I think you have far more leverage than you think in most places still.
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.
The biggest problem with VC startups is their geographic concentration, but sometimes remote is available.
I'm not sure I would call an appetite for risk a "talent", or even a natural consequence of talent.
If we look at the average case, there are plenty of millennials now turning 40 who have higher net worth and a better work-life balance precisely because they never worked for a FAANG. Can't argue with the results of sticking around somewhere and climbing the ladder the traditional way versus enduring all the job hopping, glass ceilings, and layoffs.
Pay means a lot; pay doesn’t mean everything.
Maybe working at FAANG should be something to be embarrassed of.
Not working for FAANG.
Some people prefer having a spine over selling their integrity. There’s heaps of opportunity for doing interesting work in a less toxic environment in places other than Silicon Valley, if you accept a little less pay.
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
I encounter plenty that used a for loop when something else would have been advisable.
The task was to write a simple sum of a list, but they had to convert the list to a pandas dataframe and then call some series of arcane functions. I originally thought this was just a preference but when I asked them for the simpler version while standing over their shoulder they were unable to do it.
They had ~8 years of claimed experience at the time and were from a country notorious for faked credentials. Turned out to be an ok hire overall (friendly, hardworking) but definitely lacking 80%+ of their supposed competencies.
(Source: I've helped hire lots of programmers.)
The bigger issue is not having seen fizzbuzz before, really.
Worked for 25+ years in regular business software - banking , insurance etc. I never recollect using the modulo operator.
But any time you're walking over a discrete multidimensional list packed into a linear list, or walking over any discrete periodic signal (one very common example would be walking a linear array of screen pixels, walking over pcm samples in an audio waveform, literally 100% of GPU programming and 90+% of SIMD programming) you will want to be able to translate between "how far from the start am I" and "how far into the current cycle am I", and modulo handles that.
Similarly for almost anything involving time calculations (and for the same reason: because they are periodic). Modulo is literally described as "clock arithmetic" after all.
Here you can find Tempestt Bledsoe singing about it, lol https://youtu.be/fqtzqcJ6agE?t=570s
So you are absolutely correct that there do exist avenues in programming which can dodge this particular raindrop, I hope you aren't opposed to the idea that they are at least few and far between? ;)
Absolutely not. Part of the reason why I mentioned the areas that I work in, are for that reason. I suspect that the vast majority of software jobs are of the kind I mentioned.
As the HN user 'strken' correctly pointed out, fizzbuzz can stump an experienced job candidate if he has never used the modulo operator.
Fizzbuzz is used to confirm an already present suspicion of complete incompetence, not to assess skill (ability to pass is not a meaningful signal).
I feel that you did not address the specifics of what I wrote. It's a silly test because it's meant to cover the bare basics but it still relies on knowing/remembering the modulo operator, which junior hires might reasonably not have seen. If everyone didn't already know about fizzbuzz it would be even more stupid.
I’m not talking about devs who got hung up on integer overflow issues (or even off-by-one errors), but rather “just couldn’t get started at all”. I have no idea what they did before or what they expected to do if they got the job, but I doubt it would turn out well.
My pet theory: A lot of companies are very, VERY big, and a clever person who doesn't know how to do their job but can identify a weak manager, can simply get lost in them. Hiding away getting the paycheck, but doing nothing except convincing their manager they're doing things. I've definitely met a few people in my career that I believe were doing exactly that.
I don't have a good explanation for how candidates with zero ability to write code can make it through a hiring funnel to sit in front of you. Maybe they don't know what they don't know.
I found most of the people who couldn’t program were not the nervous ones, but were smooth talkers who probably didn’t write much code. Maybe they did at one point, maybe they never did, it was hard to know, but I couldn’t get even logical steps to solve straight forward problems out of them. Those were the worst interviews, not because the candidate wasn’t a fit for the role, but because then I had to panic to try to keep the experience positive, constructive, and collaborative. When I expected to fill 20-40 minutes talking through a problem with someone who can’t solve problems, let alone produce anything remotely looking like code, I always found that painful.
The questions I asked could be solved by non-programmers (my wife, who was an elementary teacher and even my kindergarten son could come up with reasonable solutions, but of course not code). That was probably the biggest issue I ran into with nervous people - they didn’t think about the problem first, they’d try writing code before really thinking through. That was usually easy to correct and I didn’t fault anyone who could handle correction and guidance.
companies seem really eager to just decline applicants before they even get interviewed
I interviewed over 100 people. The number of people who didn’t even know how to search with Google was mind boggling. Some wouldn’t even make an attempt. The people who knew their stuff laughed at the end of the interview and said, “is that it?” But even the most basic questions, that some found laughable, knocked out 80% of applicants. Many people who claimed to know Linux, interviewing for a server support role, had never touched the CLI.
It was rough. By the end of the hiring window, they were just making offers to anyone, so they didn’t lose the positions. I wasn’t happy about that.
Also I would like to add, that companies in general are quite clueless about how to hire good engineers and set up hiring processes, which reward talkers and liars, rather than good engineers. Someone not able to write a loop will be found out, but that doesn't mean they won't hire other types of mediocre engineers, instead of good ones, that they gave a pass. Don't forget, that often not even any engineer is involved in taking a look at someone's application or its contents. Often it is HR going off of checklists, which leads to them ending up with the people, who have fake CVs ticking all the boxes.
I wish companies were able to distinguish better, because then your point would stand, that talented engineers had far more leverage. Lately though, I have lost my faith in that.
