> The term “value identity” is not defined anywhere in this post, nor can I find it elsewhere in Mojo’s documentation, so I’m not clear on how Modular claims that Mojo solves the problem that Pin is meant to solve
I don't claim to know the answer either, but it reminds me of a great talk from Dave Abrahams, who worked on the value semantics for Swift together with Chris Lattner (who started Mojo). The talk is "Value Semantics: Safety, Independence, Projection, & Future of Programming" [0]
One month ago this same company found a bug with a 2 million dollar bug bounty.
The bug would let them drain funds from a crypto exchange by sending funds to the exchange on the blockchain, but then after sending, reverting the part of the transaction that sent the funds, while keeping the overall transaction alive. The software at the exchange was fooled into counting the reverted transfer as actually happening. [0]
So what do you do when you find an incredibly critical bug with 2 million dollar bug bounty?
CertiK researchers choose to steal 3 million.
Then when they stole it, they exchanged the bulk of the coins for other coins, and sent some of the funds to an OFAC sanctioned entity. CertiK did not report the massive bug that they were exploiting live, in the wild, in public view, for ten days. When they finally did report it for the 2 million dollar bug bounty, CertiK did not mention the 3 million dollars that they stole. When confronted about it, they referred all questions to the sales team, who made demands and refused to return the money. Two weeks of refusing to return the money pass by, and before the head of security at the exchange posts on Twitter the story [1], without naming the company.
So what do you do now there's a now a story out there that some researchers stole 3 million and won't return it.
CertiK chose to confirm everything on their official Twitter, loudly proclaim that the team that stole the money was them, and claim that the exchange was persecuting them by threatening legal action for the return of the stolen funds. CertiK founders also retweeted these tweets.
After a firestorm of twitter drama, by the end of the day, CertiK promised to return the stolen funds.
So CertiK is just some random team of anonymous people, right? Nope.
CertiK is 2 billion market cap, company, headquartered in the US, just did 230 million dollars worth of fund raising.
(CertiK does have a long reputation for working in ways that no one could conclusively prove if their actions were from evil or from incompetentance.)
"The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt. – Rob Pike 1"
"It must be familiar, roughly C-like. Programmers working at Google are early in their careers and are most familiar with procedural languages, particularly from the C family. The need to get programmers productive quickly in a new language means that the language cannot be too radical. – Rob Pike 2"
So a language that makes it quite easy for enterprises to deal with developers as cogs.
In the winter, I used to stay warm by turning up the thermostat. Then I discovered (via HN) the Low-Tech Magazine article, "Insulation: first the body, then the home." [0] The article argued that it's much more efficient to focus on heating yourself rather than your whole living space.
I invested in high-quality wool clothes that I wear in layers and warm slippers. Now, I keep my home about 5 degrees F cooler than I used to for the same comfort, and it's a big reduction in oil and wood consumption for home heat.
Between Obsidian, Roam, Amplenote, and Reflect it has certainly been a golden age for note taking over the last few years. It's hard to remember that it was only 5 years ago that second generation note apps like Evernote, Notion and Bear were the only viable options unless you wanted a 1st gen app like OneNote or Workflowy.
What might be most interesting about the new set of fast moving note apps is that all seem to be built by teams of 3 or less people. Obsidian seems to have ascended to the top of the heap with a team of three and no apparent VC funding. Anyone that roots for small companies and passionate programmers should appreciate Obsidian proving that the best tools don't have to be built by the biggest teams. More the opposite.
In your mind you imagine an HR professional planning your loop, interviewers that are genuinely interested in you, a hiring manager who's carefully read your resumé and has specific questions about your experience. You just (wasted|spent) five or six years and $200,000 on your four year degree. They better be interested, right?
Not.
In reality, a hiring manager clicked on your resume because an algorithm suggested it, told HR to setup a loop, and then promptly forgot you until the day you showed up.
If you're one of the lucky ones, your resume might have actually been read by a human.
The interviewers on the loop are probably not even on the team you'll join if hired.
There's a 90% chance they haven't even read the job requisition for the position you're applying for, if they could even find it. I've had to interview people blind without requisition or resume, and yes I did feel like an idiot both times, a rude one.
The person sitting across from you asking questions probably first learned of your very existence 15 minutes before it began; not because of disinterest, but because HR assigned the interview with that short of a window! re: x out sick, y in important meeting, etc.
All of this is true for at least 2 FAANGs and 1 MSFT in my experience as an interviewer and interviewee on over 50 loops over a decade.
What I'm saying is there is no spit or polish to the hiring process, not even at competitive companies, not even at the big ones, perhaps especially so because the assumption will be that you actually know what you're doing since you were bold enough to apply and even bolder to attend an interview loop at one of these "amazing" companies.
The musical chairs you experienced at Stripe, if explained at all, will be calendar conflicts, meeting overruns, sick employees, fire drills within, etc., all of those ambiguities that constantly interrupt IT. The show doesn't stop within because you're being interviewed on Wednesday. You are not the show. That $1000 suit you're wearing, the only suit you'll ever buy or ever wear ever again, bought you 60 minutes (or 20 at Stripe for Mgr of Mgrs).
The real explanation you will never know, but something as facile as the third guy on the loop not liking the fact that you have a full head of hair and he has none is actually sufficient, if you understand what I mean, that hiring is messy and opaque and human and, therefore, often ridiculous.
Would you believe one of these companies has had for decades now, as a core competency to hire for, “A tolerance for ambiguity”? I always loved that one.
I interviewed for a marketing role at Optimizely back in 2013...I passed all the interviews with the team and then had a final, short interview with the CEO. He asked me a few basic questions and then asked 'if you only had 3 years to live, would you work at Optimizely?'. I responded honestly and said no. Said that I'd love to work here to help and grow the business, learn, and further my own career but if I had only had 3 years to live I'd spend my time differently. The hiring manager called the next day and said I would not receive an offer and when I asked him if it was because the answer to that question he said yes. That made it obvious they had a strange and not particularly healthy culture...lucky for me as I ended up at a much more successful early stage startup where I accomplished what I wanted to accomplish.
I don't claim to know the answer either, but it reminds me of a great talk from Dave Abrahams, who worked on the value semantics for Swift together with Chris Lattner (who started Mojo). The talk is "Value Semantics: Safety, Independence, Projection, & Future of Programming" [0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QthAU-t3PQ4