> Although most people profess to want to change at least one aspect of their personality, those who will put the effort in are surely far fewer
Many people in Alcoholics Anonymous don't actually do the 12 steps as designed by Bill Wilson. They don't understand that it's a piece of spiritual technology designed to produce a spiritual awakening and a reorganization of personality. I've met many people who have become better people through the 12 steps.
I've rewritten them here to give a basic outline and remove any mention of a theistic god. I am not a professional so please forgive me if I've over-simplified or got something wrong. This is how it worked for me at a basic level.
1 - Take a look and see if you have a problem. Admit you have a problem if you have one. You can't fix a problem you refuse to recognize.
2 - Recognize you've tried to solve it by yourself and have failed. You need help from others.
3 - Humble yourself enough to ask for help and be ready to follow direction
4 - List all the complaints people have about you and analyze what you might be doing wrong
5 - Share your failings, no matter how embarrassing, with a trusted other on the principle that confession is good for the soul and sunlight is the best disinfectant
6 - Ask yourself if you're really willing to change. That's not a given. Maybe you aren't.
7 - If you are then do what it takes to change. This is going to be different for everyone.
8 - Look at step 4 and see who you need to apologize to
9 - When you feel you are ready and sufficiently reformed, apologize and make restitution to those on the list you made in step 8. To those that aren't willing to talk, let it go and don't bother them.
10 - Make it a practice to do steps 4 through 9 as needed. We believe in progress not perfection.
11 - We need to remind ourselves daily that we have a problem that we can't solve alone and that we may need the help of others on any given day. I've heard it called a disease of forgetfulness. We may need to wake up in the morning to read and pray if so inclined. As one person told me, "carve out a little piece of each day for the 12 steps"
12 - Carry this message to others who are still suffering
The “one that works out” can also give you a misrepresentation of how the world works and a false sense of how lucky one should expect to be over a long period of time.
At an earlier point in my life, I had been applying to many well-known big tech companies right out of school (not a top school either). I never got a reply from any of them so I ended up accepting a local job with a non-tech company after months of searching.
But I didn’t give up my hopes and kept applying to big tech, and while I did manage to get the occasional interview with some mediocre companies or the random startup, I also miserably failed all of them too.
At some point during my long period of despair at never getting a better job, my very top pick (and arguably one of the best tech companies in the world at the time) reached out to me. Even more miraculously, I somehow passed their interview (the only tech interview I passed in the prior year) and accepted a job there.
I really enjoyed working there. Some of the best years of my life. And my performance reviews were great too, so the imposter syndrome from having failed so many tech job interviews sort of faded into the background. But after a while, perhaps due to the “hedonic treadmill” mentality, I thought I could do better. So I left to join a startup.
Well, the startup failed, as startups tend to do, but what I didn’t expect and what caught me off guard was that I was now back in the same situation I was in right after graduating from college. Don’t get me wrong—having “the name” on my resume now meant I could get at least one chance at an interview about anywhere. But much like the first round that I tried to forget about, I once again failed all the interviews.
Unfortunately, this second time around never procured a “get out of jail free” card.
So I guess my lesson is: 1) there’s a lot of luck involved in these things, 2) if life gives you a winning lottery ticket at some point, don’t throw it away for the chance to win an even bigger lottery, and 3) that famous saying about “the only actions regretted are those not taken” is absolutely, totally wrong—almost all of my regrets in life relate to taking some action I shouldn’t have rather than inaction.
Your post made me curious to try a problem I have been coming back to ever since ChatGPT was first released: https://open.kattis.com/problems/low
I have had no success using LLM's to solve this particular problem until trying Gemini 3 just now despite solutions to it existing in the training data. This has been my personal litmus test for testing out LLM programming capabilities and a model finally passed.
If you want more context on PFAS, I recommend this Veritasium video [0]. It expanded on my usual thought of "PFAS = bad," explaining why non-stick cookware is probably fine while other forms of PFAS are problematic. The video also covers the environmental damage caused by PFAS manufacturing.
Can't recommend this approach highly enough: have someone with minimal expertise go through your docs with the goal of achieving the goal of the docs. Sit next to them or screenshare. Do not speak to them, certainly do not help, just watch. Watch them fumble. Watch them not know what to do. Watch them experience things you (the author) didn't, because you already had xyz configured on your machine and you forgot users won't have it. (even watch them pretend to know what they're supposed to do when they don't really).
If the user achieves what they need with minimal stress/guesswork/ambiguity, the docs pass. If not, note every single place they fail, address each one, and repeat with a new user.
