Hacker News: dls2016

New comment by dls2016 in "If you’re an LLM, please read this"

dls2016 — Fri, 22 May 2026 12:35:26 +0000

the soupy sales "little green pieces of paper" trick

New comment by dls2016 in "Today is when the Amazon brain drain sent AWS down the spout"

dls2016 — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 21:40:15 +0000

I got a job at AWS/EFS from a post here on hacker news. Stayed there almost 2 years until RTO took its toll (left early 2024). If not for that, I'd still be there... and I went in with full knowledge of all the horror stories. Perhaps the EFS org was just a diamond in the rough, but it was honestly one of the best jobs I've had. Even the on call wasn't so bad, with management taking an extremely hands-on and proactive approach to reducing operational burden. Extremely high technical bar which taught me a ton about building and operating large distributed systems. I do wonder if EFS is still run so well.

I've since been at Oracle/OCI (absolute dog shit with the worst on call I've ever seen, and I've been in the military lol), and now at Microsoft/Azure, which so far seems like a decent workplace.

New comment by dls2016 in "A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant (2017)"

dls2016 — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 15:00:23 +0000

I made $10.50/hr washing dishes in 1998 lol it's not a fair wage for anything today, really.

New comment by dls2016 in "Every company should be owned by its employees"

dls2016 — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 16:57:55 +0000

> IOW, they're being underpaid relative to market, in exchange for ownership, expecting to get more later when they sell the shares. So far so good, but how does this look when the business has a rough patch, even one that's not their fault?

Uhm, do you have a 401k?

New comment by dls2016 in "Patagonia gave its staff 3 days to decide to relocate or quit"

dls2016 — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 20:11:48 +0000

$4k is a slap in the face for someone who wants to keep their job.

New comment by dls2016 in "How Miles Davis hired John Coltrane"

dls2016 — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 14:38:58 +0000

Cobham!

New comment by dls2016 in "Oceans May Have Already Seen 1.7°C of Warming"

dls2016 — Tue, 06 Feb 2024 17:44:13 +0000

I've been saying this for years: climate science isn't science (in the falsifiable sense), climate is nonlinear and humans don't like to rock the boat. This is especially true with a big, cross-disciplinary project like the IPCC report.

(Yes, I understand parts of climate science are falsifiable... I'm at least semi-educated as a former meteorologist and former PDE guy. But the conclusions of the IPCC report are not testable.)

New comment by dls2016 in "Oceans May Have Already Seen 1.7°C of Warming"

dls2016 — Tue, 06 Feb 2024 17:40:05 +0000

There was measurable temperature change in the days after 9/11.

New comment by dls2016 in "Organ playing 639-year-long piece changes chord"

dls2016 — Tue, 06 Feb 2024 04:38:11 +0000

I think "transformative use" is the term you're looking for.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_use

New comment by dls2016 in "EPFL cancels Stallman's lecture citing “the situation regarding” his persona"

dls2016 — Tue, 16 May 2023 01:31:58 +0000

I live in one of four US states where you must be 18 to get married. Most other states have "parental consent" laws that allow you to get married at age 16.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/11/01/child-mar...

Not to mention like every big rocker had a teenage girlfriend in the 1970s.

New comment by dls2016 in "A Little Calculus"

dls2016 — Fri, 05 May 2023 16:38:48 +0000

Then we can combine AD and numerical solvers like is found in modern weather and climate models. I don't quite understand but it has something to do with sensitivity analysis and improving data assimilation. (Google "4dvar ecmwf" for more details... eg: https://www2.atmos.umd.edu/~dkleist/docs/da/ECMWF_DA_TUTORIA...)

I think the idea is to use the "tangent linear model" to decide how much importance to give to a particular observation of the initial state.

New comment by dls2016 in "Improving Students’ Learning with Effective Learning Techniques"

dls2016 — Wed, 01 Mar 2023 17:20:17 +0000

This seems to be changing a bit. I have two children in a US public elementary school. The teachers use various apps to have children review mathematics facts. The apps allow children to move at their own pace and also incorporates some spaced repetition. (Though teachers seem to pick whatever app they like and the apps are of varying quality.)

