is that there has been chatter on how discussions on WFO, specially in tech forums, are brigaded by shills to sell the illogical idea that getting back to the office is fantastic and awesome, and the hallmark of these shills is the fact that their arguments in favour of returning to office are simply unbelievable. And quite frankly you post reads like that.

I have to say that I found it very weird, and outright unbelievable, that someone was arguing that commutes were "far more effective for unwinding". To me that makes no sense at all, because when working from home you are free to pick whatever you'd like to do with that time, instead of being forced to sit in a car or public transportation and waste away your life while you endure traffic. I mean, if suffering commutes is something you enjoy then if you work from home nothing stops you from hopping into your preferred means of transportation and go anywhere you'd like. But you can also do any other thing. Is driving to/from the office during rush hour the most pleasurable and relaxing thing possible? I quite doubt it.

So why claim that being forced to do something is more effective at unwinding than actually pick whatever you'd like to do? It makes no sense.

Ditto. I’ve been doing a lot of managery stuff during the pandemic and the main things I miss are the water cooler talk that greased a lot of wheels and filled in a lot of gaps (...)

I'm sure mileages vary, but between wasting a significant portion of my life commutting to be able to experience water cooler talks, and hugging my wife and children once I step out of my home office, you can keep all the water coolers in the world to yourself.

Work/life balance shouldn't fall all the way to the work side of the scale just because some managers struggle with remote work.

From the article's summary:

The central sticking point, and cause cited by many people who recently left, was Smith’s strong push this year for all Blue Origin employees to return to the office.

This is without a doubt about Blue Origin's call to return to office.

Every time you commit, package-lock.json is different. And when it is not, then I have 26 new vulnerabilities to be fixed by “npm audit fix”. I have zero trust in my build being reproducible, or even working one year forward.

In some of the nodejs projects I've worked, we had allu dependencies with pinned version numbers, and each week we created a ticket to track work on upgrading them. This typically involved a single commit updating package versions and running all tests. More often than not it took no work at all.

If a project just lets their dependencies change randomly and does not invest any work updating them, of course there's bound to be pain and suffering.

Differentiating DLL and SO hell is getting a bit beyond pedantic (...)

It really isn't. Unlike linking problems, where the problem is focused on how you need to fight your dependencies to be able to resolve symbols, DLL Hell has been for over a decade a dependency resolution problem that is solved at the packaging level.

More importantly, on Windows, where sharing DLLs is not a thing, you can simply drop a DLL in the app dir and be done with it. In fact, it's customary for windows apps to just bundle all their dependencies.

DLL Hell ceased to be a practical concern over a decade ago, particularly given that Windows provides tight control over its dynamic linking search order.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/dlls/dynamic-...

DLL Hell is not a linking problem, it's a packaging problem.

I'm afraid that this is one of the expected outcomes of lowering and even outright eliminating preventative measures, such as mask mandates and social distancing, and placing all the chips on the current generation of Covid vaccines being sufficiently effective in lowering covid-related deaths.

If the virus is allowed to run rampant throughout the population then the odds that an unfortunate mutation happens is far higher, as it's proportional to the number of infected hosts, and there is also an evolutionary pressure in favour of strains that aren't effectively countered by the host's immune system and spread more efficiently. Consequently, it's only a matter of time before, just like the Delta variant showed, the wrong kind of strain is developed.

End user of a linker?

I'd argue that if you're not packaging your software or testing your software's dependencies, either you're doing something extremely exotic that lies far outside anyone's happy path or "dylib error" should not even be a keyword in your vocabulary.

But that sleight-of-hand hides the fact that many (perhaps even most) security fixes do not break the ABI or API; they are completely contained to the implementation (one obvious exception would be if the security issue was caused by bad API design, but even then often there are ways to fix it without breaking the ABI).

