The elephant in the room: People who have gotten over the K8s learning curve almost all tell you it isn't actually that bad.
Most people who have not attempted the learning curve, or have just dipped their toe in, will tell you they are scared of the complexity.
An anecdotal datapoint: My standard lecture teaching developers how to interact with K8s takes almost precisely 30 minutes to have them writing Helm charts for themselves. I have given it a whole bunch of times and it seems to do the job.
> People who have gotten over the K8s learning curve almost all tell you it isn't actually that bad.
I have been using K8s for nearly a decade. I use it both professionally and personally. I chose to use it personally. I appreciate why it exists, and I appreciate what it does. I believe that I have gotten over the learning curve.
And I will tell you: it really is that bad. I mean, it’s not worse than childhood cancer. But it is a terrible, resource-heavy, misbegotten system. Its data structures are diseased. Its architecture is baroque. It is a disaster.
But it’s also useful, and there is currently no real alternative. There really should be, though. I strongly believe that there can be, and I hope that there will be.
The first time someone started writing templated YAML should have been the moment of clarity.
> My standard lecture teaching developers how to interact with K8s takes almost precisely 30 minutes to have them writing Helm charts for themselves
And I can teach someone to write "hello world" in 10 languages in 30 minutes, but that doesn't mean they're qualified to develop or fix production software.
One has to start from somewhere I guess. I doubt anyone would learn K8s thoroughly before getting any such job. Tried once and the whole thing bored me out in the fourth video.
This article assumes a lot more self-determinism than is available in practice to most people.
Beyond that many of us have been running on fumes for years, I can't lose ten extra hours every week away from seeing my family, so I can up-skill for a new variation on the same career with ultimately the same bull.
If your goal is to get a cushy high paying job you will need to make sacrifices, otherwise that job would no longer be cushy and high paying.
Some sacrifice their 20s and grind an education, career, and have no kids or spouse.
Others put a large burden on their spouse to retrain, you have to weigh the short term toil versus the amortized improvements over your career. And it is important to remember that luck plays a part as well. Some get lucky on their first go around and others never get luck in life. The only thing you can do is maximize the number chances you have for good luck.
It is important to live well within your means. Having an extra margin makes job and life changes much easier and lower risk. Many people’s expenses grow to their income and they paint themself into a financial corner. Unfortunately once you are in that spot it becomes much more difficult to get out, and larger sacrifices need to be made.
There are always options, and we have more opportunities and “stuff” than any other generation which has lived. Our stuff and jobs should serve us and not the other way around.
I have sacrificed my relationships with my friends and family for two decades and it hasn't helped advance my career beyond a normal, lowly IC.
I don't want to manage people. I would be the exact kind of manager that destroys my own will to live. A senior role would be nice, but because I don't have any social skills (all that time I spent learning all of the technical knowledge I have now had unforeseen consequences, specifically, my social skills and emotional restraint are significantly stunted.)
Stop using the argument that people need to make sacrifices. It's not true.
Well that’s just assuming alternative paths would have been much better than current situation. Looking at how life played out for many of my classmates even my lowly IC job looks quite good.
This is the point I was going to make as well. I think the article is written for high-agency people, which are rare in my experience, even in tech.
Also related: The Peter Principle: people get promoted to their level of incompetence. We think we want something but then realize the job is actually harder than we thought, so we do a bad job (or burn out).
So to the excellent points in the article I would add an introspection about the level we want to achieve and how to continue working at that level, assuming we don't hate the job.
> I think the article is written for high-agency people, which are rare in my experience, even in tech.
While your assessment about the article may be true, high-agency people are common in niche careers. Anything that is extremely high performing (emergency medicine, Wall Street trading floor, elite law firms, entrepreneurs of any kind (especially non-tech!), etc.) will have plenty of high-agency people. Plus, this board is full of high-agency people. At this point in 2024, "tech" is a pretty much meaningless term, similar to "Europe". What does it even mean? The landscape is much too wide and diverse at this point.
> And , I don’t want to assume but so have found “I can’t” attitudes don’t work for effecting change in life.
I personally subscribe to framing “I can’t” as “I will not”. Then you can view such things as the conscious choices they are. You can also avoid feeling forced to do things just because they are expected of you.
E.g. “I can’t give up time with my kids” vs “I will not give up time with my kids”.
Posting a nonsense job to accrue CVs and a call-list of details is a common tactic used by the people tasked with building the internal candidate database.
I think you have an erroneous model of how the job "market" works. Right now employers have the upper hand with tech jobs, at least junior and mid-level jobs. With so many people laid off and coming out of school competition will get most fierce at the low end. Employers don't have to care, they will get piles of applicants regardless, and can pretend to hire with online postings until it suits them to hire.
The people asking about these practices, and getting upset and indignant, either never had to search for a job before, or got their last job back when demand meant anyone who could credibly put "React" on their CV got ten offers right away. Those days have gone.
At some point an arbitrary conspiracy theory will be shown to be true; and the title of this article will have to change to read "Reducing people's belief systems through dialog with AI"...
Imagine working this hard to track down people sharing ideas, that you didn't work to produce or fund in the first place, in order to punish them for not giving you a financial cut... Companies like this are just holding humanity back.
It's not actually hard, but I agree with the point. BTW, they also charge authors ridiculous amount of money for additional services, e.g. printing colored images.
In a far (and optimistic) future such companies will be studied as examples of social parasites in schools and universities.
I think they'll be studied as universal basic income. There's so many college graduates with no skills who basically unemployable, but are still collecting a decent salary to teach things that no one wants to pay for in the first place. Our economy can evidently support a lot of people who aren't working.
The companies themselves aren't the problem, they are a symptom. The real problem is governments, especially the US government, that happily use their monopoly on the use of force to help such companies enforce such business models.
So is your point that companies are put in a position where they _have_ to take advantage of government's use of force?
Elsevier could well come up with a business model that isn't purely based on extraction, rent-seeking and legal intimidation, but the problem is that governments possess legal resources that have good-faith use cases?
Yes, the problem is that governments allow such business models. These legal resources are used overwhelmingly with bad faith and to the detriment of the society, so maybe they need to be reformed.
To be clear, I 100% agree regulation and more commonsensical legislation is fundamental to stop and punish bad players like Elsevier. I just find it gross that consolidated players invariably go their way.
Imagine working this hard to write a book. Some authors work for years. Many work for at least a year. Some academics work several years on one article.
Elsevier is very much a partner to producing and funding this work. The people who work there edit, format and distribute the work. The authors are very much partners in this endeavor and they're often paid royalties by Elsevier.
And then scummy people rationalize their piracy with lots of different stilted rationales.
If you see a poor author, you can be sure the piracy is cutting into the ability to support themselves by selling their writing. But, yeah, imagine that it's Elsevier that's holding humanity back, not pirate scum.
Believe me, the publisher still hasn't to reconcile the work and tweak it when it comes in. Have you ever tried to edit a book from N authors? Even if they're using the exact same style file, there are always issues.
But again, go start your own free journal. People have been trying it since the Internet began and the best we get are some glorfied FTP server. Yes, this is all that some branches of science need, but there's a reason why Elsevier is still in business.
elsevier isn’t paying authors a dime lmao, the authors are the ones paying here.
A publisher would never deign to pay an academic. They get “paid in exposure”, and again, actually they have to pay for that exposure in the first place. Elsevier sits in the middle and skims the authors when they publish and the readers when they read. Peer reviewers, of course, work for free. Nice work if you can get it - billions of dollars a year for running a static website and providing a latex template. You could run the whole thing off a single server and cloudflare with some http basic auth lol.
(and if you’re asking “why don’t you start your own journal then”… that’s why arxiv and others are taking off like crazy over the past 15 years.)
Elsevier pays many authors. They may not pay the authors of some of the journal articles, but they also publish many books which generate royalties that are shared with the authors.
But why does pay have anything to do with this? Why does it justify the piracy? No one is holding a gun to the head of the journal article authors. They're making their own choice to submit it. And why? Probably because they want the fame and hope that it will generate big grants in the future. The editors, typesetters etc at Elsevier have ZERO chance of getting one of those grants.
