RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u

Joined 11 years ago

Karma
832
Submissions
277
Member since
Jan 12
View on Hacker News

Recent submissions

Comment · 1 month ago
Thanks. I went back and re-watched that part, and her point's that "[a] tree's cryptographic strength is equal to the weakest hash algorithm anywhere in the tree," and that's fair. I also understand why Git 3.0 may not want to give user the choice, though I would still rather it be given.
Comment · 1 month ago
Comment · 1 month ago
I agree with the gist of the author's point, but often when managers say they don't want the details, they really meant that they do want the details, just to some unspecified level, that you must divine. Give them less, and they aren't satisfied, and you risk damaging their trust in your expertise. So I've learned to give enough details until they tell me the magical phrase. Perhaps if I were better at reading people, and managers are better at managing, then there would be fewer misunderstanding, and less annoyance, from both sides.
Comment · 4 months ago
>> You will encounter business decisions you think are terrible but you still have to sell to your team.

> This is incorrect. You don't have to. In fact, you shouldn't.

> There can be situation in which stuff will need to happen regardless, yes, but that does not require lying and probably works even better when one does not lie.

Selling doesn't mean lying. It's usually possible to sell, or persuade, the team to move forward on terrible decisions, without resorting to lying, if you're a good manager.

Having said that, steering a team to execute on good or bad business decisions often do involve withholding information, and some argues -- though I disagree -- that's also lying. If you subscribe to that reasoning, then I suppose you would be right.

Comment · 5 months ago
Suppose I'm driving at 20 kph, and I set my cruise control to 40 kph. My car then goes WOT, overshoots my target speed and hits 120 kph, at which point it slams on the brakes[0], dropping my speed to 15 kph. It repeats until it finally settles at my target speed. (Rhetorical question) would that be considered "completely normal"?

Over/undershoots and corrections are of course unavoidable and normal; the absurdity is at the magnitude and rate of change. Furthermore, this is giving it the benefit of the doubt, that measuring AI spend is a good indicator; that's arguably also in dispute. To stretch my car analogy a bit more: it would be like the cruse control system has to hit the target speed, but it only has data from the O2 sensors.

[0] I know that the "classic" cruise control system cannot apply the brakes, but hey no analogy's perfect.

Comment · 5 months ago
> These days basically any ATM allows foreign cards

I thought so, too, and perhaps it's just bad luck, but I was at Tokyo Station a few months ago, and I wasn't able to withdraw cash from Mizuho Bank's -- one of the largest retail bank in Japan -- ATM from my US debit card. I ended up walking (getting lost for) ~10 minutes to a Seven Bank ATM, and withdrew cash there without issue. So YMMV.

Comment · 5 months ago
In case this anecdote is not made up, I would implore you or your friend be a bit more subtle at tokenmaxing (ugh). At $JOB, I'm under the same mandate, and it turns out that every prompt is logged and aggregated. When someone else at $JOB asked the team PM who's in charge of the logging, s/he replied that the log is only used to correlate with commits, and nothing else, trust us (wink). I doubt this is unique to my $JOB.

Therefore, sigh burn those tokens, but make sure your prompts are at least superficially defensible, in the unlikely event that you get audited. Use multiple models for the same prompt / task, for instance. It's well know that LLMs are prone hallucinations, so it's only prudent to double / triple cross-check the results with multiple models.

Comment · 5 months ago
> [G]etting into a heated argument in public, accidentally taking an item you didn’t pay for, overstaying a visa, or even grabbing someone else’s umbrella or bike thinking it was yours [...]

While it doesn't detract from the article's main point, that Japanese prison conditions are poor, but arson, murder, and jaywalking much? Overstaying your visa is a lot more egregious than the other infractions.

> Damn, I want to move to Japan now.

I know this is sarcasm, but going to Japan as a tourist and _living_ in Japan as a resident -- or the same of any country, for that matter -- are very different experiences. Some, but surprisingly little, of your experience from the former carries over to the latter.

Comment · 9 months ago
Comment · 10 months ago
HN is how I discover whether other sites are down or not, so it serves a critical function, so of course I check it frequently.

/s

Comment · 11 months ago
Not as absurd as back when AOL bought them, but just barely so. I think I'll have an extra frothy latte for breakfast today.
Comment · 11 months ago
Comment · 1 year ago
I sympathize, but the reality is that except for very specialized cases, (hyper) optimizing for CPU performance is unnecessary, even in the embedded space. A Cortex-M0 has roughly the same performance as a 486, and is cheap and power efficient enough to be bundled in disposable test kits, vapes, etc.
Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 1 year ago
I won't be contributing much to rational discussion, but this "feature" annoys me so much that I just have to rant for a bit.

----

Like, is nobody in Google multi-lingual? Who the fuck thought this -- not auto-translation, but forced auto-translation -- is a good idea? Surely for an organization that purportedly only hires the cream-of-the-crop, they'll have a larger fraction of employees that speak more than one language? Look, I'm resting-and-vesting like the rest of y'all, but if I were in the team that implemented this, I'd definitely speak up, and let them, up to my skip-level, know that this is terrible. The implication of either possibilities had occurred, yet the feature still shipped, is harrowing.

Even if the developers only speak one language, they must know at least three -- cream-of-the-crop, remember? -- programming languages, right? Imagine if, when you're first hired into Google, you declare your programming language of choice, say Go; then, henceforth whenever you check out the source code, irrespective of its original form, it gets auto-translated into Go, and you can't turn that off? Checking out Pixel first-stage bootloader code, almost certainly written in assembly -- nope! We know better: you're getting that in Go. Fuck, I shouldn't be giving them ideas!

Could they not imagine how horrible this would be, and by analogy when applied to human languages, be also just as horrid?

YouTube's often been cited as a great resource for learning new things. Well, now it's useless for, that's right, learning a second language! I wonder why this Spanish for beginners video's all in English? /s

Speaking about shit features, let's throw "Stable Volume" into the pile. At least this one remembers your preferences...most of the time. When I watch ASMR -- yes I'll admit in public I'm that guy -- videos, and am just about to fall asleep, I just love to be jolted awake by a loud robotic voice's rendition of tapping sounds. Maybe my grumpiness's due to my lack of sleep!

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton