Hacker News: grayclhn

New comment by grayclhn in "Inside the weird and delightful origins of the jungle gym, which just turned 100"

grayclhn — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 23:01:45 +0000

We sure as fuck developed specialized parts of our hands…

New comment by grayclhn in "I wired up my bike's GPS to order me pizza during a gravel race"

grayclhn — Mon, 11 Sep 2023 01:00:03 +0000

It does. Getting your stomach good at that (and figuring out what food you can personally tolerate best) is a nontrivial part of training for longer ultramarathons.

New comment by grayclhn in "The Elements of Style [pdf]"

grayclhn — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 12:26:06 +0000

I was expecting something a bit more comprehensive and damning after the link… but if one of the most objectionable and controversial claims in the book is about adverbs modifying “unique” I think I’ll continue to recommend elements of style.

New comment by grayclhn in "Learning the ropes: why Germany is building risk into its playgrounds (2021)"

grayclhn — Sun, 19 Mar 2023 21:40:24 +0000

Climbing gym :)

New comment by grayclhn in "The silent struggles of workers with ADHD"

grayclhn — Mon, 12 Dec 2022 21:39:25 +0000

Wow, it's almost like ADHD is independent of mental health.

New comment by grayclhn in "The most unethical thing I was asked to build while working at Twitter in 2015"

grayclhn — Mon, 07 Nov 2022 23:11:44 +0000

When I jump, do I become a satellite?

New comment by grayclhn in "Ask HN: How to show a not “so perfect” MVP to potential customers?"

grayclhn — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 15:13:12 +0000

If the MVP isn't good enough to get useful feedback from customers, you need to either 1) narrow the set of people you consider as early customers or 2) it's not an MVP yet.

New comment by grayclhn in "Not Frequentist Enough"

grayclhn — Fri, 07 Oct 2022 21:59:52 +0000

IME “bad Bayesian analysis” is when people use plausibly defensible priors to manufacture outcomes… which happens all the fucking time.

New comment by grayclhn in "What I’ve learned from users"

grayclhn — Wed, 21 Sep 2022 12:15:35 +0000

That has not been my experience of dating at all fwiw

New comment by grayclhn in "Ask HN: How does your company handle late running projects?"

grayclhn — Tue, 20 Sep 2022 14:41:46 +0000

Dude, if I trusted myself I’d be so fucked.

New comment by grayclhn in "Ask HN: Inherited the worst code and tech team I have ever seen. How to fix it?"

grayclhn — Sun, 18 Sep 2022 12:54:16 +0000

Some of the things you listed are bad practices, some are bad outcomes. Change the bad practices (no version control, no beta environment, etc) and use them to prioritize and change the bad outcomes over time.

At least half of the stuff you listed will probably never change. Congrats! Being the senior person means becoming comfortable with people making objectively worse decisions than you would, and putting the structure and architecture in place so that it still works anyway. As a bonus, most of those “objectively worse” decisions can be really good and better suited for the team than your decisions would have been ;).

New comment by grayclhn in "What makes a senior engineer? Writing software vs. building systems"

grayclhn — Tue, 13 Sep 2022 02:44:35 +0000

The secret is — when you’re a senior IC, if you think that it’s important to spend 2 days a week coding, you’re expected to tell people to fuck off so you can spend 2 days a week coding.

New comment by grayclhn in "Apple Introduces Apple Watch Ultra"

grayclhn — Thu, 08 Sep 2022 01:51:26 +0000

Not sure that list of example injuries supports the “risks of serious injury or death” claim, but ymmv. If “contusions and abrasions” needs to be spelled out, it seems like someone’s padding the list. :)

New comment by grayclhn in "Apple Introduces Apple Watch Ultra"

grayclhn — Thu, 08 Sep 2022 01:48:27 +0000

Switching AirPods over from phone to watch and back is pretty nice. That’s the only example I can think of offhand though.

New comment by grayclhn in "Apple Introduces Apple Watch Ultra"

grayclhn — Thu, 08 Sep 2022 01:39:35 +0000

I’d love to not have to charge my watch on a 10 day backpacking trip. I’m old enough that most of my formative camping trips were before cell phones, and taking a charger and battery on a hike seems crazy to me. :)

New comment by grayclhn in "Ask HN: How do startups/lean teams successfully handle mat/pat leave?"

grayclhn — Fri, 02 Sep 2022 17:58:40 +0000

A lot of these questions (not just yours) indicate that bad management is rare… that hasn’t been my experience. :)

I’m sure the impact to the parent commentor could have been mitigated, but absolutely sure that it almost always isn’t.

New comment by grayclhn in "Want quick answers? Ask questions well"

grayclhn — Wed, 31 Aug 2022 23:41:38 +0000

+1000. "Do you have 5 minutes to join this conversation?" is totally fine. The alternative of

> Them: "Hi"

> ...

> Me: "What's up"

> ...

> Them: "Do you have 5 minutes to join this conversation?"

> ...

is awful.

New comment by grayclhn in "Want quick answers? Ask questions well"

grayclhn — Wed, 31 Aug 2022 21:31:48 +0000

Obligatory: https://www.nohello.com/

And as a blanket rule of thumb, don't send people chat messages that you wouldn't want to see displayed to an arbitrary meeting full of people. :)

New comment by grayclhn in "The culture of rejection in computer science publications"

grayclhn — Fri, 26 Aug 2022 22:46:04 +0000

Splitting up a groundbreaking idea into so many papers that the idea is lost is 1) going beyond a “minimal publishable unit” and 2) not in the authors’ interest, since getting credit for a groundbreaking idea in a correspondingly prestigious outlet is much better than getting credit for 2 or 3 bad ideas. I’m sure there’s a level of novelty where 2 irrelevant papers is better for the author than 1 single paper, but I don’t think we should design academic publishing around slightly-better-than-mediocre contributions.

New comment by grayclhn in "The culture of rejection in computer science publications"

grayclhn — Fri, 26 Aug 2022 15:52:17 +0000

Honestly, I think this is often said cynically but is a good practice overall. Would you rather have to read and understand one giant commit reflecting 2 years of work, or 10 well-documented and logically complete individual commits?