Hacker News: Others

New comment by Others in "Why the Culture Wins: An Appreciation of Iain M. Banks (2017)"

Others — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 06:27:49 +0000

I appreciate the fact that IMB is trying to present a optimistic view of the future. Not all sci-fi needs to be negative or dystopian, and his remains plausible despite its optimism.

I think if you’d rather read about the downfall of the Culture, then you’ve somewhat profoundly missed the point of Ian’s writing.

New comment by Others in "The away team model at Amazon (2022)"

Others — Sun, 09 Jul 2023 04:19:15 +0000

1. Exercise good judgment about what projects are “away team-able”. Be okay saying “this needs to be done by our team” even when that’s hard. Otherwise you’ll end up with tricky features implemented by people who don’t understand the full context (this sucks very badly)

2. Make sure the amount of process matches the amount of complexity. If the change is very simple or only a few lines, make it trivial to submit code changes that will pass review. (So have really good automated style checks/test suites.) If the change is complex, make sure you’re doing design reviews before implementation, to ensure the away team doesn’t waste time with bad implementation strategies

New comment by Others in "The away team model at Amazon (2022)"

Others — Sun, 09 Jul 2023 04:13:50 +0000

How does that work when the thing you want to change is a complex micro-service with a public API? Do you want to spin up your own version of that service and own it forever? Even if you’re okay with that, you’ll not have the clients the older version has

Open-source model works for libraries, or small changes in service code (where the maintenance burden is trivial). But it doesn’t work for complex services with high maintenance burdens

New comment by Others in "How can some infinities be bigger than others?"

Others — Thu, 20 Apr 2023 00:15:55 +0000

There are more than two kinds of infinities. Consider the set of all subsets of the real numbers.

Also the rationals are countable by diagonalization.

New comment by Others in "TV disappears, but HBO Max removing shows feels different"

Others — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 05:44:45 +0000

This should never happen on Prime Video. Major breach of customer trust.

If it’s happened to you please call customer service and complain. If they can’t fix it or refund you, please get in touch with me and I will try and get it fixed for you

New comment by Others in "Rust in the 6.2 kernel"

Others — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 17:25:21 +0000

I don’t follow. It’s exactly like C in this regard, except with Box::new instead of malloc.

New comment by Others in "Absurd Trolley Problems"

Others — Wed, 06 Jul 2022 05:06:31 +0000

I feel like this is easier if you’re a non-lever-puller. If you think it’s wrong to pull the lever if it causes anyone’s death who wasn’t dying anyway, then most of these are easy.

Except the “you can’t see the track” one I suppose :P

New comment by Others in "Crude oil market opens at $125"

Others — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 01:33:42 +0000

I think (3b) isn’t true, since the sanctions are effecting every part of Russia’s economy. And while the petroleum industry is like 40% of their exports by revenue, the other 60% is obviously significant. Also from a Russian point of view, the difficulty importing and lack of access to the international banking system may be more painful.

In fact if the west could target everything except oil, they probably would (since that’s the most critical export that Europe needs).

Your overall point still stands though. Your argument is strong. It’s not practical for Russia to simply redirect their flow to maintain “business as usual”.

New comment by Others in "Common Lisp ASDF maintainer considers resignation"

Others — Fri, 21 Jan 2022 02:40:10 +0000

Is it really sane to have a world of software that can’t survive new compiler or loader warnings? That just seems crazy to me

New comment by Others in "Podswap: Keep airpods alive and out of the landfill"

Others — Sun, 11 Jul 2021 23:18:02 +0000

1. The parent comment is referring to waste in the environmental sense. Nature does not care how expensive the trash was--just the volume/composition 2. It's a big stretch to call AirPods "disposable" I (and many others) keep them for years. In the long run everything is rubbish; an expensive electronic device that lasts for years and years is not "disposable"

New comment by Others in "macOS extensions are moving away from the kernel"

Others — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 16:20:50 +0000

How is removing 3rd party kernel modules a “pure political decision”. Do you really believe there are no technical/security factors behind this choice?

New comment by Others in "File Descriptor Limits"

Others — Thu, 20 May 2021 07:05:56 +0000

Like: https://github.com/mheily/libkqueue ?

New comment by Others in "Child's burial 78k years ago in Kenya was a Homo sapiens milestone"

Others — Sun, 09 May 2021 18:55:42 +0000

Nit: you cannot see the Great Wall from space unaided: https://www.nasa.gov/vision/space/workinginspace/great_wall....

New comment by Others in "I need to explain to you just how dire America's Pokémon card crisis is"

Others — Sat, 01 May 2021 17:37:33 +0000

I think this comment implicitly assumes that just because people survive on less than 18, it’s livable

That’s not necessarily true, since many people around or below the poverty line rely on government assistance to survive.

Also, the federal minimum is so low and our social safety net is so weak (virtually non existent), many people would be instantly screwed by any sort of drastic/expensive event. (Like unexpected illness or the loss of a job or a car accident.) Is a wage livable if you can’t live through times of trouble?

New comment by Others in "Wasm3 compiles itself (using LLVM/Clang compiled to WASM)"

Others — Mon, 26 Apr 2021 01:49:22 +0000

Bounds checking, dynamic dispatch is more expensive, wasm semantics have no undefined behavior to exploit for optimizations. And there is bloat in the process. I’m sure losing information effects things as well

New comment by Others in "Wasm3 compiles itself (using LLVM/Clang compiled to WASM)"

Others — Mon, 26 Apr 2021 01:47:51 +0000

10% worse performance. Not 10x worse :D

New comment by Others in "Wasm3 compiles itself (using LLVM/Clang compiled to WASM)"

Others — Sun, 25 Apr 2021 01:32:12 +0000

I worked on one as an undergrad: https://github.com/gwsystems/aWsm

Full AoT compilation, C programs run within 10% of native

New comment by Others in "Young female Japanese biker is 50-year-old man using FaceApp"

Others — Fri, 19 Mar 2021 16:38:59 +0000

The issue here is that YouTube (and other platforms) encourage this. It works, in that if you ask people to like comment and subscribe, they like comment and subscribe more. (And that boosts your standing within the system getting you more impressions.)

Plenty of good creators do this (as it works), just to keep up with their peers. It really has nothing to do with the quality of the rest of their content. Don’t blame the player, blame the game IMO

New comment by Others in "Gab Has Been Breached"

Others — Thu, 04 Mar 2021 07:37:24 +0000

I understand this comment was made before the edit. However, is it really that surprising that “build a wall” narratives and racism to hand in hand?

(It’s not as if the border wall makes any logical sense, since the southern border is too long to wall off, and the majority of illegal immigration is visa overstays anyway (https://apnews.com/article/48d0ad46f143478d9384410f5ae3d38b))

New comment by Others in "Killing TurboTax"

Others — Thu, 04 Mar 2021 02:30:56 +0000

I think this is fundamentally a regressive idea. Currently the very poor pay zero (or effectively zero) income taxes. No matter how you structure the sales tax, you cannot go below zero. (I think negative sales tax is not actually realistic, nor particularly progressive.)

A system that only taxes spending fundamentally has problems in that the richer people can afford to save and invest.