Viewing profile — xenotux

Coding as such is seldom a bottleneck to begin with. How many times have you been in a conversation along the lines of "we have every detail of the product figured out, but we need…

> There's been a strong theme recently here on HN of confusing programming (the act of writing code to meet specifications) and Engineering(the writing of specifications, and the o…

Nah. Every company has its lore about what makes a good candidate and they try to test for that. The lore is often rubbish (as in: there's often little correlation between intervie…

> One great piece of advice and informal mentor gave me long ago is that there is no information in a rejection. I mean, there might be, in two ways. Sometimes, you just mess up in…

It's moving in the right direction, but I'd still say that CSS has more quirks and misbehaviors than the common subset of JS...

So... how is it useful? You're trading one oracle for another. Either of these oracles can be manipulated or compromised. I think one could argue that it's more elegant from the po…

I've been in engineering, TLM, and management roles in multiple companies. In terms of output, TLMs are not held to the same standard as full-time engineers at the same level, peri…

Look, I'm trying to describe reality; you seem to be expecting me to defend it. But briefly: > Inevitably because why? Because proven, effective managers are always in short supply…

> Role power is by far the least effective. To be frank: it sounds nice, but I don't think that's really true. It's the power of "who's going to decide my promotions", "who is goin…

In big FAANG-style workplaces, I don't think that middle managers without the TL- prefix have the kind of influence or leverage you're talking about here. It changes at VP level, b…

The original ethos was that you didn't want the company ran by MBAs, so you wanted to build your management team by tapping into talented engineers. Of course, this can backfire in…

TLM roles are a trap, but not in that sense. There's no expectation that you do two jobs at once. It's just a way to ease unsuspecting engineers into management. If you don't suck …

I'm surprised this is aliased to char*, not const char*. The benefit of the aliasing is convenience, but the main risk is absent-mindedly passing it to a libc function that modifie…

> Toxic expert here! I hate when blog posts try to teach complex subjects. It's almost always a non-expert doing the teaching, and they fail to do it accurately. This then causes 1…

Such is the curse of blogging: when writing a series of posts, authors naturally assume that the readers are as engaged and as familiar with the previous discussion as they are. In…

I don't think there's anything that would put some new, esoteric math concept in your mailbox every week, although there's plenty of books that cover recreational mathematics in an…

You can say that about 99% of the tech that people use today. Windows and MacOS don't serve you. Your browser doesn't serve you. Heck, Hacker News doesn't serve you - it serves a b…

> I don't understand why we would ever want an agent to buy stuff for us. Why not? Offload the entire task, not just one half of it. It's why many well-off people have accountants,…

There is a downvoted comment that reads "ah yes the totally new math of exponentiation". The snark is uncalled for, but that's actually the essence of this article: it talks about …

The main difference between democracies and secular autocracies isn't that they have a vastly different approach to run-of-the-mill moral vices, such as prostitution or porn. It's …

I think a simple way to take emotion out of this is to ask if a computer can beat humans at math. The answer to that is pretty much "duh". Symbolic solvers and numerical methods ou…

> While the park trees contained lead isotopes normally associated with air pollution, the street trees had isotopes found in lead water pipes, which were made with metal from geol…

> I think it's fascinating to follow her trajectory. I think it's a lesson that we all consistently fail to apply to ourselves. It is so pervasive on social media - HN included - y…

> What's the point of surveilling the movements of average citizens' money? The most important is taxation. People pay their babysitters or gardeners under the table, or transact w…

Eh? With the "anonymous" models that we're pushing for right now, nothing stops you from handing over your verification token (or the control of your browser) to a robot for a fee.…