Part of that is also about who management and HR are socially comfortable with and candidates that may have connections with people in the company. It's often not a level playing field because of cronyism, nepotism, and many other -isms.
That's also why a good engineer, confident in their skills and value, needs to read the room or figure out what's going on. If the situation is not to their liking, then jump to another company or start their own business, whenever the chance presents itself.
Of course knowing how many golf balls fit into a plane will help when it comes to fix that nasty bug on a Vulkan driver.
Or having to solve a data structures and algorithms question as if just left university, completely disregarding the 30 years in between.
Naturally we all do cool algorithm problem solving before getting into bed, and can't wait for the next Advent of Code.
Then they complain they can't hire anyone, go figure.
In some sense this is true, but in my view it's not whether a person theoretically has leverage or opportunity, but whether it's feasible to practice or to explore it. If enough people believe that programmers shouldn't have leverage, and in-practice if there's only negative repercussions from trying, then it's not meaningful. Broadly, in any profession, it seems like it comes down to a whole lot of luck whether you have real, practicable leverage. Barring some exceptions for somehow intentionally positioning oneself to be solely responsible for an uncommonly important system in an uncommonly lucrative business, but that seems to me to also be dependent on a lot of luck.
Overall, it seems that if you really have leverage, you effectively can't economically be replaced, and everyone knows it, but otherwise you'll be on the chopping block for not doing exactly what your narcissistic boss wants on a moment to moment basis.
Absolutely insane claim to make coming from the other side of the process. You get FAANG-style Leetcode Hard assessments, day-long takehomes with no pay and complete nonsense rejections even for very run-of-the-mill companies. The kind of feedback you're usually getting is so unfounded it can't even be considered in the category of wrong or right. But that's not a problem, since most of the time you're just getting ghosted. And all of that is assuming you're landing interviews, which in an optimistic scenario is going to take you weeks, sometimes over a month.
Anybody who claims they "can't find engineers" either has a broken hiring pipeline or enormously big self-esteem - based on my conversations with founders and people responsible for hiring, it's usually both.
This sounds like a job for unions. It would have been advantageous to have formed and joined them before so much power was lost, but it's easy to be shortsighted when you're happy and comfortable with where you are and ignore that the situation could easily change, if not for you then for the next generation. Companies are happy to leverage every advantage they have against workers. Unions can be a powerful tool for workers, one that could help solve a lot of problems current and future, and it's sitting there just waiting to be used.
Why should I support a union? If the company couldn't fire me they wouldn't pay me so much. If a union advocates for everyone else, it's gonna be harder for me to get paid so much.
I don't really mind the constant layoffs; I think that those are horrific for morale and lead to disengaged engineers and the bare minimum of work being done, but that's true with or without the union. I certainly look at the lack of opportunities for career growth and the constant threat of layoffs as a good reason to take it easy.
What I think the union would be AMAZING at is the same thing unions are always amazing at in this country: stopping anyone from being fired and ending merit based promotions.
Even if that is true today, it may not be tomorrow. The corporation you work for is not your friend. They aren't looking out for your best interests. They are worried only about themselves. You should do the same and unions give you more power in negotiations with your employer and more protections against them as well.
> If the company couldn't fire me they wouldn't pay me so much.
That's a lie. First, because unions don't make it impossible to fire employees, but also because the ability to fire you for arbitrary (or even illegal) reasons does not force companies to pay you more. Removing that ability won't force them to pay you less.
> the same thing unions are always amazing at in this country: stopping anyone from being fired and ending merit based promotions.
Employers spend billions every singe year trying to con workers into thinking that unions are evil and wow, you really fell for their bullshit. Those are some commonly repeated lies, but they don't stand up to scrutiny. They're just supposed to trick people who don't bother questioning what they're told.
At most, all a union does is force a company to actually document the disciplinary problems and give an employee an opportunity to correct their behavior before they fire them. This makes it more difficult for companies to fire employees for reasons that have nothing to do with their performance and for any reasons that the company isn't comfortable documenting (often because those reasons would be embarrassing or illegal).
There's nothing preventing merit based promotions either. How promotions are handled will be determined in part by the contract between the company and the union and it's the workers who decide what the union asks for in their contract. If you want a contract with the employer that allows for merit based promotions you can have one. There are zero rules against that, but you should expect the union will require the terms to be well defined. Employers like to say they want "merit based promotions" when what they actually want is total control over promotions for whatever arbitrary reasons they decide to call "merit based".
A union contract probably should require that an employer is able to justify the reasons for their merit based promotions using objective measures of productivity/performance that apply equally to all employees. That means the people who work the hardest and do the best work will be promoted even when the boss would rather promote their favored nepo baby, or when the boss would rather not promote someone who actually earned it. Even then, that'd all be according to the contract. If your union doesn't care about fair merit based promotion and wants the boss to be able to deny or award them to anyone at any time without justification that's fine too.
Unions are organizations made up of people. There are good ones and bad ones. Workers get from them what they put into them. There are plenty of horror stories that get heavily promoted to scare you. Some of them are even true stories. Ultimately though, employees have the power to change or replace their union to make sure their needs are being met. You may still think that unions aren't for you, and that's okay. It's still probably worth looking into them a little though because you've been being lied to by people who want to keep you ignorant and misinformed on the subject. Those people are afraid of what unions are capable of and that isn't because they're worried about your career and want to protect you. Once you understand what unions actually are, and aren't, you can make up your own mind.
Why do Europeans get paid so much less than Americans for the same jobs? Like it or not, at-will employment makes it much easier to justify hiring a new employee because they can just be let go if things don't work out. I'm not even talking about the employee not working out, forcing companies into continuing employment can be disastrous if the market shifts (e.g. what's happening at VW right now).
