Hacker News: aoanevdus

New comment by aoanevdus in "Social drinking also a well-worn path to alcohol use disorder"

aoanevdus — Fri, 09 May 2025 23:59:41 +0000

This thread is cluing me in that I need new wording to describe my rare consumption of alcohol.

New comment by aoanevdus in "“Fewer Users” Warning Hurting Specialized and New Apps"

aoanevdus — Fri, 02 May 2025 17:46:11 +0000

It’s tempting to anthropomorphize a company like Google, and assume that every behavior is part of some evil master plan. Just as often, it’s some small group of people within the company making a dumb mistake. I’d guess there is some team tasked with reducing the “app spam” problem, where there the store and (app review process) is crammed with thousands of near-identical apps, torturing the naive user with ads as they attempt to perform basic functions.

This targeting of this warning is over-broad, preventing honest new app developers from getting traction. That’s bad for the long-term health of Android’s app ecosystem, and a competitive disadvantage against iOS. There’s probably some other team at Google who is responsible for improving the development experience for Android, who hates this new warning.

Talking about the harmful outcomes of this warning, it’s good to get the news far and wide and try to get it fixed.

Analyzing why the thing got pushed in the first place, it seems to me a symptom of the challenge of coherently managing a hundred thousand employees.

New comment by aoanevdus in "We identified a North Korean hacker who tried to get a job"

aoanevdus — Fri, 02 May 2025 02:47:13 +0000

The common pattern of requiring three days a week of in-office time makes it much harder.

New comment by aoanevdus in "Why can't Ivies cope with losing a few hundred million?"

aoanevdus — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 18:38:53 +0000

When a large institution is faced with uncertainty about the future, it’s both feasible and prudent to make plans that account for multiple future outcomes. In this case, it makes sense to do both of the following:

1) Fight the administration in the legal system.

2) Plan for the case where some of those legal fights are lost.

New comment by aoanevdus in "California overtakes Japan to become the world's fourth largest economy"

aoanevdus — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 08:16:30 +0000

Supposedly there are hundreds in Concord.

New comment by aoanevdus in "Careless People"

aoanevdus — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 23:38:08 +0000

In pure math at a school like Harvard, the standout kids like the ones in that quote are probably trying to become tenured math professors. There are very few such positions available. You can shoot for the stars, and if you succeed, make about the same as the average software engineer. More likely, get stuck a postdoc. So most students give up pure math at some point. If you realized you weren’t cut out for it in freshman year, you got a head start over the people who got a math phd before finding out the hard way.

This pressure didn’t exist in computer science because there were plenty of tech jobs for anyone competent (not sure if that’s still true in 2025). And you didn’t need to be a genius to build something cool.

New comment by aoanevdus in "A Ford executive who kept score of colleagues' verbal flubs"

aoanevdus — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 07:23:01 +0000

When I was a kid, an adult told me that I should stop using “basically” as a filler word because people will interpret it as an insult to their intelligence (ie. “You’re not smart enough for the whole thing, so I will just tell you the basic version”). I’ve been attentive to the way other people use the word ever since, and I think they have a point. Some people say it very frequently and don’t mean anything by it. But a good chunk of the time, it does seem like there is a status game going on when people use that word.

New comment by aoanevdus in "Ethically sourced "spare" human bodies could revolutionize medicine"

aoanevdus — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 07:15:26 +0000

Quite a tangent, but what if we apply this logic of informed consent to property? If a person without a will dies, should we leave their house abandoned until it decomposes? Automatic organ donation is like probate for bodies.

New comment by aoanevdus in "Ethically sourced "spare" human bodies could revolutionize medicine"

aoanevdus — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 07:10:56 +0000

I thought that was because the lab meat competes with farmers. I can’t think of any similarly situated rival to the lab bodies for organ transplants that would lobby against it.

New comment by aoanevdus in "Capitol Trades: Tracking Stock Market Transactions of Politicians"

aoanevdus — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 03:56:34 +0000

Isn’t trading off of delayed disclosures basically being dumb money? You’re in a similar position to a pump and dump victim.

New comment by aoanevdus in "Circuit breaker triggered in Japan for stock futures trading"

aoanevdus — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 03:53:04 +0000

Would they need a veto-proof majority for that to work? You’d need like half the republicans to go along with that.

New comment by aoanevdus in "AI 2027"

aoanevdus — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 05:21:30 +0000

Don’t assume that because the article depicts this competition between the US and China, that the authors actually want China to fail. Consider the authors and the audience.

The work is written by western AI safety proponents, who often need to argue with important people who say we need to accelerate AI to “win against China” and don’t want us to be slowed down by worrying about safety.

From that perspective, there is value in exploring the scenario: ok, if we accept that we need to compete with China, what would that look like? Is accelerating always the right move? The article, by telling a narrative where slowing down to be careful with alignment helps the US win, tries to convince that crowd to care about alignment.

Perhaps, people in China can make the same case about how alignment will help China win against US.

New comment by aoanevdus in "What to Do"

aoanevdus — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 19:20:23 +0000

Why even go through the effort of making a criticism when you can satisfy the urge simply by pointing and implying one exists?

New comment by aoanevdus in "Why a plane turned around when a passenger lost a phone midflight"

aoanevdus — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 19:07:58 +0000

https://apnews.com/article/russia-poland-germany-sabotage-ca...

November 5, 2024

> WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England.

> Poland said last month that it has arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and is searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene said Tuesday there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration.

People have been sending explodey batteries by air freight. In that context, requiring batteries on a plane to be in the cabin where they can be located, accompanied by the owner of the battery could be a good deterrent.

New comment by aoanevdus in "Noise cancellation improves turn-taking for AI Voice Agents"

aoanevdus — Sat, 29 Mar 2025 05:22:59 +0000

IMO this is a use-case where the added latency of cell phones is a downgrade.

New comment by aoanevdus in "Take this on-call rotation and shove it"

aoanevdus — Sat, 29 Mar 2025 03:08:54 +0000

At Amazon it’s common to have terrible, week-long oncall shifts with many repetitive pages. At Google they have shifts that follow the sun and they get PTO to compensate for being oncall during the weekend. Both jobs pay similarly. And I think most people joining Amazon don’t know about the oncall they are in for.

New comment by aoanevdus in "Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg"

aoanevdus — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 08:28:05 +0000

I’m curious what would be considered the industry standard for fact checking in tech. Does Google Search, Apple App Store, TikTok, Snapchat, Amazon store, etc. apply fact-checking to the content posted by users/sellers?

Or more abstractly, is fact-checking the responsibility of authors and content editors, or of platforms and infrastructure that spread the content?

New comment by aoanevdus in "Sayonara, R35: Nissan Japan has stopped taking orders for the GT-R"

aoanevdus — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 17:44:31 +0000

Assuming you’re driving a sports car for fun and not to win a race - isn’t feel the whole point?

New comment by aoanevdus in "Penn to reduce graduate admissions, rescind acceptances amid research cuts"

aoanevdus — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 05:14:48 +0000

By this metric I would have got into any school I wanted, but that’s just because I put an exceptional amount of effort into preparing for the test. My grades and extracurriculars weren’t top-notch. I did go to an elite-ish school and it was clear that many other students deserved to be there more than me (ie. were able to contribute to society more in various ways), and in my view that difference was legible in the admissions process.

New comment by aoanevdus in "Yash: Yet Another Shell"

aoanevdus — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 05:34:40 +0000

Neat idea. I think I’d like it to maintain a global history and local, with some UI affordance to remind me both exist and perhaps what are the last few entries.

A lot of my commands would work in any directory, but sometimes the directory matters and I run it in the wrong place.