Hacker News: great_wubwub

New comment by great_wubwub in "Can we have the day off?"

great_wubwub — Thu, 28 May 2026 00:52:01 +0000

This reminds me of Ted Chiang's point that fear of technology is really fear of capitalism. https://kottke.org/21/04/ted-chiang-fears-of-technology-are-...

"Most of the things that we worry about under the mode of capitalism that the U.S practices, that is going to put people out of work, that is going to make people’s lives harder, because corporations will see it as a way to increase their profits and reduce their costs."

New comment by great_wubwub in "Throwing AI-generated walls of text into conversations"

great_wubwub — Thu, 21 May 2026 20:31:18 +0000

Are you arguing that trying to write more clearly is a 'special use case'?

New comment by great_wubwub in "Throwing AI-generated walls of text into conversations"

great_wubwub — Thu, 21 May 2026 12:14:14 +0000

I have a coworker whose first language isn't English. She uses AI to polish up her writing, particularly long documents. She puts a ton of effort into making sure that it still reads well. Because of this effort her writing is strong and precise. Before AI she made all the obvious mistakes you'd expect from someone who's not a native English speaker. It's very hard to tell that she used AI because she puts so much effort into post-AI copy editing, it's just clear and useful writing. Sure, the occasional non-idiomatic phrase creeps in but those are hard to find.

That's AI writing done right, and it's very different from this other guy I work with who does the whole slop grenade thing.

New comment by great_wubwub in "GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values"

great_wubwub — Tue, 12 May 2026 16:54:37 +0000

So is New Relic, which also featured the same CEO and CTO. I'm sure that's just a coincidence.

New comment by great_wubwub in "FCC Funding Application Notes Paramount Will Be 49.5% Foreign-Owned Post-Merger"

great_wubwub — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 17:02:35 +0000

This is the scariest part.

New comment by great_wubwub in "How far can you go with IX Route Servers only?"

great_wubwub — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 15:29:31 +0000

Calling these Magna not Manga is a miss.

New comment by great_wubwub in "Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines"

great_wubwub — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 18:57:15 +0000

> this means a court order can't block a single cloudflare site without blocking every cloudflare site

Not true. Cloudflare can't block only a single web site _by IP address_ but that's pretty common with IPv4, The same is true of Fastly and AWS and I'd be shocked if there's a mass-market CDN out there that has a unique IPv4 address per customer.

They can absolutely block any site they want at the application layer (SNI or Host header or whatever they use, IDK, I'm a network guy).

New comment by great_wubwub in "Eat Real Food"

great_wubwub — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 21:41:47 +0000

No, what I meant was "haven't we been basically ignoring science on nutrition since the 80s?" I think we have.

For those who don't believe me - go find some old family photos of your parents or grandparents, whichever generation would have been young adults in the 1960s or 1970s. Compare them to people of the same age born any time after, say, 1990. Nothing come of one sample, but people from the previous generation just weren't fat in their 20s like we are.

Yes, there's more to it than that. But food is a big part of it.

New comment by great_wubwub in "Eat Real Food"

great_wubwub — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 20:54:42 +0000

The man is stark raving bonkers mad in that head-in-the-sand, if-I-ignore-science-then-it-can't-hurt-me way but (and OMG I think I'm going to throw up a little in my mouth even coming close to agreeing with anything that come out of his mouth) isn't that basically what we've been doing with dietary guidelines since the 80s?

Like, don't get me wrong, RFK will kill N*10^5, N*10^6 people with his outlook on diseases, but....how many people have had their lives wrecked by "fat makes you fat", "ketchup is a vegetable", and "eat a balanced diet composed entirely of sausage, flour, and sugar"? As a GenXer I've been dealing with the echoes of this for a long time.

New comment by great_wubwub in "An Implementation of J (1992)"

great_wubwub — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 03:17:31 +0000

Me too, but

> This document describes an implementation of J in C. The reader is assumed to be familiar with J and C.

New comment by great_wubwub in "OMSCS Open Courseware"

great_wubwub — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 22:07:05 +0000

I have not applied to this program but I've gone through a part-time MBA. I doubt that an online program for working professionals is as rigorous about references as, say, undergrad admission to an Ivy League program or Oxford or Hogwarts or something. Just get a couple of coworkers with a similar advanced degree to write something that says "this person exists and I think they can handle the load" and you'll be fine. Remember that college is a business; if you look like you can both handle the program and pay for it, they'll let you in.

New comment by great_wubwub in "Transparent leadership beats servant leadership"

great_wubwub — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 15:05:29 +0000

I once worked for a guy who'd obviously seen the term Servant Leadership on a bumper sticker somewhere and figured that meant he was the leader and we were the servants. Worst boss I ever had, and I've been doing this 30+ years and have had a bunch of bad bosses.

Why not just 'competent leadership', where 'competent' means 'figure out what your people need you to do and do it'?

New comment by great_wubwub in "The Lucas-Lehmer Prime Number Test"

great_wubwub — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 22:13:07 +0000

/r/whoosh

New comment by great_wubwub in "Monotype font licencing shake-down"

great_wubwub — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 14:45:08 +0000

I think there was a single web page that summarized all of that. IIRC it was extremely well written and gave me warm happy fuzzy schadenfreude vibes.

New comment by great_wubwub in "Monotype font licencing shake-down"

great_wubwub — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 01:34:12 +0000

This reminds me of the Blue Jeans Cable / Monster Cable shakedown nonsense.

https://www.bluejeanscable.com/legal/mcp/index.htm

I wish I could find the original writeup from Blue Jeans, it was frickin' magnificent.

New comment by great_wubwub in "Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy"

great_wubwub — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 15:12:45 +0000

> 5. Top secret information

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

New comment by great_wubwub in "Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy"

great_wubwub — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 14:36:10 +0000

> Trust, security, and privacy guide every product and decision we make except ones that involve money.

-- openai, probably.

New comment by great_wubwub in "Please donate to keep Network Time Protocol up – Goal 1k"

great_wubwub — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 11:57:55 +0000

PTP is more precise so it's much harder to synchronize over long distances. Even in data centers it benefits from hop-by-hop participation from the routers involved.

New comment by great_wubwub in "BGP zombies and excessive path hunting"

great_wubwub — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 18:59:29 +0000

> Things get more interesting when AS64510 signals for 2001:db8::/48 to be withdrawn by Cloudflare (AS13335)

Typo - shouldn't that be AS64511?

...and...

> The MRAI specifies the minimum amount of time ... between each BGP advertisement update.

Each update _per prefix, per peer_. RFC4271 sec.9.2.1.1 says

--- [MRAI] determines the minimum amount of time that must elapse between an advertisement and/or withdrawal of routes to a particular destination by a BGP speaker to a peer ---

New comment by great_wubwub in "Amazon Rivian electric delivery vans arrive in Canada"

great_wubwub — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 00:46:51 +0000

> Being associated with delivery vans would dilute the Tesla brand

Counterpoint: Mercedes-Benz fleet vans.