- The listing says it's compatible with Pololu pinout. That has become a common term in stepper motor control.
It's little more than a standard IC on a simple board with a standard pinout.
- As a counterpoint, my YouTube feed is great these days. When I open it up, I get more of what I want to watch. The hardest part is choosing which video to watch in my limited time.
I think the key is that I subscribe to channels I want to watch and I use the like button on videos I want to see more of.
> I've noticed over the past few years though, that no matter how much I try to tweak the algorithm, I'm just getting mindless junk. And shorts are the worst of it! They're deliberately designed to hook you in, so they're very hard to ignore.
If you're actually clicking the shorts ("very hard to ignore") then you're going to get more of them, period. I get an occasional shorts line in my feed but I scroll right past it.
- > I have never in my career had to do anything like designing a large scale system.
Giving large scale system design interview questions for a role where someone never has to work with large scale systems would be a weird cargo cult choice.
However, when a job involves working with large scale systems, it's important to understand the bigger picture even if you're never going to be the one designing the entire thing from scratch. Knowing why decisions were made and the context within which you're operating is important for being able to make good decisions.
> I've worked with the Linux kernel, I've written device drivers, I've programed in everything from Fortran to Go, and that's what I want to keep doing. Why put me through this?
If you were applying to a job for Linux kernel development, device driver development, and Fortran then I wouldn't expect your interviewers to ask about large scale distributed web development either. However, if you're applying to a job that involves doing large scale web development, then your experience writing Linux kernel code and device drivers obviously isn't a substitute for understanding these large scale system design questions.
- 8K is four times the pixels and therefore four times the bandwidth as a 4K monitor.
It took us a long time to go from 1080p to 4K. It has taken even longer for 4K at 120-144Hz to be practical.
It’s more likely that you’ll end up with intermediate steps to 5K, 6K, than getting 8K 120Hz.
The other limitation is lack of demand. You need a gigantic monitor for 8K to be worth it, and you need a powerful video card to drive it. The number of people who would buy such a monitor is very, very small.
- > I do not know how many developers use VS code, but all of them are using electron and it seems to be fast enough for them.
At this point, I think the debate about slow apps is more ideological than reality.
I also think a lot of people are mistaking backend/network latency for front-end slowness. Slack isn’t going to load your scroll back history any faster if the backend is spending all of that time searching the database. People are too quick to blame the front end.
Either that, or some of these posters are running 10-year old hardware and wonder why it’s slow
- > Of course this is just a toy example. But suppose you had a different task that is I/O bound, like processing terabytes of jsonlines files.
If this task was the bottleneck in a large scale system then it would definitely get hand optimized after a proper analysis.
But if this is an occasionally run task or something otherwise not business critical that doesn’t bottleneck anything, spending orders of magnitude more time hyper-optimizing it would be a waste of time and money.
Match the solution to the job. Optimizing everything is one of the age-old mistakes in computer science.
- My best managers have been umbrellas, but with transparency. If something was happening in the company we would be informed, but could rest assured that our manager would do their best to work the issue for us while keeping us informed.
The worst managers I’ve had were umbrellas, but to such an extreme that they kept us in an isolated island separate from the rest of the company. We didn’t know what was going on in the company and had no chance to integrate that content into our work. It felt good at first, but over time I realized that the umbrella manager was trying to keep us in the dark so they could keep exclusive control over our work and neutralize any possibility of us competing with them among management. The last manager I had like this went so far they they would praise us for our work and give nothing but positive feedback, right up until he cut people for low performance. It felt like everything he did was for equal parts performance (looking like the ideal, happy, positive manager) and control (keeping us isolated from the rest of the company so he was always in full control).
Ironically, that manager now posts frequent leadership thoughts on LinkedIn and has a newsletter.
- It’s not really a significant safety difference. The visibility difference isn’t that big.
It’s nowhere near on the level of removing airbags.
- > I tripled my salary in two years by starting off woefully underpaid,
Unfortunately, this is how most "I tripled my salary in X years" stories look when you dig into the details.
I've spent a lot of time coaching people on interviewing and negotiating. With some people, half the battle is detaching them from their original compensation anchor point and re-centering on real market data.
On the other hand, I've also had to gently convince a lot of eager students that they can't expect $300K full-remote FAANG offers right out of college, despite whatever they heard on Reddit and Blind.
- Because the value of accounts that browse extreme numbers of posts per day is near zero to advertisers.
Someone who has seen thousands of ads per day for years on end is basically immune to ads (or has blocked them, or is a bot)
One of the hard things to grok as an engineer or power user is that we are not the target audience for ad-supported services most of the time. How many people in this thread have aggressively blocked ads everywhere and are confused about why ad-supported services aren’t catering to people like themselves?
- > Because legally, that's as meaningful as saying "they are quooquaquams".
I don’t see how this is at all equivalent, given that “psychedelics” is a well-known term that can be found throughout decades of literature and that gibberish word you just made up has no attached meaning.
