Hacker News: gloryless

New comment by gloryless in "Institutions try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution"

gloryless — Sat, 24 Feb 2024 16:53:50 +0000

The systems people are just nodding

New comment by gloryless in "Blue Frontier and its energy-efficient AC"

gloryless — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 14:50:59 +0000

AC is a fairly nuanced problem, and I like to see evaporative cooling getting an update. Obviously there is a chemical component here but for a ton of climates evaporative cooling is the best choice.

New comment by gloryless in "Where does my computer get the time from?"

gloryless — Fri, 06 Oct 2023 01:11:54 +0000

Great question and great article. This is an "old Internet" vibe for me

New comment by gloryless in "Quadlets might make me finally stop using docker-compose"

gloryless — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 16:57:11 +0000

I don't understand how people go through the effort of writing an article about containers but start out with a basic incorrect statement. They don't disconnect from the OS, and in fact are dependent on the OS.

New comment by gloryless in "How large is that number in the Law of Large Numbers?"

gloryless — Tue, 12 Sep 2023 18:39:36 +0000

This kind of intuition is why a high school level statistics or probability class seems so so valuable. I know not everyone will use the math per se, but the concepts apply to everyday life and are really hard to just grasp without having been taught it at some point.

New comment by gloryless in "The worst programmer I know"

gloryless — Sat, 02 Sep 2023 18:10:09 +0000

I have been this person and I'm trying to move away from it. It really is a great skill to enjoy lifting others and to be the glue of a team. But there are multiple slippery slopes inherent to that role that make it difficult. You can begin to confound the knowledge of others as your own, and almost certainly your own IC skills will atrophy if not purposefully maintained. I think it also requires the explicit buy in of the team, or at least other seniors who understand the benefits and can help keep balance.

It just takes one jealous colleague or one "efficiency minded" manager type to completely rug pull you. I know it's valuable because I have benefitted from that person many many times, but it takes empathy and a lot of balance.

New comment by gloryless in "Tornado Cash devs charged with laundering more than $1B"

gloryless — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 22:34:10 +0000

Seems like it wasn't writing and giving away the tool but running it as a service? I don't know the facts here, was it OSS as well a service?

New comment by gloryless in "What happened in this GPT-3 conversation?"

gloryless — Tue, 08 Aug 2023 22:15:44 +0000

OpenAI has shown that these models at full power work great, so now they're trying to optimize for cost. I've gotten similar low accuracy responses from stuff it could handle a month ago.

It was kind of cringey when the model generated low accuracy nonsense the user detected that as "sentient." Come on

New comment by gloryless in "Water"

gloryless — Sun, 06 Aug 2023 22:07:13 +0000

Pretty cool, but it acts more like a dense gas than water. Very bouncy and not sticky enough

New comment by gloryless in "Falsehoods Programmers Believe In"

gloryless — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 19:49:50 +0000

This is not good. Some of the time stuff is relevant if you're digging deep into it, but it's more like "uncomfortable truths we ignore for sanity." They're mostly edge cases that are unreasonable or silly to address until it's a problem.

Just listing off "falsehoods" is not a good exercise. It's literally an endless list. Some sections have no explanation and you lose context on what it is you should be learning.

More than half of what I read should just be deleted. It's not a reminder, or a lesson to be learned, or actionable

New comment by gloryless in "Stanford president resigns over manipulated research, will retract 3 papers"

gloryless — Wed, 19 Jul 2023 22:10:36 +0000

This guy is like an actual billionaire. I have no idea if his fraud extends to the actual drugs he's made money from, but I wish these kinds of people were held to higher standards. Zero chance he's gonna have any legal repercussion.

New comment by gloryless in "A surprisingly simple way to foil car thieves"

gloryless — Mon, 17 Jul 2023 18:19:07 +0000

Sounds like a simple layer that can be retrofitted easily, but "there's nothing to hack" is absurd. The truth is that car security is bad, and any killswitch at all is something they don't come with standard.

New comment by gloryless in "Super Drug"

gloryless — Sat, 08 Jul 2023 19:29:17 +0000

Anyone else notice the animated header image? That's a flex

New comment by gloryless in "Don’t open the details in a modal window, have it be a separate page"

gloryless — Wed, 24 May 2023 15:37:59 +0000

Most of this post is trying to declare rules that just aren't true. Even Asana will deep link a modal, it's just another piece of state in the url

New comment by gloryless in "There is no software maintenance"

gloryless — Sat, 07 Jan 2023 22:18:24 +0000

This is an unhelpful oversimplification. There are lots of tasks that are maintenance, and the more code your team has written the more these tasks build up. I don't know what motivates someone to pretend it is the same as writing new features, but it deals with distinctly different risks.

New comment by gloryless in "Spreading deadly pathogens under the disguise of popular music"

gloryless — Fri, 25 Nov 2022 22:18:51 +0000

Pretty sweet paper. First time the clickbait title actually turned out to be accurate

New comment by gloryless in "Evidence-based conclusions about ADHD"

gloryless — Wed, 12 Oct 2022 18:44:35 +0000

I didn't even think about it, I just closed it and went to the comments

New comment by gloryless in "Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic"

gloryless — Tue, 13 Sep 2022 17:55:51 +0000

I work in web, and one guy did this for two modules in a non-critical server, just TWO before I flat out told him to stop. "What does X mean" was a common question across people who had actually seen the code before and forgotten, and it was absolutely the first question someone trying to learn the codebase asked. It was a frustrating and silly practice that added to cognitive load and corroded faith in the authors decision-making.

In a team ecosystem where you probably need to optimize for readability and ease of use, try to be simple and accurate and get used to refactoring. Making up random shit is the worst advice I can think of.

New comment by gloryless in "If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault (2011)"

gloryless — Sat, 25 Jun 2022 15:02:39 +0000

Anil dash is one of those tech bros that just says shit to create content and it has no basis in experience or research, just a weak amalgamation of thoughts. This article vaguely describes moderating. Thanks for your wisdom, Anil.

New comment by gloryless in "Hexwords: Hex colors that are similar to words"

gloryless — Thu, 09 Jun 2022 00:14:38 +0000

This is amazing, love it!!