riizade

Same, but games run uncompressed assets as an optimization measure to trade disk usage for CPU usage, depending on which is the bottleneck for their particular game (iiuc)

So it'd be surprising to me if a developer chose to use uncompressed/lightly compressed assets, and compressing them caused performance to increase; because you're intentionally choosing the tradeoff in the opposite direction the developer did

Of course, there are game developers that are less technical and may not have knowingly made that tradeoff in which case all bets are off, but the games made by those developers tend not to be the kind that require beefy machines to run at 60fps+

Can you elaborate on Unity wasting disk space on gigabytes of zeroes?

How did you discover that? Is it intentional on Unity's part? Percentage-wise, are we talking 2% of a 100GB game, or 50% of a 4GB game?

I can't find anything about it online.

I got a light interrogation as a US citizen. For the record, I have Global Entry, NEXUS, and TSA Pre-Check.

I handed the border agent my US passport and the conversation went like this

"why are you entering the country?"

"I live here"

"do you have legal status in the US?"

"I'm a citizen, you're holding my passport"

"have you ever overstayed a visa in the US in the past?"

"I was born here, so no"

"do you intend to do any work while you're in the US?"

"yes, I'm a US citizen and I have a job"

I didn't get pulled off to the side or anything, it was just standard questioning at entry processing when flying in, but it was just bizarre

the border agent kept looking me up and down suspiciously like I was hiding something, but he had my passport the whole time

even when I got questioned on my way to Canada (I would've stopped me too), they were much nicer about the whole process, it's an air of "we're just double checking cuz making a mistake here would be real bad, but as long as everything's legit, no worries, I hope you have a nice stay in Canada"

entering the US the vibe is "you're a violent criminal and it's my job to ask you questions until you slip up and admit that fact, the US is magnanimous for allowing you to touch our great country's land with your disgusting feet, and you should remember that every day you're here or we'll detain you so you won't forget again"

I'm a little surprised you've only had positive experiences.

normally, you can visit the PRC for 15 days, you're railroaded throughout your whole trip, and you're required by law to stay in a select few hotels where the staff speak English anyway

Huh?

The tourist visa is I believe 90 days per entry (as it is for most countries), and valid for 10 years. There has been no foreign guest licensing requirement in the PRC since 2002, as far as I can tell, and even then it didn't seem to be a "select few" hotels, it was something any hotel could get, but probably a lot didn't because international tourism to China wasn't as big then. Some hotels will refuse foreign guests, apparently, but that's the hotel's individual decision and it doesn't seem to be widespread.

I know several non-Chinese people who have traveled extensively throughout China via simple tourist visas, there were no restrictions as far as I could tell, and I've never heard of any.

Are you confusing the PRC with the DPRK?

Wait, huh? The article is light on hard figures, but the homicide rate in Sweden doesn't seem to have changed much at all in the last 30 years

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5?location...

The only real numbers the article gives are > About 62,000 people are linked to criminal networks in the country, police say.

which says... nothing? What does "linked to" mean? are those people that buy illicit drugs off the street? are they "linked to" a criminal organization?

Last year, 363 recorded shootings led to 53 deaths across Sweden, according to police.

Absolute numbers, without per capita context (given above) this is not useful.

In 2022, the gun murder rate in Stockholm was roughly 25 times higher than in London.

This is _gun_ murders specifically, but for all murders, London is comparable to Sweden overall (~1.3 per 100k population), I wasn't able to find numbers for Stockholm specifically, but yeah, if I die I die, I'm not sure I would particularly care whether it was due to a knife or a gun.

Overall, seems like another overblown narrative that doesn't reflect reality to me. Violent crime just doesn't seem to be trending upward in Sweden.

Curious if others have information that counters what I've found.

Edit: sorry, Wikipedia was the source for London homicide rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_London

I don't have anything insightful to add, I just want to add my voice to the choir of people saying that after using sum types, working in a language without them feels unnecessarily restrictive and awkward.

If this feature were implemented, it would take C# to a top contender for a daily driver language for me, and would make me feel a lot more confident in choosing it for projects where the C# ecosystem is already present, such Godot's C# version.

