I think in the end we should not expect GitHub to provide the best option here. We should expect them to provide a basic option (which they do) and for sophisticated consumers to pay more for a much better option. Everyone should be shopping for code review tools!
The base LLM is absolutely a Markov chain. It gives a probability distribution over the next token, given the previous 2048 or however many previous tokens in the sequence. You can't be more of a Markov chain than that.
Or, just name your company quickly and move on. We lost a couple weeks early on to naming Matasano, and after some false starts, eventually gave up and thumbed through a list of exotic plants. By the time the book of plants had been opened, the naming premise had been accepted: we were done trying to find a semantically "fitting" name for the company. We just picked a plant with a cool name.
We ran into two "problems" down the road; first: it turns out that a "Matasano" is a "quack doctor" in South America, which we discovered shortly after hiring someone from Argentina. We quickly convinced ourselves that the irony was a value-add, not a cost.
Second, we kept getting confused with Monsanto. This sounds (a little) sillier than it actually is. A lot of our clients, particularly back in 2006-2007, were large enterprises where the staff was particularly likely to have some confusion. We had more serious conversations about renaming over the Monsanto thing than over the "quack doctor" thing.
Ultimately, we just got over it and kept plowing forward. Equity goes into your name; it usually doesn't get extracted from your name. There's some sense in picking a good name, but keep in mind that weeks of time --- which is what we were facing --- is a very steep price to pay for something that might only be marginally important down the road.
I submit that the term "Airbnb", while memorable, has very little intrinsic meaning to most people who rent out their places on Airbnb. Ebay has none whatsoever. "Heroku" was one of YC's biggest acquisitions; that name breaks one of the rules of thumb of this post (3 syllables, yet means nothing to its customers). "Stripe" and "Square" and "Paypal" are great names, but "Braintree" seems to be doing pretty well too, and if "Braintree" is OK, I humbly suggest that "Mindweasel" and "Thoughtpants" will work too.
This is a good post. All I'm saying is, be careful of the procrastinate-y issues that come up early in your company. They all matter less than execution on everything else.
Agatha Christie's quote is well-known but the exact same situation still holds today in many countries. Here in Viet Nam it is extremely common for middle income families to have a maid or nanny (or both) but not a car. The cars themselves are quite expensive. A Honda Civic is $33,000 by itself whereas a nanny (6-days a week, 10 hours a day) is $400-500/month and a maid who works 9 hours a week, i.e. 3 days a week, 3 hours each time) is $90-100/month.
So a single car not very expensive car costs the same as 5 years of a full-time nanny and part-time maid.
And that's without figuring in all the extra costs of a car, especially parking. There's not really free parking most places here. So you'll be paying for parking literally everywhere you go.
Even worse, most houses (unless they are luxury houses >$500,000 built in the last 5ish years) aren't built with a garage for a car, so you're looking at buying land, smashing down the existing structure, and then rebuilding something with a garage. And the space for a garage isn't cheap either. If you're a middle income family you're probably living in one of the capital cities and most people would probably be shocked at how expensive land is in the capital cities nowadays.
There have been many interesting threads recently about the decline of Google's search quality here on HN. There's zero doubt search results are getting worse, and that ads and spam are the cause. But Google's financial performance has been going from record to record. So there is a huge disconnect building in the market.
Each thread has had some common themes, but what's surprising is how different the problems discussed are. Here are a few of the best recent discussions:
Google no longer producing high quality search results in significant categories (twitter.com/mwseibel):
Disclaimer: I'm working on a search startup, so I have a clear bias, but one of the main reasons I am working on a search startup is because Google's results are clearly getting worse.
This and more. The Sail version of TeX is mentioned, but everything else had a usable prototype, too: An early version of Metafont in Sail, an early version of Web (called Doc, though I don’t recall what the names of the Tangle and Weave equivalents were), and an early version of Computer Modern fonts in the early Metafont language.
Though fully documented and available via anonymous FTP on the Arpanet, all of these prototypes were experimental proofs-of-concept and were completely discarded, along with the languages they implemented, with the “real” versions rewritten from scratch by Knuth (each first by hand on legal pads, then typed in and debugged as a whole.)
