I have grown up in rural Russia in the 80s and that was also similar - a forest started 50m from our house and I would just get lost there from time to time - not fun for my parents but magical for me.

Then we moved to the middle of a European capital city (Sofia) and I _still_ had almost a forest right next to the apartment block we used to live in - enough of a forest that as a 10yo kid I could find a nook to build myself a small hut with a burning fireplace inside it and nobody complained.

There are plenty of big European cities that are 10-20mins short unsupervised trip to a wilderness that a kid can do.

For example - Valencia has an uninterrupted bicycle highway that gets you from the city center to a wilderness preserve and a beach in less than an hour cycling.

To me all of these nature vs city laments are just US car dependency. Cities don’t have to be this way at all.

And don’t forget all the other expertise that comes from being a country that is able to build reliable nuclear reactors. China is _the_ production superpower not just because it can build x or y, it’s because it has all the supply chains to be able to do it at scale.

If a country invests into that expertise - you get a lot of very capable engineers, a lot of tech and supply chains to deal with making it all happen, again and again, at scale. That in itself would be something that can offset the raw “price” of a single reactor, though it is very hard to quantify.

Like how much has USA actually lost by relinquishing its historical role of guarding international trade? Maybe it won some independence, but maybe the upstream effects to its economy would be bad?

We don’t know for sure about nuclear, but when a similar scientific project was put on a national scale - the space race - USA got silicon valley out of it.

These are so much better than the interface fetch offers you, unfortunately.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47570312

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The way the book is structured there is only one big reveal that would be spoiled by the movie, but I don’t think that was the most interesting thing in the book anyways, it was all about engineering, the scientific method and all that, and I think that will still hold before or after watching.

The one big exception I’ve found to “read the book first” advice to me has been “the expanse” there the books and the series were so great that they sort of complemented each other, and the advice there is “definitely do both”. I was reading the books and watching the series in parallel - side by side.

I do hope Hail Marry is like that…

If they strike desalination plants, Israel/us can do the same … really mass casualty event could follow.

And they might, at some point the Iranian gov might feel desperate enough to be like “fuck it, we have nothing to lose” … Dubai could end up with a lot more graves.

Almost all of their water comes from these plants, and humans can’t survive without water for more than 3 days …

There are reserves/stores sure, but how long will they last, and which part of the population do they cover? In a week you could have thousands of civilians dead on both sides.

So MAD keeps things in check.

I think this is whaly Iran has invested so much into rockets - they are very ineffective at providing decisive military victory by themselves, but without them, Iran will be at Israel’s mercy, and they have proven to not possess that in great amounts lately

It still uses MJML for the actual templates, but it is a translation layer between markdown and the template itself.

If you need to author a lot of emails with LLM this does seem like it would be a great fit.

So I’m shocked cloud providers haven’t just done this themselves, given how feasible it is with the right harness

And I think this has become even more so with the age of ai, because there is even more unknown unknowns, which is harder to discover while planning, but easy wile “doing” and that “doing” itself is so much more streamlined.

In my experience no amount of planning will de-risk software engineering effort, what works is making sure coming back and refactoring, switching tech is less expensive, which allows you to rapidly change the approach when you inevitably discover some roadblock.

You can read all the docs during planning phases, but you will stumble with some undocumented behaviour / bug / limitation every single time and then you are back to the drawing board. The faster you can turn that around the faster you can adjust and go forward.

I really like the famous quote from Churchill- “Plans are useless, planning is essential”

There are accounts from all over history of how "the times were more thoughtful and moral in the good old days" But here we are, thousands of years later, still complaining about the younger members of our species and how they will bring ruin to us all. Perhaps they will, but it all seems so human to complain about that.

I remember the art of the 90s - when my part of the world got access to marvelous pieces like Thunder in Paradise, Barbed Wire, American Ninja, Bay Watch ... at the time it was considered the pinnacle of art by teenagers like me, and despised by my parents. But at the same time we had things like The Matrix, The Shawshank Redemption, Leon ... We remember the good stuff and the forget the fluff.

There are some real gems being created all the time, maybe not always from Hollywood but human creativity soldiers on.

The Good Place, The Expanse, 3 Body Problem, Horizon Zero Dawn, Expedition 33, Project Hail Marry. There is a constant stream of incredible thoughtful stuff being produced - books, games, movies, essays, videos, podcasts - the medium might change but humans always try to find ways to discover, understand and express the world around us in novel ways, one just needs to listen/watch.

If you still want to make the old headphones work these welders are a godsend, and with some small amount of diy work of cleaning, sanding and buffing you can easily hide these welds.

I personally like to leave them though since they accent that something that was once broken is whole again, and that it has a long history!

If I know about it as well, then we can have a really deep discussion, if I don’t- then I can learn something new.

The aim when interviewing is to check how well / deeply the interviewee can think through a problem.

If we pick a topic that they don’t have deep knowledge - they can either stumble and freeze emotionally, or hallucinate something just to appear smart. At this point it is an examination not an interview. And sure some people are capable enough to get to an answer, but that’s more of a lottery than a real analysis.