I'm really excited about this proposal, and I don't know anything about C#'s development pace, but I'll be watching from the sidelines hoping I can use union types in production in 2025 or so.

As a very junior developer, I once worked on a chatbot for purchasing flight tickets. You know the ones, the annoying windows that pop up when you're trying to navigate a (hopefully) otherwise perfectly usable site, the ones that are intended to replace customer support but are fundamentally unable to, the ones that you'd never trust with a transaction worth $5, much less one worth hundreds or more.

Even if this project were a rousing success by the company's definition, it would have ended up a useless chatbot used by very few people but frustrating many more.

Instead, one day we're chatting about the project, and when talking about strategy for implementation, the product manager pushes back on working too early on integrating with the actual API calls to purchase tickets. I thought having a proof-of-concept for the actual functionality would be important, so if we ran into roadblocks we could ask other teams to provide us alternative APIs with enough notice at the beginning of the project rather than the end.

The product manager said that we couldn't afford to do that, because if we did, we'd lose.

I said "what? lose? what do you mean?"

It turns out, our team was one of 3 teams competing to make the same project. Leadership wanted to make 3 fully implemented, separate systems, and the one they liked best would go live, while the others would wither and die.

It also turns out, that our team was way behind because although we had some logic set up for handling edge cases in conversations (not great by any stretch), another team with no backend developers had a beautiful UI concept that handled only exact strings with no room for deviation on the user's part. This UI concept demoed well, of course, so they were the favorites.

It was made clear to me by the team's technical lead that nobody up the management chain (including our team's direct manager) had ever written a line of code before, or knew what the difference was between backend and frontend, or a tech demo that presents well versus a working product, and so wouldn't be able to differentiate a finished product that actually purchases tickets from one that runs entirely on the frontend and talks to nothing (until launch day, of course).

I was already on edge because I had been asked to test API integrations by using my personal credit card to purchase a real flight ticket and refund it because we didn't have test cards or even corporate cards we could use.

So I resigned within a week, and my manager was furious.

This story happened probably more recently than you're thinking.

That was the most useless project I've ever worked on.

Same.

Expedia asked me to test production ticket booking flows using my personal credit card.

It was a flow where you can use a special code to book a refundable ticket. I asked what happened if I forgot to refund it in time, or if something went wrong.

"Don't forget!"

I asked for a corporate card to test with and was denied. I refused to ever input my personal card. I think the team lead said I could use his, but I refused to use anyone's actual, real card.

I was young at the time, and I'm glad I saw the red flags quickly enough and left.

Tangentially related, but I don't understand.

From light googling, a quick-release steering wheel seems to be a steering wheel that you can simply remove by pressing a button.

So from your post, the implication seems to be that if someone has one, and their car is rear-ended, the steering wheel just comes off into their hands and they can't control their car.

Is that right?

Why would someone purchase a quick-release steering wheel? What does it help them accomplish?

This particular question doesn't seem like a fallacy to me.

I, like most people intuitively answered b). Given the explanation on the Wikipedia page I went "oh, of course, yeah", but then I thought about why I'd answer b) given that I'm fairly familiar with basic probability.

If you give me two options and ask me to pick between them, my brain is usually going to assume it's not a trivially true problem.

Language needs context for any sense to be made of it.

As a result of the above, reading the question, the intuitive reading makes the answer choices

a) Linda is a bank teller (implicitly, a bank teller NOT active in the feminist movement)

b) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

This question is one of language, context, and interpretation, not of people failing to understand basic probability.

I suspect that if you prime people to excise interpretation of the question by presenting it as the following, the majority of people would guess correctly:

---

"Consider the following two statements:

1) Linda is a Bank Teller

2) Linda is active in the feminist movement

Which is more likely?

a) 1

b) 1 ^ 2"

The previous point is very reasonable, and I think your response is overly flippant and confrontational.

I've had coworkers hounded by managers from unrelated teams because my coworker wasn't working fast enough on a feature that was important to their team. They made assumptions about how many different tasks my coworker might have had assigned to them.

