<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: andrewprock</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=andrewprock</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Fri, 17 Apr 2026 11:23:04 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=andrewprock" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewprock in "Entities enabling scientific fraud at scale (2025)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Suggesting that people would stop reading Nature if they also included replication studies send like an incredible leap.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 11 Mar 2026 17:21:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47338428</link><dc:creator>andrewprock</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47338428</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47338428</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewprock in "Lessons from 14 years at Google"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>On the contrary, the best products are typically built by the users of the products. If you are building a product you don't use, it will be worse than if you used it.<p>Users should be everywhere, in and out of engineering.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 04 Jan 2026 21:08:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46492249</link><dc:creator>andrewprock</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46492249</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46492249</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewprock in "Lessons from 14 years at Google"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There are many leaders that use information as a tool that serves their own needs.<p>They may have the context, but they are either too focused on their own job to share it, or actively manage dissemination so they can manipulate the organization.<p>In my experience, this is the typical operating mode, though I do not think it is sinister or malicious - just natural.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 04 Jan 2026 21:05:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46492218</link><dc:creator>andrewprock</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46492218</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46492218</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewprock in "Why Twilio Segment moved from microservices back to a monolith"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The whole point of micro-services is to manage dependencies independently across service boundaries, using the API as the contract, not the internal libraries.<p>Then you can implement a service in Java, Python, Rust, C++, etc, and it doesn't matter.<p>Coupling your postgres db to your elasticsearch cluster via a hard library dependency impossibly heavy. The same insight applies to your bespoke services.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 14 Dec 2025 00:16:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46259570</link><dc:creator>andrewprock</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46259570</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46259570</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewprock in "Kelly Can't Fail"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In practice, there are a number of factors which make using Kelly more difficult than in toy examples.<p>What is your bankroll? Cash on hand? Total net worth? Liquid net work? Future earned income?<p>Depending on the size of your bankroll, a number of factors come in to play. For example, if your bankroll is $100 and you lose it all it's typically not a big deal. If you have a $1 million bankroll, then you are likely more adverse to risking it.<p>What is the expected value? Is it known? Is it stationary? Is the game honest?<p>Depending on the statistical profile of your expected value, you are going to have to make significant adjustments to how you approach bet sizing. In domains where you can only estimate your EV, and which are rife with cheats (e.g. poker), you need to size your wagers under significant uncertainty.<p>What bet sizes are available?<p>In practice, you won't have a continuous range of bet sizes you can make. You will typically have discrete bet sizes within a fixed range, say $5-$500 in increments of $5 or $25. If your bankroll falls to low you will be shut out of the game. If your bankroll gets too high, you will no longer be able to maximize your returns.<p>At the end of the day, professional gamblers are often wagering at half-kelly, or even at quarter-kelly, due in large part to all these complexities and others.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 20 Dec 2024 05:33:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42468550</link><dc:creator>andrewprock</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42468550</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42468550</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewprock in "The two factions of C++"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Run valgrind on any large successful code base and you will find tons of memory corruption. It just happens to occur in places where it does not matter.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 26 Nov 2024 15:29:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42246590</link><dc:creator>andrewprock</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42246590</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42246590</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewprock in "Ubuntu Hoping to Remove Qt 5 Before Ubuntu 26.04 LTS"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Decades? Really? The UX was so bad in 1998 I just went back to windows for another decade.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 01 Nov 2024 20:01:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42020938</link><dc:creator>andrewprock</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42020938</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42020938</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewprock in "Panic at the Job Market"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>He lost me when he boldly declared that correlation IS causation based on one chart.<p>Complex systems are a lot more .. um .. complex than he suggests</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 17 Jul 2024 17:18:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40988112</link><dc:creator>andrewprock</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40988112</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40988112</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewprock in "California Approves Waymo Expansion to Los Angeles and SF Peninsula [pdf]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If you pay a lot for parking or don't use the car much this tracks. But if you have the volume, then owning a car is cheaper.<p>An affordable mid size car costs roughly $6k per year total cost for a new car, and about 2/3 that for a used car.<p>If you commute daily to work, that is 500 trips per year. Two weekend trips adds another 100 per year. Now we are talking about ~$10/trip if you own your car.<p>When you add the premium value you get from flexibility, then it's an even better deal. If you only drive 50x a year then yeah, just use services.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 01 Mar 2024 23:42:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39568201</link><dc:creator>andrewprock</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39568201</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39568201</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewprock in "All code is technical debt"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>And all code is an asset. Have we just reduced the conversation to: everything has a cost, and everything has a benefit?