I know you didn't ask to problem solve, but... Email your resume to me at [email protected], mention this HN thread. We're hiring for Azure MySQL and sister Postgres team, lots of interesting problems to solve!
EDIT:
"I feel like a firework that exploded in bursts of color (everyone ooed and ah-ed), and then... nothing" ~~> that's a beautiful sentence. Welcome to adulthood!
My experience has been that "chosen family" is a thing that works when you're young, but almost always falls apart when you get older. This has happened to countless people I know. Life throws all kinds of curveballs, incentives change, conflicts arise, sometimes very intense conflicts. Empirically, chosen family is a structure that works in a particular place and time, then disintegrates when conditions change. Real family isn't like that; there is a very strong anthropological connection wired into us that doesn't go away when the situation changes.
Of course it's different for everyone, some families are so tragic they may not be worth preserving, etc. But that's an outlier-- the modal experience is that the power of family is precisely in the fact that you don't get to choose it.
Modern western societies kind of broken that. A culture of Kicking your kids as soon as they are 18 years old is not very conducive to a culture of strong familiar links like, let's say, the culture of early 20th century Sicily.
I moved out at 18 (like most of my peers) and my extended family lives far away to begin with. I think I have an alright family situation compared to some friends, but it's not like I see any of them more than once or twice a year?
If you can get friends who live nearby and come over once a month that's probably closer than the modern us family structure tbh
And I have seen multiple counterfactuals. Even people who are descended from the one who was part of the "chosen family" continue to visit and treat them as family.
An adopted child is also a form of chosen family. As is a spouse.
I think the point that's being made is-- it's a lot easier to stick together over the long term when you spend the first 20 years of your life together in a family unit. It's possible to build long term, stable bonds under other circumstances-- just less likely. It's also possible to screw the former up.
Strongly disagree. Claude Code is the most intuitive technology I've ever used-- way easier than learning to use even VS Code for example. It doesn't even take weeks. Maybe a day or two to get the hang of it and you're off to the races.
The difference is AI tooling lies to you. Day 0 you think it's perfect but the more you use ai tools you realize using them wrong can give you gnarly bugs.
It took me a couple of days to find the right level of detail to prompt it. Too high level, and the codebase gets away from me/the tooling goes off the rails. Too low level, and I may as well do it myself. Maybe also learn the sorts of things Claude Code isn't good at yet. But once I got in the groove it was very easy from there. I think the whole process took 2-3 days.
I actually don't use it in the terminal, I use the vs code extension. It's a better experience (bringing up the file being edited, nicer diffs, etc.) But both are trivial to pick up.
Know Amjad from years ago. We're on the opposite sides of ideological barricades, but he's no terrorist sympathizer. Just a man who loves his people. He seemed extremely pragmatic too-- if he ran Gaza it'd be an economic paradise by now.
He doesn't seem pragmatic because everything I read about him or any time I hear from him it's about this geopolitical issue. Doesn't he have a company to run? What's the point of making this front and center part of your personality. His thoughts on the war in Gaza is literally the only thing I know about him. That and him firing an intern about a weekend project. It's all just exhausting.
How is that pragmatic? If you want to do good things, build a business and donate money or whatever. Getting into Twitter wars with internet strangers and spending on PR to tell everyone what you think about geopolitics strikes me as anything but pragmatic.
It sounds like you're mainly responding and reacting to what people (and media) choose to write about him (a narrative revolving around his political beliefs), rather than how he (mostly) goes about his day to day.
Eh people get consumed by these things. It's very hard to resist when you have a platform and your own people are at war. Very very difficult to get past abstractions and just work to help in minute particulars.
Plus social media is a uniquely deranging technology. Persona on twitter is rarely who the person is in real life.
Two counterintuitive/surprising lessons I've come to appreciate:
1.Talent pools in nation states are extraordinarily deep-- much deeper than they appear. Countries can suffer from brain drain for decades (or centuries!) but when conditions call for it, superbly talented people somehow manifest.
2. The correlation between talent and conscience is weak. Nation states always manage to find superbly talented people to work on problems many of us would recoil from.
This is so much true! Indeed you can find absolutely everywhere absolutely incredible brilliant people in any area you want. The reason for the 1st and 3rd world is that is difficult to come by enough people and then coordinate them: is about critical mass and alignment.
About 2. also 100% true: intelligence/knowledge is totally independent of any other trait.
