Hacker News: dave333

New comment by dave333 in "LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs"

dave333 — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 12:26:37 +0000

Now I'm retired, linkedin's daily games are a fun way to do a little brain tai chi. Queens https://www.linkedin.com/games/queens/ is my favorite, although my solve time is consistently about twice the average apparently.

New comment by dave333 in "What Happened to Fry's Electronics"

dave333 — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 07:56:23 +0000

Fry's was one of the few places that used a single checkout queue for multiple checkout stations instead of each station having its own queue. Seemed like the queue was longer, but checkout time was actually less most of the time. Was a fun place to go and browse, just to see what stuff was available. Before fast shipping, was also great if you needed something for a fast fix today.

New comment by dave333 in "The differences between an IndyCar and a F1 car"

dave333 — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 08:26:00 +0000

Think of an oval as two straights connected by two Eau Rouge nearly flat style corners. Short one mile ovals offer some of the best racing as there are multiple lines around the corners and you can often race side by side. An F1 race on something like the Milwaukee Mile would be absolutely fantastic with the leaders coming through traffic after about 10 laps.

New comment by dave333 in "The Boring Part of Bell Labs"

dave333 — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 06:31:54 +0000

People used to spend entire careers at one company so investment in them pays off. I spent 10 years working for Bell Labs in the 1980s albeit as a contractor, and the bodyshop that employed me found it worthwhile reimbursing all educational expenses for a grade of C or better.

New comment by dave333 in "Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure"

dave333 — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 19:49:53 +0000

Privatisation was awful from the traveller's point of view having to figure out which company to deal with. It would have been much better to micro-privatise each train - selling off the dining car franchise to a commercial operator or allowing a commercial company to add a coach to a train for a given fee.

New comment by dave333 in "Ask HN: Senior people, how did your career evolve?"

dave333 — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 06:48:56 +0000

In work life as in the rest of life there is a mid-career crisis thing where you plateau and realize this is likely the best you will ever do. Crazy things can happen or you may float until there's a downturn and/or layoff but likely at some point the same old same old may appear to be a friendly shore you would not mind landing back on to finish your career. A side hustle can be a good way to do something you feel passionate about.

New comment by dave333 in "Ask HN: Can't get hired – what's next?"

dave333 — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 01:19:02 +0000

Been there after the dot com bust - in my case I eventually got hired by a startup where I aced the brain teasers and 6 months there gave me the tech stack to get hired at a big company that carried me through to retirement. Six months of 996 may be the price to get back on the ladder.

New comment by dave333 in "Ask HN: Has anyone else been unemployed for over two years?"

dave333 — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 17:53:01 +0000

Was laid off in 2001 during the dotcom bust. Was self-unemployed buying and selling used docking stations and power adapters until 2007 when I aced a job interview for a small start up after mostly giving up the job search. Six months at the startup gave me experience in an in-demand tech stack that landed me a job at a large tech company that saw me through to retirement 10 years later. If I had it to do over right now I would be creating something with AI as my own business - probably not very lucrative but good experience that might get you hired someplace.

New comment by dave333 in "The Rise and Demise of RSS (2018)"

dave333 — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 13:21:42 +0000

What are your favorite few RSS feeds?

New comment by dave333 in "She puts the Lord in 'vanlord.' Palo Alto wants to ban her business"

dave333 — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 05:17:19 +0000

Fabian Way is an office/industrial area near the major 101 freeway with wide streets and plenty of room for the RVs. Seems entirely reasonable to park RVs there. The surrounding office buildings have acres of empty parking lots. I can see if they stay a long time or are broken down and it becomes a shanty town that would be a problem, but given the problem of stupidly high rents pricing people out of homes, this seems a reasonable solution. City could lease an empty office building and allow cars/RVs in the parking lot with services like security, showers and social services in the office building.

New comment by dave333 in "DOOMscrolling: The Game"

dave333 — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 04:31:50 +0000

Maybe I don't know enough about spreadsheets but two dimensions isn't enough for most applications. Maybe pivot tables? They are too hard to figure out. Need something like "SQLSheet" that takes a more complex data structure and presents viewing and editing it in a natural way with drill down and joins etc. AI should be able to help you design the DB and then create a tool to interact with it.

New comment by dave333 in "The “impossibly small” Microdot web framework"

dave333 — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 18:32:36 +0000

I need to measure temperature at multiple points and humidity in my experimental garden shed with a skytherm roof [ http://www.solarmirror.com/fom/fom-serve/cache/30.html ] for passive heating and cooling. Thinking your thermostat code might be 90% of what I need however I don't yet know python. I guess it's easy to understand and modify the code with the help of AI.

New comment by dave333 in "University of Cambridge Cognitive Ability Test"

dave333 — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 00:11:11 +0000

To SPOIL my own question now my brain has had time to work on it, the answer may be that the first digit is larger than the second digit for liked numbers and less for not liked, with the 0 digits irrelevant. So 9 > 6 and 4 < 5 and 5 > 4 and 2 < 5.

New comment by dave333 in "University of Cambridge Cognitive Ability Test"

dave333 — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 23:00:33 +0000

I scored 54 and while the cube rotations are painful to do I was sure of all my responses and wonder which ones I got wrong. There was one I didn't know the answer: somebody liked 96 but not 45 and liked 540 but not 250 - can someone spoil that for me? There was one that had a trick in the answer order - which was 4 letters on from T which is X but in the choices 4 after T was Y which was what I checked initially.

New comment by dave333 in "Money and Macroeconomics from First Principles for Elon Musk and Other Engineers"

dave333 — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 19:37:21 +0000

Kindle unlimited link to Prof Steve Keen's new book. Mainstream economics ignores debt and so fails to predict events like the subprime crisis. Keen's first principles approach using double entry bookkeeping shows how money is created by banks when they lend and shows the importance of public and private debt.

Money and Macroeconomics from First Principles for Elon Musk and Other Engineers

dave333 — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 19:37:21 +0000

Article URL: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FLWJ8LXY

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44857641

Points: 1

# Comments: 2

New comment by dave333 in "Show HN: Wordle-style game for Fermi questions"

dave333 — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 20:45:22 +0000

The classic question of this type from high school physics/chem class is "How many molecules from Caesar's dying breath are in a persons lungs now?"

New comment by dave333 in "A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages"

dave333 — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 08:25:27 +0000

It's still peanuts compared to what owners make when their startup goes big. Seems reasonable that there's still room for small startups in AI with smarter approaches that don't require Manhattan project scale at a big company. Whether successful startups should sell out to big companies or become one themselves is the 64 billion question.

New comment by dave333 in "Live coding interviews measure stress, not coding skills"

dave333 — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 19:50:59 +0000

I always hated whiteboard coding exercises because under stress coding from scratch I would make stupid syntax errors often in boilerplate code that I normally would just copy from an example. Pseudo code wasn't as bad, but still stressful. Brain teasers on the other hand were fun and I could often solve them without having seen them before. Solving one brain teaser has got me hired more than once.

New comment by dave333 in "Delta moves to eliminate set prices, use AI to set your personal ticket price"

dave333 — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 23:29:36 +0000

I can see a huge opportunity after this scheme is common practice to offer a paid club membership like Amazon Prime that guarantees good/reasonable/lower prices on all flights with an airline.