Hacker News: gryphonshafer

New comment by gryphonshafer in "Air-Traffic Control Is in the Midst of a Major Change from Radar to GPS"

gryphonshafer — Fri, 24 Jan 2020 16:19:16 +0000

A valuable part of the ADS-B out mandate is that planes even as small as mine (a.k.a. tiny) can cheaply (<200$US) pick up ADS-B in and display it on a consumer tablet. My private airplanes now have pseudo radar. Not every airplane in the air is broadcasting, but most are. This is a huge safety win. Almost without exception I'll see airplanes on my tablet long before I have visual on them.

New comment by gryphonshafer in "Simple questions to help reduce AI hype"

gryphonshafer — Sun, 10 Jul 2016 15:03:33 +0000

> Achieving human-level performance on any real-world task is an exceedingly difficult endeavor when moving away from a few simple and well-defined tasks.

It's an exceedingly difficult endeavor to try to get all humans to produce "human-level performance" while doing simple and well-defined tasks. Evidence = Mechanical Turk.

New comment by gryphonshafer in "Why companies who don’t embrace remote working are wrong"

gryphonshafer — Wed, 06 Jul 2016 16:15:22 +0000

I've worked for companies as a remote worker, and I've owned a company that for its entire lifetime hired remote staff. In my experience, as long as you hire good people, the time zone delta is the only limitation that's extremely difficult if not impossible to overcome. Everything else can be solved with good communication (which should exist anyway), good requirements (which should exist anyway), and good process (which should exist anyway).

If the time zone range of a team is less than about 4, then in my experience the team works quite well. If the range is greater than 5, it almost always encounters problems that even good process, requirements, and communication struggle to solve.

There are always exceptions, of course.

New comment by gryphonshafer in "See the things you’ve searched for, visited, and watched on Google services"

gryphonshafer — Wed, 06 Jul 2016 14:31:30 +0000

I have this argument with my wife every few months. She posts things on a popular social media platform and sets them "private" in full expectation that the content will only be shared with those she selects. Then she gets pissed when she later discovers the privacy settings didn't work the way she expected.

Anything pushed to the internet should be assumed public unless encrypted using open source encryption tools you completely control in a safe zone (like in Tails). All internet activity should be assumed to be logged somewhere, somehow. I don't even 100% trust Tor.

New comment by gryphonshafer in "Fatigue Is a Brain-Derived Emotion that Regulates to Ensure Protection (2012)"

gryphonshafer — Mon, 04 Jul 2016 14:19:01 +0000

>90% of fatigue in basic (based on a scientific study I just made up in my head) is mentally induced because recruits have a belief of their limits that's short of reality. Part of the drill instructor's responsibility is to demonstrate these limits are just mental by pushing recruits beyond them. Of course, that still leaves the <10% of times when the limits are real and someone gets hurt, but that's just collateral damage, I guess.

New comment by gryphonshafer in "Fatigue Is a Brain-Derived Emotion that Regulates to Ensure Protection (2012)"

gryphonshafer — Mon, 04 Jul 2016 02:27:12 +0000

Maybe something that copies military basic training. It has been decades, but I can still hear my drill instructor yelling, "You aren't tired until I tell you you're tired!" He was right.

New comment by gryphonshafer in "How I Cracked a Keylogger and Ended Up in Someone's Inbox"

gryphonshafer — Sun, 03 Jul 2016 15:51:56 +0000

I don't think criminals are stupid; they're simply lazy. They put the minimum amount of effort is into a scam like this in order to make it profitable.

Criminals come in all shapes and sizes, at all levels of intelligence, skill, and laziness or lack thereof. There are indeed criminals who aren't stupid but are lazy; but in my experience counseling the incarcerated, most criminals (that I spoke to in a non-scientific, non-random sampling) were both stupid and lazy. Of course, maybe that's confirmation bias, because I only spoke to the criminals who got caught.

What I found most fascinating were the criminals who were smart in the short-view, stupid in the long-view, and extraordinarily not lazy. Many young hackers fit into this category. They work long hours and invest a lot of effort in a crime, thinking all the while that the investment had a better return than non-criminal activity over the long-term.

New comment by gryphonshafer in "How I Cracked a Keylogger and Ended Up in Someone's Inbox"

gryphonshafer — Sun, 03 Jul 2016 15:38:19 +0000

When I use a desktop browser, I just right-click on the post age data and select "Save link as..." or "Bookmark This Link" or whatever.

New comment by gryphonshafer in "Boaty McBoatface and the False Promise of Democracy"

gryphonshafer — Fri, 22 Apr 2016 13:21:06 +0000

This happens with airports a lot. Some really wonderful and generous old pilot or aviation engineer dies, so the field gets renamed in honor of the person. But aviators still refer to the field by it's traditional name. It's not a slight against the honored dead; rather, it's just out of habit and the fact that it's tremendously easier to remember "$CITY_NAME Airport" than it is "$GUY_WHO_DIED Field".

New comment by gryphonshafer in "I Am Alex St. John’s Daughter, and He Is Wrong About Women in Tech"

gryphonshafer — Thu, 21 Apr 2016 15:41:27 +0000

So this is somewhat OT, but in reading the slides, I noticed this gem:

> Potential money is worth more than actual money.

In very, very rare circumstances, that is true. In the vast majority of cases, it's total B$. It's what company founders tell employees to exploit them, to get them to work overtime as a norm for crap normal-time pay. It's what the founders genuinely hope is true because they own so much of the company, but it rarely turns out that your shares are worth as much as the net-present-value of the delta to an average salary. At least in my experience.

New comment by gryphonshafer in "Nearly half of Americans would have trouble finding $400 to pay for an emergency"

gryphonshafer — Wed, 20 Apr 2016 15:00:18 +0000

It's really easy if you purchase lots of little things using a non-cash form of payment. It's even easier if what you're buying is non-physical, like streaming movies or video games for a tablet/phone. The key is to remove the physicality on one or both ends of the transaction and keep the single transaction cost in 2-digit range or the low 3-digits. And of course, never budget, ever, and try not to mentally track how many purchases you've made over the past few weeks. Do that as a pattern, give it some time, and money will evaporate Brewster's Millions style.

New comment by gryphonshafer in "Questions to Ask a Potential Tech Employer"

gryphonshafer — Thu, 14 Apr 2016 17:59:39 +0000

Just for the giggles, I love hearing wars stories of epic fails to questions like these. Paraphrased, here are some I've personally experienced:

q: If you could wave a magic wand and change anything about the company, what would it be? a: Get rid of all our customers.

q: How many hours did you work last week? a: All of them.

q: How many meetings were you in in the last few days, and how long did they last? a: Most of what I do is meetings.

q: What do you use for source control? a: We use $NAME but we forbid branching because merging is too hard.

q: Describe your build / deploy process. a: I don't think we have time for that right now.

q: What do you use for a bug / task tracker? a: Email.

q: How would you gague your technical debt? a: What's "technical debt"?