Hacker News: gregcoombe

New comment by gregcoombe in "Emmett Shear becomes interim OpenAI CEO as Altman talks break down"

gregcoombe — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 06:03:27 +0000

He'll probably be relegated to some minor role like "Husband of Board Member #6"

New comment by gregcoombe in "Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm"

gregcoombe — Sat, 01 Apr 2023 00:33:34 +0000

"It's one flag, Michael. How much could it cost, $44B?"

New comment by gregcoombe in "Fred Brooks has died"

gregcoombe — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 19:17:08 +0000

Side story: the haptic feedback for the NanoManipulator was through a hydraulic system (kinda like this? https://www.sarcos.com/wp-content/uploads/history_5-339x280....). There were hydraulic lines that were piped through the building down to the machine room (where the SGI Infinite Reality Engine was!). Someone read through the manual and realized that the force that the arm was capable of could easily break someone's arm, and since it was usually grad students working late at night programming it, they decided it would be safest to just decommission that. I think I got one of the last demos during a UNC grad school recruiting event.

New comment by gregcoombe in "Why read Dostoevsky? A programmer's perspective"

gregcoombe — Sat, 01 Oct 2022 20:09:25 +0000

Tolstoy also has a lot to share about programming. "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" is a clear recommendation to use status codes as return values instead of boolean success/fail.

It’s a Unix system I know this

gregcoombe — Tue, 27 Sep 2022 19:30:06 +0000

Article URL: https://elaine-cao-93.medium.com/its-a-unix-system-i-know-this-a-highly-requested-tournament-report-for-f2f-toronto-134ad7cfa878

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32999978

Points: 207

# Comments: 61

New comment by gregcoombe in "S2: Computational geometry and spatial indexing on the sphere"

gregcoombe — Sun, 13 Mar 2022 19:03:19 +0000

H3 has the significant downside that children nodes do not fit within parent nodes. So one needs to be very careful working within any sort of multi-resolution algorithm (the most effective uses I've seen are with a fixed resolution). S2 does not suffer from this.

A New US/Japan Variant to Watch

gregcoombe — Fri, 24 Sep 2021 03:18:03 +0000

Article URL: https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2021/09/20/a-new-usjapan-variant-to-watch/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28638244

Points: 11

# Comments: 6

Self-driving startup Aurora will raise $2B in SPAC merger

gregcoombe — Thu, 15 Jul 2021 22:06:14 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/15/22578959/autonomous-vehcile-aurora-spac-merger-reid-hoffman-mark-pincus

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27850672

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by gregcoombe in "Project Starline: Feel like you're there, together"

gregcoombe — Wed, 19 May 2021 03:07:50 +0000

It's the office of the future! https://www.cs.unc.edu/Research/stc/. The challenge in 2000 was that bandwidth and 3d reconstruction needed several leaps forward in quality.

New comment by gregcoombe in "Wikipedia is 20"

gregcoombe — Sun, 10 Jan 2021 06:32:34 +0000

The Wikipedia page dedicates an entire section to explaining that comment, under "Appointment to CEO, controversy and resignation". He was forced out of the CEO position for this political view. It was a pretty significant news story, and I think they are right for including this as part of what he is known for (particularly outside the HN community).

Uber exits self-driving car sector, sells business to Aurora

gregcoombe — Mon, 07 Dec 2020 21:19:50 +0000

Article URL: https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/uber-self-driving-car-business-aurora-sale/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25337704

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by gregcoombe in "Ask HN: What are the pros / cons of using monorepos?"

gregcoombe — Thu, 08 Oct 2020 18:01:41 +0000

Yeah, it was a significant infrastructure cost. I heard at one time that the single largest computer at Google was the Perforce server. They ended up completely re-writing it (called "Piper") for scaling. This is sort of what I was alluding to with my comment about Google having different concerns than many other companies. They can afford to dedicate a number of engineers to maintaining a monorepo system and then re-writing when it doesn't scale. That said, I personally believe that there are a lot of benefits to monorepos, and I think those tradeoffs are worth it for other companies too.

New comment by gregcoombe in "Ask HN: What are the pros / cons of using monorepos?"

gregcoombe — Thu, 08 Oct 2020 15:15:08 +0000

Google posted a paper detailing their reasons for choosing monorepo: https://research.google/pubs/pub45424/

Caveat: your company probably isn't Google, so your challenges may be different.

New comment by gregcoombe in "Saliva-based Covid-19 test approved by FDA"

gregcoombe — Sun, 16 Aug 2020 02:45:55 +0000

You can get a saliva test today, it's just a bit expensive: https://www.vaulthealth.com/covid

We did this this morning, and it was not bad. They ship the tubes to your house, and you get in a Zoom call to verify ID and do the procedure. They haven't worked out all the kinks (it took much too long to do all of us) but it was pretty convenient. The biggest issue? It's surprisingly hard to fill up an entire test tube with spit.

New comment by gregcoombe in "Brex Lays Off 62 Employees"

gregcoombe — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 02:59:46 +0000

"Hey, should I put this on my personal card?" "No, just Brex-it!"

New comment by gregcoombe in "So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering"

gregcoombe — Sat, 16 May 2020 02:54:03 +0000

Talented jerks can absolutely destroy a team. In my experience, the actual degree of coding prowess turns out to be significantly less important than the ability to collaborate.

FMCW Lidar: The Self-Driving Game-Changer

gregcoombe — Sat, 11 Apr 2020 15:55:38 +0000

Article URL: https://medium.com/aurora-blog/fmcw-lidar-the-self-driving-game-changer-194fd31fd0e9

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22842296

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by gregcoombe in "Zoom rolled their own encryption scheme, transmit keys through servers in China"

gregcoombe — Sat, 04 Apr 2020 00:26:13 +0000

They observed keys being transmitted to Chinese servers, which makes them to suspect that Zoom is distributing keys via these servers. They have worded this very carefully to avoid claiming something that they cannot confirm (distribution to multiple users).

New comment by gregcoombe in "Zoom rolled their own encryption scheme, transmit keys through servers in China"

gregcoombe — Sat, 04 Apr 2020 00:20:38 +0000

It's possible it comes from a corporate culture that is focused on ease-of-use over security. This is not the first time that they've done some questionable things to reduce friction. See for example https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/9/20688113/zoom-apple-mac-pa..., where they installed a secret webserver to save Mac users a single click.

New comment by gregcoombe in "Don DeLillo deserves the Nobel"

gregcoombe — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 15:31:30 +0000

This is exactly the opening argument of the article, and the writer's response (in part) is, "Nevertheless the Nobel continues to exceed the Booker, the Pulitzer, and all other literary awards in its prestige, global impact, and ability to tip the scales toward immortality."