And you missed one more obscure but instructive example: To get the camera-ready copy for ACP Vol 2, Knuth purchased an Alphatype CRS phototypesetter. And, unhappy with the manufacturer’s firmware, he rewrote the 8080 code that drives the thing. Eight simultaneous levels of interrupts coming from various subsystem: the horizontal and vertical step-motors that you had to accelerate just right, while keeping synchronized with four S100 boards that generated slices of each character in realtime from a proprietary outline format, to be flashed into the lens just as it was passing the right spot on the photo paper. (Four identical boards, since you had to fill the second while the first one did its processing; times two for two characters that might overlap due to kerning). Oh, and you had to handle memory management of the font character data since there wasn’t enough RAM for even one job’s worth (see our joint paper).
Fun times. I did the driver on the mainframe side, so got to be there for the intense debugging sessions that used only the CRS’s 4x4 hex keypad and 12-character dot-matrix display.
The thing is: this is sort of true. Now, all electrical engineers are very familiar with transmission line theory, that's pretty much their bread and butter. And all EEs know that if you're not working with well-defined transmission lines (like coaxial cables), you need to use a field solver. 2D field solvers are often sufficient, but if not 3D field solvers can and will be used.
And then most of those same EEs, despite having just used a field solver which clearly shows that all the power is in the fields, which are in the dielectric space between the conductors, persist in using the mental model that electrical power moves in wires.
This isn't just a pedantic quibble. There are real, practical effects. If you're designing a PCB and you have two signal lines with overlapping fields, those signals are going to couple, which will create common mode current, which will cause an EMI problem. You can stop those signals coupling by making them reference different ground planes, which makes the fields no longer overlap. If you route a signal line from one side of a ground plane to the other, you have to provide a path for the fields to get to the other side of the ground plane (i.e. "route" the dielectric, generally with a ground via), because if you don't, they will find their own path anyway and you won't like the results.
If you persist in thinking that electrical power flows through wires, these sorts of effects are mysterious and only explicable through the magical black box that is a field solver. If, on the other hand, your mental model is that electrical power is in the fields, then -- surprise! -- the results of a field solver won't be so mysterious any more.
And if you have a more accurate mental model, if you can predict more or less how the fields will behave before looking at the results of the field solver, then that means you can design with the fields in mind, rather than just tweaking things until the field solver stops being angry at you, but not actually understanding why the design works in the end.
I found the responses from other EEs on youtube like Electroboom and EEVBlog disappointing. You can quibble about details of how he presented it (like, saying 1/c rather than 1m/c), but Maxwell's equations are the correct description of how electricity works, and Veritasium is absolutely correct in his core point which is that power flows outside the wires. Other models, such as lumped-element and transmission lines can suffice for many purposes but are ultimately wrong. Rather than responding towards him with hostility, perhaps they should have considered if their own mental models weren't quite as accurate as they had thought.
As a final note, the problem as presented by Veritasium can't be accurately modeled by anything less than Maxwell's equations (i.e. a field solver), but you can get most of the way with transmission line theory and tweaking it with some physical common sense. Closing the switch causes electric and magnetic fields to propagate across the gap between the switch and the light bulb, and down the two transmission lines, at the speed of light (modified by the relative permittivity). The current that will initially flow across the light bulb, once the fields reach it, can be calculated from the characteristic impedance of two parallel wires acting as a transmission line. When the signals reach the end of the transmission lines, they will "see" a short and reflect with opposite voltage; when that opposite-voltage signal reaches the switch and light bulb the transmission lines act like a short and from that point on the light-bulb receives the full current. That 1m/c delay, in particular, isn't accounted for by transmission line theory at all. The way you get that (without a field solver) is by knowing that electrical power is in the fields, which propagate at the speed of light. Since transmission line theory can't accurately model the problem in full, I think Veritasium can be forgiven for not mentioning it (especially since he was targeting a general audience).
In a world full of discrimination against trans folks, who knows how many people who would prefer being trans have failed to be identified?