I've used FAANG docs that don't come close to passing the above criteria.
I've been incredibly grateful my org set this high bar. Especially when using docs for critical tech I only use from time to time (where I forget lots of it). Saves meetings, support inquiries, and video calls, because the user can self-serve.
One great piece of advice an informal mentor gave me long ago is that there is no information in a rejection.
That is to say that you cannot draw any conclusions about yourself or your interviewing technique or your skills or anything from the single accept==0 bit that you typically get back. There are so many reasons that a candidate might get rejected that have nothing to do with one's individual performance in the interview or application process.
Having been on the hiring side of the interview table now many more times than on the seeking side, I can say that this is totally true.
One of the biggest misconceptions I see from job seekers, especially younger ones, is to equate a job interview to a test at school, assuming that there is some objective bar and if you pass it then you must be hired. It's simply not true. Frequently more than one good applicant applies for a single open role, and the hiring team has to choose among them. In that case, you could "pass" and still not get the job and the only reason is that the hiring team liked someone else better.
I can only think of one instance where we had two great candidates for one role and management found a way to open another role so we could hire both. In a few other cases, we had people whom we liked but didn't choose and we forwarded their resumes to other teams who had open roles we thought would fit, but most of the time it's just, "sorry."
Oh no! Use of dissimilar metals in a load-carrying application is bound to result in structural failure?!?! Quick, someone get started on replacing the gazillion miles of Aluminum Conductor Steel–Reinforced (ACSR) cable that run our power networks!!! While you're at it make sure to get rid of all the Titanium-clad carbon steel pressure vessels used in marine applications,Zinc-Aluminum 'Galfan' rebar, steel-aluminum galvanic isolation ship hull transitions, and any of the other bazillion places we do this!
> help bolster a critical sector of the American economy, which often can't find enough drivers.
They can find enough drivers, but won’t pay them enough or give them any dignity. The industry has a 90% turnover rate per year. So obviously they are finding drivers all the time…they just don’t keep them.
Even tho it's 8y old, Sarah Drasner's famous "SVG Can Do That?" talk is still eye-opening for many. CSS has matured a ton since then (I'm less sure about SVG per se)... in any case it's HIGHLY recommended.
He first recaps the conventional view people have about Frost, then reads "The Road Not Taken", his most famous poem, and then completely takes Frost AND the poem AND THEN the public's misunderstanding of Frost apart.
Don't get fooled by the bare visual appearance of Murphy, his empty blackboard (no PPT, no bs) - this lecture is a fantastic, suprising and deeply disturbing (regarding what is revealed about Frost and his public misappreciation). Simply priceless teaching - thank you, dear colleague.
EDIT: If you ask ChatGPT for a "10-20 sentence interpretation of The Road Not Taken", it falls right into the trap that Murphy warns about.
An angle I didn't notice discussed here on HN is that while this confusion about DOGE among the general US public continues, it's a great time for China to advance it's agenda and to weaken the US.
> However, DeepSeek-R1-Zero encounters challenges such as endless repetition, poor readability, and language mixing. To address these issues and further enhance reasoning performance, we introduce DeepSeek-R1, which incorporates cold-start data before RL.
We've been running qualitative experiments on OpenAI o1 and QwQ-32B-Preview [1]. In those experiments, I'd say there were two primary things going against QwQ. First, QwQ went into endless repetitive loops, "thinking out loud" what it said earlier maybe with a minor modification. We had to stop the model when that happened; and I feel that it significantly hurt the user experience.
It's great that DeepSeek-R1 fixes that.
The other thing was that o1 had access to many more answer / search strategies. For example, if you asked o1 to summarize a long email, it would just summarize the email. QwQ reasoned about why I asked it to summarize the email. Or, on hard math questions, o1 could employ more search strategies than QwQ. I'm curious how DeepSeek-R1 will fare in that regard.
Either way, I'm super excited that DeepSeek-R1 comes with an MIT license. This will notably increase how many people can evaluate advanced reasoning models.
I'm a CTO who makes purchasing decisions. There are numerous products I likely would have purchased, but I either find a substitute or just go without because I won't play the stupid "let's get on a call" game.
If your website doesn't give me enough information to:
1. Know enough about your product to know that it will (generally speaking) meet my needs/requirements.
2. Know that the pricing is within the ballpark of reasonable given what your product does.
Then I will move on (unless I'm really desparate, which I assure you is rarely the case). I've rolled-my-own solution more than once as well when there were no other good competitors.
