brsg's comments

I think there's 2 opposing forces that will affect "us" (rich country engineers) over the coming decade.

1) An absolutely insatiable demand for software as _everything_ needs to be remote friendly and digital.

2) An equally insatiable demand to offshore engineering talent for a fraction of the cost.

I'm not sure which will have a greater effect. Technically, if the demand for software grows faster than the world's ability to educate developers, salaries might actually grow. However, there's a real chance the gold rush of super high California $300k+ software salaries is coming to an end.

Personally, I'm seeing moving into management as more attractive everytime I see an article posted here about remote work. People here are understandably dismissive of this, but it's happened before in a lot of industries.

I thought this was an interesting quote

A: Two thoughts. First, you can leave a foreign country behind in an orderly way. Ask the British Empire, which mostly ended its colonial occupations in an orderly way.

The interviewee says this as though it's common sense, but is it true? The examples that stick out to me are India, Israel/Palestine, and the South African colonies. Can these really be described as safe and orderly withdrawals? What are the examples of successful withdrawals? Are they really that much better than US withdrawal from Vietnam or Afghanistan?

It's no coincidence that the following events seem to coincide

* Distrust of traditional media

* Collapse of local media

* Rise in social media platforms

Traditional media isn't competing with rival newspapers on a stand anymore. It's competing on platforms like facebook, twitter, and reddit. Getting clicks on these platforms is correlated with what drives engagement - usually some cultural outrage or some "out-group mocking". Newspapers are really just catching up to the psychology hacking that social media has already profited from. It's more economics than ideology that enforces this imo.

Frankly, you see this shift on HN as well. Half the time I log on here, at least 2/10 of the top articles are appeals to whatever cultural outrage triggers this site's demographics (let's be honest, this article does that too), and these articles will always have 10x the comments of other on the front page.

I'm a little suprised they're still around tbh. Their competitor in New York, Knotel, straight up went bankrupt and got sold for parts. They must've had a lot more cash to endure this.

https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/05/a-look-at-how-proptech-sta...

Selling short term leases on your own long term leases can probably work in places with expensive office space, but covid in NYC just completely annihilated this. The market rate for their office space now has got to be less than what they owe on their lease.

It's probably been great for the businesses who only had short term leases through them when WFH started though.

Idempotency is a pretty critical concept in system design, and I think most developers have run into issues related to it even if they aren't directly familiar with the term.

To give another simple example as the OP - Suppose you have a product that relies on time series data. For demo purposes you might create a curated data set to present to clients, but the presenter doesn't want to show data from 2019 as the "most recent"

Naturally, you decide to write a script. Do you

A) Write as script that moves the data forward by 1 week explicitly, and simply run this once per week or

B) Write a script that compares the current date to the data and moves it forward as much as it needs

At first glance, these two approaches work the same, but what if (A) triggers twice? What if it runs once every 6 days by mistake? (B) is idempotent however - subsequent executions won't change the state. It's usually impossible to predict all of the ways that software breaks, but designing with idempotency in mind eliminates a lot of them.

Speaking anecdotally, going back to school for an MSc allowed me to pivot from an engineering career in the transportation industry to the data/software field. It would've been more difficult to get interviews for entry level roles without the shiny new degree from a school that was - quite frankly - more prestigious than my undergrad, however I can't say for sure that it's benefited me materially beyond that initial "start". Experience is much more important once you're in the field you want.

I also continued working full-time while pursuing the degree half-time, which alleviated the risk of leaving a stable job. MSc degrees are much less likely to be fully funded than PhDs, and some companies will even reimburse your tuition as well.

You're asking this in good faith, so you don't deserve to get downvoted. I think people on hn are a bit sensitive to comments they perceive as "reductionist" that may oversimplify complex problems, even if they're honest questions.

But you're right, at it's core this kind of problem will use techniques like memoization, and most projects that need something like this will have adhoc approaches to solve this problem. The advantage of differential data flow is that it's a generalized approach to this problem. The business logic behind these workflows, between tracking dependencies and updates can get pretty damn complicated and difficult to maintain. Having a generalized approach would make building these dataflows much simpler.

The paper it's based on is pretty skimmable, so I recommend taking a look at it. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TimelyDataflow/differentia...

Of course, I hope that you didn't take too personally the snark in my original reply =).

At most other points in human history, our discussion probably would've been a cordial trade of livestock for bread and there would never be a reason to fear ill will. It's bummer of the 21st century that this time it was meta discussion about politics on the internet.