They were juggling like 3 or 4 fairly important features/fixes for various parts of the organization at the time because our team was (in my opinion) understaffed.

But of course, each of the relevant managers can only see "didn't satisfactorily complete my fix in the expected timeframe", and then perf review comes back and collates that info to "doesn't complete tasks on schedule" without taking a step back and recognizing that this is a failure mode of planning where one engineer was responsible for way too much stuff with no reasonable ability to push back.

At the same time, of course, engineers were getting promotions for doing exactly one thing well, which is as it should be.

There are lots of lessons in here, one of which is very likely "push back on work that causes you to overburden yourself", but I'd argue another important lesson is that you just don't see what others are working on. I'd be surprised if there were more than one or two people in your org who knew every task you've completed in the last 30 days, and to me it seems unreasonable to expect that you can make that assessment of more than 5ish people in your immediate radius.

But while we're throwing ad hominems for the fun of it; I'd rather have a bunch of "bloaters" on my team than the one person who is convinced that they are one of the golden few producing value, and everyone else is a lazy freeloader. I've worked with that type of person before and it's awful. It is rarely the case that they are _actually_ producing an 2-3x the value of other engineers, it's much more likely that they're just reducing morale and causing internal conflict while building some small piece of the pie and assuming that's the majority of the work.

Like someone who builds a button that says "delete my account" and says "I built the delete account feature" while not recognizing that there are a ton of people on the database teams that made the feature possible without performance hiccups or leaving dangling foreign keys.

There are a lot of assumptions baked into your position.

1. The employer pays for your time, not your expertise or output.

It'd only be stealing from the company if the company cares about hours worked over output. If we explore this concept in a theoretical sense it's clear that it doesn't hold up.

You have two candidates One candidate has 20+ years of experience doing the exact thing you want them doing. This candidate says they'll work for you for $100k/yr, and they'll work 10 hours a week, complete all the relevant tasks, and very very rarely cause catastrophic errors or user-impacting bugs.

The other candidate is fresh out of school and says they'll work 50 hours a week. They'll complete the same amount of work as the first candidate, but they'll write more bugs, there will be more planning mistakes causing feature delays, and there's a reasonable chance of catastrophic failure due to debugging-in-prod shenanigans. They are also asking for $100k/yr.

Which candidate is better? Under the assumption that employers pay for _time_, the second candidate is better, but I'd argue most companies should prefer the first candidate.

2. More hours worked produces more or higher quality output.

There's a reasonable amount of research and practical anecdotes that disputes this recently (see companies that have gone to 32-hour 4-day workweeks with no reduction in productivity). Enough that at least, this point is seriously in doubt.

3. Twitter maybe pays a senior engineer $400k/yr under the expectation of their output for 40 hours, and if they get less it wasn't a fair deal.

This is a reasonable take, but Twitter (like most for-profit companies) theoretically has a performance evaluation system, managers, deadlines, etc. They're paying an engineer some amount of money for some amount of output. If that engineer produces that amount of output, Twitter is happy, the engineer is happy, there's no issue. If the engineer working 20 hours or less per week caused them to not meet their goals, then Twitter has the right to fire that employee. They don't, so that implies that they're happy with the arrangement.

4. The employee's salary is equal to their expected output/profit

If the Labor Theory of Value is correct, then companies derive their profits almost exclusively from the labor of their employees.

In order for an employee to "steal" from a company by under-producing work, they would have to earn more in salary + benefits than they earn the company from their work.

This is necessarily not the case (on average) in a for-profit company, because if the company makes a profit and uses those profits to grow or to issue dividends to shareholders, they have earned "_surplus value_" from the employees' labor (on average).

---

In any case, it's not necessarily true that you're wrong, but your comment was fairly dismissive and confrontational. There are a _lot_ of cultural and individual assumptions baked into how we exchange salary/wages for labor, and it's worth examining those before firing off moral judgments at one another for not working hard enough or working too much or whatever.