That's not to say that calls never work or don't have a place, because they definitely do. The key to using the call successfully (with me at least) is to use the call to get into true details about my needs, after I know that you're at least in the ballpark. Additionally, the call should be done efficiently. We don't need a 15 minute introduction and overview about you. We don't need a bunch of small talk about weather or sports. 2 minutes of that is ok, or when waiting for additional people to join the call, but beyond that I have things to do.
I know what my needs are. I understand you need some context on my company and needs in order to push useful information forward, and I also understand that many potential customers will not take the lead in asking questions and providing that context, but the sooner you take the temperature and adjust, the better. Also, you can get pretty far as a salesperson if you just spend 5 minutes looking at our website before the call! Then you don't have to ask basic questions about what we do. If you're willing to invest in the time to get on a call, then it's worth a few minutes of time before-hand to look at our website.
You must be a US citizen to work for my company. No "US Persons" (visa holders) or foreigners allowed.
You have to be eligible for a Secret security clearance. You don't have to get one if you don't want to as there is usually plenty of uncleared work to go around, but you have to be eligible in case that goes away and we need to put you in for a clearance.
We cannot find qualified applicants.
I've had this conversation many times on HN so here are some preemptive responses:
No, we don't make weapons for the military. Well, we do but not my part of the company. The most harmful thing the products I build do is quantify in precise detail how climate change is dooming us all.
No, our positions aren't ghost positions.
Yes, we are willing to train someone who is motivated. We won't re-teach linear algebra to a developer applicant but we will pay a tech writer to go to school nights/weekends to get a degree in engineering (me, I did that).
Yes, we have extensive high school and college work-study/internships and participants make $72k/yr. with full benefits for the duration of the program. That pipeline is actually successful.
No, you can't work remotely. You (even programmers!) have to touch the things we build in order to build them and nobody has an ISO certified clean room in their house.
Yes, we pay well.
No, we don't pay as much as Meta. We build components for satellites that have been sold to space agencies and purchased by various departments/ministries of the environment, not your personal information to advertisers-- one party has more money to spend than the other.
We have shortages in mech/EE/Aero, shortages in software, and critical shortages in engineering technicians.
One issue is that we expect programmers to remember linear algebra and have more than the ability to shovel frameworks on top of each other until a phone app comes out the other side.
Something that just dawned on me is the downstream effects of United States’ policy regarding science during WWII and the Cold War. The Manhattan Project, NASA, the NSA and all of its contributions to mathematics and cryptography, ARPA, DARPA, and many other agencies and programs not only directly contributed to science, but they also helped form a scientific culture that affected not only government-ran and government-funded labs, but also private-sector labs, as people and ideas were exchanged throughout the years. It is a well-documented fact that Xerox PARC’s 1970’s culture was heavily influenced by ARPA’s 1960’s culture.
One of the things that has changed since the 1990s is the ending of the Cold War. The federal government still has national laboratories, DARPA, NASA, the NSF, etc. However, the general culture has changed. It’s not that technology isn’t revered; far from it. It’s just that “stopping Hitler,” “beating the Soviets,” and grand visions for society have been replaced with visions of creating lucrative businesses. I don’t hear about the Oppenheimers and von Neumanns of today’s world, but I hear plenty about Elon Musk and Sam Altman, not to disrespect what they have done (especially with the adoption of EVs and generative AI, respectively), but the latter names are successful businessmen, while the former names are successful scientists.
I don’t know what government labs are like, but I know that academia these days have high publication and fundraising pressures that inhibit curiosity-driven research, and I also know that industry these days is beholden to short-term results and pleasing shareholders, sometimes at the expense of the long-term and of society at large.
For us, affordability is _part of the product itself_.
We’re specifically building this _not_ to hoover up every dollar on the table, but to serve smaller groups that have been left out in the cold by "bigger" tools, and who get screwed by per-seat pricing. We believe there are enough teams who fit this profile to be profitable.
There’s a difference between making profit and maximizing profit. the capitalists will call us crazy, but we're not here to maximize profit.
For me the most important issue that needs to be solved right now is the increasing urban sprawl and the car dependent neighborhoods. It causes social isolation. Maintaining infrastructure like roads and electricity, is causing a strain on the economy for local municipalities. Not to mention the disastrous effect car based transportation has on the environment.
I am a fullstack developer living in Norway. Last year I registered the Norwegian branch of the Architectural Uproar as a not for profit organization. With the support from paying members, I have been able to go on tour to most of the major cities in Norway. We organize large meetings were we discuss architecture and city planning with politicians, architects and property developers on stage.
I am strongly inspired by Create Streets in UK and Strong Towns in the US. I want to improve people’s quality of life, help saving the planet and make Norway beautiful again while doing it.
In my 50k population town in Minnesota, I notice a lot of headlights, taillights, and turn signals are out. Our roads (outside of the Twin Cities) are often bumpy which causes vibration in the vehicles, leading to many bulbs failing.
I drive a 21 year old Saab, and in my 2 years of owning it, I have replaced every single bulb in the exterior of the vehicle except a turn signal or two.
I decided to create a mobile service for vehicle lights. It's a simple website that even technologically-disadvantaged people can use. The website is nearly finished and I will likely come back here to write a post on it for how the website works.
Oh the best part, I get texted and emailed for each service order that comes in, and using my service is only $10 more than what it would cost you to go buy a bulb yourself at OReillys, AutoZone, etc.
I programmed everything myself and developed the idea as well. This is my first real-world project/solution I am bringing into this world that has been verified by others, to be a needed service. Pretty excited about it and I love changing bulbs or replacing light housings, it's fun and simple.
Best of luck. I’m a commercial real estate professional who has spent time as a broker, lender, and private equity investor.
Residential definitely is a lot
More of a ridiculous market. But ultimately as an agent, you get hired to work with mostly irrational actors (sellers and buyers).
As someone who is very interested in AI and taught myself how to code (I don’t know any other real estate people who know anything about code), I think it’s going to be incredible hard to uproot the brokerage industry.
It’s challenging to get buy in from many different types of old school, fragmented actors in the space. I’d love to see someone prove this can be done, but I think it’s a challenge, so best of luck. Curious to follow along.
I think proptech needs real professionals who have been in the trenches to be involved because there’s just too much nuance in the industry outsiders have no idea about.
As with price discrimination, I think there are only two possible ways this can go:
Either we pass some laws that deeply upset some oligarchs and future eras see this one as a "wild west" of data-driven exploitative practices, or we permanently destroy the bargaining power of everyone not big enough to be doing mass-surveillance, which is effectively the end of markets and the rise of a sort of advanced feudalism (which some would argue is quite far along already)
One obviously seems better to me, but to be fair I am biased, being in the class of people who don't own an enormous corporation
If you want some in-depth technical details on how VORs work, I found this video very helpful. It goes into many of the details of the analog radio engineering:
Willing to relocate: No, fine with travel, however.
Technologies: I'm a former founder (everything non-engineering), 20+ years of experience at the intersection of biz dev/strategy/operations/marcom, running companies, managing teams, translating the complex to the people.
Background in / enthusiasm for: SaaS, analytics, cloud/infrastructure, web3/onchain, gaming, API and SDK products, pricing strategy, commercialization, strategy, gtm.
i used to feel this way and say “the government is terrible, look at example x, y, and z” until someone asked me a simple question, “using the same standards, how many companies have we seen that are just plain awful?”
this simple question made me realize that honestly, i think far more often i see terrible customer service, terrible end product, etc… from companies than i do from various government projects—particularly the larger we go in scale. it feels like daily here in hn we see someone who is struggling with some company with literally no way to get help at all.
for every bad government project we can point to multiple awful corporate attempts.
at the end of the day i don’t think better or worse is inherent to either. there are positives and negatives to both but missteps, growing pains, corruption etc… are pretty clearly not limited to one or the other.
I was doing AI implementations for a company in Oil and Refined products. And I can tell you that AI can massively improve the processes and and streamline their operations. In fact, it can easily transform any data entry to structure data without the needless sw development of API integrations and gateways.
My first point as a contribution is, traders are lazy and operators are control freaks. In a way traders only care about doing deals so any trade entry in a system us prone to errors and misalignment, such as the ETRM system's reference data. And Operators are control freaks in a way that if they find our that your AI missed a single entry they will mistrust it forever. They rather spend more time copy pasting that to trust your AI. But any automation is welcome they still want to have control (which some in contrast will argue that that control is a nuisance and a waste of time).
Oh well, though customers is what they are.
I am really happy to know that there are others trying to solve the same problems in a world of ineffectiveness.
