wayne-li2

TIL ratfucker actually means something relevant to the context of the article.

I think you worded my feelings much better than I did. This is a fiery op-ed from a personal blog and not polished journalism, so I should expect some individualism on writing tone.

Whoa, I had no idea it was an actual term that’s applicable here. I thought the author was just creatively insulting the guy.

Even though I agree with what the author is saying, the tone of this article is off putting to me. There are ways to call out people for being bad at their job without resorting to “class traitor” and “ratfucker”.

That being said, Google search is 100% dead. I append “reddit” to every Google query to get actual results from people, and I don’t see it on Reddit, I give up on my query.

Huh, I would have thought the opposite. Companies at Figma size are easily able to hire talent to maintain a core part of their engineering stack. On the other hand, they retain no control of Citus decision making. Those tailwinds could easily have been headwinds if they went in a direction that did not suit Figma.

I don’t really think this is true anymore.

When a doctor messes up, their patient gets hurt. When we mess up, millions get inconvenienced. You can’t really say one is worse than the other. Take Twitter for example. You could say “so what, people can’t tweet for a while” but among those millions of users are a couple (like the Japanese tsunami twitter account) where lives can be lost if your service doesn’t perform adequately.

I work in financial services — if my bug causes a million people to lose money, what percentage of that million were on the border of suicide and my bug tipped them over the edge? Even if that number is 0.1 person / 1 million that means I can commit 10 such bugs in my lifetime before I’ve statistically taken a life.

Not saying this line of thinking is right or healthy, but it’s just not as black and white as “doctor can kill people, we can’t”.

I strongly disagree. First of all, in normal situations, you can't "threaten" a billion dollar company as an individual. The power balance there is so asymmetrical that any logical person's first thought shouldn't be "the individual has threatened the billion dollar company". Sure there might be exceptions, whistle blowing, etc. but overwhelmingly, this rule holds.

It is clear that Christian was asking Reddit to buy out Apollo. It was a business proposition. Pay me 6 months, and I'll shut off my app, which is what Reddit wants. They want more users on their official app so they can make revenue. The language he used was clumsy, but it is clear, and it was clarified afterwards. The natural easy response is to say no, we are unwilling to pay, end of conversation.

The problem here is that Reddit seems to be litigating free-flowing language from part of a conversation as part of its defense for its changes. That is not only ridiculous, but wildly inappropriate.

To be honest, reddit has all the justification it needs to do what they're doing. Do I think they're making the right decision? No. But they're free to raise prices however they want. It's their API. But a billion dollar company accusing an individual of threatening them and then continuing to litigate the words used even after clarifications have been made is indicative of a catastrophic leadership failure on Reddit's side.

No worries, I was just trying to be humorous!

That’s really cool! Thanks for sharing. Living here definitely is a bubble, and in a good way. I feel 99% safe walking my dog late at night, and I’m generally not on edge here. And I’m still able to enjoy everything SF offers.

That’s fair. I don’t think our 61B is optimized for public consumption nor is it designed to do so. I would not recommend learning DS by just watching the lectures posted on this website. But making this website public gives people at least the option, even if it is subpar. So I think we’re in agreement here!

Do you have more info on how Mission Bay privatized their services?

I live there and AFAIK I don’t pay anything extra for living in that neighborhood. Is it baked into my (high) rent and apartments pay out?

Yes? Are we surprised at the boys’ lack of ethics here?

I would say yes.

The students are learning about lists, sets, and maps. These are so common that misusing this stuff can lead to big consequences during engineering design.

Hi, I used to TA for 61B. This isn’t an online course though. You’ll notice a small detail at the top “245 Li Ka Shing” which is the lecture hall used.

Granted most students don’t attend because the lectures are diligently posted online on the website.

What’s not captured on the website are twice a week discussion small groups where one TA to 20-30 students work through problems in a group setting. There’s a lot of collaboration and interactivity here. Then there’s the once a week lab, where about 20-30 students go to a computer room and go through an interactive lab exercise.

Then, there are the projects. Every CS 61ABC course is defined by their projects. These projects are the opposite of traditional learning. And 61B has done some of the most innovative projects I’ve seen in an educational context. For example, we had one semester where students grouped up and designed a rogue-like from scratch. There was a minimum rubric, but students were given the time to be extra creative, and we definitely saw that shine. It was a nightmare to grade though, but it was experimental and cool.

So this website is just a small fraction of what the students experience. It’s really just a schedule + lecture directory.

This is the ugly side of HN in my opinion. Discussions here are usually very reasonable, except for a few subjects such as telemetry.

I guess to the hacker heads of HN, telemetry is as political as religion for regular people.

Once again, YouTube’s copyright system is harming creators, this time one of my favorite channels — EckhartsLadder. Can someone at YouTube please fix this insanity?

All the problems you listed can be solved though. In fact, HN is a good demonstration of it. Its policy decisions have largely led to one of the last bastions on the internet that still seem sane.

The issue is how a social media product can solve the problems above and be a growing, profitable company. HN does not have a direct profit motive nor does it need to grow exponentially to satisfy investors.

Personally I don’t believe it’s possible because as long as engagement is optimized, extremity will always be preferred.

I’m confused, why would you be jealous here? Aren’t you and your wife “life partners” so to speak? That means understanding what money means to each person, understanding your partner’s money goals, and working towards shared financial goal.

Honestly, it sounds like you two need to have a heart to heart on this and figure it out, because frankly, you’re behind the curve on this. And if it’s not going well you should seek counseling. It’s important for a couple to be on the same page regarding money.

You’ve presented two extremes here. With no indication of timescale either.