Right you are. I was also perplexed when I read that non sequitur. The author's reference to DLL Hell also suggests there's some confusion in his analysis of the underlying problem, given that DLL Hell is very specific to windows and at best is only orthogonally related to ABI. The author's references to API changes make even less sense, and definitely cast doubt over his insight into the issue.

I think the issue comes when results are reported and consumers try to use those results to determine which behaviors are risky.

Well, consumers are doing it completely wrong if they're looking up to papers as established and definite references regarding scientific findings.

Papers do not define reality, at most they only describe the author's perception of reality give their circumstances and current understanding, and reflecting the current state of the art. Thus observations might be off, but still interesting enough to spark further work to build up knowledge and clarify misconceptions.

It's like the parable about the blind men and an elephant[¹]. We might have an academic paper describing a novel species of trees that have a strong correlation with snakes, and consumers would be using that paper to justify shooting at treetops just to be sure they aren't attacked by a snake.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant

to be fair though, it can be a hassle to get something on wikipedia - writing a well thought out addition to a page, only to have it immediately reversed out can be disheartening.

It indeed can take work, but that's also the reason why wikipedia's signal/noise ratio is high and often passed as the tertiary source.

Still, I feel that the bulk of the work lies in establishing notoriety. Sometimes people feel that very obscure topics that lack any acceptable source and fail to establish notoriety should be center stage. Sometimes the problem is half-assed nature of a contribution. Still, it's better to give it a try than to simply complain about no one having done any work.

Unfortunately deletionists have won, at least in my limited experience, and Wikipedia subjectively feels now to be largely a kingdom of those who find it more satisfying/easier to delete information than to create.

One of wikipedia's tenets is that Wikipedia is not your personal blog. Thus I feel that any baseless accusation of "easier to delete than to create" is disingenuous and more often than not is just a kneejerk reaction motivated by a desire to hit back at Wikipedia for doing the right thing and keeping the signa/noise ratio high.

I've been at both ends of that deal. I've seen plenty of my articles being marked for deletion, and as an anti-vandalism editor I've also deleted an awful lot of articles. I recommend you also invest some of your time doing anti-vandalism work to get a glimpse of the torrent of crap that storms into Wikipedia each day, from puerile vandalism to shills forcing their products/services everywhere, and also of course people posting their own uncorroborated personal accounts citing themselves.

The process is flawed given that it's driven by volunteers and unfortunately there are indeed false positives and false negatives. Nevertheless, I'm sure the experience would be insightful and educational, specially with regards to learning how to write acceptable wiki articles, and enough to stop this blend of petty baseless attacks.

After all, it's easier to whine conspiratorial accusations on online forums than it is to actually learn how to contribute, and more importantly how to work to improve things.

Went hunting for relevant pages, and it's surprising how weak Wikipedia is on this entire subject.

That's how Wikipedia works: people like you and me search for a topic, and if something is missing then it's up to us to fill the blanks.

Contributing something to a wiki takes as much work as posting a message on HN.

And my grandfather used to say the longer you look at something the easier it gets to compress all the information of a complex world into a few dots. Basically these artists brains were running highly optimized compression algos.

Christoph Niemann[¹] has an interesting series on Instagram he dubbed Abstract Sunday[²] where he posts Sunday sketches, and it amazes me how much detail he compresses in so few brush strokes. I definitely recommend a click.

[1] https://www.christophniemann.com/

[2] https://www.christophniemann.com/detail/sunday-sketches-2/

(...) what makes you think that a company with rapidly outdating chip designs and access only to domestic silicon fabs (...)

Well, maybe the fact that not so long ago it had none of that and it clearly looks like both the company and the political regime aren't having many problems getting their hands on all the missing pieces.

If ARM china "steals" ARM ip, ARM is still capable of licensing to it's western clients;

If the smartphone market is an indicator, too bad that this will just mean that the majority of OEMs will just buy their chips from ARM china and thus demand for ARM IP will expectedly drop, and meanwhile this IP appropriation will just be used to develop independent design capabilities.