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 20 Dec 2023 22:57:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38714769</link><dc:creator>andrewprock</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38714769</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38714769</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewprock in "Gemini AI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The prompts were also likely different:<p>video: "Is this the right order?"<p>blog post: "Is this the right order? Consider the distance from the sun and explain your reasoning."<p><a href="https://developers.googleblog.com/2023/12/how-its-made-gemini-multimodal-prompting.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://developers.googleblog.com/2023/12/how-its-made-gemin...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 06 Dec 2023 19:41:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38548504</link><dc:creator>andrewprock</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38548504</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38548504</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewprock in "Gemini AI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You can see the cracks in the feature early on:<p>"What do you think I'm doing? Hint: it's a game."<p>Anyone with as much "knowledge" as Gemini aught to know it's roshambo.<p>"Is this the right order? Consider the distance from the sun and explain your reasoning."<p>Full prompt elided from the video.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 06 Dec 2023 19:32:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38548403</link><dc:creator>andrewprock</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38548403</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38548403</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewprock in "Gemini AI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>i.e. artifice-ial</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 06 Dec 2023 19:06:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38548152</link><dc:creator>andrewprock</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38548152</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38548152</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewprock in "Gemini AI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This does highlight the gap between SOTA and business production. Google search is very often a low quality, even user hostile experience. If Google has all this fantastic technology, but when the rubber hits the road they have no constructive (business supporting) use cases for their search interface, we are a ways away from getting something broadly useful.<p>It will be interesting to see how this percolates through the existing systems.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 06 Dec 2023 19:03:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38548111</link><dc:creator>andrewprock</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38548111</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38548111</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewprock in "Ancient Echoes"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There's not much to elaborate, tons of practical use cases for search, sort and storage rely on alphabetization. If you move through an analog world of organized data, you'll find and develop many practical approaches to interacting with data based on knowing the key and the alphabetic ordering. Whether it's a phone book, a map, a dictionary, or filing systems, alphabets were always used as an indexing mechanism.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 29 Nov 2023 03:33:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38455178</link><dc:creator>andrewprock</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38455178</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38455178</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewprock in "Ancient Echoes"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It saddens me to think that alphabetization is going the way of the dodo. It was a gateway drug into computer science for me.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 26 Nov 2023 00:28:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38418135</link><dc:creator>andrewprock</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38418135</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38418135</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewprock in "After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It might be better to ask the inverse. Which "AI Safety" experts are worth listening too. I have found very few, and the ones that I've found worth listening to are much more concerned about practical issues that impact systems today, as opposed to the ones that are just author fiction.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 24 Nov 2023 15:59:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38405222</link><dc:creator>andrewprock</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38405222</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38405222</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewprock in "After OpenAI's blowup, it seems pretty clear that 'AI safety' isn't a real thing"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The crazier thing is that most advocates of "AI safety" don't know anything about "AI safety". By and large the term is marketing with very little objective scientific development.<p>It is essentially a series of op-ed pieces from vested interests masquerading as a legitimate field of inquiry</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 23 Nov 2023 19:55:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38396814</link><dc:creator>andrewprock</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38396814</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38396814</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewprock in "The big TDD misunderstanding (2022)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You should be very skeptical of anyone that claims they have 100% test coverage.<p>Only under very rare circumstances is 100% test coverage is even possible, let alone done. Typically when people say coverage they mean "code line coverage", as opposed to the more useful "code path coverage". Since it's combinatorially expensive to enumerate all possible code paths, you rarely see 100% code path coverage in a production system. You might see it for testing vary narrow ADTs, for example; booleans or floats. But you'll almost never see it for black boxes which take more than one simply defined input doing cheap work.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 19 Nov 2023 22:29:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38339097</link><dc:creator>andrewprock</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38339097</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38339097</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewprock in "datetime.utcnow() is now deprecated"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Deprecation should not break anything. At some point the code will be removed and the org will have to pin the version until the deprecations are resolved.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 19 Nov 2023 21:40:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38338447</link><dc:creator>andrewprock</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38338447</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38338447</guid></item></channel></rss>