Hacker News: danielodievich

New comment by danielodievich in "US closely monitoring case of lab worker who possibly died of plague in Siberia"

danielodievich — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 23:00:29 +0000

oh no no no, just about everything about Russia these days is explained by Hanlon's Razor. There is absolutely no any conspiracy/planning, I assure you

New comment by danielodievich in "US closely monitoring case of lab worker who possibly died of plague in Siberia"

danielodievich — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 22:58:40 +0000

pezduza of course. It is a crude malapropism/joke on from Meduza.io

New comment by danielodievich in "US closely monitoring case of lab worker who possibly died of plague in Siberia"

danielodievich — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 19:31:40 +0000

One of the popular sarcastic meme posting channels on russian Telegram today posted a picture of an ad "Wanted: lab worker, ready to break a vial right next to just the right person. Benefits: $10M payout; guaranteed care of your descendants; your name mentioned in annals of history". Nice and dark and very accurate.

New comment by danielodievich in "NASA asked several former SR-71A staffers to help secret restart"

danielodievich — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 16:41:53 +0000

There is an SR-71 on display in Seattle's Boeing Museum of Flight. One of my most favorite memories of it was taking my late Belarussian grandfather to that museum and having one of the docents there, a retired airforce person about my grandfather's age, tour us around, with me translating. I already knew a bunch of BlackBird's lore, but the docent/tour guide was pulling out all the stops to impress my grandpa and was talking about various overflights of USSR, and I my grandfather's smile crinkled up and he said "oh I remember we finally shot that guy [Powell] down, and all the papers were trumpeting about it" and he and the tour guide started laughing and slapping each other on backs! I miss my grandfather. He was a good one!

New comment by danielodievich in "Everybody’s home. No one’s coming over"

danielodievich — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 22:27:27 +0000

Here is 3 cheers for my neighbor 50th birthday party that is COSTUME, and to which we got a PRINTED invitation. It is a "come as your favorite SNL character" party. Stylish people, single handedly bucking this indisputably sad trend. Now what character would you come as?

New comment by danielodievich in "Nvidia wants to put a watchdog chip next to every AI agent"

danielodievich — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:04:23 +0000

William Gibson's Neuromancer had this marvelous quote when Case is talking to Dixie, dead construct of former hacker, about Turing police

* "The moment, I mean the nanosecond, that one of those things starts figuring out ways to make itself smarter, Turing’ll wipe it. Nobody trusts those fuckers, you know that. Every AI ever built has an electromagnetic shotgun wired to its forehead." *

It would seem someone has read the book? And maybe heeded good advice?

New comment by danielodievich in "Not all AI workers think the tech could kill everyone"

danielodievich — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:51:33 +0000

At a business dinner this week with 3 high level eng clients p(doom) in next 10 years was brought up. It was rated by 2 if them them at 1% and 30% respectively, with 3rd guy demurring to put a number but saying its > 0. Completely unprompted, from people whose company is very AI-all-in.

New comment by danielodievich in "AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)"

danielodievich — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:20:32 +0000

Fascinating seeing you get irate with people who are giving you feedback that your own thoughts are far superior to the regurgitated "cleaned up" version which is absolute garbage indeed.

You have some solid ideas there but they are very poorly organized. I think you would benefit from a class in writing. I had a month-long technical writing workshop back a couple of decades ago that my company sponsored and it helped me tremendously with starting with wall of consciousness, progressing to writing plan, outline and then editing. It had a very positive impact on my career in professional services where clear communication via documents is an essential part of value prop.

New comment by danielodievich in "Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI"

danielodievich — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 20:02:56 +0000

5 years ago out of necessity I made a CLI around a private product API to manage something it wasn't making publicly, by reverse-engineering the API and complex logons and etc. It was very useful to ~ 100 people worldwide but it was enough of an audience. But I couldn't get any traction releasing it publicly until a distinguished engineer very far away from my org was in need of just this tool for his project. All of a sudden I got an innovation award from company leadership and legal fast tracked open-sourcing it. Pushing something like this out into public repo without legal review is suicidal.

New comment by danielodievich in "Steam Machine launches today"

danielodievich — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 18:14:03 +0000

back in 2019, I was thinking of getting an MBA and as part of the exploration, shadowed an MBA class at University of Washington for a day. It was so fun. One of the things they were discussing in the class that day was a case study of Valve, specifically around the Steam Machine. The team's consensus was that Valve was carefully arranging money in a barrel, lovingly soaking it in high octane gasoline, and was about to light a match.

New comment by danielodievich in "Various LLM Smells"

danielodievich — Thu, 28 May 2026 22:15:54 +0000

I meant interviewer. Sorry!

New comment by danielodievich in "Various LLM Smells"

danielodievich — Thu, 28 May 2026 20:48:07 +0000

All of those are included in the bulk of the documents passing my work input these days. It is infuriating. Out of principle I maintain 100% me in all my writing but I don't know if it matters. Well maybe it does... an interviewee recently complimented me on the "nicest and most human resume" they saw recently. That felt good

New comment by danielodievich in "Hold on for Dear Life"

danielodievich — Thu, 28 May 2026 19:06:37 +0000

like 6 years ago I had a job reach out to me once from I think the filecoin or some such. It wasn't something I was interested or suited for but I spoke with the guy and we were clearly talking at right angle at each other. Whatever. I then went out for brews with my friend who is also in tech and I told him about this. He looked into it and then went and bought like 500K of seagate stock, saying to me "these idiots are going to lead to hard drive shortage". He's made all kinds of money on that. Wish I took his lead on that too.

