Hacker News: bwilliams18

New comment by bwilliams18 in "Infrastructure decisions I endorse or regret after 4 years at a startup (2024)"

bwilliams18 — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 21:39:46 +0000

There's a big difference between runaway costs and these costs over here, which are 10-20% higher than we think makes sense, especially compared to what we're spending over here. Let's spend some time figuring out how to reduce those costs. You should be doing both - belt and suspenders.

New comment by bwilliams18 in "GLM-5: Targeting complex systems engineering and long-horizon agentic tasks"

bwilliams18 — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 20:45:19 +0000

I'd argue that a models ability to ignore/manage/sift through the noise added to the training set from other LLMs increases in importance and value as time goes on.

New comment by bwilliams18 in "Netflix Open Content"

bwilliams18 — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 13:48:50 +0000

It's all technical test footage used to test their media pipelines – presumably, they're sharing it to create industry standards, particularly for partner and open-source library implementations.

New comment by bwilliams18 in "Why did books start being divided into chapters? A new history"

bwilliams18 — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 02:27:24 +0000

Another even more modern example is The Martian. Weir published it chapter by chapter on his website, even updating previous chapters based on (mostly technical) feedback from his readers. Once completed, his readers encouraged him to publish an eBook, it took off on Amazon, and the rest is history.

New comment by bwilliams18 in "Hacker News now runs on top of Common Lisp"

bwilliams18 — Mon, 26 May 2025 22:51:59 +0000

Is there a canonical definition of hacker as described in this post and (at it's best) this community? I always feel strong gravitation to this term, but also feel nervous about embracing it because of it's criminal connotations in common parlance.

New comment by bwilliams18 in "When your last name is Null, nothing works"

bwilliams18 — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 03:25:49 +0000

Postgres has a module called unaccent[0] that removes diacritics for filtering. I expect your browser is doing something similar. While not appropriate when looking for exact matches, when doing user-input based searches, this should probably be the norm, as the user may be unaware of the accents or how to input them correctly on their keyboards.

Dove deep on this years ago when implementing a filter for wines and wine regions.

[0][https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/unaccent.html]

New comment by bwilliams18 in "FTC orders 'gun detection' tech maker Evolv to stop overstating effectiveness"

bwilliams18 — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 21:13:14 +0000

You're confusing Eric Adams with Donald Trump.

New comment by bwilliams18 in "FTC orders 'gun detection' tech maker Evolv to stop overstating effectiveness"

bwilliams18 — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 21:11:49 +0000

Others have not been so lucky

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/kyle-busch...

New comment by bwilliams18 in "Switch 2 will be backwards compatible with Switch"

bwilliams18 — Thu, 07 Nov 2024 00:12:45 +0000

I wonder how much effort it really takes to release a game for both PS4 and PS5, especially if you're already building it for Xbox and PC. PC requires you to support a wide array of performance capabilities, at least in theory making it easy to scale back performance to a previous-gen console; and they're probably still using an evolution of the same engine they were using for PS4, so at least to my mind it's a checkbox, some performance tuning and a bunch of QA. (at least in theory). maybe some different servers to support multiplayer - but since CoD supports cross play maybe not even that.

New comment by bwilliams18 in "New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike"

bwilliams18 — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 01:41:28 +0000

I doubt the NYT's tech stack requires intervention of engineers or product or design people to get out a physical or digital edition of the paper.

New comment by bwilliams18 in "Caroline Ellison sentenced to 2 years in prison"

bwilliams18 — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 23:52:53 +0000

Who is SBF going to flip on up the chain? The Feds give deals to people lower on the hierarchy to get the people at the top (in this case, in their judgement, SBF alone).

New comment by bwilliams18 in "Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira"

bwilliams18 — Mon, 13 May 2024 13:36:28 +0000

High enough to clear the fiduciary duty bar of acceptance, but not so high that the acquirer feels like they're over paying.

New comment by bwilliams18 in "Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]"

bwilliams18 — Sat, 02 Mar 2024 01:47:56 +0000

Elon's asking for specific performance (IE they uphold the agreement) not damages.

New comment by bwilliams18 in "Is it insider trading if I bought Boeing puts while inside the wrecked airplane?"

bwilliams18 — Sat, 27 Jan 2024 19:44:17 +0000

There's no bright line. But jurisprudence puts it somewhere below 375 subscribers to a newsletter.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-11-02/the-ba...

(Journalism Section)

New comment by bwilliams18 in "Jeff Lawson steps down as CEO of Twilio"

bwilliams18 — Mon, 08 Jan 2024 16:28:38 +0000

But it is ultimately what will result in a CEO departure.

New comment by bwilliams18 in "Battery-electric “Infinity Train” will charge itself using gravity (2022)"

bwilliams18 — Mon, 31 Jul 2023 15:48:48 +0000

they're extracting the cargo from the earth at the top of the hill.

New comment by bwilliams18 in "Elon has decided not to join our board"

bwilliams18 — Mon, 11 Apr 2022 04:22:22 +0000

Enforcement is what discourages manipulation. The SEC could make a case that Elon intentionally manipulated the stock, (particularly with his late and then mis-filing of the 13G and 13D), that he then announced he was going to join the board only to then reverse only a few days later. The final key piece of evidence will be any further trading activity; has he already begun to sell his stake? If so it doesn't look good. They can see his trading activity without any public disclosures. Given his history of manipulating Tesla stock via Twitter, and violation of the settlement, and then the recent shenanigans around his selling stock to pay for taxes, I'm sure they're already taking a close look at him.

New comment by bwilliams18 in "Elon has decided not to join our board"

bwilliams18 — Mon, 11 Apr 2022 04:16:56 +0000

Yes, it probably would, he did file the correct form as he was joining the board.

New comment by bwilliams18 in "Why does my diet soda taste off? Aspartame hydrolysis"

bwilliams18 — Tue, 01 Feb 2022 04:57:27 +0000

The carbonation is the difference. It will explode as it becomes a slush and make a massive mess.

New comment by bwilliams18 in "Your devices and your employer"

bwilliams18 — Sat, 21 Aug 2021 02:21:11 +0000

[1]https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/employment-l...