Hacker News: Infinitesimus

New comment by Infinitesimus in "Study finds memory decline surge in young people"

Infinitesimus — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 16:32:42 +0000

I mean this turn of speech makes it easier to identify hunan (carbon) or machine (silicon) content.

Took me a bit to figure it out too

New comment by Infinitesimus in "When the Dotcom Bubble Burst"

Infinitesimus — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 00:17:21 +0000

Damn, what a turn of opportunities from just saying yes and showing up (and obviously a ton of hardwork and sacrifices). Thanks for sharing!

I can't resist ...

> There were other dramatic events that evening in Cambridge that I think sharpened all our minds and made us appreciate there’s no time like the present, but I’ll leave that story for another day.

> ... appreciate there’s no time like the present ...

The present is now! Some of us are dying to hear the story.

New comment by Infinitesimus in "A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology"

Infinitesimus — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 12:49:28 +0000

It doesn't have to be an argument. You know what each system is good at and prioritize inputs accordingly.

New comment by Infinitesimus in "Mid-level Nvidia employee gets $62M in stock options; another lost it all"

Infinitesimus — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 13:58:40 +0000

1. Life isn't fair. The earlier you accept that, the better off you'll be. This unfairness is why you're here posting on hackernews and someone through no fault of theirs is starving trying to cross the Sahara into greener pastures. It cuts both ways.

2. Hard work rarely ever implies financial success.

3. "...second tier job from the perspective of software professionals". Tiers are a made up concept. An Nvidia programmer working on critical HPC work is in a difference league than someone who is very good at making infinite scroll smooth.

Software is a broad field with different specializations. I don't know what you do but you made a bet and it's probably turned out quite well for you. Other people's bets did worse, others did better.

Comparison is the thief of joy. Remember to be grateful for where you are and how far you've come.

New comment by Infinitesimus in "From engineer to manager: what I love, what I hate"

Infinitesimus — Sat, 17 Feb 2024 15:09:15 +0000

It mostly masquerades as performance curves.

You're not being told to pick someone, you're being told that your org cannot really have 80% of people meeting/exceeding expectations and that because reasons (budget), you should review the cusp cases and adjust them down.

New comment by Infinitesimus in "Rebuilding Netflix's video processing pipeline with microservices"

Infinitesimus — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 12:56:47 +0000

Ridiculed by whom? We've seen many competitors try to make a streaming service and beyond Apple, they all provide a laggy experience even in the menus.

If you're going to emulate someone, it's not a bad idea to emulate who has the best results

New comment by Infinitesimus in "OpenAI scrapped a promise to disclose key documents to the public"

Infinitesimus — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 20:31:31 +0000

I think we all saw how that went when the non-profit board assumed they had any credible power.

New comment by Infinitesimus in "Why new hires often get paid more than existing employees"

Infinitesimus — Tue, 16 Jan 2024 03:55:45 +0000

No they don't. They _say_ they do (really mainly Amazon) and the rumor develops legs and gets repeated.

To actually do this, you need an objective measure that is repeatable over many different kinds of products, domains and people and they is a very hard problem no one has cracked. Career ladders and some calibrations help to do this but it'd never perfect and people slip through the cracks.

If you're at a big company, you've seen people get a rating that seemed misaligned to their work because an arbitrary curve is enforced or a project has high visibility by sheet luck because an exec was adamant that the project be on the roadmap.

New comment by Infinitesimus in "Netflix never used its $1M algorithm (2012)"

Infinitesimus — Wed, 10 Jan 2024 23:25:58 +0000

How so?

New comment by Infinitesimus in "IT employment grew by just 700 jobs in 2023"

Infinitesimus — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 03:20:37 +0000

Google is the big tech company with that reputation though. MS has pockets but pays considerably worse

New comment by Infinitesimus in "You're Supposed to Be Glad Your Tesla Is a Brittle Heap of Junk"

Infinitesimus — Sun, 31 Dec 2023 13:29:30 +0000

Not really until tesla - Mercedes has been excitedly shipping creaky piano black plastic for years and I'm sure there are many other brands cutting corners to reduce price. (Porsche doesn't seem to care which is good)

New comment by Infinitesimus in "Show HN: An open-source, self-hostable synced narration platform for ebooks"

Infinitesimus — Mon, 25 Dec 2023 04:19:02 +0000

This has existed for a while, it's called Whispersync for Voice. Not available for all titles but it's there

New comment by Infinitesimus in "Resetting the timer in my toothbrush"

Infinitesimus — Mon, 25 Dec 2023 00:01:50 +0000

Cavities can be the result of many things, including genetics

New comment by Infinitesimus in "How Pinterest scaled"

Infinitesimus — Sat, 23 Dec 2023 12:39:55 +0000

Part of it is how many of these companies handle performance. If you're more likely to get a good rating by building a complex system, you might as well do it and take the money.

New comment by Infinitesimus in "Tesla blamed drivers for failures of parts it long knew were defective"

Infinitesimus — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 13:25:57 +0000

Why did you get rid of the ioniq 5 then?

New comment by Infinitesimus in "Tesla Recalls 2M Cars to Fix Autopilot Safety Flaws"

Infinitesimus — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 12:37:27 +0000

These depend heavily on car. What kind of car is this?

The decision to have an annoying beep instead of a soft ding or pop up is stupid but many cars do this. Mine handles seatbelts well and never has a false positive there so it's not a general modern car problem (2021 sonata).

New comment by Infinitesimus in "FDA approves a CRISPR-based medicine for treatment of sickle cell disease"

Infinitesimus — Fri, 08 Dec 2023 23:49:05 +0000

(You already know this but for the general audience)

The train doesn't make you immune to malaria but it does increase resistance after infection.

New comment by Infinitesimus in "OpenAI employees did not want to go work for Microsoft"

Infinitesimus — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 20:15:36 +0000

Apple has taught us time and time again that you rarely have to be first to the market. Executing well and keeping people locked in are pretty important

New comment by Infinitesimus in "OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO"

Infinitesimus — Sun, 19 Nov 2023 08:17:25 +0000

That link validates the board's claim, does it not? "Not being candid" is a form of communication breakdown.

New comment by Infinitesimus in "OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO"

Infinitesimus — Sun, 19 Nov 2023 00:52:03 +0000

> A non profit board absolutely calls the shots at a non profit, in so far as the CEO and their employment goes. Non profit boards are not beholden, structurally, to investors and there are no shareholders.

There is theory and there is reality. If someone is paying your bills by an outsized amount and they say jump, you will say how high.

The influence is rarely that explicit though. The board knowing that X investor provides 60% of their funding, for instance, means the board is incentivized to do things that keep X investor happy without X having to ask for it.

9 times out of 10, money drives decisions in a captilist environment