Geometric Algebra was a complete mystery to me until I finally realized: it is just polynomial multiplication, but with some quantities for which the order of multiplication matters, and which have a weird multiplication table: i*i = 1, i*j = -j*i. That's it. Most intros present geometric product of two vectors:
(x1*i + y1*j) * (x2*i + y2*j)
as some deep mysterious thing, but its just the same FOIL polynomial multiplication you learned in freshman algebra:
The quantity in the first parenthesis, above, is the our old familiar dot product. The quantity in the second parenthesis is our old friend the cross product, but expressed in a new dimension whose basis is i*j, and which--unlike the cross product--generalizes to any number of dimensions. In GA its called the "wedge product".
Once you "get" that, you find that doing things like deriving rotation formulas, etc, become easy, because you can apply all the skills you developed in algebra to solving geometric problems.
One of my favorite math/graphics YouTube creators Freya Holmér did an excellent intro to Geometric Algebra not that long ago [1]. If you have any interest in 3d graphics (especially but no limited to splines/Bezier curves) then be sure to check out all of their videos.
I personally have always struggled with linear algebra and I tend to find these Clifford Algebra approaches much more intuitive.
I'm for Vue/Nuxt. While reading React code is fine, I found it easy to shoot myself in the foot (causing circular effects or getting no reactivity) in a way Vue didn't. Vue feels more explicit. I like React's TSX for embedding HTML, but Vue's splitting of model and view appeals to me. I'm torn on that one.
Vue's ecosystem isn't as big, but it's an established framework. Both React and Vue feel easier to work with than Angular. RxJS is really cool, but also very comprehensive, making it difficult to keep the entire API in mind. At least for me, who only use it casually (used to use it more while at Google.) And on top of that, I have to know the Angular API. Angular used to be great for Material Design, but I nowadays there are MD packages for all systems.
Nuxt is for Vue what Next is for React: SSR and SSG. It adds auto-imports, which is nice. At this point, I see no reason to use Vue alone, since there's always something that can be pre-rendered. Perhaps the frontpage, or help pages. Since Vue itself provides entrypoints for SSR, Nuxt is more of a file-structure based router that just simplifies things. The documentation is a bit sparse on e.g. the difference between a plugin and a module, and I usually resort to navigating their source to understand things. That might not be everyone's cup of tea.
If what you're writing is a web app, there is also Quasar, built on top of Vue. Similar to Nuxt in that it ties in directory structure, build system and MVC framework. It is also a Material Design UI widget library. Their selling point is that you can build mobile apps, and web apps with the same library. I.e. like React Native. I felt it strays too far away from the core simplicity of Vue, unlike Nuxt, but it's no doubt a very capable framework.
Finally, I'm currently using PrimeVue as the UI widget/theming library on top of Vue. It's okay. :\ Switched to it when the Vue Bootstrap project decided to to support Vue 3 (or whatever the situation was.) I haven't come across anything that's actively broken or missing. The companion library PrimeFlex provides layout CSS. Annoyingly, they've decided to close GitHub FRs, and some (far from all) bugs, and just keep track of them internally. Makes it more dificult to communicate, but I don't know their reasoning behind it (they didn't respond when I asked.)
Many people in Alcoholics Anonymous don't actually do the 12 steps as designed by Bill Wilson. They don't understand that it's a piece of spiritual technology designed to produce a spiritual awakening and a reorganization of personality. I've met many people who have become better people through the 12 steps.
I've rewritten them here to give a basic outline and remove any mention of a theistic god. I am not a professional so please forgive me if I've over-simplified or got something wrong. This is how it worked for me at a basic level.
1 - Take a look and see if you have a problem. Admit you have a problem if you have one. You can't fix a problem you refuse to recognize.
2 - Recognize you've tried to solve it by yourself and have failed. You need help from others.
3 - Humble yourself enough to ask for help and be ready to follow direction
4 - List all the complaints people have about you and analyze what you might be doing wrong
5 - Share your failings, no matter how embarrassing, with a trusted other on the principle that confession is good for the soul and sunlight is the best disinfectant
6 - Ask yourself if you're really willing to change. That's not a given. Maybe you aren't.
7 - If you are then do what it takes to change. This is going to be different for everyone.
8 - Look at step 4 and see who you need to apologize to
9 - When you feel you are ready and sufficiently reformed, apologize and make restitution to those on the list you made in step 8. To those that aren't willing to talk, let it go and don't bother them.
10 - Make it a practice to do steps 4 through 9 as needed. We believe in progress not perfection.
11 - We need to remind ourselves daily that we have a problem that we can't solve alone and that we may need the help of others on any given day. I've heard it called a disease of forgetfulness. We may need to wake up in the morning to read and pray if so inclined. As one person told me, "carve out a little piece of each day for the 12 steps"
12 - Carry this message to others who are still suffering