Don't Take the Black Pill [video] • Hacker News Board

Re: Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

#91

Post by giantg2 » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 1:39 AM UTC

lkey wrote: post #86

giantg2 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"have a right to my own body and choices?" Not sure exactly what you mean by own body. However, under the law children generally do not have a right to their own choices and are expected to be controlled by their parents (really look at the stutes around this stuff and you might be surprised). After all, parents are held responsible for their child's actions under the law.

I am not surprised. I'm aware that the US never adopted: https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/... You have stated an unfortunate fact while hiding your value judgement. Do you think the laws you reference are correct, or no? Do you understand the difference between having a responsibility to prevent your child from law-breaking and having absolute control over their life in general ? If you hav…

The laws are to complicated to go into a full yes or no. But they mostly are. There are some things not covered by law which generally are controlled, such as the clothes, toys, and food bought for the kid.

Re: Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

#92

Post by thejazzman » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 1:41 AM UTC

foobarian wrote: post #87

hungryhobbit wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he was being a little hyperbolic, but the core concern (that programmers look competent right up until you have them write a FizzBuzz) is very real. (Source: I've helped hire lots of programmers.)

Sadly I have run into people like that. To this day I am convinced they paid someone to stand in for the interviews.

I'm probably the person ya'll are hating on. Writing code and writing code under pressure while you have a full blown anxiety attack are not the same thing. I'm lucky if I can accurately tell you what I had for breakfast once that triggers..

Re: Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

#93

Post by bluefirebrand » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 1:51 AM UTC

ianbutler wrote: post #32

spudlyo wrote: post #19

So in case you're worried about watching a 35 minute video and wishing you hadn't, here is what I think is an interesting observation that the speaker starts coming around to at around the 7 minute mark. Why does software suck? Management often has other priorities, and isn't interested in doing the hard work required to increase the reliability and reduce the technical debt in software. Engineers who care about such…

I don't think this is really entirely true. Everyone who isn't a FAANG or Frontier Lab seem to be absolutely starving for good talent. It's far more often that I hear "we interviewed someone we thought looked good and they couldn't even write a for loop, where are all the good engineers". I think you have far more leverage than you think in most places still.

> I don't think this is really entirely true. Everyone who isn't a FAANG or Frontier Lab seem to be absolutely starving for good talent

I don't think the management at most companies could identify good talent if it poked them in the eye. Good talent wants to have agency and freedom to act, the average manager wants to breathe down your neck at all moments

Re: Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

#94

Post by RazorBucksICO » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 1:56 AM UTC

SwellJoe wrote: post #90

RazorBucksICO wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The man is running a slide deck in front of his colleagues that is full of crude graphics, memes, and, I guess some anime or something. It’s an unserious talk given by an unserious person for entertainment value. He dons the jester’s hat and signals his alignment with the monied San Francisco tribe to keep his easy job in an air-conditioned environment. If not, he might suffer the awful fate of having to earn his bre…

WTF are you talking about? He made Zig and is employed by the Zig Foundation, of which he is founder and president. He can't lose his job because he ruffles feathers.

So he spends his time working on a hobby project and is completely supported by the charity of others? Do you see where I’m going with this?

Re: Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

#95

Post by SwellJoe » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 1:59 AM UTC

RazorBucksICO wrote: post #94

SwellJoe wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WTF are you talking about? He made Zig and is employed by the Zig Foundation, of which he is founder and president. He can't lose his job because he ruffles feathers.

So he spends his time working on a hobby project and is completely supported by the charity of others? Do you see where I’m going with this?

I do not. He spends his time working on a language used by and supported by several startups and a few major corporations, a language that seems heir apparent to C, at least among a lot of developers. The ICO in your name leads me to believe you're a cryptoscammer, so...seems like maybe you're not in a position to be throwing stones regarding how people make a living.

Re: Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

#96

Post by saghm » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 2:05 AM UTC

giantg2 wrote: post #79

saghm wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Kids are raised by their parents. Parents try to impart their wisdom on their kids, often in the form of rules meant to protect them. These rules are necessarily over restrictive due to simplification during various ages. These rules are also out of date with the new generation. > It's always a right of passage for children to find their own values and how they align with ideologies they have experienced or discove…

"you can forget about any chance of a healthy adult familial relationship between them." Such is life. Not everyone has a family to begin with.