A requirement to provide x months of notice with y% chance of success is a quantifiable risk with a dollar price tag. It is definitely brought up when companies decide to expand in places where labor law is different, and it scales directly with how much the employee is being paid.
> There's nothing preventing merit based promotions either.
So why do most of our unions have time-in-grade promotions? Merit-based promo is quite rare in unionized jobs in the US. There are obvious incentives that push unions away from merit-based promo, and you're being intentionally obtuse if you refuse to see them.
> Even if that is true today, it may not be tomorrow. The corporation you work for is not your friend. They aren't looking out for your best interests. They are worried only about themselves. You should do the same and unions give you more power in negotiations with your employer and more protections against them as well.
You're right, that might not always be true. Every time that's happened I've just changed jobs for a raise and sometimes also a promotion.
That's my defense against shitty companies: I can just leave. If people were MORE WILLING TO LEAVE when things got bad, companies would get away with much less and make more efforts to retain employees.
I get the argument when we're talking about working-class people who might have a lot of difficulty finding a new job, but IN SOFTWARE? Demand for qualified engineers is insane! I haven't bothered to apply to a job since college, I've just set LinkedIn to "open to work" and replied to a few recruiters. FFS, even when I've been voluntarily unemployed, just holding onto my stock was enough to see my net worth INCREASE.
> It's still probably worth looking into them a little though because you've been being lied to by people who want to keep you ignorant and misinformed on the subject. Those people are afraid of what unions are capable of and that isn't because they're worried about your career and want to protect you.
I don't understand why pro-union folks always assume that skeptics think their boss is their dad. Rest assured, I am very cynical about my job and corporate politics.
Look man, I'm fully aware of what unions are and what they do. They're a great deal for some union members! They're also why American ports are the least efficient in the developed world, they're a big part of why RICO exists, and I'm already doing an in-demand well-compensated job. My peers and I are all going to be able to retire at 40, barring a major war or other disaster. If I get laid off, I get 90 days of COBRA and then Medi-Cal, and odds are I won't even need the Medi-Cal.
What exactly is a union going to get me that I can't get myself?
You could also silently burn out. Especially if fighting this as your own personal sisyphean uphill battle.
I think especially people driven by passion and curiosity are at risk of this. And I mean, that's pretty much what the "hacker mindset" of many people on here amounts to. There's also a reason why people with a lot of passion are often taken advantage of, e.g. game development industry.
This is Hacker News syndrome. What you described is why everything sucks. It's because people at the top are more concerned with making money than doing good things well.
Without the support of a unified vision, these good intentions could pave the path to hell by the way.
I've been guilty of this myself.
The way to understand the value is to see the engineer as an asset. Engineers aren't interchangeable and no codebase can truly be documented and CI'd to the point where expertise doesn't matter.
The expectation of the code not blowing up in production still stands though. There is no arguing with this unreasonableness.
It basically sucks.
People do get a pass on this -- you can't rigorously examine every decision and counter-factual or you'd never make forward progress. And I don't really have any great ideas on how to bridge this gap. It'd be nice if there were better ways to measure this but there aren't, so it really comes down to who is more convincing, which is often orthogonal to facts and correctness.
...and often the amount more isn't catastrophically more, so they don't even think about it. The company might be bleeding from paper cuts, it might be terribly unhealthy because of it, but still not unhealthy enough to kill it.
In my experience, yeah, but how they do it is... not what you'd expect.
Leadership has no clue about the scope of tech debt in their products and if they do decide to fix it, it will be by coming up with a bunch of ridiculously optimistic estimates and then foisting them off onto engineers who are already overworked trying to keep up with tech debt to launch new stuff. This feels awful and generally doesn't lead to anything being properly fixed because it turns fixing tech debt into a "just get it barely good enough and mark it as done."
After the inevitable surge in attrition, more often than not the tech debt is "solved" by throwing out the old codebase and starting from scratch with a new team. This is expensive, but in a lot of cases produces a better product.
(I think HN should consider creating TLDR type of comments for upvoting separately from commentary. @Dan incentivise with different karma credits?)
Quitting HN[1] might have more to do with feeling he and Zig had already harvested the maximum benefit and marketing propaganda usage for elevating itself, including using it to thoroughly smear its C alternative language competitors. Thus, it came time to figuratively give HN the middle finger while on top (selling high before the stock may fall).
Many might not have done a review of the history, as he quit Twitter and Reddit too[2], years ago (2023). Arguably excuses are given to cover for offloading any personal involvement on a particular social media platform, as either they are self sustaining without his presence or no greater benefit is thought to be possible.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47928645 (Tell HN: Site Is Trash Now)
[2]: https://andrewkelley.me/post/goodbye-twitter-reddit.html (So Long, Twitter and Reddit)
Crazy how time flies, given that talk is seven years old at this point. But could've been given today, with the points being more relevant than ever.
Then they not only stagnate but simply have to prompt to even deliver anything.
Building software that serves you only...and then sharing with others is like serving others. It's good stuff and we need more of it.
I'm not sure how the deconversion of his faith needed to be conflated as related to the main ideas, especially when the next point was about weilding technology for good or evil in the next point as if these aren't pre-existing realities of our world or universe.
I did find a few things adventuring into the off topic in the video. Considering all the drama lately and certain opinions that always come out with threads on this person, I was thinking "oh no, people aren't going to like this" while watching, despite broadly agreeing with the substance of the message.
