Unlurker

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Ask HN: How do I bridge the gap between PhD and SWE experiences?

Have you tried talking to someone at places like ESRI?

Maybe try finding a software engineering job at a place that also uses your scientific expertise. You may be able to find or create opportunities there. The position might not exist, but you can maximize your chances of something coming your way that needs both skill sets.

I'm in much the same boat - however my SWE pivot was when I attempted to commercialize my PhD research along with my advisor. We had a startup for a few years and then got acquired by a global company. I now manage a team of SWEs and coordinate with SMEs in technical fields to make sure that our scientific software products are great in both areas. These roles exist, but probably not commonly as a straight hybrid - may have to lean into one and use the other as a differentiator/value-add. For me, I think I got here by caring about the customer experience first - which takes "whatever it takes" - software and science both. I have to be an evangelist for both of these things but only as a means to a common end, which is to help the end users expand their understanding and abilities with applied knowledge.

Do you have a CV for more context? Work in a more academic setting is always highly context dependent, as you know. Chances are, there are a handful of labs, somewhere that could benefit from the overlap, but finding them is like finding the needle in the haystack.

Mattermost restricted access to old messages after 10000 limit is reached (github.com/mattermost)

Story time. This has basically nothing to do with this post other than it involves a limit of 10,000 but hey, it's Christmas and I want to tell a story. I used to work for Facebook and many years ago people noticed you couldn't block certain people but the one that was most public was Mark Zuckerberg. It would just say it failed or something like that. And people would assign malice or just intent to it. But the truth was much funnier. Most data on Facebook is stored in a custom graph database that basically only has 2 tables that are sharded across thousands of MySQL instances but most almost always accessed via an in-memory write-through cache, also custom. It's not quite a cache because it has functionality built on top of the database that accessing directly wouldn't have. So a person is an object and following them is an edge. Importantly, many such edges were one-way so it was easy to query if person A followed B but much more difficult to query all the followers of B. This was by design to avoid hot shards. So I lied when I said there were 2 tables. There was a third that was an optimization that counted certain edges. So if you see "10.7M people follow X" or "136K people like this", it's reading a count, not doing a query. Now there was another optimization here: only the last 10,000 of (object ID,edge type) were in memory. You generally wanted to avoid dealing with anything older than that because you'd start hitting the database and that was generally a huge problem on a large, live query or update. As an example, it was easy to query the last 10,000 people or pages you've followed. You should be able to see where this is going. All that had happened was 10,000 people had blocked Mark Zuckerberg. Blocks were another kind of edge that was bidirectional (IIRC). The system just wasn't designed for a situation where more than 10,000 people wanted to block someone. This got fixed many years ago because somebody came along and build a separate system to handle blocking that didn't have the 10,000 limit. I don't know the implementation details but I can guess. There was a separate piece of reverse-indexing infrastructure for doing queries on one-way edges. I suspect that was used. Anyway, I love this story because it's funny how a series of technical decisions can lead to behavior and a perception nobody intended.

Bait contributors by a FOSS-like model, then switch the mode to sell the results of their contributions without paying them back. What a classic.

For all the bad press element/matrix has been getting, I am happy that at least I don't have to deal with this as well.

Am I understanding this right that the main complainant in that issue thread is an IT company that wants to resell the (free) version of Mattermost software and is now complaining that they have to pay? At first they tried to say that "we're a school" and then when the MM rep said they have an Education license, they admitted that they are not actually a school, but rather a consulting company that is gouging schools by overcharging for open source software.

> an IT company that wants to resell the (free) version of Mattermost software and is now complaining that they have to pay? A user that was following the letter of the license and has suddenly had their access to the software restricted without warning. Open source software means people are entirely within their rights to sell it to others, perhaps creating value by providing the warranty that all licenses expressly disclaim.

No, you are not understanding this right. It's about rug pulling your users and cutting them off at the knees. I don't use mattermost but read the github thread in it's entirety.

The good brand of open-source software is basically being abused to do basic rug pull schemes. Sad.

