I initially thought the author was being metaphorical. Teaching poker to a kid is a very risky proposition. If they have any propensity for addiction, the dopamine rush of gambling may take hold of their thought patterns before they have the wisdom and mental maturity to counteract such urges.
Teaching kids the probabilistic nature of life? Sure, if there is a way to teach a kid such things in a meaningful way. But I definitely veto teaching a child poker.
OTOH, chess is great. I didn't study any chess until my 20's. I've never had a problem with the sort of intelligence that is exercised in the school system, but chess exercised my brain in a novel way that might only be experienced in academia via pure math or theoretical physics. The visualization of moves, even a few moves in advance, can initially be surprisingly challenging, especially if there are many seemingly legitimate options. For those who have not seriously exercised this mental muscle before, I suspect it this kind of thinking will feel quite difficult.
After getting to the point where I could solve moderately difficult to difficult chess puzzles -- let's say approaching "master" level if you're familiar with the title hierarchy in chess -- the foresight required for programming, especially the kind that is done in most jobs nowadays, "felt" much easier. This is because getting to that level not only required the ability to visualize N steps in advance, but it also forces one to develop a very strong awareness of mental blind spots, which can be very humbling, and is an highly useful skill to have in this profession.
Not to mention that poker is a game that rewards you for not getting caught lying. Fine for a game, but a problem if you're trying to draw life lessons from it.
This is an interesting take. I find CS to be a beautiful subject that I've enjoyed studying in my free time, and would probably enjoy it even more if I really delved into it. But I have a hard time justifying the time and cost. The key question: would it make me a more effective software engineer?
I've been in the industry for many, many years now, and the work I do has a small amount of overlap with the contents of a CS degree. But a lot of software engineering in the real world exists "above" the layer that CS teaches, not unlike CS living above electrical engineering. On top of that, in general, soft skills seem to matter so much more than having 10-30% more hard skills. This varies with your position of course, but I'd wager that the majority of software engineering positions are like this.
Having a credential from a decent school might help get more compensation, but without being able to truly quantify the amount of "help" it gives, it becomes impossible to adequately quantify the ROI.
And sure, you'll see some job postings from time to time that say they "prefer a masters degree," but what about once you're in the door? I don't think I've ever heard a software engineer explicitly put much weight onto the educational credentials of a peer. There may be unconscious biases, but for most engineers, it's about producing results.
Typescript “generics” (type parameters) are probably the most powerful such feature in a mainstream language at the type level. Of course neither Java or Typescript generics improve code performance versus the T<any> or T<Object> version; whereas the Go version will improve performance due to memory stenciling or whatever they call it - memory allocation shape is improved and data is actually inlined into the container struct, so you can avoid pointer chasing all together if that’s your goal.
But there are two major drawbacks in Go generics now:
1. Methods cannot be generic, so you can’t do any chaining-style interfaces like thing.Map(…).Reduce(…) if you want to output a different type.
2. Possibly even worse: you cannot cast from Container[ConcreteType] to Container[any], or from Container[any] to Container[ConcreteType]. In my limited experimentation this was the most surprising blocker for me since it’s quite natural to work with Container<unknown> in Typescript, and possible (although I’m not sure how idiomatic) to do Container<Object> or Container<*> in Java/Kotlin.
Still when writing “normal” Go (as opposed to trying to abuse the type system), the generic slices package is a noticeable pain relief. But I actually don’t find myself implementing generic containers too much in the Go domain.
Coming from a C++, C#, Java background, the implementation of generics in Go seems half baked and less useful. Of course, it is better this way than no generics at all.
you can do it that way but you can't add the map method to a struct like persons.map() which would allow you to chain methods. But I guess with the multiple return value convention, you can't chain anyway very nicely.
No, it's not. If you get lucky with stock market movements, that might be your total annual comp, which is not your wage. I made close to what you're claiming at senior level, at the recent peak of stock market insanity, but I'd stick to the dictionary definition of "wage."
This all day. Sure if you joined FB in March 2020 your total comp today will be a multiple of that 700k, but FB is not giving out 600k packages today to e5s ( and e5 imo is staff+ at many lower tier companies ), more like 450k all in compensation.
The post is not only too braggadocious for my taste, but some of the figures quoted are highly unlikely. I would personally not work for someone with this kind of ego, but there are many such people in positions of power.
This article is representative of an attitude I'm seeing around the tech industry, and if this is indeed the level of "confidence" in the Bay, I don't think that's a good sign.
We know how to do fusion. We know the physics behind it. We haven't yet figured out how to build profitable fusion plants, and we probably won't for a long time, if for no other reason than improvements in fission--modern fission plants are the best .
When it comes to AGI, we have no clue. It's a constantly moving target, because our conceptions of intelligence evolve. Most things that were once "AI" became "non-AI" solved problems after we got good at them using a couple key insights, e.g. that image processing could be sped up with CNNs due to the existence of a topology on the inputs. We still have no idea what makes us tick, and moreover there is not a strong economic incentive to replicate all of our intelligence... although, of course, automation will continue and that itself will be disruptive enough.
We're fairly certain it can be done given unbounded resources, we have some idea of the principles involved, but then there's a rather significant element of "draw the rest of the fucking owl" between where we are and where we imagine we could go.
He says AGI could happen in 20 years, not that he will single handedly manifest it into existence. That seems like a reasonable timeline given the field's current pace and may even be conservative.
If he's actual top talent as opposed to a poseur who's good at self-promotion, he should stay in academia for his own sake because he'll be crushed in the corporate world. Actual high IQ people get clobbered in corporate, while OKR-ing charlatans climb the ranks effortlessly... yes, even at FAANGs.
