Very loose definition of "prove". I would guess that there are many on HN who are overqualified for any H1B job and would take it for the right money. The talent is here, they just want to pay less.
1) the Postgres documentation does not mention that Notify causes a global lock or lock of any sort (I checked). That’s crazy to me; if something causes a lock, the documentation should tell you it does and what kind. Performance notes also belong in documentation for dbs.
2) why the hell does notify require a lock in the first place? Reading the comment this design seems insane; there’s no good reason to queue up notifications for transactions that aren’t committed. Just add the notifications in commit order with no lock, you’re building a db with concurrency, get used to it.
This tax issue (not a break - normally you can count employees as a businesss expense for the current year, this made software unusual) meant that startups or other tech companies were extremely disadvantaged in the short term, and had to pay way more in taxes than they should have. For startups, having to pay far more in taxes during the first few years of existence is crippling.
This fixes that problem. That encourages both investment in software and encourages software companies to hire.
After a recent conversation here, I spent a few weeks using agents.
These agents are just as disappointing as what we had before. Except now I waste more time getting bad results, though I’m really impressed by how these agents manage to fuck things up.
My new way of using them is to just go back to writing all the code myself. It’s less of a headache.
Cursor, Copilot agent mode, and Windsurf. The agent modes can search repos, modify code, and run code on their own. I thought Cursor's agent was the best. I did like Windsurf's agent plans, but the actual results weren't good. Copilot's agent has been slow and not good. But basically all of them were like a pretty bad junior engineer - sometimes it would hit the right result, but usually not. The code often looked good but rarely even ran, let alone met requirements. They would frequently break things, I'd fix them, they'd break them again. Most of the time this cycle was slower and more frustrating than just writing the code myself. I tried one or two one-shots on lovable - the design was impressive, but functionality and attention to specs were poor.
I've had the most success with extremely small questions rather than asking the agents to write a lot of code. In those cases, the code is still usually wrong, but it's close or small enough that I can quickly fix it.
Don't get me wrong: I find all of these tools to be really impressive and good enough to be useful. But the improvements and huge productivity gains friends claim they or their workers are getting just aren't materializing for me.
Iran believes in martyrdom, which absolutely changes the reasoning. They would destroy Israel in a heartbeat even if it meant losing 90% of their population.
Don't confuse religious rhetoric with actual state behavior.
In Iran’s case the highest religious authority has repeatedly issued a fatwa declaring the use of nuclear weapons forbidden.
Pakistan’s army motto invokes jihad, yet it has treated its arsenal as a shield against invasion so far, not a ticket to paradise.
Israel’s so-called Samson Option evokes a biblical suicide attack, but I doubt they'll use nukes for anything but deterrent.
North Korean propaganda urges citizens to die for the Leader, and I'm sure there are other nations I've not listed who's dominant religions have some sort of martyrdom idea, which use nukes as deterrents.
Look at political interests, command structures, and the costs of escalation, not whether a nation honors death in battle (which one doesn't?)
I've spent the past month or so immersed in Penrose diagrams. Some of the implications of the math and diagrams include white holes (opposite of black holes - spew matter outwards), infinite universes contained within one another other, anti-gravity universes, and things like this. You can also fall into a black hole and make it out into another universe instead of meeting the singularity (at least, an idealized, rotating black hole). Anyway, cool stuff.
Where are the results? I keep hearing about how great these coding agents are. What have you built beyond the complexity of a disposable toy app? Where are the swarms of new apps built by these agents that are solving new problems and taking over markets? I’m just not seeing results. I guess I need to spend some time using cursor as an agent to see it for myself.
I am a believer that these tools will be (if they aren’t already) extremely useful. Game changing in many ways, and I worry about the future of knowledge fields. Definitely not a skeptic in the trajectory. I do wonder if that makes those of us who are on the cutting edge more valuable as AI can quickly reproduce things that are well understood.
I think the below poster got it right. Cutting out Facebook certainly improved my life; cutting out instagram later was an additive improvement. Now I’m left with HN (which generally avoids the bad parts of social media) and Reddit (which has plenty of brain rot).
It also took a lot more than 6 weeks to get acclimated to it. You get psychological withdrawal. It took months for it to feel normal. My income went up a lot in the years after as well (in part due to more time to focus on finding a new job), so that also contributed to my happiness.
I find Reddit (and HN to a lesser extent) even worse than Facebook. There is a lot more content, for one thing, and so it's easier to waste even more time :(. I wish I could quit...
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