But the topic is much bigger than that. You see, the ideology being pushed says that everyone who has gender dysphoria should be assumed to be trans. But a LOT of teenagers, particularly girls, go through a period of gender dysphoria when they hit puberty. What little research exists on the topic says that most of those girls will grow out of their gender dysphoria, and well-meaning attempts at gender reassignment surgery for them will backfire. However said research is highly controversial exactly because it undermines the politically correct ideology that we should take seriously all claims that physical appearance is less important than chosen gender.
And THAT is the real problem. I don't have statistics. But anecdotally I have a 12 year old with gender dysphoria. Many of their friends have the same. I personally know more children claiming to be trans at present than I've known people who were blind or missing a limb over my entire life.
A *LOT* of parents are in my boat. It is easy to find opposing ideologies about how we should deal with our teenage children. There is very little research. And people are so focused on yelling at each other that nobody dares DO more research. Because no matter what you find, you're going to get targeted by someone.
Same story for various Wordpress plugins and widgety things that live in site footers.
Google has turned into a cesspool. Half the time I find myself having to do ridiculous search contortions to get somewhat useful results - appending site: .edu or .gov to search strings, searching by time periods to eliminate new "articles" that have been SEOed to the hilt, or taking out yelp and other chronic abusers that hijack local business results.
Excellent observations. The essay illustrates what it is advocating by the generous clarity, simplicity, and accessibility with which it is written.
John Osterhout wrote what may be the best elaboration of this perspective in his wonderful book "A Philosophy of Software Design."
A couple of related thoughts from an old grizzled programmer (moi ;-), gregfjohnson.com):
Rule number one: All code must follow the Porthole Principle. The fundamental issue in programming is that we each look out at the world through a mental "porthole" that limits our field of view. We are limited in how much we can see and understand at any one time. Therefore, systems must be structured so that they can be understood completely, at all levels, even though we are only allowed to investigate them piecemeal, through our own limited and finite cognitive windows.
Abstraction is the essential tool that allows us to create systems of arbitrary size and complexity. A beautifully designed abstraction is easy to understand and use. It is so trustworthy that you don't feel any need to worry about how it is implemented. Finally, and most importantly, it enables you to reason with rigor and precision about the correctness of the code you are writing that makes use of it.
Then, one day, after 12 hours chasing a race condition bug, you learn that when you expand objects from console.log, it shows you the current value of properties and not the values at the time of the console log. Because the values are evaluated when you click on the arrow.
Then you quit web development and start a new career.
We used this a couple times at Sandstorm back in the day. At the end of the interview the candidate would play Factorio cooperatively with the team for a while.
I think it is remarkably effective at identifying the kinds of skills and personality traits that a software engineer actually needs to have in day-to-day work. You can find out if someone is self-directed, how fast they work, whether they produce clean designs or spaghetti code, whether they are good at cooperating or tend to go off on their own, etc. Some people will just sit and watch and do nothing unless instructed... that's bad. Some people will build stuff, but with obvious efficiency flaws and "bugs"... also bad. Some people identify what needs doing and get it done effectively but without trying to be perfect... that's good. Factorio essentially compresses real-world work patterns into a shorter time period, giving you the chance to see how someone works in the space of a couple hours. I don't know anything else that does that.
But, obviously, it's problematic. A person who has played the game before will have a big advantage. A person who doesn't play video games at all will have a big disadvantage. For these reasons, I don't think I could seriously recommend this approach be adopted more widely.
But then, I don't know of any approach to interviewing that I think is fair. Everything has problems:
* Regular interviews bias towards people that are charismatic, not effective.
* Coding interviews bias towards people who can code under pressure with someone looking over their shoulder, which is almost nothing like real-world coding.
* Puzzle-y algorithms questions identify people good at clever solutions but that's hardly what most people need to do day-to-day when coding.
* Take-home assignments bias towards people who have lots of free time, and still don't really tell you how that person works with others.
* Looking at GitHub history biases against people whose lives are too busy to code in their free time (e.g. maybe they have kids) and who weren't lucky enough to have a previous job that touched a lot of open source.
* Looking at past work experience misses brilliant junior programmers coming out of college.