I'm not aware of anything he's accomplished but can see the delusion. ML people seem to think the output of their work is not mediocre. Yeah, you bred monkeys till something resembling shakespeare appeared to some reproducible consistency and it is better than something someone can code - but that's an incredibly low bar.
Acknowledge that were still very much in the stone age of AI and what were doing is large scale analytics at best.
Still.. do you think being a top talent in ML guarantees success for your own company, for example? I think there are a lot of valuable skills to have, being an expert in X is just one of them.
Clients and employees of SemiAnalysis may hold positions in companies referenced in this article.
This article lacks the evidence to warrant the boldness of its arguments. And after reading through the paragraphs of poorly based assertions, I see this at the bottom of the article. Why am I not surprised?
If I thought I could move the stock, I'd make the position in the morning alongside my clients, and publish shortly after, like I did with the article I just linked.
> no impression that my articles can move fucking Samsung's stock
> I do know that my reports have moved smaller companies stocks by 20% in a single day
seems like a weird contradiction. you really think a disclaimer can protect you here? Like many of us pointed out, you've made quite a bold, unsubstantiated claims with poorly cited evidence. You've admitted that your writing in the past have moved the targeted company's stock.
> If I thought I could move the stock, I'd make the position in the morning alongside my clients
I'm sure you could but writing a piece like this, without substantial evidence, I think could influence investors opinions and you've admitted that your writings in the past have moved stocks negatively.
> There's plenty of evidence though. Be an industry insider and you'd recognize it all.
so where are the evidence that support your claims?
If you don't want to believe it. Go ahead. The major claims are true, Qualcomm moving away. Nvidia moving away. DRAM node ramps being pitiful. DRAM engineering efforts come directly from a source there.
The cultural issues being the cause of these issues is the substantial claim.
It might be construed as defamation in Samsung's view, as they've repeatedly shown to be quite intolerant and litigious in the past, I have to warn that the author is treading on the deep end here.
A big part of Samsung's success is because of their insanely powerful and effective legal department. There's just no way their attorneys aren't reading semianalysis.
These kinds of articles always seem to get a lot of comments, and so many hiring processes seem to miss the mark.
If the criteria that you use for engineering hires has nearly 0 overlap with the criteria that you use for engineering promotions, then I'd assert that your company is suffering from some serious cognitive dissonance.
This article describes a hiring process that is probably a lot more useful than what I've typically witnessed at the FAANG's, provided the results can be quantified.
Unless you know, with certainty, who is responsible for customer-facing communications , how can you publicly call on a specific person to be fired? Even if you did know, and are correct in your implication, how do you know that she didn't want to do the right thing but was overruled by people above her in the chain? Overall, this is a pretty irresponsible comment, and reflects the kind of mob mentality that I would expect in Reddit, but not HN.
And the bit about Atlassian employees being in Vegas has nothing to do with anything - as if the entire company is supposed to shut down its planned celebration because of an incident that a small subset of the company should be handling.
Completely agree. Can we please keep the pitchforks on Reddit. It's so incredibly easily to point the finger when you really have no idea. I'm all for calling out their lack of communication, but picking someone you deem to be responsible and calling for their head is pretty medieval.
Why do you think "pitchforks" are on or should be on Reddit? That's a very odd thing to say on Hacker News. And if you don't like Reddit, just don't go there!
At no point did I say anything _should_ be on Reddit - I have no influence or say over what goes on on Reddit, but if you take a look through many recent posts, you will find massive amounts of mob mentality. Thankfully this kind of behaviour is much less common on hn and the community is generally much more open to discussion. I would love for this to continue to be so.
They are literally the head of "customer success". The buck should probably not stop ONLY with them, but obviously they're one of the people it needs to stop with
You seem to be implying that customer success is a customer support role. It isn't. Customer success is about helping customers get the greatest business value from your product. They are not going to be munging databases and wrangling backups. Support engineers (among others) do that work.
Customers unable to access the product they paid for, for over a week with very little communication, are not experiencing success.
These are the kind of incidents where parties and celebrations are put on hold and everyone does what they can to help, regardless of department or title.
Assuming that the "Global Head of Customer Success" is a leadership role that covers support engineering teams (no clue, but it appears to be some sort of executive position), then it's sorta beside the point whether or not the person is personally munging databases and wrangling backups. If an organization fails it is the fault of its leadership. The buck has to stop somewhere. Whether the "root cause" was risky engineering practices, careless employees, or just back luck, the blame lies with leadership, who should have established safer practices, not hired careless employees, and had a plan to mitigate the unlucky circumstance.
And yet maybe they could have personally responded to the impacted customers with informative, timely updates instead of waiting several days and then sending automated replies from templates.
Being a leader at the top of the food chain in a company this big means that you get to take credit for a significant portion of the success of company and your paycheck has an extra zero or two more than most people working for you. It's only fair that they have to take the blame for the horrible mistakes that their teams make.
Teaching kids the probabilistic nature of life? Sure, if there is a way to teach a kid such things in a meaningful way. But I definitely veto teaching a child poker.
OTOH, chess is great. I didn't study any chess until my 20's. I've never had a problem with the sort of intelligence that is exercised in the school system, but chess exercised my brain in a novel way that might only be experienced in academia via pure math or theoretical physics. The visualization of moves, even a few moves in advance, can initially be surprisingly challenging, especially if there are many seemingly legitimate options. For those who have not seriously exercised this mental muscle before, I suspect it this kind of thinking will feel quite difficult.
After getting to the point where I could solve moderately difficult to difficult chess puzzles -- let's say approaching "master" level if you're familiar with the title hierarchy in chess -- the foresight required for programming, especially the kind that is done in most jobs nowadays, "felt" much easier. This is because getting to that level not only required the ability to visualize N steps in advance, but it also forces one to develop a very strong awareness of mental blind spots, which can be very humbling, and is an highly useful skill to have in this profession.