I don't know whether this is a truly serious paper or can be filed under "Spurious Correlations"[0]

I don't understand what leads you to believe that a paper that can be filed under "spurious correlation" could be automatically discarded as not being serious.

One of the purposes of scientific articles is to report interesting findings to peers, which serve as food for thought. By definition, the state of the art of any field is perpetually in a "work in progress" stage, and researchers feed off each other's work to progress.

This paper reports an observation. Like all similar papers, now the community is free to look into it and bring some clarity to the topic. This is how progress is achieved.

can you name the sustainable sources of hydrogen, and their efficiency?

Hydrogen is an energy store. It doesn't typically exist by itself in nature and must be produced.

Thus the answer for your question is any and all renewable energy sources.

https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/hydrogen-clean-flexible...

Neither electricity nor pre-charged Li-Ion batteries exist in nature by themselves, thus it's precisely the same problem.

I don't want to live in a region where my neighbors just watch me get robbed...

What do you expect a neighbor to do regarding a violent gang that blows up a door, takes 5min to do its thing, and proceeds to vanish in the night?

Personally, I take way more than 5min to get up the bed.

The result? No response. No company cared what skills I have gained during my studies. They see courses like hardware security as non-practical and a course on multithreading as mostly theoretical.

I wouldn't take that personally, or even as a strong indication of a problem with your hard skills.

Sometimes recruiters mainly look for real-world experience because that makes a hiring a candidate easier to justify. People without work experience or a portfolio are a crapshoot. Also, resume embellishment is indeed a common problem, thus great but unverifiable CVs might raise a red flag. Furthermore, if a company is looking for someone to tighten nuts but they get a CV from a highly trained engineer, they might prefer to pass on him. After all, if he's being underemployed then he might not be planning on sticking around for long.

And finally, but not less importantly, soft skills matter. Sometimes they matter far more than hard skills. A recruiter can tolerate a competent candidate that is eager to learn, but they will be less inclined to tolerate an outstanding developer who is unbearable, insufferable, or unwilling to learn from (and work with) team members.

In the end it's all a crapshoot anyway. There is a lot of confirmation bias, and a lot of lottery winners offering advise on how to win lotteries, but we would do well to acknowledge that the stars need to be aligned for good things to happen, and often they aren't.

QML spoiled me, as React in comparison is quite clunky, so I'm not really sure where your post is coming from.

My post comes from my personal and professional experience developing Qt applications with C++, which unfortunately already spans over a decade.

Given you only mentioned QML, which is a relatively new addition whose adoption rate is still negligible, my guess is that you've never worked with C++ projects that use Qt's widgets.

This is true for values defined in code, but TypeScript cannot directly see data that comes in from eg. an API, and so can't infer types from it.

No, that's not right at all. TypeScript allows you to determine the exact type of an object in any code path through type assertions and type guards.

With TypeScript you can get an any instance from wherever, apply your checks, and from thereon either throw an error or narrow your any object into whatever type you're interested in.

I really do not know what leads you to believe that TypeScrip cannot handle static typing or input validation.

Energy efficiency is important relative to other distribution methods.

The point is that energy efficiency is only one factor among all other. For example, it makes little difference if you blindly tag a 80% efficiency tag on a EV if afterwards you have to waste twice the energy to cart along a massive battery.

If the efficiency is half that of electric, you can power half the cars you could with electric with existing energy supplies.

The point that you're missing is that said cars are also far heavier (the battery on a Tesla Model S weighs half a ton alone which contrasts with Toyota Mirai's 40kg fuel cell), which requires far more energy to move around. What matters is how much energy you actually waste while driving, because that's where all the energy is going.

Hydrogen hasn't been adopted because it is expensive, dangerous, difficult to store and not as efficient as electric.

I disagree with any of those points, specially as some of them like the safety scaremongering are far-fetched, as they aren't really grounded on the real world.