* Don't even think about using ML for this, that doesn't solve biases, it just hides them in a black box.
I feel like this topic has been discussed a lot already, but I think it's important to keep pushing back against useless wasted man-hours like this effort is.
I live in a country that was almost entirely enslaved by foreigners for ~700 years. I've discussed this rename with dozens of engineers in my country. Without exception, every single one of them thinks it's completely ridiculous. We need to keep voicing these thoughts so that decision-makers in large companies have a chance to hear us and realize that they should focus on more useful issues instead.
My work sent out a memo today regarding what pronouns I'm allowed to use. We're in the middle of a cultural revolution, and the current trend seems to be for rapid acceleration rather than moderation.
I'm leaving San Francisco next month also. I just see no reason to continue living here. The weather is nice in California, but the city is so mismanaged it's a joke. The homelessness has been an issue for decades now and local politicians always talk about it, but what do they actually do to help? I genuinely have no clue where the high taxes go. I just find it so ironic that San Francisco is a bastion of liberalism, yet in Tenderloin every day for decades tech bros have stepped over needles and homeless people on their way to make their 200k a year. Why didn't they build more houses here? Oh, the views would be spoiled! Right. People can continue shitting in the street then. We don't mind that view.
I've been following Tether for quite a long time. I have no absolute proof it is a scam but the writing is on the wall. Here are some facts.
- The current Market Cap of USDT is 34 Billion Dollars. It was 4B this time last year. Since the value is pegged this means there has been an influx of cash of 30 B into this shady company in the last year alone. Who invested this money? We have no idea since Tether doesn't disclose, but we're supposed to believe all this money entered USDT even with the red flags we see.
- There's a correlation between Tether printing new USDT and the Bitcoin Price.
- There's no way to transfer USDT into USD. The few exchanges that say they offer withdraws actually don't if you go and try.
- Daily volume of transaction is in the 100 B mark. Twice that of Bitcoin and 3 times Tether daily volume this time last year.
- BitFinex is included in the NY decision because it's proven now that Bitfinex and Tether are operated by the same people. Note that a few years ago this was not only undisclosed but actively denied by Tether.
- Tether initially told its investors it was 100% backed by dollar reserves and that it would be subjected to constant audits. The audits never happened, and they eventually conceded only ~70% was backed by "short term cash reserves".
My conclusion is that the folks at BitFinex came up with a new currency, printed billions of it and used it to wash trade against itself and other crypto, creating an artificial demand that drove the prices up. It's textbook Ponzi scheme and will inevitably come crashing down, killing Tether, BitFinex and a chunk of the Crypto Market.
Crypto folks will counter argue that people has been saying this for years but Tether is still chugging along and crypto is healthier than ever.
Personally I won't touch any crypto with a 10 foot pole until this thing blows over. If that means missing out on a lot of possible gains so be it.
Please, for the love of anything meaningful, read a book about negotiation before trying to sound this stuff out.
If you accept the term "location based pay," you have basically handed your wallet to the "wallet inspector," and you are being hustled. It's just like "policy," or "pay scale," they are utter bullshit if you have something of value. The media people who write articles about whether "location based pay, is it good?" are literally just 20-something bloggers with zero life experience trying to get published, and their editors and publishers have a stake in promoting the idea that your work should be cheaper.
If you want to pay me based on location, I'm going to charge you based on location, because I know what kind of prima donnas people from the bay area <or insert region> can be and I charge a risk premium for having to put up with their nonsense. If that sounds offensive, why should using their perception of my housing situation as leverage be legit?
If you are looking at a role, you need a clear idea of the total comp you are looking for as a part of your own plan for your life. Comp isn't a reward for good behaviour unless you are a prisoner begging guards for privileges or an animal doing tricks for treats - it's earned from value. When an HR person tells you what they want to pay you, say, "that's interesting, thank you, here is the data I have on what this role looks like from sources x, y, z, and these are the criteria I am using to evaluate the total package value." Those X, Y, and Z sources and references are things I've written about here before.
Please, please, please, if you write code, read a book on negotiation.