To be fair, HN does remove a ton of political posts. If they didn't, this tech forum would be overrun with irrelevant political discussion.

Conservative think tanks posts can definitely stimulate good discussion, but if you don't moderate consistently, the community will eventually form a hivemind politically.

That's fair! I think I may have confused you with the OP that responded as such to the moderate point.

For what it's worth, I think you may be surprised how much you can discuss on this topic without crossing "the line" for most people. I think that if partisanship wasn't as divisive as it currently is than you'd be able to discover a lot more common ground with people.

.... though definitely not online.

I agree with this and, for what it's worth, I've found discussions like this are always far more cordial in person versus online - even if you already know the person online.

I genuinely blame social media for this "descent into dogmatism". Any time my belief is challenged in an online discussion, I can just retreat into my echo chamber and feel even more confident than before.

Yeah, but why not stuff like immigration, stances on environmental regulation, income tax rates on high earners, gun rights...

You've gotta agree that those fall under the moderate umbrella a bit more right? I've lived/worked in some very conservative environments and I don't think anyone would've walked along with the race IQ path.

I'm not going to "cancel" you, but it's a little telling that your example of a moderate view immediately went there.

This is a dishonest argument. Trump ran I 2016, when gay marriage was already law. It was explicitly the result of Democrats being elected that legalized gay marriage.

Weren't polls actually quite accurate for the UK in 2019?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2019_U...

Obviously social media is a terrible barometer for political mood. It's designed to build a self-co gratulatory bubble, but I'm not sure I buy the argument that polling is rigged or unscientific.

Polling is a statistical model of a rare event of human behavior - of course there's uncertainty!

I think people's memories are a bit short regarding just how dire things were in NYC back in April. I think things are a bit more complicated than just blaming the governor for shutting down restaurants.

Every resident in or around New York heard ambulances 24/7. Everyone knew someone that got very sick (not that anyone could even prove that they had it since testing was extremely scarce). The virus was still very new and there were legitimate reasons to suspect the death rate was much higher than it thankfully ended being. I even remember hearing rumors from friends, family, and coworkers that the feds were going to enforce a "wuhan-style" quarantine in NYC. In terms of general fright, it reminded me a lot of 9/11.

It would've been political malfeasance for the mayor/governor to do nothing in these circumstances. In terms of infections, the city recovered relatively quickly and most of the lockdown was lifted by Summer (indoor dining obviously being one of the holdouts here that hurt restaurants a lot)

I think the worst "medium-term" effects are the loss of tourists and office workers. There's very few legal restrictions on offices reopening at this point, but very few have actually come back. The triple of lockdowns, vanishing tourists, and vanishing office workers is just too much for small businesses.

I guess it really depends on what you mean by "stimulating" manufacturing. They're only recourse, really, is to make purchases of the equipment (does increased demand count as stimulating?). The federal government, and only the federal government, has the power to compel industries to manufacture under the Defense Production Act.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act_of_1950

This was a major point of contention at the beginning of the outbreak in the US. Governor's were lobbying the feds to invoke the act, although the administration declined to do so. The end result was that states were competing with each other for heavily inflated PPE costs. In some cases, the feds themselves were outbidding states.

https://news.wbfo.org/post/cuomo-asks-federal-defense-produc...

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-04-07/hospitals-...

People are "allowed" to be frustrated with the situation, and I think it's a little dismissive to accuse them of having "victimhood".

It's perfectly reasonable to miss direct interactions with coworkers, and there's nothing wrong with being friends with your coworkers. Video chats really aren't comparable for most people.

It's perfectly reasonable to be frustrated that you're stuck in a crowded apartment with roommates and no office space. The WFH change happened virtually overnight for many people.

It's perfectly reasonable to be fearful that a junior contributor's career may stall during this. Most companies' cultures weren't built around this system, so it's pretty rational to expect companies to struggle recognizing junior employees.

Obviously people can and will adjust, but criticizing an imperfect system is the only way it will improve - it's not a sign of weakness.

Demographics alone probably explain this well enough in the US. Tech workers skew heavily young and skew heavily college educated. If you sample any population with those demographics - in this political environment - you're going to get some pretty anti-trump sentiments. Although maybe not necessarily "leftist"

Personally, I think Twitter (or any social media) gives the impression that this group is more radical than they probably are as a whole.