It usually boils down to how often have they interviewed before and been in a similar situation. And “people who have interviewed a lot” is hardly a metric I want to optimise for.

Now picking something they know or have expressed interest or passion in, this means we are sure to have more signal than noise. If the interviewee’s description is more of a canned response - then I delve deeper or broader.

“I’ve managed to solve this issue by introducing caching” - “Great, are there other solutions? How do you handle cache invalidation, what are the limits? What will you do if the load increases 10 fold, would you need to rethink the solution?”

There is usually a huge disconnect between someone who knows that “this task should take 20mins” and doing it cold in a super high-pressure environment.

People sweat, panic, brain freeze, and are just plain out stressed.

I’ll only OK something like this if we give out a similar but not the same task before the interview so a person can train a bit beforehand.

I’ve heard it all justified as “we want to see how you perform under pressure” but to me that has always sounded super flimsy - like if this is representative of how work is done at this organisation, then do I want to work there in the first place? And if it isn’t, why the hell are you putting people through this ringer in the first place, just sounds inhumane.

I’ve mostly given up on all of the standard techniques for interviewing sadly, just because “using ai” makes a lot of them trivial, and have resorted to the good old fashioned interview, where I screen for drive, values and root cause seeking, and let people learn tech/frameworks/etc themselves.

But I was wondering, isn’t a take home question still good, if you give a more open ended and ambitious task, and let people vibe code the solution, review the result but ask for the prompt/session as well?

People will be doing that during normal work anyway, so why not test that directly?

What is the scope of projects / features you’ve seen this be successful at?

Do you have a step before where an agent verifies that your new feature spec is not contradictory, ambiguous etc. Maybe as reviewed with regards to all the current feature sets?

Do you make this a cycle per step - by breaking down the feature to small implementable and verifiable sub-features and coding them in sequence, or do you tell it to write all the tests first and then have at it with implementation and refactoring?

Why not refactor-red-green-refactor cycle? E.g. a lot of the time it is worth refactoring the existing code first, to make a new implementation easier, is it worth encoding this into the harness?

I remember the birth of React was because Facebook had a problem - you would add a comment and your notification bar would sometimes not get updated.

They had so many bugs with normal html / css that they wanted to solve this on the application layer - to make inconsistent UI elements unrepresentable.

So they came up with react with global state - because in their use case changing one thing does affect a bunch of other unrelated things, and they all need to sync together.

I mean honestly that’s what I use React _for_ - especially with contexts it’s very easy to express all of this complex interconnected state of a webapp in a consistent way.

And of course there are other ways to solve it - for example with elixir/phoenix you just push all that complexity to the backend and trust in websockets and the BEAM.

I just feel that if you really don’t need global state, then react kinda isn’t needed as well…

The time it happened for me was rather abrupt, with no training in between, and the feeling was eerily similar.

You know _exactly_ why the best solution is, you talk to your reports, but they have minds of their own, as well as egos, and they do things … their own way.

At some point I stopped obsessing with details and was just giving guidance and direction only in the cases where it really mattered, or when asked, but let people make their own mistakes.

Now LLMs don’t really learn on their own or anything, but the feeling of “letting go of small trivial things” is sorta similar. You concentrate on the bigger picture, and if it chose to do an iterative for loop instead of using a functional approach the way you like it … well the tests still pass, don’t they.

So just decided to get a motorbike license and go check out Asia.

Ended up finding a partner (totally unexpected) selling everything, moving abroad, marrying them and now expecting a child (planned), all in a manner of 3 years.

Has been quite the joyful and interesting experience, all after I had the deeply depressing feeling of having “solved life” at my nice position in the EU.

There are so many places in the world where you can feel you are actually doing great service to the community, on a shoestring budget and feel happy and fulfilled.

I like what Singapore is doing - having a government built “base level” of housing that is both abundant and readily available - it can anchor the price where deep excesses are harder to end up with.

It’s like a market where a very significant player keeps the price law, because of its own reasons.

In such a scenario the price will not go up as sharply, so there would be less incentive for people to buy real estate just as a financial vehicle.

And the government can also prioritise who it sells the units it builds to - e.g. not investors.

I honestly am surprised why western governments are not trying this.

Now they accomplished this by imposing a lot of constraints on what you could do, but honestly it was solid UX at the time so it was fine.

Like the things you could do were just sane things to do in the first place, thus it felt quite ok as a dev.

React apps, _especially_ ones hosted on Next.js rarely feel as snappy, and that is with the benefit of 15 years of engineering and a few order of magnitude perf improvement to most of the tech pieces of the stack.

It’s just wild to me that we had faster web apps, with better organizarion, better dev ex, faster to build and easier to maintain.

The only “wins” I can see for a nextjs project is flexibility, animation (though this is also debatable), and maybe deployment cost, but again I’m comparing to deploying rails 15 years ago, things have improved there as well I’m sure.

I know react can accomplish _a ton_ more on the front end but few projects actually need that power.