I think this article (of sorts) is definitely helpful for onlookers to Common Lisp, but doesn't provide the full "story" or "feel" of Common Lisp, and I want to offer to HN my own perspective.
Disclaimer #1: I've been working professionally as a Common Lisp programmer---not as a contractor!---for the past decade. I have a vested interest in the language and hiring for it.
Disclaimer #2: I am going to ignore commercial implementations of Lisp here, which provide very useful and advanced features, like GUI development, a user-friendly IDE, paid support, etc. [1,2]
So let's get started. Common Lisp's best feature is that it allows you to be insanely productive at the "raw programmer" level. You can write, edit, and debug code very quickly and incrementally, and end up with safe & performant code.
There's a price to pay: currently the best-in-class experience is still Emacs and SLIME (which come nicely packaged here [3]). As an Emacs fan, that's the best news, but to my fellow PyCharm/VSCode/vim users, it's terrible and alienating news. My colleagues who aren't Emacs users managed to learn just enough Emacs to be productive in a week, but they still frequently fired up their editor of choice in times of need.
It really is worth underscoring that the Emacs+SLIME experience truly fits Common Lisp development like a glove, and the experience, in my opinion, is better than almost every mainstream editor environment out there.
Common Lisp's worst feature is that it feels like just about everything imaginable has a catch. I don't mean "there's no free lunch", I mean that things just plainly don't feel cohesive or "100%" most of the time. To name a few examples:
1. GUIs: If you want to make a traditional, native GUI using open source solutions, you're stuck with really goofy libraries that are non-obvious to get working. As the article points out, you have options. Lisp actually has a renowned framework called CLIM, but I consider the open-source implementation McCLIM [4] currently only principally useful to hobbyists and hackers.
2. Deploying applications: Almost every implementation of Lisp has some way to create an executable. But very important aspects that real people care about in production are missing, inconsistent, or poorly documented. For example, almost no open source implementations of Lisp have first-class support for signing binaries on MacOS. Almost no open source implementations have a "tree shaker" to remove unnecessary cruft from the executable. Almost no open source implementations make building a shared library practical.
3. Libraries: Many libraries don't do even usual things people might want to do. The linear algebra library MAGICL [8], for example, doesn't at the time of writing have a way to solve the matrix equation Ax=B. This isn't due to laziness of the authors or lack of foresight, but rather that it's a library that's just not used by enough people to see regular, high-quality contributions as an open-source project. I'm sure MAGICL solves problems for the authors, but the authors haven't taken it upon themselves to make a general, useful, and quasi-complete library for matrix programming in Lisp.
These examples are just examples, maybe not even the top examples.
There are many things I wish for Common Lisp, but there are two I think I wish most.
First, I wish Common Lisp implementations put in work so that they could play nice with other programming languages. Google [11] recently came out with support for protobufs in Lisp, which is nice, but I feel something deeper is needed. I think Common Lisp implementations supporting building C ABI-compatible shared libraries would be an insanely big step forward; it'd mean that Lisp could feasibly used by every language out there. Right now, the closest we've got is Embeddable Common Lisp, an implementation of Lisp which makes embedding Lisp within C relatively painless, but as usual, it has many catches [12].
The way I've coped is to produce stand-alone command-line applications, or to build servers with HTTP APIs. But it feels icky, especially if you're working with Python programmers who want to `import` stuff and not run servers just to get some code to work.
Second, another thing that I constantly hope for in the Lisp world is for more "hyper productive" programmers to join it, or programmers whose livelihood depends on it. Of course, since Lisp is used by hobbyists, you see tons of hobbyist code. To be sure, a lot of this hobbyist code is perfectly fine. Usually it works, but it's just a tad incomplete. However, in my opinion, the worst thing about hobbyist code is that it usually doesn't do something useful.
What does "useful" even mean? I won't claim to be able to define this term in a one-size-fits-all fashion, but "useful" to me is about getting practical computing work done. The further away from being concrete the library is, typically the less useful it is. For example, a typical Lisp programmer will have a penchant for writing a domain-specific language for parsing binary files (cool!), will open-source that code (cool!), but then nobody---including the author of said library---will actually use it to, say, write a parser for GIFs [5]. When somebody does come along to write a GIF parser, they're likely not going to use this general binary parsing framework, but hand-roll their own thing.
