Hacker News: elseweather

New comment by elseweather in "Amazon braces for another major round of layoffs, 14,000 jobs at risk"

elseweather — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 23:30:54 +0000

This is the WARN notice for the _previous_ layoff in October. Presumably they'll file another one for the next wave this week.

New comment by elseweather in "Beej's Guide to Learning Computer Science"

elseweather — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 04:29:58 +0000

Beej's guide to network programming is an all-time classic, and I suspect this is the same (even before I've read it thoroughly).

New comment by elseweather in "Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) v4.0 is out [pdf]"

elseweather — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 05:53:58 +0000

this is a book for people who think the wizard on the cover of SICP is an actual wizard and get scared

New comment by elseweather in "The bunkbed conjecture is false"

elseweather — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 18:28:25 +0000

Yes, it seems intuitively obvious, which is why mathematicians spent a long time trying to prove that the conjecture was true. It turns out The conjecture is false in a non-obvious way. The result described in the blog post is a specific counterexample: the conjecture fails, just barely, for a specific graph with several thousand nodes and edges. It's not the kind of counterexample you would intuit in your head or even on a whiteboard.

New comment by elseweather in "Lottery Simulator (2023)"

elseweather — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 22:05:42 +0000

In the US at least they're a state monopoly

New comment by elseweather in "CERN aims to build €20B collider"

elseweather — Tue, 06 Feb 2024 06:32:00 +0000

they have a whole complex of particle accelerators; many of the old ones are feeders into LHC

https://home.web.cern.ch/science/accelerators/accelerator-co...

New comment by elseweather in "I liked this simple calculus exercise"

elseweather — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 08:58:56 +0000

It's floor(_) - as in, floor(1.999) = 0, but floor(2.001) = 2. If you look carefully the upper flange of the [] square brackets is missing, which makes it a floor.

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

New comment by elseweather in "One man’s quest to revive the great American vacuum tube"

elseweather — Fri, 31 Mar 2023 00:21:51 +0000

I dunno, man. At least with guitar amps the solid state ones _try_, but even expensive ones kinda suck compared to a tube amp

New comment by elseweather in "Amazon Mandating 3 days back in office come May first"

elseweather — Fri, 17 Feb 2023 20:00:30 +0000

> Maybe Amazon should also ensure employer safety while commuting/walking to the office.

I've never looked into it myself, but they do advertise a service like this around the Seattle offices

New comment by elseweather in "Amazon will require employees return to the office 3 days a week"

elseweather — Fri, 17 Feb 2023 19:47:27 +0000

It would be nice if that area was something more interesting than a corporate dormitory. Of course this change is ... not the way

New comment by elseweather in "I don't like making the best things"

elseweather — Fri, 17 Feb 2023 09:05:32 +0000

That's a lovely photo

New comment by elseweather in "People who “drink to cope” can make their symptoms worse: study"

elseweather — Sat, 23 Oct 2021 23:10:27 +0000

You have to eat something, but you don't have to drink. I've seen it described as: Imagine telling alcoholics to keep it under control, while still making them have 2-3 drinks a day!

New comment by elseweather in "Activision Blizzard Hires Notorious Union-Busting Firm WilmerHale"

elseweather — Thu, 29 Jul 2021 20:05:55 +0000

That's what Blizzard's always done - they didn't invent RTS games, or MMOs, or collectible card games, or roguelikes, they just refined and productized them. I think it's fair to call Overwatch a huge success if you're counting e.g. Diablo and World of Warcraft in there.

New comment by elseweather in "Disintermediating friends: Online dating displaces other ways of meeting (2019) [pdf]"

elseweather — Tue, 22 Jun 2021 21:58:43 +0000

Most people don't go to college, but if you did, you're likely to have a mostly college-educated bubble

New comment by elseweather in "Avoiding Leetcode Anxiety"

elseweather — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 02:42:36 +0000

1. Trial by fire; learning on the job

2. CS stuff is widely available for self-study if you've got good discipline. "The Algorithm Design Manual" by Skiena is my favorite textbook on algorithm fundamentals. CLRS is a bigger book with more mathy crunch, if you're into that.

There's a lot more to computer science and software engineering than just algorithms, but it's what you'll get grilled on the most in junior level interviews. By the same token, the skills you need as you get more senior in this industry aren't really taught in school.

New comment by elseweather in "Avoiding Leetcode Anxiety"

elseweather — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 02:27:18 +0000

Ah, man, I get being anxious in interviews but it never occurred to me that newbies would be stressed out by their (lack of) Leetcode score. It's totally unnecessary of course - the people who've racked 1500 problems are probably as unemployed as you are :p

New comment by elseweather in "Rare chunks of Earth's mantle found exposed in Maryland"

elseweather — Wed, 28 Apr 2021 05:36:00 +0000

I wish the article had more photos - from the one it looks like it could be an awesome rock climbing area

New comment by elseweather in "Neutron stars may be bigger than expected, measurement of lead nucleus suggests"

elseweather — Tue, 27 Apr 2021 20:11:44 +0000

I'm curious what useful applications we have for black holes of any size

New comment by elseweather in "The unreasonable effectiveness of print debugging"

elseweather — Sat, 24 Apr 2021 16:19:47 +0000

It's a meme, like "_____ Considered Harmful". That one started with "GOTO Considered Harmful". This one started with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness...

New comment by elseweather in "Ask HN: Solo developer, what's your recipe to start working?"

elseweather — Sat, 10 Apr 2021 01:55:52 +0000

This is, in fact, an existing product category: the one I'm most familiar with is https://www.beeminder.com/, but it's got a few competitors.

I've never found it particularly useful, but then I'm also too chicken to put up serious cash. I figure I put a high price on having to be disciplined :)