Right-- talent isn't that useful in a vacuum. You need economic and legal infrastructure that talented people can plug into to be productive. That infrastructure (a) takes a very long time to build and (b) depends on cultural norms that take a long time to evolve and don't find fertile ground everywhere.
I tend to agree with most of what you said regarding all governments and countries. What may not be widely known is that some authoritarian regimes have been accused by expatriates of identifying and indoctrinating intellectually gifted children into their state-sponsored organizations for use by these entities for unmentionable purposes. Of course, it's next to impossible to find written documentation, with specific details since detailed evidence in such states are understandably hard to retrieve. Most of these accounts arrive through word of mouth.
>What may not be widely known is that some authoritarian regimes have been accused by expatriates of identifying and indoctrinating intellectually gifted children into their state-sponsored organizations
Literally every country does this. It's just perspective whether an individual thinks it's okay or not.
If you're on the side doing the indoctrination, you probably agree with it, or are indoctrinated yourself. We all are to some degree.
That is true. But I refer to those parents that sent their children to other countries because they knew the state or gov would not have allowed them to prevent the indoctrination of their children. But yes, we all are to some degree, unfortunately.
Counter-intuitive? The primary motivation for fretting about Brain Drain (whether it is true or not is secondary) is because the people who fret about it are educated professionals, precisely the people who are prone to build their identity around the idea that society thrives and succumbs based on their own existence.
The same people who have unironically latched onto the idea of Meritocracy. A concept/idea that was literally conceived as a parody.
Not always, but sometimes, new things are just better.
One example is null-- a billion dollar mistake as Tony Hoare called it. A Maybe type with exhaustive pattern matching is so dramatically better, it can be worth switching just for that feature alone.
I was a bit eager to start work after three months of waiting for the HSP 1b visa. Tried to keep myself busy with side projects, and got quite far with embedded Rust. But the lack of a "regular schedule" from a job was making me eager to start "proper work" again.
So far, it has been a mixed bag of trade-offs. Made it in time for various events, got to see a few friends for the first time in a while, etc. However, nothing beats the comfort and security of one's parents home, especially during the holiday season.
Probably obvious to everybody, but seriously do not schedule a move in December. If it is feasible, spend the time to make memories with your family and loved ones.
> nothing beats the comfort and security of one's parents home, especially during the holiday season.
A bit morbid, but reminds me of this passage by John Quincy Adams:
> Everything about the house is the same. I was not fully sensible of the change till I entered his bedchamber [...] That moment was inexpressibly painful, and struck me as if it had been an arrow to my heart. My father and mother have departed. The charm which has always made this house to me an abode of enchantment is dissolved; and yet my attachment to it, and to the whole region around, is stronger than I ever felt it before.
Hope you get to spend the next Christmas with your family!
Hope everyone has a healthy, rewarding and prosperous year. Special thanks to @dang and team for keeping this community a great place everyone wants to come back to. I love coming back here every day.
In a universe where all AI investment goes to zero, wouldn’t you have the opposite effect? You can torch wealth but not the money supply, which ultimately _increases_ inflation, not decreases it.
There is only a short term inflation decrease while we produce what people mistakingly think is wealth. That can evaporate, but the money supply won’t.
It's confusing, but bankruptcy destroys mainly money, and only has second order effects on wealth.
What makes it hard to understand is that the Oracle going bankrupt on their debit because OpenAI took all their money is what would destroy the money. AFAIK, OpenAI itself doesn't have a lot of debit to burn. It would burn money that is currently on the hands of Oracle's creditors.
And bankruptcy is a bit of an extreme example, but just people thinking Oracle is less credit-worthy would destroy some money already. Repeat that for every company that invested in OpenAI.
IMO this view puts the cart before the horse. Suppose ChatGPT builds a UI that consumers prefer over web browsing to purchase products. How should merchants plug into that UI? This protocol is an easy way for merchants to do that. And once merchants are plugged in, consumers still need to be able to pay, and merchants need to get paid. Stripe makes that easy.
Consumers will only use the UI if it's better. Merchants will plug into the UI to make more money. So everyone wins-- consumers, merchants, OpenAI, and Stripe. And since the protocol is open, other chatbots and other payment processors can implement it too. Who loses?
(I agree that at scale these things tend to accrue to top players and you get all kinds of weird unsavory consequences. But I'd argue that's a critique of our regulatory apparatus, not of the companies building products and services.)
EDIT:
"I feel like a firework that exploded in bursts of color (everyone ooed and ah-ed), and then... nothing" ~~> that's a beautiful sentence. Welcome to adulthood!
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