In Lisp, it seems popular to solve meta-problems instead of problems, which is partly due to the fact that Lisp lets you think about problems at very high levels of abstraction using its advanced object system, the meta-object protocol, and macros.
(One of my biggest "pet peeve" projects in Lisp, second only to "utility libraries", are documentation generator libraries. As soon as somebody figures out that documentation strings can actually be programmatically queried in Lisp, they invariably write a baroque "generator" that spits out HTML. I've never, not a single time, ever, used a documentation generator for doing real, paid work. I think one Lisp programmer I know uses it nicely is Nicolas Hafner, aka Shinmera, who uses a documentation generator simply to augment his long-form documentation writing. Staple [9] is one example library of his, where you can see some generated documentation at the bottom.)
"Useful" also has to do with how a library is consumed. In the Common Lisp, a library like this [6] is typical. It's a bare page (be it on GitHub or otherwise) that provides no examples, no indication of dependencies, etc. Not all libraries are like this, but you run into it frequently enough.
The Common Lisp ecosystem lacks a certain "go-getter" philosophy, needed to forge through "boring" work, that some other language ecosystems seem to have. To cherry pick one example, though I don't use it, Zig [7] comes out with interesting stuff all the time that's genuinely useful. Andrew Kelley, its main developer, is putting tons of hours into getting details around deployment right (e.g., cross-compilation). Little about Common Lisp prevents a motivated person from making equally productive-enhancing strides with the language, but I find that either (a) the interest isn't there or (b) the interest is there but the interest is for developing weird, esoteric stuff in Lisp.
(My favorite example of a "productive stride" that happened in Lisp is the following. For context, people talk about all the time how difficult it would be to port a Lisp compiler to a new architecture. I myself have clamored for documentation on how to do it with SBCL. But, out of nowhere, some grad student named Charles Zhang came out with a port of SBCL to RISC-V. Not only did he port it, he's maintained it with 100s of new commits, making it more performant and less buggy [10].)
Common Lisp is an amazing language purely from a practical point-of-view. As I said, to me, it's bar-none the best and most productive language to use if you want to "sit down and write code". The implementations of Lisp, like SBCL, are marvels. Lisp code, once you write it, will work forever (seriously, decades). The #lisp channel on Freenode is nice and helpful, and there are so many amazing people in the community. In Lisp, it's seamless to inspect assembly code and work with the world's most high-level, meta-object systems all at the same time. But the ecosystem mouthfeel is still off, and Common Lisp would greatly benefit from programmers obsessed with making the language more useful to themselves and others today.
[12]: Poorly documented, performance isn't very good, it's maintained by essentially one person, the rituals needed to use ECL-built libraries are more extensive than necessary, build times are insanely slow, ...
HN has always had productivity articles, but I've noticed some particularly good procrastination ones in the past few months [0]. I think this is another excellent addition, one that really examines the problem and goes beyond "break it into manageable chunks" or "work on it for just ten minutes." For many, even those standard tactics are not enough, you really need to examine the most discrete and atomic feelings of discomfort that cause procrastination.
The OP says "The most favorited articles by the top 10k most active Hacker News members." How was "most active" defined? (Edit: oh I see - the users who post the most comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24352688). It's an interesting list, and it never occurred to me that by counting the top favorites of different subsets of users you might get quite different interesting lists.
I got curious about what the global most-favorited would be. Here are the top 50. The first column is the fave count. It's interesting how many are Ask HNs, i.e. text posts with no external URL. Sorry that the item ids aren't clickable:
836 19087418 Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?
783 16745042 Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?
685 16775744 Ask HN: How to self-learn electronics?
581 21332072 Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
554 21581361 Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?
510 18588727 Ask HN: What are your “brain hacks” that help you manage everyday situations?
510 20264911 Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?
506 22786853 Ask HN: What are your favorite low-coding apps / tools as a developer?
472 15919115 Machine Learning 101 slidedeck: 2 years of headbanging, so you don't have to
470 23151144 Ask HN: Mind bending books to read and never be the same as before?