New comment by danielodievich in "Tesla is recalling its cheaper Cybertruck because the wheels might fall off"

danielodievich — Fri, 08 May 2026 16:32:56 +0000

When I was around 12 years old in USSR, my family took a vacation to Georgia to ski in a lovely resort of Gudauri. A big group of us skiers were riding a soviet made PAZ (or PAZik as it was often called) bus. It wobbled a bit since the airport, and about 100km into the ride as we were finally entering the mountains, it vibrated very badly. At some point the driver yelled really really loud - "everyone, to the left side of the bus, NOW", and we all moved to the left, and then we saw the rear wheel of the bus separate and roll forward past the bus. The pin holding the wheel in broke. Quality engineering, that pin design! I wonder if Cybertruck inherited some of that stuff.

New comment by danielodievich in "AI Self-preferencing in Algorithmic Hiring: Empirical Evidence and Insights"

danielodievich — Sat, 02 May 2026 18:45:07 +0000

So just to test, loaded qwen/qwen3-v1-30b locally, and fed my 100% human-written resume and asked it "Make this resume more professional".

Mucho bullets came out.

My sentence "I specialized in enterprise data modeling and worked on Cost of Goods Sold optimizations across entire customer base." became a bullet sentence "Specialized in enterprise data modeling and performance optimization, driving $5M+ in recurring cost savings across the customer base.".

The $5M+ sure sounds awesome, and clearly the corpus of resumes lean towards metrics, but its not true and I didn't ask the model to make up numbers.

Oh and it awarded me a "Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from University of California, Berkeley | 1996 – 1998" out of thin air. My resume has a SDE job between 1996 -1998. Oh man.

New comment by danielodievich in "The smelly baby problem"

danielodievich — Fri, 01 May 2026 23:47:13 +0000

We had cloth diaper service for our two children, where they'd deliver a huge stack of nice soft thick cotton squares, and take away the dirty ones, once a week. They barely smelled, especially in the beginning before solid foods start. They were excellent as burpy cloths on the shoulder too. Disposable diapers were more excellent for outside, and at later times for sleeping through the night when we realized that the absorbency was better for sleep. We definitely felt better about the environment with the reusable cloth ones.

New comment by danielodievich in "SFO Quiet Airport (2025)"

danielodievich — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 20:57:38 +0000

One of my formative consulting projects in like 2002 or 2003 was in St. Louis, where couple of hundred of accenture and avanade and microsofties got together for like 6 months week after week to hack on a large software project for multiple states. It was a total crazy show but who cares. I had to take a red eye from west coast to Chicago which landed at 5, then take a 7am to St. Louis. I found some places to just lay there for 2 hours in Ohare, which is already hard. But they all had those TVs that were blasting CNN. I was smart and bought a legendary TV-B-Gone https://www.tvbgone.com/ and it would work on those! And on so many other tvs out there, from the sports bars to obscure brands in the airport shuttle buses. Thank you TV-B-Gone!

New comment by danielodievich in "Chernobyl's last wedding"

danielodievich — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 23:40:12 +0000

My well educated physicist grandfather was downwind in Gomel. In the immediate aftermath of this, all the while all the May parades were going on to show "everything is normal", he called my parents in Moscow to tell us to not send us kids to Belarus that summer, has locked his family in the apartment and sealed all windows with paper tape for a couple of weeks. After that we were never allowed to pick chanterelles in forests near Grodno downwind from Chernobyl, or pick linden tree flowers for our dried tea. Plenty of people did and sold that stuff at the markets to unsuspecting people.

New comment by danielodievich in "North American English Dialects"

danielodievich — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 16:27:39 +0000

At Microsoft TechEd in 1997 in Orlando, Florida, Microsoft bought out SeaWorld for the attendee party. I wound up getting really wet from the orca that they used to have there splashing people and met 3 other guys on the bench in same state. We went wandering around laughing and drinking. There was an Australian from NSW, New Zealander from Auckland, a French Canadian out of Ontario, and me, a fresh off the boat immigrant from Russia. I couldn't understand half of what was said! Aussie and kiwi were giving each other lots of good natured ribbing. The canuck was having fun and so was I as we got progressively more silly. One of the best parties at an industry conference I've had. Ahh the joy of dialects!

New comment by danielodievich in "Troubleshooting Email Delivery to Microsoft Users"

danielodievich — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 23:37:56 +0000

Not exactly on the same topic, but I think it's a good story. When my children were little we'd put them into summer camp. I would send an appointment with "something rather summer camp" from my @live account to my wife on her @hotmail account (you can tell the vintage of us by those, but anyhow). By then both of those were running on Exchange infra. I also had a b-dash@microsoft account at Microsoft which was was sure on Exchange, I wanted to block that time on that email. Well, I'd get these bizarre failures to deliver those calendar that were incomprehensible. I eventually tracked it to not liking "summer camp" in subject line. I changed it to "summer lamp" and they went through. !!! Because I was quite connected to Microsoft ecosystem, I was able to file this in proper raid/product studio repo and get it fixed (never sure of the exact reason though), but for years after that my children always went to "summer lamp" because it was funny that way.