No. I am almost certainly an outlier, even among my peer group. No kids, taking a break from work, very few responsibilities. When I have a full time job my playtime drops, but 1-3 hours on weeknights plus large binges on weekends can keep the number surprisingly high, though.

This is mostly a matter of multitasking (which I know HN is fairly divded on).

I play games when I watch TV, and I also use games to socialize with my friends.

If an average person added up ~80% of their socialization time and all of their TV/movie/audiobook/podcast time, I suspect that it'd look pretty close to the amount of gaming I do when I have a full time job (probably fluctuates between 10-40 hours per week).

I want to echo this sentiment, albeit for different reasons.

When I have a particularly bad day as an adult, I often think back to being a child (or worse, teenager) in school forced to follow arbitrary rules by tired adults who were more interested in making sure nobody wore a baseball cap than keeping kids safe from anaphylactic allergic reactions.

When I think back to my school days and how anxious, stressed, unheard, and restricted I felt almost 100% of the time, I usually feel immediately better.

I remember being 16 in high school, and during the school day I couldn't just take a walk, because that would be truancy to skip class.

I couldn't just take a walk at night because our municipality instituted a curfew past I don't know, 10pm or something for those under 18, and a police car actively patrolled my neighborhood for violations.

I lived 18 years like that. Allowed to make no choices about where I went to school or at what time.

So now, as an adult, sometimes I just exit my apartment and walk down a city street when I feel like it, and it feels extremely empowering.

Taking a mental health day and not showing up to work, or better yet, handing in my resignation, also feel extremely empowering.

From my perspective, being a child sucked. I hated almost every moment of it, despite being reasonably popular in high school, having a close circle of friends, and never worrying about my grades.

Being an adult is amazing by comparison and I would never want to go back.

But I also understand that to some degree, that's a result of the freedom that comes with a high salary and an in-demand skillset that allow me to leave jobs and take days off with little risk. Many adults don't have that opportunity, and I totally understand how in some cases they could see their childhood as having been better due to a lack of responsibilities.

Just to echo the other children of this comment; I'm pretty lost as to the reasoning here.

I game at 1440p on a GTX 1080 from launch day in 2016. Cost is essentially no object for me, as gaming is my primary hobby and I can easily spend 60hrs/week playing video games, so the return would be more than justified in my mind.

But I haven't upgraded in 6 years because there has been no reason to. I'm running my favorite games at 144fps, and the newer super-high fidelity stuff I can run at 60fps, which is more than reasonable.

I will say that I was excited for the 40XX lineup, but at these prices I'm more inclined to hunt for a cheaper 2080 or 3080 solely for RTX functionality, but that's an enthusiast feature even for someone like me who spends a huge amount of time gaming.

I couldn't imagine giving up my access to old titles, console emulators, mods, itch.io experiments, and low-budget indie games on Steam to save a few hundred bucks in the short-term to buy a console.

YMMV if you're not paid well in a HCOL area, or if your location offers alternatives such as PC cafes.

I've been burned by this in the past (also for Italian, but also Japanese).

Do you find this issue persists even if you attempt to search the Italian internet for definitions/usage examples in Italian?

Or is this problem specific to finding information in English about Italian terms?

The difference here is between an n problem and an n^2 problem (if the site expands and wants to accumulate definitions from each language/dialect to ~several supported major languages, for example).

Anecdotally, I've found that once I got to the point where I could read Italian well enough to use Italian dictionaries when I don't understand the word, finding the information on the Italian internet has been much easier. Of course, certainly there have been dialect words and slang I haven't found (which I attribute to some of the words being in a dialect mostly spoken by older Italians who don't use the internet).

I'm also thinking quite a lot about this.

TL;DR There are many pieces to our culture and capitalist economy that make this difficult, but somewhat surprisingly to me, also many legal hurdles to formalized democratic corporate structures.

I've taken a few steps to talk to lawyers and contact advocacy/support groups for worker-owned co-ops and things, and there are a number of surprising hurdles for this type of formalized corporate structure.

