The kind of people GP is referring to refuse to actually learn from this. I've had several coworkers over the last 15 years that absolutely refuse to 'learn to fish'.
I have often offered to work with folks, and teach them how to develop shipping software. This is something I’m actually fairly good at, having done it, my entire career. I’m retired, now, but continue to develop shipping software. I often offer to do so, with others, so they can learn in an actual production context.
Valuable stuff. They could actually learn skills that could boost their own careers into LEO.
Instead, they invariably ask me to do it for them, or, more annoyingly, say they’ll do it, then never show up, and castigate me for going ahead without them.
Meta: This is why HN attracts curious people. They are rare. Finding and hiring them is hard. The forum cultivates for them, like gardeners tending a garden for pollinators. My best tip for hiring has always been "Hire curious people with a proven ability to build, get out of their way, and retain them as long as you can by meeting their professional expectations (comp, work experience, meaningful work, broadly speaking)."
(strongly agree working with people who do not care or do not want to learn is soul crushing, engineer around it to the best of your ability, or change your operating environment to improve upon it, when able to; your time and energy is non renewable)
You learn to know who are the lazy ones, and at that point you can politely always respond with a, "what were you able to find on this?". You can repeat this ad infinitum since at that point, they're just being lazy and disrespectful of your time. They eventually give up going to you because they know they won't get you to do their work for them.
Good point, and I realize that's what I did in school. When people came to me that I suspected were just looking for easy answers to avoid doing the work themselves, I'd lead them gradually through the chain of reasoning. Like, point out the first step and imply that that should be enough for them to work it out, leading them to ask again ("ok, I get that, but what does that mean for the final answer? What should I write down?"), and I'd give them the next step, leading them to walk away in disgust and bother somebody else. Even better, the next time they start with that person and it's no longer my problem.
Be high friction when you suspect it's warranted. Even if you're not sure someone is looking for a shortcut, the people who aren't won't mind. It's detection and deterrence rolled into one.
(And if possible, find a place to work where you never have to do this.)
As someone who loves helping people to learn things for themselves... you have to identify these "help vampires" and just stop helping them.
I had a coworker who would ask me the same questions over and over and over, despite me trying to show them 10 different ways how to do it or find the answer in the docs or whatever. And eventually I just said I was too busy and they had to figure it out. After a while they actually started figuring stuff out.
Basically if those people aren't your direct reports, your obligation to help them only goes so far. Take care of yourself first. If they figure it out eventually then good for them. If not, it's really not your problem.
You're looking at human nature. We evolved to conserve energy, to take the berries that are growing right here rather than go foraging for something else with less certain outcomes. Even better, someone else collects the berries for you.
There are some exceptional people, who have the drive and curiosity to see what else is out there, but that's not the average.
I think it shows exactly the opposite of the second. Even with the availability of checklists, and instructions to use them, people won't and don't actually use them consistently.
'With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow' and AI is an automatable eye that looks at things we can tell nobody has seriously looked at before. It's not a panacea, there will be lots of false positives, but there's value there that we clearly aren't getting by 'just telling humans to use the tools available'.
See also: modern practices and sanitizers and tools and test frameworks to avoid writing memory errors in C, and the reality that we keep writing memory errors in C.
> See also: modern practices and sanitizers and tools and test frameworks to avoid writing memory errors in C, and the reality that we keep writing memory errors in C.
I think there's a difference in how trivial some of these things are to detect and how difficult others are. IDOR and SQLi aren't nearly as complex as C unsafety is.
This doesn't follow at all. The game received _excellent_ reviews prior to release. It's currently the second best reviewed PC game of the year on metacritic [1] (an aggregator with some problems but I don't think this is controversial).
Exactly contrary to your point, both Clair Obscur and Blue Prince (#1) got excellent reviews in the days leading up to release leading to people on e.g. Reddit saying "this game came out of nowhere and it has amazing reviews, I'm excited".
Yes, people noticed it's good. But that's not how I heard about the game. That's not how anyone in the three separate groups of friends I heard about the game from heard about it. In fact, the only person I knew who really follows that sort of stuff is the only person I know who wasn't interested.
I think you're confusing cause and effect. If you look at steam's concurrent player counts, you see that the number of concurrent players kept increasing for the first 10 days after the game's release. That's not consistent with curators instructing people to buy a game at release. That's consistent with massive word-of-mouth spread. Everyone is talking about it and rating it highly because it's good, not because they were told to.
I think you are bringing up an interesting discussion of curation vs. word of mouth. Where exactly do you draw the line?
Players counts kept increasing because a people came across the game on social media - upvoted reddit posts, high number of retweets, streamer sponsorships, etc. And a lot of that got rolling only because of initial positive reviews and PR. But isn't upvoting/downvoting something on reddit or other social media a form of curation? Is there even such a thing as pure word of mouth on the internet?
There isn't one, there are hundreds. Given that you end up on a small fandom wiki, you have no idea where 'the better community' is. You go to your search engine of choice and start clicking random wikis hoping at least one other one has decent info (most are useless).
As a concrete example, Path of Exile moved to https://www.poewiki.net/ (which is a single MediaWiki instance not associated with a larger network). The content is quite good but it took probably 18 months for it to start reliably appearing in google search results.
In many cases, it is not a big deal to just open a few links and figure it out. Fandom's content is usually too crap and incomplete. I have been mostly avoiding fandom and fextralife because of content reasons, and I had no idea of all the drama around them.
> What you need is volatile read/write or load/store intrinsics. When you have those, you can express what's actually possible on a hardware platform, and not inadvertently enable people to write nonsense in your language...
Firefox has all of this except the date. `about:config` lists all config values, values in bold do not match their default or do not exist by default, values can be reverted with one click, and there's a checkbox to filter out unmodified items.
But does that include the personalized settings for a specific site?
I mean Tools menu -> Page Info -> Permissions
An example: the gong doesn't sounds when a game starts in lichess if you have autoplay disabled for sound. You need to allow that for the site. There are other configurations there like accepting cookies, etc.
about:preferences#privacy, scroll down a bit, it's under "Permissions". You can also adjust it when on the site, using the icon at the left of the URL bar.
Credit cards have by far the best in-person UX of the options that I am presented, tap my card or phone and leave and they're accepted everywhere in practice (my debit card is not).
The 'cardholder can always reverse any charge' behavior is also nice once every few years.
Not a direct compiler optimization, but consider memcpy() vs memmove() as an example. If you know two regions of memory do not overlap you can call memcpy() for a direct optimized copy, but if they overlap you must call memmove() and introduce an intermediate copy.
memmove does not (in any implementation I’ve ever heard of) introduce an intermediate copy, it just performs the copy loop in the reverse direction to handle the overlap (and can’t always vectorize in the same way memcpy can).
It makes sense, but when would you ever memcpy with overlap? I would think any situation that lets that happen is from a bug, like you have an incorrect buffer length or an incorrect destination address.
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