And you mentioned the other academics who review papers. Again, they're doing it of their own free will. And why? Because they want to stay on the cutting edge. They want a chance to read the papers before they're published. Why? I would think that getting their own big grants is a motivator for many of them. Maybe all of them.
I'm glad that Arxiv is taking off. But riddle me this: why does Elsevier still exist? Why are enough scientists submitting their papers? Because they're making a rational decision about the benefits. They don't want to spend weeks fussing with LaTeX. They don't want to maintain archives. Everyone in this chain is a free person making a free decision.
If you don't like it, don't read the papers. Or complain to the authors who chose Elsevier.
No, they're doing it because their career is tied to it. No published papers, reviews, editorships, means you're not going to land that academic job, you're not going to move up the ladder to full professor and you're not going to have grants (which some places tie salary to!).
Elsevier exists because of inertia. There's so much inertia left over from when paper journals kind of mattered that it's hard to change at an individual level.
Publishing with Elsevier doesn't avoid LaTeX either. Some journals mandate you use their template and you still have to proof after acceptance and correct all the mistakes the typesetting staff makes.
So in the scientists' case it's a "career", but in Elsevier's case it's money and greed? Are those scientists being paid? If so, I would submit that it's just as much about money and greed for them too.
BTW many of the scientists are better paid than the editors and proofreaders in academic publishing. But, hey, this thread is all about hating on Elsevier so what am I saying?
Funny how when Elsevier tries to enforce its copyright, HN acts like they're the devil, but when the AI training data is the subject turns into the strictest IP rights warriors I have ever seen.
They get papers for free, that were funded by the public, or other entities. Then they charge people obscene amount of money to let them download the PDF.
This is dictionary definition of "parasite".
Nobody funds most artists. Buying artwork isn't funding. They produce art from their own funding. Then a company leeches them off and trains models without compensating them.
I am okay at training models on arXiv papers. The authors consented to spread the knowledge publicly.
With such dumb-logic comments, you make it hard to take your point-of-view seriously.
Edit: The copyright of the paper _authors_ isn't being protected. They are being blood-sucked. And, before the Hub, if you emailed an author for a free PDF, if you couldn't afford it, most, if not all emailed you a free PDF.
Harvard famously said that they couldn't afford Elsevier anymore. [0]
I send my research to Elsevier for free, and surrender all my publishing rights & copyright to Elsevier to be able to publish it.
When/if it's published, I have a paltry "author's copy" in return, which I have to be very diligent while giving copies of it away, otherwise Elsevier might punish me.
At the end, it's a paper which bears my name, but I have none of the rights attached to it, and Elsevier gets literally millions of dollars from each country which licenses its publications.
Their expenses are a mere rounding error for what they charge, and they are doing this to protect their income, not my research.
Copyright infringement / ethical issues in AI is something else:
Crawlers reap & providers sell my data without my consent, and I get nothing in return, except the ability to poorly imitate my writing/art style, making my work, blood, sweat and tears I shed over these years to create that style worthless.
Both parties earn exorbitant amount of money with my work, for free, and suck me dry in the process. One at least gives me a paltry PDF file and maybe some recognition, and the other one threatens my livelihood while raising hype and applauding degeneration of human achievement and reducing it to a mere set of numbers.
Both are cutting the tree they're living on, though.
I am not familiar with the academic publishing world but it seems this should be disruptable. Why isn't there some other outfit running a WordPress site taking submissions and publishing them on much less onerous terms?
It's kind of like saying; 'Shit, why are people paying 6 figures for college degrees in US when they could just learn most of that for free'.
Because no one gives a shit if you don't have the expensive piece of parchment.
Academic publishing is similar. The impact factor and 'prestige' of the journal matters to your University, your peers, your grants panel, and yourself. However this results in 2 scenarios, when you publish in a top tier journal, a) the journal charges you a small fee and also pay-walls your work so your reach is lessened, then actively polices you sharing YOUR work without permission b) the journal charges an exorbitant fee (Nature wants $11,000 USD) for open-access publishing that allows wider distribution (but still has stipulations in some cases).