If you’re equating random gibberish words to well-known words in literature then why does anything have any meaning? Why would a new word have meaning?
Regardless, the laws generally don’t refer to “psychedelics”, they refer to specific chemicals by their name. There are numerous compounds that would be considered psychedelics that are, nevertheless, not illegal because they’re not covered by any laws (including analog acts)
- > But with the internet, you can find the absolute best book or video or tutorial in the whole world that blows your local teacher out of the water.
I’ve done a lot of mentoring, including through some formal programs.
One of my biggest challenges has been students/mentees who find a very convincing blog post or video from a confident, polished writer, then mistake that person’s confidence for absolute authority on a subject.
The worst example I can think of is the world of JavaScript training influencers. These people produce courses and training material for sale, then heavily use social media to promote their material as the canonical source of truth in the field.
These influencers can be very persuasive, confident, and relentless in their advertising. They have an incentive to present their material as flawlessly correct and exaggerate or invent problems with other ways of doing things.
The result is juniors who have taken some overpriced online JavaScript course who are utterly convinced their knowledge is superior to that of the 10-plus years of experience of people around them. They’re off on some tangent trying to rewrite part of the codebase in some new framework/tool/language that their influencers said was the “best”. They won’t accept that there are multiple ways to solve problems or that some times the correct engineering solution is to use a simpler framework even if it’s not trending on Twitter.
It’s almost a rite of passage for some juniors to go all-in on their preferred internet sources and assume that what they read is superior to the real-world experience of the engineers they work with.
- > When did we move to a "do whatever you think you can get away with" model of society?
If you judge society by the worst headlines and stories from social media then it’s going to seem very bad
You have to consider that news and social media only talk about the extreme stories. It’s not representative of normal
- Rear view cameras are a safety feature. You’re not sticking it to anyone by refusing to look at it.
I understand that you’re upset about data collection, but refusing to use a basic safety feature is a pointless protest. The only people who might be harmed are those around you.
Please reconsider.
- Is everyone on HN running their computers in some parallel universe where apps are running 10X slower than my computer?
- > AVX-512 is still not present in the chips with E-cores.
Why would they put a dig at Intel’s consumer chips in a slide deck for their server parts? The Intel Xeons don’t have E-cores. This doesn’t make any sense unless I’m missing something.
Also, you know AMD has recent consumer chips without AVX-512, right?
- > Except, that they are not,
What a weird claim. If the new apps aren’t doing anything more, then just use the old apps.
Except you’ll quickly find that the old apps are quite simple and limited relative to what we have today.
- Tim Ferriss is very good at downplaying the effort and costs that go into businesses. Good for inspiring people to try, bad for actually being transparent.
In this example, the (claimed) $200 production cost and $2.10 DVD cost are probably nothing relative to this large marketing cost:
> piece through trade magazines
The marketing costs and effort are conveniently omitted.
- Fitness influencers and podcasters took the Vitamin D story and ran with it to extremes. The number of people who think more is better with vitamin D or assume that their levels are severely low without checking is scary.
Taking a nominal amount of Vitamin D is probably a good idea for those of us who spend a lot of time indoors. Taking 10s of thousands of IUs every day for years is probably a bad idea for anyone who isn’t regularly checking their Vitamin D levels.
- Could be true, but it's worth noting that Gergely has been wrong about his "confirmed internally" facts before. To his credit, he did issue a correction when it was discovered. However, take his "confirmed internally" stories with a grain of salt.
- > I feel like this is one of the things that Gergely has sensationalized recently to drive attention.
It's important to remember that Gergely is in the business of clicks and views. While I've enjoyed some of his reporting, it's very clear that he's optimizing his reporting based on what gets engagement. On places like Twitter, sensationalizing topics and riding waves of outrage is a cheap way to drive engagement.
This material plays well to certain subsets of Twitter, HN, Reddit, and other social media sites where people thrive on sensationalism and outrage. His previous thread about leaving Google Cloud because it might be abandoned at any minute (lol) was sensationalist enough that even the usual outlets were starting to call him out on it, but I'm afraid the engagement may have only incentivized returning to the well for another dip into the "Google Bad" outrage pool.
This isn't the only Substack author I've followed who veered into audience capture like this. There's something about the ultra-tight feedback loop where authors/influencers can see the real-time engagement with their topics and continue pressing whatever button drives the most engagement.
- > This is a shockingly simple product to make "self driving".
No, it’s quite an engineering challenge to develop any robust self driving code, especially in safety critical applications.
Having human controls would still be necessary as a backup even if they did have autopilot.
Some of these armchair engineering comments about this project are incredibly optimistic or pessimistic.
- > The longer Bitcoin survives, the more it will get adopted and integrated into the world's financial fabric, e.g., as a store of value. If this sounds far-fetched, consider that many smart and smart-sounding people have predicted Bitcoin's demise, and so far their arguments have been proven wrong:
You're arguing that because Bitcoin hasn't met its demise, it will therefore be widely adopted as a "store of value"?
As if there are only two possible outcomes: Complete failure or complete dominance as a store of value. This is where your argument doesn't make any sense.
I suspect we'll discover that all of these altcoins and weird financial instruments didn't actually detract from Bitcoin at all. Rather, they contributed to its rise by juicing demand and pumping huge amounts of leverage and pseudo-liquidity into the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
If crypto becomes boring, I don't think the natural conclusion is that adoption will increase.
- > I've considered upgrading to a 12th or 13th Gen motherboard, and while I have no doubt they'd be great for me as a Gentoo developer with the greatly increased core counts, my hesitation is that the new CPUs have AVX-512 disabled.
Unless you have a very specific AVX-512 workload or you need to run AVX-512 code for local testing, you won’t see any net benefit of keeping your older AVX-512 part.
Newer parts will have higher clock speed and better performance that will benefit you everywhere. Skipping that for the possibility of maybe having some workload in the future where AVX-512 might help is a net loss.
- > The reason most foreign investors use Caymanian intermediaries is actually just that transparency, particularly when they’re being scrutinized by foreign regulatory bodies and don’t want their money to disappear into a Delaware numbered company.
> It is, however, a particularly easy place to keep global funds in a law abiding and transparent way.
I don’t doubt that Cayman is strict for individuals like yourself opening bank accounts, but the regulations on companies are a different story. It’s a well-known tax haven on the global scene.
- > Not every decision has to be done with maximum research.
I’ve been at a couple companies that wouldn’t take any proposal seriously unless you showed up with a list of citations to blog posts, books, or even podcasts.
The root cause was a management structure that wanted to do everything with a maximum of evidence.
It opened the door to a lot of terrible decisions winning for no reason other than someone found a blog post that Google does it this way, or Uber wrote a blog post about this, or Martin Fowler wrote a post about that.
The most egregious abuse was when a team that had to deal with maybe 100 logins per day spent over 6 months researching how to build their auth system to match Big Tech. They could have picked any off the shelf solution and been done in a week, but instead it became an endless boondoggle of research, presentations, proposals, and committees. Several people were even planning conference talks around it, so it started to evolve into whatever would sound best for their talks.
That was my cue that I was at the wrong type of company.
- This mod was done many years ago, before it was common to be able to find someone who could do proper frequency response measurement. Unless someone measured them in the thread, I wouldn’t assume the visual difference check identified 100% of the differences, including material differences.
Sennheiser likes to reuse parts across their headphones lineup. They have several current models that look similar despite tiny internal differences but have substantially difference frequency response due to those tiny changes.
This is always going to anger the people who think the cost of objects should be based solely on the cost of materials. I find that especially ironic for a a website where most of us work on software products where the cost of running and distributing the software is vanishingly small and produces margins these hardware companies could only dream of.
- Unless someone has actually measured the frequency response, I wouldn’t assume this mod covered 100% of the differences anyway.
Sennheiser has several models where the only difference appears to be a trivial piece of damping material, but the measured difference between the two is substantial. You also can’t get the exact foam piece yourself so mods aren’t possible.
- > Everywhere I went I was in a trance, forming arguments with people who only existed in Slack for me. The debates, the designs, the confrontation! Every time I closed my eyes I would start a stupid fight, until eventually a simple thing like an invite in my calendar became a tangible menace; a small needle, poking in the same sore spot as the last one.
This rings familiar for a past job. For the longest time I thought it was my fault, that I was the one causing conflict or being unreasonable to push back on the constant influx of demands and changes.
Then I finally escaped the situation into a healthier team. It was immediately obvious that the prior team had more managers, pseudo-managers, and busybodies than it had people who actually did the work. There were so many product managers, program managers, design managers, UX managers, product designers, customer experience designers, and other titles looking to make themselves appear valuable that Slack and calendars became a warzone for attention. We'd get started on a project on Monday only to have the rug pulled out from under us with a weekly reshuffle of the priorities list or monthly reorganization of the department.
I distinctly remember the sinking feeling in my stomach every time a new calendar invite would pop up, or every time I'd see the latest "@here" from one of the warring product managers trying to look more important.
> A company going under.
What a wild assertion: The OP hasn’t personally seen a company fail, and therefore software quality doesn’t matter? Bugs and slow delivery are fine?
It’s trivially easy to find counterexamples of companies failing because their software products were inferior to newcomers who delivered good results, fast development, and more stable experience. Startups fail all the time because their software isn’t good enough or isn’t delivered before the runway expires. The author is deliberately choosing to ignore this hard reality.
I think the author may have been swept up in big, slow companies that have so much money that they can afford to have terrible software development practices and massive internal bloat. Stay in this environment long enough and even the worst software development practices start to feel “normal” because you look around and nothing bad has happened yet.