This seems to be only for the Enterprise edition. The "free" Team edition should not have this limit: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/issues/34271#issuecomment-3534777330 Also one of the comments: > Would be a shame if someone with too much time on their hands dug into the binary and added a few zeroes to the message limit Can this be done via some binary-patch tool? Really curious. It would save recompile efforts. edit: link edit 2: I just realized, their Ubuntu repository only contains the Enterprise edition labeled "Free edition". This is really confusing. I does look like entishitification has started long ago: https://docs.mattermost.com/deployment-guide/server/deploy-linux.html#itab--Ubuntu--0_1-Ubuntu

Is it legal to "patch" (remove a restriction) the binary?

what license do they use? If a true FOSS license it's time to fork...

Appears to be "open core" agpl https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost?tab=readme-ov-file Not sure what isn't included in the core though.

They're now a defense contractor, the copy on their website sounds like military cosplaying.... Probably chasing the stupid profits of Anduril and Palantir, and doing the old open source rugpull in the process. Zulip (for Slack) and Wekan (for Trello) are good replacements, save yourself the ethical and technical worries. https://zulip.com/ https://wekan.github.io/

Unsurprising, given that the CEO of Element/Matrix is also selling and creating primarily to that end as well. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46379589

So so weird that we live in a timeline where Anduril and Palantir are military contractors of the US and other governments. I know it’s somewhat of a tired observation by now but I still wonder every time how badly you have to misread LOTR to name your company after the witch kings cursed surveillance artefacts. I wonder when the first weapons manufacturing company calls themselves Angmar or Uruk-hai. The names are really dope though I have to give them that…

> I wonder when the first weapons manufacturing company calls themselves Angmar or Uruk-hai. Luckily/unluckily, AngMar is one of those shady medical subcontracting firms instead...

You can compile MIT software and distribute the binary while saying “fuck you” to anyone who asks for the source. You are thinking of copyleft (e.g. GPL)

If that were true, the FSF wouldn't call it a free license.

You should have linked the MIT License on Wikipedia (or anywhere else) instead of Free Software. The license is only three paragraphs long. You can see it does not contain text supporting your claim. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License

Mattermost is MIT licensed. What is stopping anyone from removing this restriction?

glancing through the code, it doesn't seem like it be that hard to remove limitations such as this. PostHistoryLimit/postHistoryLimit interpreted from License Limits. a little poke here and there and I'd guess the limitations would disappear.

Maintaining your own fork is a ton of work. Even if it's just routinely rebasing on upstream and maintaining your own upgrade infrastructure and doing releases, that's far from trivial. The open source community really needs to stop with the "just fork it" mindset.

I use MM for about a year. Forking it would be a major undertaking as the number of vulnerabilities for which you would need to backport is quite high like 5 a month?). Last time they removed features from free (group calls in v10) there was a lot of grumbling but thats it.

>The open source community really needs to stop with the "just fork it" mindset. The open source community really needs to stop with the "just do everything i want for free" mindset. I mean, open source does not mean you're entitled to free support, and free in free software is not about money. I think people depend too much on those projects and then act entitled. Of course the open source bait and switch done by companies is a shitty behavior worth calling out, but the companies exist to earn money and at this point this can be expected.

> Of course the open source bait and switch done by companies is a shitty behavior worth calling out, Yes, that’s what we are doing here. > but the companies exist to earn money and at this point this can be expected. Expected != ethical. Also not a necessary, logical outcome. What is legitimately expected is a pro version that has more corporate features. We’re not talking about $Xx/user/mo to enable SSO here, though.

We invited a man into our home at Christmas and he stayed with us for 45 years (bbc.co.uk)

Well that's something I really liked reading from the BBC. This give hope that humanity is still alive & not everyone is selfish like us.