The critical difference between EVs and hydrogen was that EVs benefitted from a fantastic marketing and PR push, investment in infrastructure and R&D effort from private companies pushing EVs that was able to budge the status quo and made them acceptable to the public in spite of their major drawbacks such as massive cost, autonomy restrictions, and long charging times.

This foot-in-the-door was further compounded by the way some states decided to invest heavily in EV subsidies and public infrastructure, which was completely absurd, unrealistic and politically impossible in the recent past.

EV's recent mass adoption acceptance is not a technical feat but a social and political one which happened to leverage a specific technology.

Modern vehicle weigh multiple tons, what's a half-ton battery really matter?

The Tesla Model S weights about 2100kg.

The Tesla Model S battery weights about 540kg.

This means that a 1500kg car is forced to pack an additional 540kg to be able to store energy. That's an additional 30% of the mass that you need to accelerate and brake.

People do care about that. In the very least, the battery mass is responsible for an effective drop in energy efficiency of around 30% just to cart someone around.

Finally, electric cars charge at ~96% efficiency, while hydrogen is something like 40%. I, for one, am not interested in paying 3x per mile.

This claim has little substance and credibility. For starters, if you factor in how much additional energy you need to waste just to pack along a massive half ton battery, you'll eventually realize that the effective energy waste of a EV is not much different than the hydrogen one.

I mean, the point of a EV is not to have it parked on the driveway, charge a battery, and proceed to boast about how that was very efficient. Your goal is to move around, and moving that massive half ton beast of a battery along with you wastes a lot of energy too.

Also, battery efficiency is around 80%, which naively sounds a far improvement over fuel cell's lauded 40% efficiency. However, a Li-Ion battery weights half a ton and represents around 1/3 of a EV's mass, which also requires energy to be moved around. For reference the fuel cell of a Toyota Mirai is only 40kg, less than the weight of an adult passenger. Once you do your math you'll quickly notice the effective energy use is not that different.

And then there's the cost argument. The typical back-of-the-napkin figure for how much EVs cost to run is around 500€/year. Even if you bump that up to twice the cost, that price is eclipsed by the huge markup that you're already paying for an EV. I mean, a Tesla Model S costs about a century worth of energy bills before it even gets it's tires dirty.

Playing the frugality card with the current batch of EVs lacks any credibility and is, at best, being penny wise and pound foolish.

So, they have "ground breaking tech" in a dead-end technology then? The energy losses required to power vehicles with hydrogen are much greater than losses with electric batteries (there was a recent article on HN that really drove this point home for me).

These comments show a failure to understand what does hydrogen mean and why did it popped up as an alternative to ICEs to begin with.

Hydrogen is presented as an alternative energy store that is clean, renewable, and can leverage existing infrastructure and, perhaps more importantly, consumer patterns and mental models, with little to no change.

Energy efficiency is not a concern with hydrogen, or even a relevant talking point, because the promise of being able to generate it through renewable sources means it has no implication on its carbon footprint or even pollution. Also, it was a topic that was actively being researched and thus, much like photovoltaic panels, its efficiency was likely to go up.

We also need to keep in mind that hydrogen was closest to production and mass adoption a few years ago, and we need to remind ourselves that not so long ago the idea of widespread supercharger stations and affordable electric batteries with enough storage to power a small family car was very close to a pipe dream.

In my opinion, the only reason hydrogen why hydrogen hasn't been mass adopted was the colossal investment in marketing and R&D that a few private companies made in electric vehicles in general and Li-Ion batteries in particular. In the future we might very well look back at hydrogen in a similar way that a few years ago, when ICEs were the only game in town, we looked at the EVs from the late 19th/early 20th century and we wondered why were we so close but still missed the boat.

After the report about the video of their truck driving really being it rolling down a hill and the camera was tilted.

Because a reference never hurts:

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/09/nikola-admits-prototype...

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54161343