Computers and technology are force multipliers for humanity. As coders, we are lucky to be gifted with such high agency and global reach, all at a fairly affordable price tag.
I love computers.
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 just feels mean and divisive from the perspective of a conservative OR a Christian, and I find that to be a message made in poor taste... which is difficult because this is such a potentially inspiring and positive talk. I lost the energy to be inspired by the talk due to this style of messaging, but I don't think you should have to. I'm just a bit thrown off, I guess.
Taylor Tomlinson puts much of this into her comedy. She often asks the audience to call out if they were similarly screwed up by their religious upbringing. The is a loud audience response every time.
While I don't agree with Andrew Kelly's adversarial attitude, I do understand it a little more from the perspective of someone who had to fight his way out of an ideology that will not seek consensus with his values.
This just seems normal and expected.
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 discovered in the world. And kids thinking their parents messed them up is really just an expression of value mismatch.
> It's always a right of passage for children to find their own values and how they align with ideologies they have experienced or discovered in the world. And kids thinking their parents messed them up is really just an expression of value mismatch.
Right, but not everyone has the same reaction to members of the new generation who don't conform to their values. When my brothers and I didn't end up participating in organized religion as adults, even though my parents still are fairly religious, their reaction was basically "oh well" and to never bring it up again, and we all still have great relationships with them. There are people whose react to their kids not wanting to participate in the same organized religion much more aggressively, and if their kids have "lifestyles" that they consider immoral like being gay or trans, you can forget about any chance of a healthy adult familial relationship between them.
You're not wrong that at a high level, the patterns are somewhat similar, but not all of them are the same magnitude. The values themselves will impact how volatile the conflict is because they're self-describing; parents who highly value tolerance will by definition not be as upset at having kids who don't agree with them on everything, whereas parents who instead place a higher value on conformity and adherence to tradition are going to be a lot less happy with kids who don't end up agreeing with them about that.
Such is life. Not everyone has a family to begin with.
"my parents are/were abusive" is something a plurality of people (and especially those raised in evangelical churches) experience.
Within that dynamic, the 'value' at issue here is 'Do I, your child, have a right to my own body and choices?'; Too often, the reply to that is 'no, we expect obedience and obeisance to God, your father, and your mother, in that exact order, because that is the one true way'.
This is a form of domination, not well-meaning 'protection'. It does, in fact, 'mess people up', in their intimate relationships most of all.
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.
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 have children, or plan to, do you want to control every action they take to protect yourself from hypothetical legal consequence? Do you think you have the right to do so? Do you think you should be able to control what they think and express as well?
These questions are not hypothetical, as an answer in the affirmative is precisely what creates the type of abuse I described above.
It’s one thing to try and impart your values onto your children—that seems like what most parents would want to do, although I wouldn’t go so far as saying it’s what they should do. It’s another to say, for example, “you were born with a penis and so if I see you wearing a dress I’ll beat you and send you to a camp where people demean you and question your innermost feelings until you change them or pretend to do so”, instead of having a conversation about gender vs sex vs sexual orientation, gender roles, society, and culture, and “nature vs nurture”.
Christianity is arguanbly the irritating grit that created the pearl of modern science. A strict text that had to be taken literally ... this led to great intellectual progress in order reconcile it all. Bacon, Darwin ... lots of science was done by Christians.
Christianity isn't the only example. Islam and Judaism also have been heavy hitters. As have other cultures but I don't understand enough about them to comment.
To be fair, other scientists sometimes do this to. However most begrudgingly accept new findings if they hold up to the scientific method.
Fuck 'em honestly.
There's an assymetry here no one wants to acknowledge.
Yes, really makes you think.
edit: it's wasn't just about developing software but also using software. You don't have to accept the bad situation you're in (or the bad software you've been given or told to use). Finally, I'll say that while the speaker's comment about conservative christian upbringing isn't a universal one, it is a widely shared one. If you take offense by it maybe take a moment to pause and consider that maybe the way you were exposed to it was probably more balanced than what many others experience, or in the worst case that maybe your negative reaction to it is a sort of defense mechanism that you've learned to shield yourself from confronting the reality that your own conservative christian upbringing was not so good after all?.
I am Christian. Everything in the world seems to be falling apart these days and my faith is one of the few real-feeling things!
Some people aren't yet in a place to understand this perspective. Others have been hurt by Christians who failed to live their faith or were otherwise misguided in their actions or teachings. Some slander the faith based on ignorance or misunderstanding.
We're called to forgive our enemies and respond with patience, humility, and compassion. I've found that doing this without losing sight of God's commandments is a struggle that requires daily prayer and reflection.
Have a good weekend, and peace be with you.
It is common for religious people to assume they are linked and that a religious person does good deeds because they are faithful while somebody who does bad deeds has less faith.
Which leads to an assumption by some that atheists are have no morals and priest are exception good.
" Others have been hurt by Christians who failed to live their faith or were otherwise misguided in their actions or teachings. "
By "good" I mean nice, polite, not murdering people. Generally accepted moral behavior.
You people have been telling this for the last 2000 years.
Well, the world is exactly as "God" created it.
Thus, if the world is falling apart, then the God - observably so - has done a real shoddy job.
If you come upon a piece of well written software - you can infer that it's written by a good and competent programmer.
And if the software on the other hand is shitty, then more likely than not - made and created by a shitty programmer.
World as is - is obviously created by either somebody extremely incompetent or downright malevolent as far as UX for living beings is concerned.
EDIT: just saw your reply to a similar comment below, appreciate your response!
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.
