Hacker News: britzkopf

New comment by britzkopf in "Claude Code is locking people out for hours"

britzkopf — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 16:28:53 +0000

> And before anyone accuses me of being some "vibe coder", I've built five nines active-active money rails that move billions of dollars a day at 50kqps+, amongst lots of other hard hitting platform engineering work. Serious senior engineering for over a decade

You sound like a pro wrestler. I'd like to know what "hard-hitting" engineering work is. Hydraulic hammers?

New comment by britzkopf in "What is a manifold?"

britzkopf — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 05:28:20 +0000

Every time I try to get some handle on the essence of this topic I fail. No different here. In the second paragraph it defines manifolds as "... shapes that look flat to an ant living on them, even though they might have a more complicated global structure"

So manifolds are complicated shapes that are at large enough a scale that an ant (which species?) will think they're flat....ok

New comment by britzkopf in "Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)"

britzkopf — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 18:04:49 +0000

So another strategy to do well might include tempting your classmates to distraction or perhaps offering to "help" them but in fact feed them misinformation? Got it.

New comment by britzkopf in "Doctorow: American tech cartels use apps to break the law"

britzkopf — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 19:21:50 +0000

I was a customer facing employee for a company whose underhanded policies caused me to face a lot of (legitimate) hostility. I eventually quit for this reason, and I know at least one other employee who did. That company lost two otherwise good employees. It works, it's just a question of how much collateral damage you're ok with. If management want to use front facing employees to shelter them from customer grievance, what other target to people have?

New comment by britzkopf in "Emailing a one-time code is worse than passwords"

britzkopf — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 14:40:32 +0000

Great, this is a universal solution. Let's all make it an integral part of our digital security, and in 5 years or so hope that bitwarden doesn't leverage it!

New comment by britzkopf in "Ex-Waymo engineers launch Bedrock Robotics to automate construction"

britzkopf — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 04:03:58 +0000

Framing is skilled, but landscaping and pest control are unskilled? Are you living in a well framed house overrun with mice and a terrible yard? I've done some framing. With a communicative foreman and a straightforward building design I did not find it that hard.

New comment by britzkopf in "What happens when clergy take psilocybin"

britzkopf — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 16:54:57 +0000

"latent mental illness" sounds like a tagline for the human condition.

New comment by britzkopf in "Firing programmers for AI is a mistake"

britzkopf — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 17:53:45 +0000

Who the hell, in today's market, is going to hire an engineer with a tenuous grasp on foundational technological systems, with the hope that one day they will backfill?!

New comment by britzkopf in "Tip pressure might work in the moment, but customers are less likely to return"

britzkopf — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 03:16:59 +0000

How does this rule get circumvented?

New comment by britzkopf in "Tip pressure might work in the moment, but customers are less likely to return"

britzkopf — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 02:15:26 +0000

In Canada, there is no longer any special wage below the minimum for servers. They receive the same minimum as many other blue collar workers. It's over, there is no longer any reasonable argument for tipping servers but not a whole host of other low wage earners.

New comment by britzkopf in "Weight-loss drug found to shrink muscle in mice, human cells"

britzkopf — Thu, 21 Nov 2024 02:44:16 +0000

Yeah, normies suck. I totally only want to hear from people obsessed with the latest computer Science minutia!

New comment by britzkopf in "Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid"

britzkopf — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 16:02:07 +0000

Get enough researchers to train their metaphorical microscopes on it and it's interaction with any dimension of human biology for long enough and I have to think the answer will eventually be no.

New comment by britzkopf in "Why Haskell?"

britzkopf — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 16:50:00 +0000

I've often wondered if it having a reputation as being hard is accurate. Not necessarily because of syntax etc. but because of you don't already have a grounding in programming/engineering/comp sci. it can be difficult to fit the insights Haskell provides into any meaningful framework. That was my experience anyway, came to it too early and didn't understand the significance.

New comment by britzkopf in "Copying is the way design works (2020)"

britzkopf — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 20:37:35 +0000

That actually points to the problem I have with it. I don't think many jazz lovers would balk at reference to a performance as a "jazz performance" without a specification of which one of its subvariants (which by the way are far less numerous than EDM - compare here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_jazz_genres, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_electronic_music_genre...). But in my experience, electronic music fans quite often feel compelled to endlessly nitpick over which subgenre some (almost always) 4/4, uptempo, 4 minute track belongs to.

New comment by britzkopf in "Copying is the way design works (2020)"

britzkopf — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 16:45:44 +0000

Whoa there. I've not done the polling but I suspect most EDM consumers think of themselves as music lovers the same way other people like jazz etc. I tend more to agree with your assessment that the vast majority of it is not in the same category as "real" music but I don't think attendees of a rave would go along with that.

New comment by britzkopf in "The window for great-grandmothers is closing"

britzkopf — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 15:18:35 +0000

Zero? Doesn't seem a very good faith assessment of the concept proposed.

New comment by britzkopf in "Bookish Diversions: Do Audiobooks Count?"

britzkopf — Sun, 03 Mar 2024 15:38:33 +0000

It's for a similar reason that I find eReaders to be so disappointing. I have no interest in color or other aesthetic innovations, but I'm very interested in speed. I feel they have yet to reach some threshold such that I can confidently navigate backwards and forwards any number of pages at a time without losing focus. I'm they're current implementation none of them come close to physical books for that, but I feel like they could if that were the goal.

New comment by britzkopf in "An introduction to the theory and practice of poker (2020)"

britzkopf — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 05:19:35 +0000

But if we accept the mathematics of poker are not that complicated, then are those other skills not highly generalizable to any job requiring extraordinary insight into human behaviour?

New comment by britzkopf in "An introduction to the theory and practice of poker (2020)"

britzkopf — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 01:13:26 +0000

I've had a very long standing debate with friends about the nature of poker. I'm neither a statistician, game theorist, nor mathematician so I'm very open to being corrected. My intuition having played recreationally is that the absolute optimal move in poker is relatively trivial to calculate compared to chess/go. That is to say, most experienced players would reach this threshold without too much training. Obviously, what makes poker fun/interesting is that you are trying to guess the strategies of other players, based on your interpretation of their behaviour, and react accordingly. If all that is true, then I would submit, that at any sufficiently high (i.e. non beginner) competitive level it probably comes down to luck, since I don't really believe that the second skill described is really learnable. So when we say "John is the world poker champion for 10 years running and is obviously far better than any mid tier player" are we not saying, essentially, that John is a human polygraph machine. Why, then, is that absolutely astounding skill not being harnessed for something else?

New comment by britzkopf in "Getting rid of bed bugs: trickier than ever"

britzkopf — Sat, 10 Feb 2024 16:34:35 +0000

Can't be that old. I had bed bugs in 2012 I believe. I bought some of the recommended insecticide and sprayed a small perimeter and released a couple that I had captured into the middle. They then crawled outward and I was shocked how quickly after they crossed the perimeter they died.