You called it "normal and expected". When not everyone has it happen to them, that's not "normal and expected". (It's not necessarily abnormal, but "expected" at the very least is a stretch).

Re: Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

#97

Post by kazinator » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 2:17 AM UTC

nz wrote: post #7

fellowniusmonk wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This "theft" is not a new argument, and its always been run by people who have a vested interest in killing open-source or who aren't part of it. In 2001 I had a guy at Oracle tell me it was a suckers game to write open source code. I've had M$ heads tell me ruby was a joke that would never amount to much because you couldn't use it in a "real business". I've had bad phil bros tell me in 2004 that open source was "an…

The argument is not just "theft", and to the extent that "theft" is a part of it, it is not the most important part, not by large margin. The reason that "theft" is not a solid argument, is because people creating open-source often distribute it for free themselves. Piracy is not the issue. The issue is that all attributions get stripped away by the LLM (even in cases where it is trivial to avoid). For example, as a…

The issue isn't correctly named "theft", but rather "copyright infringment" and "plagiarism".

Attributions being stripped gives rise to copyright infringement where the license for the material requires that they not be stripped, as a condition of redistribution.

Presenting work as one's own without attribution is plagiarism.

"Theft" is a word that corporate copyright mongers have used to paint people copying a CD as hard criminals.

Re: Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

#98

Post by jonhohle » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 2:23 AM UTC

dpark wrote: post #77

ianbutler wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is really entirely true. Everyone who isn't a FAANG or Frontier Lab seem to be absolutely starving for good talent. It's far more often that I hear "we interviewed someone we thought looked good and they couldn't even write a for loop, where are all the good engineers". I think you have far more leverage than you think in most places still.

> * Everyone who isn't a FAANG or Frontier Lab seem to be absolutely starving for good talent.* I think this is largely a pay gap problem. There’s a bit of prestige involved (why work for random corp’s dev dept when you could work at FAANG) but a huge part is that most those random corps are paying way less. The best talent generally goes where the money is.

Maybe it’s not this way anymore, but VC backed companies played as good or better than FAANGs 10 years ago but it was a mixed bag of talent. I ended up at a place where the engineers hard largely come from a non-FAANG, but storied engineering culture that was different but had many analogous solutions to common problems.

The biggest problem with VC startups is their geographic concentration, but sometimes remote is available.

Re: Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

#99

Post by engeljohnb » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 2:29 AM UTC

RazorBucksICO wrote: post #94

SwellJoe wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WTF are you talking about? He made Zig and is employed by the Zig Foundation, of which he is founder and president. He can't lose his job because he ruffles feathers.

So he spends his time working on a hobby project and is completely supported by the charity of others? Do you see where I’m going with this?

The Linux Kernel is also a hobby project completely supported by the charity of others.

Re: Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

#100

Post by leecommamichael » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 2:35 AM UTC

SwellJoe wrote: post #89

leecommamichael wrote: post #28

> “I almost fell into this trap (...) I was raised by conservative Christian parents and thereby had so, so much to learn, and unlearn, in order to date comfortable and confidently. Is this engagement bait? Is this a cultural critique? What is meant to be said here? At any rate, this is the kind of speech which will alienate a lot of people. Look, I'm more on the progressive end of things, I get it, but I think this…

He shouldn't talk about his own experience? Why not? Why is it in poor taste to talk about a difficulty he went through?

When you put it that way, I have no issue agreeing wholeheartedly. He’s making an example of incel culture as it appears to him to apply to software culture. After I describe it that way, I think he didn’t have to stoke the religious right in doing so. Something that hadn’t occurred to me until your reply (thank you) was that he might not be aware he’s doing that, and that is where I may be wrong in assessing the “taste” of the messaging. But I will be firm in my initial reason to post: knowingly aggravating each other is a problem in this country. We need compassion and mutual respect. Cooling the temperature of discourse will require a surplus in patience. Maybe even faith. (I am not religious, this is not a dog-whistle.)

I was so pre-occupied with someone being offended by what he was saying that I didn't see the clear positive angles you're showing. I appreciate that.