A few extremists are constantly rattling on about the "War on Christmas", the "War on Christians", etc. Meanwhile, Christians hold literally every lever of power in the US, and saying you're not a Christian in public is disqualifying from most public office in the US; not by law, but de facto, based on the prejudices against other religions and the non-religious. If someone raised in a conservative Christian household saying, "that was hard", is "aggravating" to anyone, then I would say the aggravated party is 100% the one in the wrong. I'm not going to pretend along with Christian nationalists that they need protection from any speech that isn't praising their beliefs and actions.
It’s one thing to purposefully provoke people, and it’s another to tiptoe around any personal expression or hot-button issue for fear of offending someone, and that is not limited to one end of the political spectrum. I have been on all sides of this; I was raised by a computer scientist (used to speaking freely/veracity being valued) and a doctor (used to self-censorship/not offending being valued), and have worked in academia, industry, and now medicine, and have experienced conservative as well as liberal approaches to both promulgation and suppression of free expression.
It's clear that he had a bad experience, and I'm nobody to tell him what to put on the slides and what to leave out, but my impression is that there are lots of believers out there who do cherish their faith, experience it as a very positive force in their lives, and draw from it the power to make the world a better place around them. Speaking for myself, I'd say faith has been a net positive so far in my life.
That's a fair point I agree with. Still, I've met many people who seemingly put all "flavors" of Christian faith in the same negative bucket (implicitly negating the diversity among Christians you call out in your comment). In light of that, my intention was to contribue to the conversation with the very same point you are making, backed by a data point from my own experience: that there are many Christian communities in which faith is practiced in a way that enriches your life, rather than shackling you to a cult.
> It seems like you extrapolated far beyond what he said.
Was it Andrew's intention to talk about Christianity in general? Now you mention it, he might indeed have been focusing only on people "raised by conservative Christian parents".
Most people don't want to learn, so they don't choose to live in the Omniversity.
I think the lesson here is that you can't divorce a potentially inspiring and positive talk, from the underlying ideological stances that ground that talk, and indeed determine what the speaker thinks count as inspiring and positive. There are a number of points in this talk where I think Kelly's claims that some aspect of computer technology are tempting to blackpill over, are really just that computer technology being useful to people who don't share his political stances. So a listener who doesn't actually share his political stances won't find the argument he is building in those sections of the talk convincing at all.
> In my past I've dabbled in sorts of faith that I later found to be problematic, but there's also this other faith that I think is good.
> this just feels mean and divisive from the perspective of a conservative OR a Christian
If they feel offended maybe they should ask themselves some hard questions instead of demanding the speaker to hide his experience.
If you grow up as an adult and discover that you disagree with their values, it doesn't mean that they "indoctrinated" you.
Parents try to impart their values, but indoctrination for me begins where they won't allow their children to come to their own, potentially disagreeing opinions. Prohibiting contact to peers with other views, that sort of thing.
You can impart values on children and try to lead by example, but ultimately, they're sovereign individuals, not their parents' property. It's the unwillingness to accept that where I see education and guidance cross the border into indoctrination.
A far better qualifier than my "I know it when I see it", for someone pretty certain they weren't indoctrinated, would probably be a grown-up's reflection on their own upbringing. If they're lucky and become an independent person, they will have a good feeling about whether their upbringing involved unacceptable levels of coercion and isolation.
Yet, stating that in an open source talk has the subtext of someone wearing a t-shirt "I know HTML - How To Meet Ladies".
Maybe, as a progressive, you should listen to the experience before rejecting it solely because "it is too divisive".
And if you reject personal experience and feelings solely because they are not pro-comservative-christians enougj, maybe there is issue there
The "you cant talk about something that negatively affected you, because a conservative person might feel bad" is not compassion. Its effect is biasing what people can say in very much one sided way.
Further, his views on PUA in particular might seem strange from the perspective of someone deep inside “internet culture”, and if this is you, from someone raised as a man, who is attracted to women, and who spent many years in the dark corners of the internet, please give broadening your horizons a try. You may just find that the people you think despise you and who you despise have some very good points, and the people who you thought were the only group you had anything in common with are actually quite toxic and full of bad advice.
I am unapologetically my authentic self, I find that works best. If you had broadened your horizons as you say; you'd find the same.
> you may just find that the people you think despise you and who you despise have some very good points, and the people who you thought were the only group you had anything in common with are actually quite toxic and full of bad advice.
There's no need to tell other posters what they think. As for women; I love women, and have always been in long term relationships. Maybe I'm just a lucky guy. I think it's odd though to try and appear superior to these groups as he does. You are right there are toxic people, especially those seeking to earn income and status off of male loneliness. I agree with you fully. Having said that, I stand behind what I said earlier.
Or maybe it's not an act, and he's just naturally funny :)
> to keep his easy job
He had an easy corporate job. Then he quit and spent half a decade burning his savings to work on his "hobby project", in a belief that one day it would become useful enough that the project would become self-sustainable. Now he can afford air conditioning again. Should we not be congratulating him?
[0]: https://youtu.be/zLZwpH5lCD4?si=45knBo2Hsy_6wjEM&t=2092
For anybody reading, the project tracks new Zig to get all the new async I/O goodies but was hit by some regressions in Zig's translate-c because it recently became fully independent from LLVM.
Other contributors and I took this as an opportunity to contribute some fixes to translate-c and in my case I also switched for a bit to my other projects, mainly https://zine-ssg.io, which I had neglected for a few months while going all-in on awebo.
I plan to resume development of awebo in a month or two, I just want to leave Zine in a good spot before switching again (I have a bad time paging between different projects too often and prefer doing continuous work for a while before switching back).
