Hacker News: closeparen

New comment by closeparen in "Plunging test scores are a slow-moving catastrophe"

closeparen — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 15:59:17 +0000

True leading up to 2010. The couple of kids who had the original iPhone or the 3G were unusual. Most of my classmates - including myself - got one between the 4 (2010) and the 5S (2013).

New comment by closeparen in "Plunging test scores are a slow-moving catastrophe"

closeparen — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 20:10:56 +0000

The timeline is more plausible for the rise of short-form video.

New comment by closeparen in "Plunging test scores are a slow-moving catastrophe"

closeparen — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 18:46:38 +0000

Essentially every high schooler had an active Facebook account and essentially every school paper was written on a word processor by, like, 2010. By 2018 even Instagram is starting to be played out. I would be very surprised to see a material increase in the share of US or western students using social media over the 2018-2022 period.

New comment by closeparen in "America's Driver's License Breach Is a National Security Disaster"

closeparen — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 01:37:06 +0000

People need to stop believing insane, delusional things like the existence of a human being with a certain name, address, phone number, birthday, SSN being secret or private information.

Downstream of that, people need to stop accepting knowledge of the basic public metadata fields or possession of images containing them as evidence of identity verification. Do actual public key cryptography on the internet or check biometrics and the document’s physical security measures in person.

New comment by closeparen in "Dario, Please"

closeparen — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 02:15:10 +0000

The proposal I’m hearing is to make people training models accountable for anything users do with them.

Obviously you’re going to keep the model behind an API and be very selective about the people allowed to call and the queries it’s willing to answer, in that case. As Anthropic has done with Fable. But that is voluntary restraint - mostly in today’s regime we get frontier capabilities in open weight models on a ~year delay.

New comment by closeparen in "Dario, Please"

closeparen — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:30:00 +0000

I do not buy that LLMs and the capability to run them are fundamentally different from other software or general purpose computing infrastructure in this regard. Moves to ban open source software or force OEMs to put little cops in everyone's computers are bad.

New comment by closeparen in "The Real Luxuries In Life"

closeparen — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 21:52:23 +0000

One through eight read as the list of sacrifices you make in having children. But the experiences of loving and being loved back seem at least incomplete without that.

New comment by closeparen in "Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI"

closeparen — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 01:56:01 +0000

Even startups that beat the incredibly long odds to become successful mostly aren’t successful enough to make up for a long stretch of not earning BigCo RSUs.

New comment by closeparen in "Fast drilldown dashboards from a single Parquet file"

closeparen — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 02:29:38 +0000

I work at a household name tech company and pretty much all our "data" dashboards are running SQL queries against a Hive/Presto environment that's at least 24 hours behind. Real-time dashboards are limited to the service metrics time series database (so combinations of categorical variables, no individual records) or rare expensive Pinot tables.

New comment by closeparen in "Remote workers report the highest well-being in study of 7,700 employees"

closeparen — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 21:14:25 +0000

Most of the 60 minute travel time radius around a San Francisco or Silicon Valley tech HQ is water and nature preserve.

New comment by closeparen in "Civic Hygiene – avoid building technologies that could be used by a police state (2013)"

closeparen — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 17:14:50 +0000

The obvious 21st century United States instance of "don't collect data that the government might later use for persecution" is E-Verify.

New comment by closeparen in "Rethinking Database Programming"

closeparen — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 16:20:02 +0000

The part that has stood the test of time and genuinely seems to carve reality at the seams is the query part. The data definition and data manipulation parts are just ok.

New comment by closeparen in "AI is removing the middle class of software engineering"

closeparen — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 17:35:43 +0000

I definitely hear about segments of the industry being like that, but FAANG and adjacent generally isn't. Engineers are expected to display ownership of a problem space (scope depending on seniority), navigate ambiguity, and manage their own time.

New comment by closeparen in "Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering"

closeparen — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 21:46:31 +0000

In my experience, shared memory instills the appropriate fear and caution, while the apparent simplicity of channels encourages novice Go programers to take on concurrency projects beyond their abilities and without due care. Been on both the submitter and reviewer side of that plenty of times in 10 years.

New comment by closeparen in "Go is an ideal language for AI-assisted software engineering"

closeparen — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 21:01:11 +0000

It's pretty easy to get yourself into trouble with channels: deadlocks, send on closed, channel leaks, deadlocks "fixed" thoughtlessly with arbitrarily-sized buffers, etc.

New comment by closeparen in "Tech leaders say AI means less work – staff say they work up to 90 hours a week"

closeparen — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 16:54:38 +0000

Pension fund managers, who in turn work for public employees and voters.

New comment by closeparen in ""Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all programmers"

closeparen — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 19:00:14 +0000

In my experience the only people who get paid "well" to just code up well defined JIRA tickets are new grads, and this is essentially a training period until they grow into leading complex and ambiguous projects independently. You can't hang out there more than a few years.

New comment by closeparen in "Water system controllers don't belong on the internet, says ex-NSA chief"

closeparen — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 02:52:42 +0000

If you've got secret agents on enemy soil who can get near targets with drones, you're probably just bombing them.

New comment by closeparen in "Water system controllers don't belong on the internet, says ex-NSA chief"

closeparen — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 02:47:12 +0000

If we can beat a security-state airgap by sprinkling USB drives in the parking lot, I think the Iranians can beat an "internal" network by getting someone to click on an email attachment or visit the wrong website on their municipal issued Windows machine.

It's very common for the proprietary software for interfacing with ancient, expensive machines to break after OS upgrades, so they're probably unpatched... you might not even need to burn a 0-day.

New comment by closeparen in "Water system controllers don't belong on the internet, says ex-NSA chief"

closeparen — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 02:32:36 +0000

I enjoy watching Cursed Controls on YouTube. For him, the gold standard is a flash drive with the program on it physically hanging out in the control cabinet.