463 20916749 Questions to ask a company during a job interview
461 22299180 Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building projects?
454 23092657 Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life
448 23904000 Systems Design for Advanced Beginners
447 22400375 Mathematics for the Adventurous Self-Learner
444 23588896 Teach Yourself Computer Science
441 21585235 Basic Social Skills Guide (2012)
439 17238135 How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team
439 22105229 Tricks to start working despite not feeling like it
432 16493489 Machine Learning Crash Course
425 24351073 Most favorited Hacker News posts of all time
422 22310813 Gears
421 20985875 The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
416 19490573 A guide to difficult conversations
409 24120275 How to stop procrastinating by using the Fogg Behavior Model
409 21324768 Ask HN: What's a promising area to work on?
406 23229241 Linux Productivity Tools (2019) [pdf]
398 21712194 Ask HN: Best book / resources on leadership, especially for tech teams?
396 12702651 Ask HN: What is your favorite YouTube channel for developers?
381 18805624 Algorithms, by Jeff Erickson
374 21536789 Build Your Own React
372 18104814 Ask HN: What are the best textbooks in your field of expertise?
369 23170881 Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?
366 22226380 The missing semester of CS education
365 23053981 Medium-hard SQL interview questions
364 17163251 The Importance of Deep Work and the 30-Hour Method for Learning a New Skill
363 22276184 My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file
360 22235279 Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?
360 13660086 Ask HN: What are some books where the reader learns by building one project?
358 14486657 Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?
358 15602538 Ask HN: Where can I find high-end stock images for a website?
356 19900955 Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into
356 20044876 Advanced Data Structures (2017)
355 19264048 Immersive Linear Algebra (2016)
355 12713056 Ask HN: How to get started with machine learning?
353 23339830 Tools for Better Thinking
353 21900498 Ask HN: Best books you read in the past decade?
352 20254057 Startup idea checklist
347 17999659 Ask HN: Favorite teachers on YouTube?
347 23276456 Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?
This is not exactly cherry picked, but I did play with the prompts till I could get GPT-3 to write an article in the first person in response to the article, instead of other random output. This is the first successful attempt.
But seriously, those are just a fraction of the amazingness I've experienced. I don't even think the 2D platformer Portal clone is in that list - that was amazing.
The problem, though, is not that trans-rights groups have captured the public mindset. Nor that Mrs. Rowling would be a bigot.
The main problem is that the the public debate climate has reduced to cultural revolution level of intolerance. It's shocking to the depths the west has sunk to.
Simple slogans and actions are offered as a solution to a set of complex problems, and if you don't agree to the message, you are labeled obviously as a Enemy Of The Moral Righteousness and must be flamed to death.
This is exactly what the public debate climate was in the soviet states. There is only one accepted truth. And if you question the truth, then you must be a bad person in every other way as well. Since, we all know, there is only right and wrong, black and white, true and false. We know the real world is a simple place, where it suffices to repeat the party line and enjoy a blissful existence knowing you are on the right side of history and anyone who opposes you must be wicked through and through. Or, just, anyone trying to debate anything, really. Since you need opposing viewpoints to form a debate.
I'm glad people like Rowling don't stand down in front of the hivemind firing squad but try to maintain the climate of open debate alive.
Most people probably won't care one way or the other, but it saddens me our public debate channels give the loudest voice to intolerance and mob mentality driven attacks.
Yes, most tests are bad, but there is a quick advice that improves them immensely: never ask questions that are not at least Level 3 in Bloom's taxonomy of knowledge: https://blog.testdome.com/blooms-taxonomy/
I cofounded a technical screening startup, and despite our efforts to educate our customers that enter their questions on our platform, 95% of their custom questions are bad questions. They tend to ask trivia questions, that can quickly be googled, instead of asking work-sample questions (which we at TestDome.com prefer). I think they learned that from years of paper tests in school, it is very hard to unlearn.
Just to give you an idea, for testing web programmers we suggest questions where you need to find bugs in HTML code (https://www.testdome.com/questions/html-css/inspector/17629), while our customers would ask questions like "What does CSS stand for?"
