Hacker News: jrd259

New comment by jrd259 in "Guess I'm a Rationalist Now"

jrd259 — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 17:06:17 +0000

I'm so out of the loop. What is the new, special sense of Rationalist over what it might have meant to e.g. Descarte?

New comment by jrd259 in "The Origin of the Pork Taboo"

jrd259 — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 15:26:58 +0000

In his book Cows, Pugs, Wars and Witches the anthropologist Marvin Harris tries to ground the pig taboo as a protection against the tragedy of the commons. As per Harris, pigs require excessive water, a scarce resource in the region. A flat ban on consuming pigs reduces the chance that people will divert water to pigs. The article hints at this where it calls the pig "an animal unfit for the harsh terrain and dry climate".

New comment by jrd259 in "Xkcd 1425 (Tasks) turns ten years old today"

jrd259 — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 16:18:06 +0000

This is an insult to the doctors I know who deliberately chose to do primary care because they were more motivated by service than money or prestige. For that matter, I know a developer who chose to work in IT support for a cancer research center because he put more value on helping to cure cancer than making more money. There actually are people out there who value service to the community more than fame or fortune. They deserve praise, not scorn.

New comment by jrd259 in "Greppability is an underrated code metric"

jrd259 — Tue, 03 Sep 2024 20:12:30 +0000

The ability to search the code base is one reason I insist on correct spelling even in comments when doing code reviews, and also keep adding to my IDE's dictionary so it will catch my spelling errors.

New comment by jrd259 in "What UI density means and how to design for it"

jrd259 — Tue, 21 May 2024 15:46:48 +0000

The example of low and high data-ink (from Tufte) is switched. I wrote the author to suggest it be fixed

New comment by jrd259 in "What UI density means and how to design for it"

jrd259 — Tue, 21 May 2024 15:45:52 +0000

You might also want to discuss Fitt’s law. Difference between a diagram (Tufte) and a GUI is that we only look at a diagram, but a GUI we interact with, which means we need to ensure people can actually click/tap/select the element of interest. Higher density makes that harder.

New comment by jrd259 in "The case against dual axis charts (and what to use instead) (2018)"

jrd259 — Fri, 17 May 2024 20:44:05 +0000

All fair points about zero. Sorry, I acknowledge now I was overly influenced my metrics dashboards I use for alerting. I've seen people panic at a seeming steep rise in error rate or increase in latency because the chart was not showing the full range (0 to 1 for rates, or 0 to 2x SLA for latency). I was only thinking of operational alerting dashboards.

New comment by jrd259 in "The case against dual axis charts (and what to use instead) (2018)"

jrd259 — Fri, 17 May 2024 18:31:34 +0000

I'd argue that the zero value should always be shown. Otherwise you get different impressions of the rate depending how you scale and subset the Y axis.

New comment by jrd259 in "Reasons not to take Lumina's anticavity probiotic"

jrd259 — Wed, 15 May 2024 19:33:26 +0000

I'm disappointed by the somewhat ad-hominem attack on Silverbook for being a porn producer: "Aaron, based on his previous work as guy at a rationalist nonprofit, videogame producer, and porn producer, decided to recreate Hillman’s work." Previous work experience is irrelevant, and besides, don't at least some of aspire to being polymaths?

New comment by jrd259 in "A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'"

jrd259 — Tue, 16 Apr 2024 18:04:14 +0000

The other issue is that it requires the driver to read a screen while driving. in 1988 at the MIT Media Lab I built a system called Back Seat Driver that provides spoken driving directions, allowing the driver to keep their visual attention on the road. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8C0V6lDKQ0Y&t=21s. It ran on a Lisp Machine, not in the vehicle. A later version ran on a Sun computer in the trunk.

The in-car nav system was also augmented dead-reckoning, like Etak. GPS was still denied to civilians at the time.

New comment by jrd259 in "Cliff Stoll, the mad scientist who wrote the book on how to hunt hackers (2019)"

jrd259 — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 20:48:09 +0000

Indeed, what's up with the "mad scientist" bit?

New comment by jrd259 in "How do MRI Headphones work? (2022)"

jrd259 — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 07:15:37 +0000

John Varley had a short story with that idea, too. A spacefaring race that is only conscious when needed. Good sarcastic lecture about how consciousness is overrated by those who have it.

New comment by jrd259 in "How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet"

jrd259 — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 13:58:03 +0000

Ted Nelson's vision (in "Dream Machines") was strongly focused on micro-transactions for this reason.

New comment by jrd259 in "Mars has a layer of molten rock inside"

jrd259 — Thu, 26 Oct 2023 15:07:21 +0000

Suppose we did get 100 year advance notice of some catastrophe. How many people would call it "fake news", or perhaps even interpret it as part of "God's plan"? Let's suppose, through some miracle, a substantial majority of the world agrees the catastrophe is coming, agrees to cooperate, to accept unlimited damage to the Earth (so e.g. we can use Project Orion style launchers) and to give up on all short-term profit.

Our response to climate change (which, even if it's not at the level of total planetary extinction, is still quite serious) suggests we would instead obfuscate, dispute and quarrel.

Realistically, what fraction of the world's people could we possibly move to Mars, and how would we even pick those people? How would we even come to agree on a fair way to choose?

We probably could get enough breeding pairs there to preserve our species. There is evidence of genetic bottlenecks in the past. But 99% of humans would be left to die. Not to mention all other life forms. (Maybe we'll bring cats, too?)

I'm not opposed to visiting Mars, but to do so under the claim that we could save humanity from disaster is utter folly.

New comment by jrd259 in "Researchers identify largest ever solar storm in 14k-year-old tree rings"

jrd259 — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 19:31:34 +0000

based on Larry Niven story Inconstant Moon which won the 1972 Hugo Award for best short story.

New comment by jrd259 in "Ancient Babylonian Algorithms"

jrd259 — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 21:48:34 +0000

"This is the way", perhaps?

New comment by jrd259 in "Twitter’s Rebrand to X Could Be a Trademark Nightmare Thanks to Microsoft"

jrd259 — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 02:49:08 +0000

X window system?

New comment by jrd259 in "Stay or Leave: Manager Admitted I am on PIP because quota"

jrd259 — Fri, 21 Jul 2023 19:11:04 +0000

The company that employs me has a stack ranking system that determines raises, but does not mandate PIP even for the lowest-ranked, unless they genuinely are not meeting expectations. I would advocate looking for a more employee-friendly employer. Any firm with this kind of policy most likely has other awful policies

New comment by jrd259 in "The Lucretius Problem: How History Blinds Us"

jrd259 — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 03:53:08 +0000

There's also such a thing as over-building. Robustness, per se, is good, but it comes at a price, including the opportunity cost. My city, Toronto, has never known a serious earthquake, though there is a fault zone in nearby Ottawa. Should we build all our skyscrapers to match the building code of, say, Seattle?

New comment by jrd259 in "The away team model at Amazon (2022)"

jrd259 — Sun, 09 Jul 2023 03:03:18 +0000

I'm at Amazon and am the senior developer on my team. For the last few months an "away" team has been adding a feature to a service I own. It's only n of 1, but the process worked well. I did the high level design and ensured alignment on requirements. The away team did an excellent job of learning our code base. The new feature required a tricky refactoring of some of our oldest and most rotten code, which I did myself as it seemed too hard for an away team.

I saw no sign at all of the away team compromising on quality to meet deadlines.