HOWEVER, some editorial boards of big for-profit journals have flipped the table and started their own not-for-profit journals with blackjack and hookers. The big one in my field was NeuroImage board creating Imaging Neuroscience - with a public letter to the owners (Elsevier if I'm not mistaken) calling out the bullshit publishing fees.
There is a reason no one gives a shit. And it has nothing to do with publishers. If a paper actually contributed meaningfully to a field it everyone would know about it.
Ironically, institutions like Elsevier justify the existence of the numerous hack academics (not scientists) that exist nowadays. Most of whom have no leg to stand on complaining about Elsevier's rent seeking when they themselves would be infinitely more useful flipping burgers.
This is already disrupted in AI at the highest stages. arXiv paper are the first class citizens there; people regularly cite blog posts, and even tweets in their papers. Rather than journals, people take conferences more seriously.
Now, some companies like DeepMind like to publish in Nature for prestige's sake. That's a different thing.
The disruption started even before the AI hype. ArXiV is not an AI focused service anyway (it started with pysics IIRC). It's FAIR and Open science and push from countries like Germany which forced Elsevier to sign open access submission and publication agreements in the first place.
This happened ~5 years before AI hype became something, and ArXiV was a force even before that.
Uh-- no one is forcing you to send anything to Elsevier. Or any other publisher.
If you don't like the terms, self-publish. The Internet makes it easier than ever.
The reason so many people use Elsevier is because they realize it's a better deal than self-publishing.
Copyright is a right that's given to YOU, the creator. If you don't want to sign it away, find your own way to distribute your work. Copyright will protect YOU from big companies stealing your hard work.
The name of the game is Peer Review, which is a fundamental pillar of science. Your blog or self-published papers are not peer reviewed.
If you found and can sustain an open access journal with a reputable peer review process, you can do a lot of business. If you're not get subverted by big houses, of course.
It's not the AI research which disrupts old publishing houses. It's FAIR and Open Science.
The biggest reason publishing houses still continue is not that they hold PDFs, but they provide peer reviews as a service. It's what it provides their prestige and inertia.
The bad thing is many open access journals keep the bar pretty low, allowing Elsevier, Springer, et. al to amplify their power. Moreover, if you are not aware, every big publishing house loves to allow ArXiV submissions even in intermediate revisions because they reduce the editorial load on themselves while raising the quality bar.
You can already cite blog posts, etc. in your publications. It's not something frown upon as long as what you cite is sound.
At the end of the day, FAIR & Open research, institutional federated and peer reviewed data warehouses and (high quality) open access publications will kill these big houses, and they already bent pretty hard with forced open access subscriptions and submission agreements done by countries.
Disclaimer: My institution also manages these subscriptions for universities country-wide.
it's not funny when you compare "profits over other's knowledge" to "share knowledge without profits", it doesn't make sense at all. potatoes and oranges
As I understand, it is not Elsevier's fault, it is the government that allocates funding and gives promotion based on number of publications made in Elsevier journals.
Some of those governments, in Europe, are also starting to mandate open access though.
In practice, for maths papers I look on arXiv, for crypto papers on iacr and so on - academics generally want their work to be read (and cited) so they're usually happy to make it available for free. There's even tricks you can play like uploading an "author version" or "preprint" if you're forced to use a commercial publisher for a conference.
If you're funded by a Horizon/EU grant, you can cost the article publication charges into your grant application in most cases. It ends up being the funder, not the author, who pays.
That also means that if the whole racket is revisited at some point, then Elsevier will get to pick on someone their own size if not bigger - and will hopefully come off worse in that fight.
Is that the best use of grant funds though really? Yes, it's not the author directly out of pocket but that money could be used towards new equipment, boosting grad student/post-doc pay, etc.
One can publish on Zenodo, universities and authors can band together and split the difference: divide the cost of hosting and / or optionally paid peer review.
I know, what I'm saying is if universities band together, they can arrange for reviewers to be paid, so that authors at all universities start a discussion when they are assigned to review for Elsevier... for free.