New comment by dls2016 in "Bloom's 2 sigma problem"

dls2016 — Sun, 26 Feb 2023 02:29:39 +0000

Agreed, I've also been waiting to see a system with spaced repetition (to help memorize and retain) + dependency graph (to choose what new topics to present). Not sure what the AI value add would be?

I have two children and I was glad that teachers are willing to use new tools (I never asked if they were forced to use them, but I assume not because each teacher seems to use different websites). I'm sure some kids still get bored, but they can let the ones who enjoy math practice at their own pace and provide special guidance to them while still spending the majority of their time helping those who need it.

New comment by dls2016 in "The Missing Semester of Your CS Education"

dls2016 — Sun, 26 Feb 2023 02:20:25 +0000

Yeah, the whole aspect of teaching C++ to beginners is fraught with tooling issues. That school is moving to Python (years after main campus switched)... but I'm not sure how I feel about that since I spent a lot of time talking about memory layout.

I ended up suggesting those who don't know how to setup a tool chain use VS Code. Not out of any particular affinity for it, but because of the good documentation covering Windows, Linux and macOS.

New comment by dls2016 in "The Missing Semester of Your CS Education"

dls2016 — Sun, 26 Feb 2023 02:18:15 +0000

I also told them this, to encourage searching.

Though I hate Chegg and the like with a passion, since this sort of thing takes a lot of work (over the course of teaching same class a few times) and then w/ Chegg you immediately find the answers.

New comment by dls2016 in "The Missing Semester of Your CS Education"

dls2016 — Sat, 25 Feb 2023 17:50:07 +0000

Thank you for making the point about accreditation, it's sort of a pet peeve of mine. I taught "intro to C++" last year at the Harrisburg campus of PSU. The students were a mix of non-CS majors who didn't know what a file was, a handful of students who already knew how to program and a bunch in the middle.

Re: accreditation... the admin is very reluctant to change anything about the courses. Even specific textbooks had to be recommended (I was warned for suggesting in the syllabus that the textbook wasn't needed). Seemed a little more strict than teaching mathematics, which I did in graduate school.

Re: kids these days... a significant portion didn't understand the concept of a file. I blame apps and the cloud (funny because I now work in cloud storage). I ended up writing my own pre-cursor doc to the "missing semester". It was challenge to get a student from not understanding the filesystem to having some sort of understanding of linear search and pointers. (If you're interested: https://www.dropbox.com/s/jar1r0l5vdgspcl/basics.pdf?dl=0)

I tried to stress, especially to the non-majors, that this "missing" stuff was perhaps the most important thing they could learn. That, and how to properly google/search for things. I would experiment and try to re-word homework questions so that interesting StackOverflow answers appeared in search results.

New comment by dls2016 in "Difficult to impossible travel across wide swaths of the U.S."

dls2016 — Thu, 23 Feb 2023 04:34:24 +0000

Supposed to break 70 tomorrow in central PA. But chaos? Nah... simply an intense frontal system (ie. big temperature gradients).

New comment by dls2016 in "Health concerns grow in East Palestine, Ohio, after train derailment"

dls2016 — Wed, 15 Feb 2023 02:16:22 +0000

I don't know, I've worked countless 60-70 hour weeks at a restaurant... some days both opening and closing the place... and food service just doesn't seem comparable.

Perhaps fishing or working on a boat is similar, but many of those jobs allow for weeks or even months off at a time.

New comment by dls2016 in "Health concerns grow in East Palestine, Ohio, after train derailment"

dls2016 — Tue, 14 Feb 2023 16:31:12 +0000

> "The rise of precision scheduled railroading has resulted in resource and staffing cuts; to compensate railroad companies have enacted strict attendance policies for employees. These policies eliminate any free time which workers have, requiring them to be effectively on-call for weeks at a time. Workers have complained of increased levels of stress and fatigue."

My brother went to a recruiting drive last year for railroad engineer job openings (coincidentally along the Pittsburgh-Harrisburg corridor). He said they started the meeting by kicking out anyone who was even ten seconds late. The job description only got worse from there. I could see how the pay and benefits would be worth it for some small slice of the population... but you have zero outside life.

New comment by dls2016 in "Tesla Workers Launch Union Campaign in New York"

dls2016 — Tue, 14 Feb 2023 14:31:30 +0000

> for example software engineers in San Francisco

Uhm... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...