Sanguinaire
|
4 years ago
|
on: How the pandemic has affected people’s perspective on travelling to work
Whether working in the office is preferable or even necessary is going to come down to individual teams, not whole companies. The employers who figure that out quickly will do well out of the current labour shortage. Any business insisting on 100% in office or 100% remote is limiting themselves to a subset of the eligible workforce, so it'll be interesting to see how quickly they get out-competed.
Sanguinaire
|
4 years ago
|
on: Europe has now created more $1bn ‘unicorn’ companies than China
A billion dollars today and a billion 10 years ago are not the same thing. It's not just a question of inflation either; there is more money sloshing around in VC (or similar non-retail funding sources) than ever.
Sanguinaire
|
4 years ago
|
on: SWE interviews should be paid
I think the whole idea is idiotic, but this particular point doesn't seem like it would be the blocker. We already have employment contracts which state hours to be worked and similar mundane details, this wouldn't be any different. Such contract details would only be tested if someone tried to exploit a loophole, like showing up for a bunch of interviews to get money but with no intention of actually completing the tasks.
Sanguinaire
|
4 years ago
|
on: AWS doesn’t know who I am
To see how this can go tragically badly, try using MS Teams with one login address across multiple client accounts.
Sanguinaire
|
4 years ago
|
on: SWE interviews should be paid
Alternatively, stop pretending this industry is a precious snowflake and conduct reasonable-duration, non-exploitative interviews like everyone else in the history of modern employment.
Sanguinaire
|
4 years ago
|
on: SWE interviews should be paid
Showing up for the interview, participating in good faith, likely other employer-favouring bullshit.
Sanguinaire
|
4 years ago
|
on: An inside look at the custom CPUs in Tesla's Dojo Supercomputer
HPL is a stress test with a notionally useful output measurement - just about the most effective way of pushing CPU load to the limit, and it tells you what fraction of the theoretical maximum FLOPS you can actually achieve given the other system constraints like memory and network throughput.
Sanguinaire
|
4 years ago
|
on: Amazon Drops ‘Draconian’ Policy on Making Games After Work Hours
Employees outside the games division already had much slacker rules about game development; I expect this change aligns things for all AWS employees at the lower bar.
Sanguinaire
|
4 years ago
|
on: Actual impostors don't get impostor syndrome
Having worked for both, I would dispute the hiring bar point - but I'm sure it is team dependent.
Sanguinaire
|
4 years ago
|
on: Actual impostors don't get impostor syndrome
Is it better to aspire for balance by chasing both, or neither? After all, what is status if you have no-one to brag to - and what good is having a lot of free time when you are just going to end up dead either way, and with work being the best chance most of us get at making a mark on the world.
Not meant as a snide/flippant remark; this shit is what keeps me up at night.
Sanguinaire
|
4 years ago
|
on: Actual impostors don't get impostor syndrome
Highly debatable. While Amazon is more likely to be on the shit-list of Joe Public, in technical circles it comes down to AWS vs MS. Frankly if MS hadn't bought GitHub to distract magpie developers, there would be no contest.
Sanguinaire
|
4 years ago
|
on: Apps Getting Worse
The part I find baffling is how companies like Spotify justify paying high salaries for engineers just to deliver trivial improvements over what Windows Media Player was offering 20 years ago. If they were piling this effort into reducing costs or making the app more resource efficient I'd be happy - but I'm not interested in trivial UI tweaks.
Sanguinaire
|
4 years ago
|
on: AWS's Egregious Egress
The rebate you mention sort of already exists, just restricted to public sector research customers. Think the cap is that egress is waived as long as it is less than 15% of the bill.
Sanguinaire
|
4 years ago
|
on: Intel Distribution for Python
You are correct, nothing Intel provides in their Python distro cannot be obtained elsewhere - this is just a nice wrapper.
Sanguinaire
|
4 years ago
|
on: Intel Distribution for Python
We could start with something similar to the concept of Pareto optimality; Intel could have delivered their maximum performance without preventing optimizations from being applied equally on AMD hardware, but instead they choose to disadvantage AMD without providing anything extra on top of what they could do while remaining "neutral".
Sanguinaire
|
4 years ago
|
on: Intel Distribution for Python
This is trivially easy to defeat, just so you know. If anyone reading is ever in need of optimized math library performance on AMD, just speak to your hardware/cloud vendor; they all know the tricks.
Sanguinaire
|
4 years ago
|
on: Show HN: I made an interactive anti-procrastination video course
I need a catalyst - motivation is fine once I'm going, but my activation energy for most tasks is enormous.
Sanguinaire
|
4 years ago
|
on: I critiqued my past papers on social media
"Should be" is the operative part of your statement - I totally agree there, and that the salesmanship requirement indicates a systemic failure. I'd say it goes much further than just the educational institution being at fault - they are responsible for playing the game, but funding sources do nothing to drive them more towards academic integrity.
Sanguinaire
|
4 years ago
|
on: I critiqued my past papers on social media
I was described as "too scholarly" by my PhD advisor when writing up my first couple of papers. I'm in industry now.
People doing a PhD/post-doc need to understand that there is no escape from "sales". Lots of academically leaning people, including myself, set out with a goal of avoiding becoming a seller and wanting to work in a space where data does the persuading rather than smooth talk. Unfortunately no such place exists. Even in the "purest" science-focused workplaces, you still need to sell your ideas to managers or funding agencies. To transcend "regular researcher" and become widely respected in your field, having thousands of Twitter followers will be more helpful than a paper in Nature.
Sanguinaire
|
4 years ago
|
on: The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)
It's no surprise, that was classic MS strategy. Sell the thing everyone actually needs (Office, because they smothered the competition), but bundle it with something sticky which will also hoover up data about your workers - no need for the product to be any good, execs in charge of purchasing won't have to suffer with it for a fraction of the time employees spend. Oh also, I happen to have $200k of Azure credits here for you - no pressure but if you do start using Azure we'll make the bill for all this productivity software go away...