Also notable that not up for discussion was any second order effects about user interaction with software; software always must serve its user in the immediate first order. Why? I suppose it's because if you attempt to examine nth order effects the proposition completely falls apart because the world is much more complicated than "software must serve the end user".
Finally, the purpose of software isn't determined by the end user, nor necessarily its author. A user can have their goals, the author(s) theirs, the funding body theirs, and so on. The "purpose" is diffused in this way until what's left is what it does. Saying it _must_ serve the user is a principled stance reflecting a world view, but it's just that. That are other coherent worldviews where software has more than one master. Or no master.
1. You go to the DMV to renew your driver's license at a kiosk there. There's a warrant for your arrest. Should the kiosk serve the user directly interacting with it and print out a new license anyway?
2. Grocery store: should a self-checkout serve the user and give them free groceries?
3. ATM: does the user get free money?
It's not about giving away resources, it's about serving the user.
1. No, a kiosk shouldn't be hooked up to some crime database, it should function exactly as expected in situ.
2. A self-service checkout machine shouldn't 'give away' free stuff, it should however let you pay and leave.
3. An ATM should give the user money from their account - without added charge for the convienance.
I think 2 and 3 are bad examples because they actually already exist in the way that Andrew is saying things should exist. If they didn't (for example, they played a 30 second advert before you could checkout) then people would never have started using them.
Software/SaaS/startups are much more inclined to use dark patterns and attempt to bleed the users dry (either their cash or their attention) - established conveniences like self checkout and ATMs on the whole just do their job - the general public would NOT accept it any other way. It's a shame the general public don't share the same sentiment when it comes to more glamorous technology.
I hope I can get this out soon
Free software is about the worst example, as it has inadvertently built the technology that has, more than any other, concentrated corporate power and debased the profession.
Can you elaborate on this?
> If you refrain from participating in the software of the commons, the only thing that you're doing is surrendering more of our collective agency to abusive centralized powers.
Edit: I know there are some certifications that may be required by some software engineers, computer engineers, etc. But this is limited to critical/near-failure-proof systems. Which I willing to wager is less than 1% of those employed in these fields.
One funny interaction I remember, MariaDB's Monty came to give a talk and he asked "If one wants to help with MariaDB should they be a software engineer or a computer scientist?" Monty's answer was "you just need to know C."
But in a way that does not diminish his work on Zig.
I recently took a consulting engagement with another US public (pink sheets) company and remembered how dysfunctional some software development structures/cultures are.
and while i'm not a massive fan of the music (not my kind of electronic) the mentioned Ninajirachi - Infohazard music video really is fucking cool (strobe warning) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2ZdeIKJA8c i definitely feel like my jaded oldtimer critic got called out there.
edit -- jfc, from one of the youtube comments
> From Ninajirachi, in a RollingStone interview about this song: “I love my computer for a million reasons, but it’s also exposed me to some pretty dubious material when I was far too young to see it. Infohazard is about the first time I encountered a snuff film as a kid. It’s kinda like a rite of passage and loss of innocence moment for people who grew up online. If I’d been in high school a hundred years ago, without ever touching a computer, would I even know things like that existed? I can’t ever really forget about it.”
As a mapper[2], that knowledge now gets subconsciously checked for matches and usefulness against all the other chunks of knowledge I'm fairly certain of.
The first thing that popped out (and there will be more over the next 24+ hours) is that y'all are black pilled about computers and security. You believe, incorrectly, that computers can't be safe AND secure AND easy to use all at the same time. I believe otherwise, and this might help convey that at some future point.
Currently my best hope is that the upcoming release of Genode offers a way forward. Their roadmap[3] features this line when describing the upcoming release
Sketch of a capability-based desktop environment
[2] https://garden.joehallenbeck.com/container/mappers-and-packe...
Red pill: The supplier is corrupt and should be treated as such.
Black pill: You can't win against the corrupt supplier.
White pill: You can win/convert the supplier/find a good one in a sea of bad ones/find a complete alternative.
This is basic fact. Man can make it; man can break it. I've never come across anything in my 44 years of life where this wasn't true.
Man can make mathematical proofs that will not be broken. Man is not going to disprove the Pythagorean Theorem. Software is just hifalutin math. There can exist software that, for a given mathematical specification, can be proven correct, and will not be disproven.
The pythagroean theorem breaks down in elliptical geometry. This is why it is a theorem and not a law.
Can you prove that there is no hash function that is not vulnerable? If anything man-made is vulnerable, then there cannot any invulnerable system. That is what you need to prove to win the argument. And if we can prove that any system is unbreakable, you are wrong.
If anything, the opposite thing is true. Each of the MD4, MD5, and SHA1 results are essentially exploits of design weaknesses: iteration insufficiency, too much traceable control over state given message words, weak and linear message schedules.
In the history of hash cryptanalysis, we continuously get better at exploiting these kinds of weaknesses, successfully exploiting differential analyses with smaller and smaller windows of opportunity (which is why SHA1 was such a big deal). But in the same way that you can foreclose entirely on a SQLI with parameterized query, or a memory corruption vulnerability with automatic bounds checking, you can also just make the message schedule (not understood in the era of MD4 to be that big a hinge point) strong and nonlinear.
It is very unlikely that the future of CS holds some reliable way to defeat bounds checking, and, for the same reason, you can find cryptographers like JP Aumasson (a coauthor of BLAKE and BLAKE3, with no particular reason to stan the older NSA construction) saying we're unlikely to break SHA2... ever.
- Why a collision?
> Because man made SHA-2, so it must be breakable. I don't dispute that there are systems humans make that are breakable (that would be weird given my career).
Thus implying there are man-made systems that are not breakable, and furthermore SHA-2 is one of them.
> I haven't discarded any date.
Going back so quickly?
“That will never happen” and “I think I’ll die before that happens” aren’t interchangeable. Hydrogen will never have two protons, SHA-2 will be broken. “I personally don’t consider a future where I’m not around as existing” is like busting out an Uno reverse card when you lose a hand at poker
That’s not really a rebuttal to the notion that everything is impermanent, that supports it.
Anyway a wizened crone told me I’ll die on 11 September 2098, so let’s give me two weeks to gloat. Two weeks before that date. I will bet you that it happens on or before that date. Props for taking the over that no collisions of SHA-2 will happen before then
Then again, I did defeat Hermes 2 to recover my hard drive. All it took was a lot of hardware and AI and time and luck and brute force to crack the key.
The main thrust is simple:
- Technology is not good or bad, it is an amplifier of human values and our collective ambitions.
- Those of us who are terrified of where technology is going are actually terrified that humans are, on the net, bad, and technology will amplify that, bringing about dystopia.
- Believing this this is self-fulfilling. By embracing such beliefs you surrender your agency, which is what actually brings about dystopia. If you, instead, have a positive vision of humanity, then you are one of the people that drives society forwards rather than backwards.
We are currently at a moment in history where this message bears repeating.
A lot of things feel unstable, and as a result we have an opportunity to redefine the world in good ways and bad ones. Those who choose to redefine it in ways that are intractably bad will often do so from the point of view of a system observer, not a system participant. This is cope, because in reality everyone, whether they choose to accept it or not, is a system participant.
It wasn't an unambiguously good talk. Many of the people attacking various portions of the talk are making good points. I actually agree that blackpilling is a self-fulfilling belief and indulging in it weakens your own agency, and it's better to have a positive vision of humanity and to wield your own agency towards that end. But the thing about positive visions of humanity is that different people have different, mutually-incompatible positive visions; and I think a lot of people don't necessarily agree with Andrew Kelly's specific one.
Finally, even the majority can be optimistic about humanity or even everyone, and it could still lead to a tech dystopia because of the additive effects of good intentions sometimes adding to bad (see fossil fuel use for example).
I don't think we have many opportunities to redefine the world. We're already in a state where people just trying to get by is contributing to the destruction.
Personal agency alone doesn't solve structural dystopia.
I think this is true in that people will do what they need to in order to get ahead. If you play a game by the rules against someone who is cheating, then you will lose. The only way to stay competitive and have a chance to win is to also cheat. When people see others who act in an anti-social way (PE destroying companies, enshittification of software, etc.) go unpunished and reap massive rewards...then they too have to be anti-social just to stay on the same level or have a chance of succeeding. It's the descent into a low-trust society and a general race to the bottom.
The hope for me was that humans have learned from history, from all the past mistakes of failed civilizations and collapse of authoritarian regimes to build a modern world that is equitable. But there will always be narcissistic psychopaths who are able to say the right words and sweet talk those they need to in order to gain power and repeat history.
I would not characterize what he shared as vitriolic, but from the comments when the post was submitted one would get the impression that is not a majority opinion here.
https://andrewkelley.me/post/my-thoughts-bun-rust-rewrite.ht...
Clearly they had discovered or created an incentive to write "bad software", push testing onto users, and sell the fixes. Bad software or smart business?
Look at Rock stars GTA V Online a money printing machine: still has bugs. Are we to assume they are incapable of fixing them? Or that there is no market for doing so. People play anyway.
The "developers are no good" is a red herring that blames individuals who are doing what they are told to do, or not do.
There will always be exploiters, don't believe that they will die once we manage to shield the young for enough time for the exploiters to die of old age.
People generally don't like the AI using their code for a few reasons, one is replacement, like an AI can just copy your project without attribution. Two is that it feels like you are providing value for a soulless corporate machine without compensation.
If a person uses your code you get maybe happy that it was useful and maybe something cool gets made out it. If an AI uses your work it feels like you just did free labor.
I don't feel like Andrew made any particularly great points, but comments both here and on the youtube link have mentioned really liking that point.
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 "anti american communism bullshit".
It's ok to be a humanist and not a corporatist.
It's ok to show generosity.
It's ok to reject the crab bucket framing.
Some of us are mature enough to be ok living in a better world even if still imperfect.
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 test, I asked DeepSeek to tell me how one can do an exact substring-boolean-test in Common Lisp, and it gave me code that was, character for character, _identical_ to the code that appears in Seibel's Common Lisp Book. It clearly memorized the code. It stands to reason, that it could have also memorized where it saw it, and been trained to tell the user that the code was from that book (which is NOT in the public domain, despite being free to read on the internet)[0].
To give you an analogy, nobody has a problem with someone downloading and distributing the public domain works of Leo Tolstoy or Charles Dickens or Jane Austen or Karl Marx, etc. But to remove their names from those works, and placing your (or someone else's) name on them instead, is plainly malicious behavior. Such behavior needs to shunned.
LLMs (I believe) _can_ be trained to not plagiarize. They do not have to be original, nor to use public domain training-data, they just have to give attribution (which, as far as I can tell, requires little more than a corpus and a stack of similarity-measures).
I suspect that they are not trained this way, because fully automated plagiarism creates an ambiguous situation, where a copyleft license (like GPL or EUPL etc) can be unknowingly violated, and there is hardly any trace of the violation. Plagiarism is the product.