This is why we need to take government out of the homelessness equation, so citizens can have more money to help

IDK about ya'll but the ~25-30% (or whatever) I pay in taxes/SS/medicare isn't going to be a significant enough bump to enable me to eliminate homelessness... Where we can actually take the government out of the equation and actually help people: Zoning. In places without governments like Haiti you can raise a family in a relatively simple structure. It's not ideal but it's how humans have been not-homeless for the entirety of our existence. Currently in the US, this is basically only legal in extremely rural areas where there are no jobs, schools, stores, etc. I can find lots near a major metro area on the east coast for 10-20k, less than I pay rent in year; but I'd have to spend half a million on some shitty twig built monstrosity that meets minimum sq footage, parking, and other arbitrary regulations that only exist to drive housing prices up, in order to live there. I can't just buy a $10k shed from Home Depot, add insulation and all the other niceties we enjoy and live there. (even the most staunch anti-government, anti-regulation types would agree this should not be legal: they want big government to use violence to keep to prevent anyone from building cheaper housing, because cheap housing hurts their net worth, on paper.)

How I wish such blithe, naive approaches could solve the major social quandries of our time. Unfortunately experience and time have proven lack of support is a death sentence to so many, to the detriment of all.

Happy Christmas, folks! > please have some humanity about the homeless In the US, the homeless population exploded , in the 1980s, when they closed down all the mental institutions. Before that, there was a far less pervasive homeless population in urban areas. Being "on the spectrum," myself (but highly functional), I can attest to how easy it is for an autistic person's life to go sideways. Many autistic folks have very specialized and advanced skills, which can sometimes be applicable to making a living (like programming, or visual design). However, we're "different," which often leads to being shunned/traumatized by neurotypicals. I got used to folks eventually walking away from relationships, for no discernible reason. Used to really bother me, until I figured it out. Now, I just take it in stride, and appreciate whatever time I get to spend with folks. If anyone has seen The Accountant (the first one), there's a scene, near the end, where Ben Affleck's character is considering putting the moves on Anna Kendrick's character, but remembers his father, admonishing him that people will always end up being frightened of "the difference," and he sneaks out, instead. That scene almost brought me to tears, I could relate so well. For some folks, it's much worse. They can be relentlessly bullied, abused, locked up, or shunned, which leaves psychological scars that manifest as antisocial behavior, so they are never given a chance to show what they can do.

Non-neurotypicals can receive bad treatment from neurotypicals. But, it's also a trap to start thinking that neurotypicals are 100% intolerant. The corollary of not knowing when they're offending people, is that they also don't know when they're receiving tolerance - which is actually a lot; although it's understandable that this is not obvious.

> But, it's also a trap to start thinking that neurotypicals are 100% intolerant. I didn’t get that at all from what they said tbh

Thankfully LLMs have ingested enough of human writing that one afflicted in such a way can describe the exact set of circumstances and ask the LLM how they made the other people feel, and figure out why they got expelled from the group this time. It never stops happening for us. I'm 42 now and it's happened twice this past year. But at least now I can figure out what it is I did wrong and how to prevent that from happening again.

My sympathies. And it’s sad to see you call it “what it is you did wrong”. Thus, also my apologies, for whenever I am on the wrong side of such interactions.

what did you do wrong?

I'm not crying! You're crying!

Is someone cutting onions in here?

Ronnie led a rich life. I feel ashamed that my selfish life feels pale in comparison. It's amazing these people did not worry about the extra expense and inconvenience of taking care of another person, with children of their own to take care of.

> I feel ashamed that my selfish life feels pale in comparison. You’re still alive, thus you still have the chance to live a more selfless life you feel proud of. > It's amazing these people did not worry about the extra expense and inconvenience of taking care of another person Seems to me they did worry, but decided to do it anyway. > with children of their own to take care of. The children came later, and Ronnie helped to take care of them.

Bayes' law, many more people have romantic partners than former homeless living with them.

That wasn't the point of the answer. The point is "How well do you really know someone?". You really don't. Many people live with partners who end up killing them, although they thought they trusted them. Besides, "Bayes law" is not on your side on this one, it's well-known that "regular people" are over-represented in homicide, and "autistic people" or even "schizophrenic people" are under-represented and are mostly harmless

Thank you!! I just commented the same thing, but people will eat any meme you throw at them, it's quite shocking. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46384274 One thing that spending time talking to people online has taught me is how often what people say is just mindlessly repeating something they heard somewhere. It's also fantastic how I find your response more persuasive than mine, while using fewer words. Well done.