Hacker News: alsobrsp

New comment by alsobrsp in "How octopuses squeeze through too small gaps"

alsobrsp — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 21:11:16 +0000

We lost that with the decline of the corporate research labs. PARC, Bell Labs, Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, and such are shadows of what they used to be if they are even still around. Those facilities used to look at long range ideas and we are still reaping the benefits. Most research now is product centric, looking maybe 2 years ahead. I blame the tax cuts of the 80s and 90s.

New comment by alsobrsp in "SpaceX stock erases all its gains and slides below IPO price in intraday trading"

alsobrsp — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 14:41:04 +0000

This is the main point. I bought Backblaze too early in its post IPO phase. It's a good company and I am a customer, but I am down $15k on the buy.

New comment by alsobrsp in "Costco is the anti-Amazon"

alsobrsp — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 14:25:26 +0000

I live in a smallish city, we have a lot of stores I can shop at and a Costco within a 30 minute drive. For me, incremental marginal cost of the delivery is negligible compared to me driving to a couple stores, not finding what I need, and still ordering online anyway. In general, I go to stores to get something that I know they have, not because they have "pallets of goods"

New comment by alsobrsp in "Local Git remotes"

alsobrsp — Fri, 29 May 2026 13:37:26 +0000

Everything old is new again. I wouldn't be surprised if there were people that thought GitHub invented git.

New comment by alsobrsp in "Nearly 50 Years Later, WKRP in Cincinnati Becomes a Real Radio Station"

alsobrsp — Sat, 16 May 2026 11:49:25 +0000

I watched it. I am not dead, in a nursing home, nor retired.

New comment by alsobrsp in "Ask HN: What's a good 3D Printer for sub $1000?"

alsobrsp — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 22:20:43 +0000

I love my Voron Trident. It might not be under $1000. I have about $1300 in it, I start with the Voron Tap tool head which added a bit plus other stuff.

New comment by alsobrsp in "NASA's Juno mission leaves legacy of science at Jupiter"

alsobrsp — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 22:08:51 +0000

Quite sad really

New comment by alsobrsp in "NASA's Juno mission leaves legacy of science at Jupiter"

alsobrsp — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 17:18:58 +0000

I have seen him speak several times. Does anyone take him seriously?

New comment by alsobrsp in "Ask HN: Best Windows/Linux developer laptop in 2025"

alsobrsp — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 03:03:11 +0000

I have a Thinkpad P1 Gen 4i with a RTX 3080 16GB running Debian. I run ollama and it works quite well.

New comment by alsobrsp in "Hemochromatosis patients can donate their blood rather than having it discarded"

alsobrsp — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 21:35:28 +0000

I am newly diagnosed with HH. How do you monitor your ferritin levels?

New comment by alsobrsp in "AI killed the tech interview. Now what?"

alsobrsp — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 01:46:52 +0000

Excellent answer.

New comment by alsobrsp in "AI killed the tech interview. Now what?"

alsobrsp — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 01:46:31 +0000

We hired the guy who said it was a dump question, he became our manager. He then decided to retire and we had to replace him. One of the candidates answered the 5 cli question with terminal eye candy, not functional commands. He was not hired for the job.

New comment by alsobrsp in "AI killed the tech interview. Now what?"

alsobrsp — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 17:39:13 +0000

Thank you. I took it as both. :)

New comment by alsobrsp in "AI killed the tech interview. Now what?"

alsobrsp — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 15:12:34 +0000

> My experience differs a lot. Many insanely skilled people are somewhat "weird" (including possibly

I am actually a bit weird myself, so I can relate.

> What you consider to be "skilled people" is what I would rather call "skilled self-promoters". "Skilled people" and "skilled self-promoter" are quite different breeds of people.

I don't mean that they have told me that they are skilled, or that their resume has implied it. I mean that they actually have the skills. Self-promoters that don't know the information always look good on paper, but after a few minutes of talking to them you can tell that they don't quite match.

Before IT, I was a live sound engineer TV, theater, music. There was also a entertainment university starting up around the same time. They were pumping out tons of "trained" engineers that looked good on paper but couldn't mix for shit. I think we can blame them for the shitification of pop music.

New comment by alsobrsp in "AI killed the tech interview. Now what?"

alsobrsp — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 14:00:45 +0000

I mostly skipped the technical questions in the last few interviews I have conducted. I have a conversation, ask them about their career, about job changes, about hobbies, what they do after work. If you know the subject, skilled people talk a certain way, whether it is IT, construction, sailing.

I do rely on HR having, hopefully, done their job and validated the work history.

I do have one technical question that started out as fun and quirky but has actually shown more value than expected. I call it the desert island cli.

What are your 5 linux cli desert island commands?

Having a hardware background, today, mine are: vi, lsof, netcat, glances, and I am blanking on a fifth. We have been doing a lot of terraform lately

I have had several interesting responses

Manager level candidate with 15+ years hands on experience. He thought it was a dumb question because it would never happen. He became the teams manager a few months after hiring. He was a great manager and we are friends.

Manager level to replace the dumb question manager. His were all Mac terminal eye candy. He did not get the job.

Senior level SRE hire with a software background. He only needed two emacs and a compiler, he could write anything else he needed.

New comment by alsobrsp in "Disappointed with the TVs at CES 2025"

alsobrsp — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 13:58:26 +0000

Look at fancy pants input button over here.

I have a ~2022 Samsung OLED, and it doesn't have an input button that I can find. I have to go into the home ribbon menu to find the inputs.

New comment by alsobrsp in "Iwantmydomain.com randomly refunded all of my domains and locked me out"

alsobrsp — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 17:50:34 +0000

In the 90s domain registration was all handled through email. You emailed from an approved address, with a specific format, to change anything about the registration. This included where your name servers were.

Made self-hosting interesting when your home IP changed, or you moved, and that was where you hosted your DNS and email.

New comment by alsobrsp in "Are groceries more expensive than last year?"

alsobrsp — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 13:27:22 +0000

We get our eggs from a specialty butcher, their meat prices are rather high. Their organic, locally sourced eggs are a good $4 cheaper than the big box groceries regular eggs.

I was quite surprised.

New comment by alsobrsp in "WordPress Alternatives"

alsobrsp — Sat, 12 Oct 2024 12:17:00 +0000

Lack of collaboration and proper git support are a big hold back for me. Otherwise, it is not bad.

New comment by alsobrsp in "End the line: The last Sun SPARC workstation [video]"

alsobrsp — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 02:36:42 +0000

I had a Sun as my desktop until 2010 when my Solaris admin gig was eliminated. It was running KDE on three displays. Loved it.