Hacker News: d4vlx

New comment by d4vlx in "US Ends Support For Ukrainian F-16s"

d4vlx — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 17:54:21 +0000

I think he is referring to the F-35 only here. On military discussion forums it is the consensus that the F-35 is superior to everything else out there with the only exception being that the F-22 has superior air to air combat capabilities.

Chinese troll campaign on Twitter exposes disconnect with the wider world

d4vlx — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 21:58:00 +0000

Article URL: https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/14/asia/nnevvy-china-taiwan-twitter-intl-hnk/index.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22883582

Points: 6

# Comments: 1

What Outranks Thread Priority? (2020)

d4vlx — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 21:52:44 +0000

Article URL: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2020/04/14/what-outranks-thread-priority/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22883525

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

A case of the MUMPS (2007)

d4vlx — Sat, 17 Jan 2015 05:46:48 +0000

Article URL: http://thedailywtf.com/articles/A_Case_of_the_MUMPS

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8903570

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by d4vlx in "Mystery Bidder Bids $3.2M for 6000 Detroit Homes"

d4vlx — Fri, 24 Oct 2014 16:28:00 +0000

There is some contiguousness but they are mostly spread all over the city. Take a look at the red properties on this map (zoomable):

https://whydontweownthis.com/2014/mi/wayne/detroit#15/42.347...

New comment by d4vlx in "Finding a Video Poker Bug Made These Guys Rich"

d4vlx — Tue, 07 Oct 2014 19:59:11 +0000

I worked on online casino software for several years and we had a number of bugs like this. They would usually involve someone writing a client to hit our API directly and fiddling with the xml messages. The operators would usually catch the issues within hours, turn off the game and often deny the players their winnings, if it was a legitimate win. Several people wound up in jail for exploits.

In the early days of the company it was a fairly significant problem with incidents pretty frequently. The lack of QA and a release process really bit them a few times as well. A game was put into production with the result hard coded to a win. Goes to show that just because a company makes software that deals with money and is financially successful it does not mean they are at all competent. It took 9 years for them to turn things around and transform the company into a highly effective dev shop, at least by industry standards. I am proud I was part of that. Unfortunately the industry had some major problems in 2009-2010 and they ended up having to find a buyer who even more unfortunately does not appreciate or understand developers or software development.

We did integrations with many other gambling software companies and not a single organization was what I consider competent. I would love to see a new company with serious technical chops break into the world of online gambling and school the crusty behemoths. Hard to do however because of the network effects and importance of reputation and deal making.

New comment by d4vlx in "Intel Unleashes Its First 8-Core Desktop Processor"

d4vlx — Sat, 30 Aug 2014 01:33:53 +0000

You could buy a slower Xeon for around the same price if you really needed more than 64 gigs of memory.

http://ark.intel.com/products/75269/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-...

And it supports ECC.

New comment by d4vlx in "Minting Money with Monero and CPU Vector Intrinsics"

d4vlx — Thu, 28 Aug 2014 22:56:34 +0000

I agree there is a lot of fraud and greed in the cryptocoin community which makes it risky for people new to it or the naive. For people who have done some reading or hung around for a while it's usually pretty easy to spot most scams. In cases like Monero it was probably a something the developers missed. The important thing to note is that the community fixed that oversight within a month or two.

New comment by d4vlx in "Minting Money with Monero and CPU Vector Intrinsics"

d4vlx — Thu, 28 Aug 2014 22:52:49 +0000

Premining and instamining (where they just start the coin with x coins in the devs wallet) are fairly common practices among new cryptocoins. They are usually frowned upon by the community but not always as the coin developers will sometimes keep a 1-2% for use promoting and developing the coin. Which most people consider fair. An 80% premine like bytecoin is ridiculous.

It is very easy to tell if a coin has been premined by checking the state of the block chain for the number of outstanding coins. The coins with large premines are usually outed withing an hour of their release.

New comment by d4vlx in "Minting Money with Monero and CPU Vector Intrinsics"

d4vlx — Thu, 28 Aug 2014 19:35:15 +0000

Love the story, reminds me of the early days of Primecoin where I had my first exposure to cryptocurrency code. I spent the first two months of it fighting to stay ahead of the curve as well and had a blast. Not nearly as successfully as Dave however and my wife wasn't too happy about me spending every waking hour when home from my full time job on it.