In particular, whether a member is considered an "employee", an "investor", an "owner", or some combination of the three differs in jurisdictions, often at the _county_ level, not just the state and country level (experience primarily in the US).

US law gives a massive number of very specific rights to investors, making it difficult to pull someone's ownership shares if they leave the organization in some jurisdictions. Additionally, the tax implications for individuals can be extremely complicated.

Talking to a lawyer, they said one of their clients had been working for ~10 years to hire someone across state lines and hasn't managed to do it yet because of the legal complexity (some kind of employee-owned construction company in Northern California that wants workers from Oregon I think).

For the time being, my own structure is on hold, but I'm thinking of simply formalizing the structure in the equivalent of an employee handbook and putting legal ownership into some kind of blind trust then paying members at a rate tied to net income without formally specifying that it's a dividend, but I have no idea how many laws that might be inadvertently breaking.

In any case, Mondragon is an interesting case study, as they are (to my knowledge) the largest worker-owned cooperative in existence at the moment, but workers outside of their home country (France, I believe?) are not able to participate in ownership and profit sharing for legal reasons.

1912-1964 Republicans may not have been particularly right wing.

My understanding is that prior to the "Southern Strategy" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy) of the 1960s, the Democratic Party was largely right wing, and the Republican Party was largely left wing.

So San Francisco flipping from Republican to Democrat aligns pretty much squarely with the change in politics of the parties due to the Southern Strategy.

This implies that in fact, San Francisco has always been fairly left-wing.

There are a lot of ways to compare these numbers, and I think "absolute dollar amount" is not particularly enlightening among them.

On a per-project percentage basis, the parent's story wasted ~100% of the project's budget. The same number for California's unemployment fraud is less than 2% (the program totaled about $110B).

$300M was wasted in an organization that serves (completely spitballing here) maybe ~500k people among all its customer organizations? The California government serves ~40M California residents.

In any case, government waste is likely orders of magnitude more easily uncovered than even public companies' waste. And when we find out, we can lobby for change and vote for policies that adjust the process to hopefully result in less waste.

But when Coca-Cola overpays 10x for some highly-connected contracting firm to build them some shoddy CRUD software for an internal process we'll probably never heard about it due to a combination of lack of transparency and lack of reporting interest. If we do hear about it, there is no real avenue for lobbying for the change of Coca-Cola policy.

That's not even mentioning that Coca-Cola's entire existence could be (rightfully, in my mind) considered corporate waste because their products actively harm the world, which is a claim much more difficult to apply to the DMV or the California government as a whole.

I had an encounter with a rude interviewer when I was slightly younger. (Nothing egregious, your run-of-the-mill overconfident person who wrote their own algorithms interview question and scoffed at any answer that wasn't their handcrafted one, even if it had the same time and space complexity.)

Directly after that interview, I had an informal lunch with another engineer at the company, with more interviews scheduled afterward. I mulled it over during lunch, and instead of continuing the on-site interview, I thanked my lunch companion and told them that after my experience with the previous interviewer, I was no longer interested in entertaining the prospect of employment at the company.

The lunch companion seemed mildly surprised, and apologized for the previous interviewer. I went home and had 3 hours back to myself that day I hadn't planned to have.

To this day, it is one of the most cathartic experiences I've had in my career. Realizing that I had the power to walk away and exercising it, after years of having deference toward interviewer and companies drilled into my head, felt empowering.

Sometimes I think everyone should do this once, even if they're pretty neutral about the company, just to feel more comfortable standing on equal terms with a potential employer.

Now (not that I'm particularly experienced) I advise people receiving offers to ask their potential employers if they can hang out with the team for lunch, or for a day or more. I think a lot of people can put on a smiling face for a 1-hour interview and might be a lot more irritable during a typical workday. The average workplace tenure (anecdotally) is ~2 years, it's worth doing an extra day of due diligence before signing up for an org. And of course, if they say you can't meet the team or get lunch, that's signal too (generally negative).

EDIT: I should mention, the company was small enough that I knew I'd have to work with the rude interviewer at least sporadically. Your mileage may very with large FAANG-type organizations where you'll never see your interviewer again.