[0]: Such attribution can only make LLMs _more_ useful and _more_ widely and confidently integrated into workflows. The lack of such attributions, risks diluting the value of open source projects, as (1) a high-signal indicator of skill and achievement, and (2) a way to ensure the provenance and quality of the code (both very important, if you are considering to build a business on top of one or more such projects). Just look at all those repos that claim to have "made" Minecraft-like game or Unix-like OS, when all they did was have an LLM plagiarize the code for them. This is a kind of, at best, spam and, at worst, fraud.
And something like attributions can be determined even if the LLM is paraphrasing, if I'm understanding Cosma Shalizi correctly[1]. He gives Grosse et al.[2] as a reference for doing so in a scalable manner.
At least with the old school web search engines, you got a hyperlink that you could use to find out more. Now the only way to learn more is to keep asking the LLM more questions. There is no way to get from the LLM to a source outside the LLM.
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.
This code could appear many times in training data; but I wonder what decoding params did you actually used, because that effect appears likely with close-to-greedy way. Also, if it is a coding assistant model, chances are this skill was increased by additional sampling from that domain during training? Or maybe RL has teached model to provide verbatim answers for certain questions? So it was rewarded if that kind of answers is really helpful (I guess it was?).
What they completely missed was that LLMs are a golden opportunity for the corpo-ratfuckers to completely work around the issue of those pesky OS licenses. Who cares if it's GPL/AGPL, just run it through the slop machine and everything is fine.
Open-source doesn't exist in a vacuum, they rely on inherently restrictive licenses to force corporations into contributing back instead of just sucking up everything.
He talks about developers not standing up to management's unreasonable demands, but doesn't he himself receive donations from wealthy people at his foundation? Everything seems contradictory.
The concept of 'pure will' is also really hard for me to grasp. It feels like trying to bring Plato's Forms into reality.
I always feel like the purity advocates on HN are contradictory. They just try to package their own superiority as purity. Honestly, in what sense are they pure? I don't really get it. Is not using AI somehow superior? Is using a hand drill instead of an electric drill more admirable?
I also know that dark patterns undermine user autonomy. But that has clear limits. It's like Prohibition. I understand the criticism of A/B testing in context, but shouldn't we be criticizing Goodhart's law, trying to hit metrics without understanding user behavior, rather than demonizing the tool itself?
The younger generation never experienced the open web or software sovereignty. How can they give up system convenience and choose free software?
I understand that there are problems arising from the nature of capitalism. And I agree that the world needs ethical brakes. But honestly, what I find hard to understand about this person's argument reminds me of a line from Russian literary criticism: 'Those who praise the land are those who do not farm it.
I acknowledge Andrew Kelly's technical achievements are impressive. But honestly, I find it hard to understand the people on HN who keep echoing his words. The Zig foundation runs on sponsorships from big tech companies.
The development cost of 'free software' paradoxically comes from the 'excessive profits of monopolistic big tech' that they despise.
Kelly's uncompromising will is not actually built on pure individual will alone—it rests on the autonomy provided by a very unique sponsorship structure. Can that really be presented as a universal developer ethic?
Ordinary developers don't get $300,000 in sponsorship from anyone. If they refuse a Jira ticket, they could be kicked out of their room next month.
I wish he wouldn't speak while erasing his own economic conditions. It's not that developers are evil—they're just working within the system as a condition of survival.
Honestly, the fact that he achieved that life through his abilities is admirable. But whether it's right to generalize his own minority experience and insist that everyone should follow it is a different matter.
How is that any different from a high-class courtesan telling a cheap one, 'I'm different'?
Andrew Kelly's words are just a symbol of vicarious satisfaction for cogs in the machine. Not just me, but the vast majority of programmers live as cogs—solving Jira tickets, chasing deadlines and KPIs. To them, Kelly appears as an icon of rebellion, refusing to compromise with reality and preserving his purity. But the irony of rockstars is always that they are the most devoted to capitalism.
When I strip away the halo effect around Andrew Kelly, I can't make sense of the contradictions inside.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Note this one: "Don't be snarky."
Furthermore, software that is reliable, is also software that is done (in the sense that AVL Trees, and ZFS, and DTrace, and ZSTD, and slab allocators are done -- they are very close to perfect, and require minimal changes, related to compilers and kernels and computer architectures). A team that builds reliable software, is a team that cannot be "managed". What exactly is there to manage?
While I empathize with the need for mitigation, secret goals and milestones are an excellent way to mistreat employees and eliminate morale.
The reason this is so difficult to manifest, is that only about 2% to 4.6% of the college-educated population are software engineers at any given point, which means that 95% of all the people that we interact with, have no clue what we are talking about, and do not understand why they cannot have more, more, more, now, now, now. For comparison at least 20% of people have a degree in business. And most of those, in non-concrete roles seem to be cargo-culting their way through a career.
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 things, often engage in acts of "benevolent noncompliance". Common workarounds are "asking for forgiveness instead of permission", secrecy, and misdirection. Alternately you can confront management and fight for doing what you think is right. These sorts of things can be risky. You can be fired, you can be reprimanded if caught, you can be retaliated against or lose political advantage. In the past, software engineers had a lot more agency than they do now, because nowadays the supply/demand ratio no longer favors software engineers, and as a result we have weaker negotiation power. Now we're more afraid of being fired and not being able to find a job, and managers aren't afraid of us quitting and not being able to replace us.
I haven't yet finished the whole thing, but there are sections around dark patterns and other forms of user-hostile software. I'll probably finish it.