New comment by d4vlx in "What's the Real U.S. Unemployment Rate? We Have No Idea"

d4vlx — Thu, 28 Aug 2014 02:54:57 +0000

It looks like they may have added some growing possibly linear function to the unemployment rate instead of a constant starting in 2009. All the better to push their fear mongering agenda/sales tactic I guess.

New comment by d4vlx in "Why I Traveled the World Hunting for Mutant Bugs"

d4vlx — Thu, 28 Aug 2014 01:39:51 +0000

She doesn't mention what methodology and practices she used to reach her conclusions. Did she study the same type of bugs in the same type of environment and climate in an area that was not close to Chernobyl or a nuclear plant? Did she take steps to avoid confirmation bias, such as double blind sampling? How did she gather and analyse her statistics? Without reasonable explanations for those and more her data is not sound.

New comment by d4vlx in "Critics Blame Airbnb for San Francisco's Housing Problems"

d4vlx — Mon, 11 Aug 2014 19:33:03 +0000

The issue is that by providing housing subsidies more money would be put into the demand side of the rental market. This would most likely cause rents to rise as there is now more money to spend.

In this situation the only way out that makes sense to me is to add more supply by removing some artificial barriers to building.

New comment by d4vlx in "An Idiot's Guide to Inequality"

d4vlx — Sat, 26 Jul 2014 15:53:11 +0000

Houses typically appreciate at better than 4% a year over 20 year time frames, although this is very location dependent. If they had bought in almost any city in the US with a population over a million they could have done much better.

http://www.census.gov/const/uspriceann.pdf

New comment by d4vlx in "The Economy"

d4vlx — Mon, 30 Jun 2014 20:35:40 +0000

I'm not trying to be snide but imo hoping the economy will improve by someone finding a growth engine is wishful thinking. I would like to see tax policy and government spending formulated for sustainability based on domestic consumption and have any potential innovation income as windfalls.

Hinging the economy on the creation of new grown engines is a risky strategy and I don't think the government should be in the business of making bets, at least at the macro economic scale (hell yeah on research spending).

Ask HN: Looking for C# dev stack advice

d4vlx — Sun, 29 Jun 2014 02:42:21 +0000

I have some C# enterprise type work coming up and am looking for advice or links to good information about what a great C# stack looks like. Specifically I'm wondering what good options are for unit testing, mocking, building, database connectivity, and dev libraries and frameworks.

I have a lot of experience with enterprise Java, for comparison here is what my answer would be for it:

Testing: JUnit, Hamcrest, Mockito Database: Mybatis, Mybatis Migrations Build: Maven or Gradle Libraries/Frameworks: Guava, Guice, HttpClient, Jersey or Stripes, log4j, Apache Commons

Thanks!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7960198

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

New comment by d4vlx in "Commencement address by Bill and Melinda Gates"

d4vlx — Sat, 28 Jun 2014 05:21:38 +0000

I agree with your points, I have seen people use similar justifications for why they have not improved their lives. Which is unfortunate but I think it's the wrong battle.

Many more times I have seen people from middle class or better backgrounds talk about how they got where they were because of hard work or drive or whatever. And then use that as justification for why some social program should be cut, like food stamps. The way I look at it, the "might as well not try" argument harms a few people who have the least influence in society. The "I worked hard and made it so we don't need social programs" argument is made by some of the most influential people and the programs they cut effect millions.

New comment by d4vlx in "Corporate Tax Dodgers [pdf]"

d4vlx — Sun, 01 Jun 2014 18:17:16 +0000

Does anyone know what causes the tax revenue form corporate taxes to double in the mid 2000's? Chart on page 5.

New comment by d4vlx in "Hacker School banning “feigned surprise” is absolutely brilliant"

d4vlx — Thu, 10 Apr 2014 18:24:11 +0000

When I worked at Thoughworks there were several people who were terrible for this. Many of them senior. It significantly reduced my respect for the company and I left as soon as I found a good replacement.

What made it particularly irksome was that they heavily market themselves both internally and externally as being above such things. The cognitive dissonance really grated on me.

Tamil Nadu state departments asked to switch over to open source software

d4vlx — Sat, 22 Mar 2014 04:13:06 +0000

Article URL: http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/tn-state-departments-asked-to-switch-over-to-open-source-software/article5799039.ece

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7447505

Points: 144

# Comments: 86