Sadly the publication metric is sick and made the overwhelming majority of published scientific papers, I am sadly a co-author of a paper that I know for a fact can't be reproduced because the underlying data has been stressed enough to show what the main writer wanted to show.
And it's not even the authors fault the system is like that. Research isn't just about saying "hey we found this works", but also about "we wasted 3 years, it doesn't work sadly". Yet, the second option does not lead to the same impact, because if something doesn't work it's not going to be reproduced and thus quoted.
Proof that it does not work is still an interesting result! However, I think you meant to say that if you failed to show that it works, it often also means you cannot proof that it doesn't work. And then you indeed have nothing worth publishing.
Say you're researching some material to have some behaviour. It doesn't have it.
You're not gonna be published on high impact journals with data that doesn't move the field, even though as you point out the information is as valuable.
it could be quoted by say medical insurance companies, or by patent offices, but that would mean a wider quotation scope.
a less extreme widening of scope would be just the research funds that apply or deny grants for research: suppose a flurry of papers investigates the superconductive behavior of a piece of meteorite, and you're the one to kill the buzz with your negative result, then future grant denials could cite your boring negative result.
Leetcode is about proving you can give up huge chunks of your time to learn about the current industry fads, useless to life though they may be: This is unfortunately a vital work skill in the software development industry...
I failed FizzBuzz the first time someone gave it to me in an interview...
The specific failure was that I first attempted to solve by using repeated subtraction. The guy kept asking me to "solve it a different way", or saying "there is a better way to solve this". I tried using arithmetic tables, I tried using results about base10 remainders and I even tried using one of the corollaries to Fermat's little theorem to speed it up for larger inputs... every time I was told I was getting it wrong because "there was a better solution".
In the end he pointed out that the only solution he would accept was use of the mod operator.
Since then I have actively kept a tally: I naturally use the mod operator an average of twice a calendar year, it has always been in personal life code when dealing with complicated geometry problems, the bit of code containing it almost always fails on some edgecase because at the point of using mod it is convoluted.
Honestly sounds like a bad interviewer. repeated subtraction is a good first step and I would try to push more if that was the first implementation. But If you could derive a base 10 remainder you know conceptually what problem the mod operator is trying to solve.
a % b = a - (b * a/b) /assuming a sane language with integer division, else cast a/b to int/
Figuring the above operation (or getting close) is when you should more or less pass, and That's a good point to show the interviewee what the operation is. That should be the point of an interview problem, to show the thought process, not that you know fancy tricks.
But alas, I was shown an XOR swap in an interview last week and spent 3 minutes deriving it on paper instead of 3 seconds saying "oh yeah, a => b and b => a" to a trick that I haven't seen since college some decade ago. The current market loves tricksters, I suppose.
And yes, the actual real world use of modulo is surprisingly sparse, despite easily imagining situations where you could use it.
I am highly reluctant to use type casting as a mathematical function!! I was burnt by early languages struggling with this problem... Even modern languages still have issues with this! Try running this in Python3.11
FizzBuzz is a highly artificial problem. It makes sense that people who are not familiar with it will assume that there is an elegant solution. But in the end the right approach is to be very boring and to notice that you need to check for divisibility with 15 before you check for divisibility with 3 and 5.
FizzBuzz is a problem that doesn't have an elegant solution. That is the point: to see how you approach the problem. (there are 3 possible solutions, each in-elegant in their own way)
I don't like FizzBuzz because it over-weights the interviewees knowledge of the relatively obscure modulo operator. Yes, there are other ways to do it, but the expectation of FizzBuzz is that the candidate has that "Eureka" moment and remembers modulo.
If I need a "Non-Programmer Weed Out" question, I'd rather give a problem that is 1. as easy as FizzBuzz, but 2. is just 'if' statements and loops and cannot be solved by knowledge of a particular operator (or bit twiddling tricks).
There is a method where you piece the glass together supported in investment, (a type of ceramic casting plaster), by building it up in layers. You tightly pack it and put it in the kiln, the investment holds the shape of the object when it melts.
This is a very advanced and difficult method of glass re-forming.
This is sadly not the correct site to find advice on doing naughty things with computers.