For example, starter projects in general should lean towards option 2 for obvious reasons. But as they grow, naturally you’re going to become distributed. You’re right that very few companies need hundreds of infinite scale, but many companies need “2” scale right?

Also, Rust is a fairly new language. The majority of companies out there are on slower languages. Are you asking them to fire all the Python people and bring in Rust developers to rewrite everything?

The issue is so complex and nuanced that discussing it without context and detail seems pointless. To be honest if anyone holds any of the above opinions in real life I’m probably just going to smile and nod and move on.

Great post! One quibble with your last point — your guide is probably most helpful to the devs that are too direct and blunt, and expect others to be that way to them.

It’s a different type of “coming”.

In the 90s, people imagined it was a few years away. But it was conceptual, like how we think about asteroid mining or Mars settlements.

Today, these concepts are proven. Waymo has been doing self driving in Phoenix. People here in SF are starting to take Cruise self driving cars. There have been successful self driving trucks that have made cross country deliveries. The proof of concept is already here. But the definition of “coming” has changed. It might not be economical or advanced enough for general availability. But the technology to do it is no longer a dream — simply a function of execution now.

Truck drivers and Uber drivers aren’t going to lose their jobs in the coming years. But these jobs are genuinely in danger in the coming decade.

I feel like half the comments here didn’t read the article and are basing their comments on a few top level comments.

After the reading the article in its entirety it is clear the author acknowledges their own faults. In the “passive aggressive ticketing instance” the author clearly mentions that it’s a misstep on their end.

The author also concludes with a possible perspective from the manager’s side.

The article is not a rant. Its tone is balanced. It does not bash on Spotify. The author does not portray themselves as gloriously right. Of course it’s a biased article, but that’s to be expected. It reads like someone’s personal blog.

Can someone help me understand this copy-paste issue?

I heavily rely on StackOverflow like most devs but I’ve never been able to straight rip something from SO that didn’t fall under the following categories:

- Extremely simple, but I missed something causing me to have to Google the error

- One-liners to short functions that do some common tasks for me, and is faster for me to copy rather than write.

- Language specific syntax for when I’m switching to a language I’m not as familiar with.

I’ve never been able to copy paste any meaningful code off of the internet. As in, code that could reasonably be significant in the project I’m working on. How would you even find code that complex anywhere? Are people genuinely upset that someone would copy simple stuff off SO instead of writing it on their own?

Correct, PAC another 5k, Super PAC unlimited or some amount too high for me to care.

It’s a great course if you’re into that. We even have a major for it — EECS, which is electrical engineering and computer science.

For pure CS majors, it should be an elective. But it was made mandatory until recently. The main complaint is that it’s intense and difficult - regular reports of spending an extraordinary time on the course per week. You can see how a lot of resentment builds up quickly.

I can confirm. After donating a similar amount, I regularly field calls from candidates (directly, not from their staff). Granted it’s usually just asking for more money, although I’ve had some interesting chats to say the least.

10k is not a lot at the presidential election sure, and maybe not for Senate either, but it is a lot of money even in House races. And for many state races.

Could I posit that your limiting factor is actually money, which prevents you from hiring more skilled people?

I agree with all of your points. I also choose to avoid companies that have an outsized negative impact on the world. Intrinsic motivations is important too. Totally get all of that.

At the end of the day, it’s all about what you want. I do think that if you want to make the biggest positive impact as a software engineer, and that is your only directive, then I believe my approach is a worthwhile option.

If you want to work at positive impact companies, Khan Academy is one that comes up in my head.

But take it from me, someone who has volunteered for civic tech organizations and have participated in ground work for political campaigns. The most positive impact you could possibly make is money.

Political campaigns need thousands of volunteers. But someone who has no skills or education can volunteer. The supply pool is giant! But campaigns need millions of dollars in order to survive. It’s way harder to raise a dollar because in order to donate to campaigns the person usually needs to have discretionary income. And to move the needle financially for a campaign, you need to be fairly wealthy.

At the end of the day, maximizing your salary and donating, say 10k (2.8k direct + 7.2k via PAC) to a political candidate that you believe will make a way bigger positive impact than working for minimum wage or free for that candidate. Because your skills aren’t being used optimally. If you take a paycut from 300k to 60k, are you still comfortable making that donation?

Anyways, my personal mantra is to maximize income at impact neutral companies or positive adjacent. And then commit to donate a significant chunk of income to positive impact organizations. Don’t know if this helps or not.

It was gone for a while but came back as CS 10 and it’s fantastic. See my earlier comment but I believe CS 10 should be made mandatory as a CS 101 course for all incoming CS/EECS majors.

61A is not a weeder course at all. It’s theoretically the CS 102 equivalent at Berkeley, with CS 10 being the CS 101 of Berkeley.

The problem is that because CS 10 is not a required course, most freshmen that come into Berkeley, many who were top of their class in high school, think “hm I can just take 61A since it’s mandatory.” It’s not entirely their fault, since Berkeley doesn’t do a very good job of advertising the CS 10 course. It’s fairly new, and there’s still a stigma around it — that you’re “not as smart” if you need to take it. The result is you have almost 2000 students every semester, and many of them are inevitably going to struggle.

I’ve sat in some CS 10 lectures (albeit while I was graduating with a CS degree and TAing CS 61B) and watched my friends do the homework. I didn’t have the luxury of taking CS 10. It’s a great way to learn how to think like a programmer. My personal recommendation is that every incoming Berkeley freshman going into CS should take CS 10, and it should be made mandatory. The CS degree only takes 3 years to complete all the required courses at a fairly leisurely pace, so there’s definitely room to add an extra requirement. Especially since now, the incredibly stupid EE16B has been dropped from the curriculum.