Hacker News: brolumir

New comment by brolumir in "Patrick Stewart has died"

brolumir — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 12:20:16 +0000

Zero desire to advance is a good one.

IIRC Riker has turned down multiple offers to become a captain of his own ship, to stay as Picard's #2. This would've never happened in real life, he would've been gone after Season 2 at the latest.

New comment by brolumir in "There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]"

brolumir — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 12:31:10 +0000

Excellent old soviet cartoon based on this story (english subtitles) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oxP3TyuQx0

New comment by brolumir in "Don't Become a Scientist (1999)"

brolumir — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 21:54:14 +0000

While this is clearly an old post, I'm not sure about the actual date. On the bottom it says 1999, but there's also a citation for an article from 2001.

> For many more details consult the Young Scientists' Network or read the account in the May, 2001 issue of the Washington Monthly.

New comment by brolumir in "The Wright brothers invented the airplane, right? Not if you're in Brazil"

brolumir — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 16:25:41 +0000

This reminds me of a somewhat related topic - who won the space race? Growing up in Soviet Union, we were taught that it was the USSR - when Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space. Then I came to the US, and was taught that it was the US, when Neil Armstrong became the first man on the moon.

New comment by brolumir in "Chronon, Airbnb's ML feature platform, is now open source"

brolumir — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 16:22:31 +0000

It's tough to prioritize migrating to a new platform for the engineering blog, without a very good ROI. Airbnb's eng blog was set up on Medium a while ago, it's doing fine, they have no real reason to spend a lot of resources on switching.

New comment by brolumir in "A 'scam manual' written to help immigrants not become victims"

brolumir — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 19:42:10 +0000

Yeah, I should've been more clear: it wasn't really investing in a friends company. I agree it can be a source of funding when other sources aren't available, but in this case it was a total scam - the company was specifically designed to accept money and fold.

New comment by brolumir in "A 'scam manual' written to help immigrants not become victims"

brolumir — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 18:00:50 +0000

Really wish this existed in the 90's when my family moved to the US from eastern europe. A non-exhaustive list of scams my parents fell for:

- Investing money in a friend's company - this was the most painful as it was perpetuated by our family members who lived here for a while that we trusted

- Rainbow vacuum cleaner

- Aqualife water filter

- Hiring someone to take us to another city to buy a car to "help get a good deal" - turned out he was working for the seller, and it was not a good deal at all

- A summer job for me selling Vector cutlery

Unfortunately it's easy to scam new immigrants, this happened for hundred years and still happening now.

New comment by brolumir in "The Married Introvert"

brolumir — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 21:00:18 +0000

This is literally me.

I'm very happy with my life - my spouse, my kids, my extended family, my small group of friends that's been together for 20+ years, and my career. I have very little interest in socializing / meeting new people, and would much rather spend all my free time improving my existing relationships (see above), or be by myself.

I know how to socialize / meet new people, but never feel comfortable doing that.

New comment by brolumir in "The Ur-Quan Masters: Open-source remake of Star Control II"

brolumir — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 19:47:19 +0000

The original team is working on a sequel: https://pistolshrimpgames.com/uqm2/

New comment by brolumir in "Ex-Finance developers mock McKinsey's monitoring metrics"

brolumir — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 21:25:51 +0000

> Kent Beck, ex-fellow at payroll infrastructure fintech Gusto ...

Really weird way to introduce Kent Beck

New comment by brolumir in "GPT-4 API General Availability"

brolumir — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 19:21:39 +0000

Hmm, when I try to change model name to "gpt-4" I get the "The model: `gpt-4` does not exist" error message. We are an API developer with a history of successful payments.. is there anything we need to do on our side to enable this, anyone know?

New comment by brolumir in "Encyclopaedia Metallum"

brolumir — Thu, 06 Jul 2023 14:58:00 +0000

Man, all these comments from folks who've discovered this site in their youth many many years ago makes me feel old... because I remember when that site was first started.

I was a member of the metal-rules.com forums (RIP) and the founders of Metal Archives came from there. Many hours of my misspent youth were wasted arguing with the people on those forums, now all gone. Back then metal-rules was THE place to talk about metal on the internet, and MA was an upstart who almost nobody knew about.

New comment by brolumir in "Native JSON Output from GPT-4"

brolumir — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 00:34:49 +0000

Unfortunately, in practice that works only most of the time. At least in our experience (and the article says something similar) sometimes ChatGPT would return something completely different when JSON-formatted response would be expected.

New comment by brolumir in "On a great interview question"

brolumir — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 12:18:00 +0000

Agree, this is a bad question that gives absolutely no indication on whether the candidate will perform well in the role as a software engineer.

> The fastest I had a candidate solve the entirety of the problem with all bells and whistles was in 20 minutes, by a freshman from the University of Waterloo, the type who did high-school competitions.

This should’ve been the interviewer’s first clue.

New comment by brolumir in "Petrichor"

brolumir — Wed, 28 Dec 2022 13:56:46 +0000

And a great Phish song by that name too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbMTa1yeSyw

New comment by brolumir in "State of the Sanderson 2022"

brolumir — Fri, 23 Dec 2022 19:11:23 +0000

Absolutely. There's a world of difference between a professional voice actor narrating an audiobook, and AI/amateur. Personally I can't listen to anything narrated by anyone other than (good) pro voice actors, it just kills the enjoyment.

On a similar note, Sanderson's own books in "graphic audio" format (multiple voice actors, sound effects, music, etc) are a wonderful piece of art and is my preferred way to consume audiobooks when possible. I don't see that being replaced with AI any time soon.

New comment by brolumir in "Metal Archives 20th Anniversary"

brolumir — Thu, 18 Aug 2022 15:19:25 +0000

There’s https://www.progarchives.com for progressive rock and related genres.

New comment by brolumir in "What Tech Workers Don't Understand They've Lost by WFH"

brolumir — Tue, 09 Aug 2022 13:15:49 +0000

Not one mention of children in the article - the #1 reason people that have them prefer to work from home.

New comment by brolumir in "The Betrayal at Krondor Help Web"

brolumir — Tue, 17 May 2022 10:04:55 +0000

While the game itself is not getting remade, there is an “inspired by” game in the works: https://www.callofsaregnar.com/

New comment by brolumir in "Eve Online fans cheer Microsoft Excel features at annual Fanfest"

brolumir — Tue, 10 May 2022 15:37:48 +0000

Am I the only one who thought of this video? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xubbVvKbUfY