Hacker News: kdowns

New comment by kdowns in "Creepy Crawlies"

kdowns — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 21:00:44 +0000

I made it to a third round interview at anthropic in 2024 and they had me build a web crawler as their programming test. Part way through I started on making it respect robots.txt and I could immediately tell they were no longer interested in me.

New comment by kdowns in "Microsoft's Rust guide for C#/.NET developers"

kdowns — Fri, 15 Mar 2024 23:44:49 +0000

Don't think that's quite right. `float` has 4 bytes, and `double` has 8. The `decimal` type has 16 bytes and does all it's arithmetic in base 10.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/language-ref...

New comment by kdowns in "In 1950, a U.S. troop plane vanished without a trace in the Yukon"

kdowns — Sun, 04 Feb 2024 13:48:13 +0000

When my grandfather finished his ROTC program for the army core of engineers him and one other classmate got assigned to go to France to rebuild destroyed bridges. I asked him once what his other classmates ended up doing and he had told me they all died in-route on a transport plane headed to Korea. I wonder if this is the one? I didn't ask for more details at the time because it was clearly something he didn't like dwelling on.

New comment by kdowns in "GitHub Spam"

kdowns — Mon, 29 Jan 2024 06:44:25 +0000

A one time administration fee for account creations would make most of these spam tactics unprofitable. People are probably too used to having everything for free online (paid for by ads) for anyone to try this right now.

New comment by kdowns in "Fintech engineering mistakes (2022)"

kdowns — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 18:24:17 +0000

Currency conversions are a transaction not an operation, the conversion rate fluctuates constantly and typically involves fees and involve tax liabilities. For a money type I’d go so far as to want it to either disallow or throw an exception if attempting an operation on two monies in different currencies.

New comment by kdowns in "Justice at Spotify"

kdowns — Tue, 16 Mar 2021 14:25:12 +0000

There is also the issue of fraud. Click/Stream farms are already soaking up the artists pool of revenue, and this change would incentivize it more. Justin Bieber recently asked his fans to go to sleep with his new song on repeat, and I'm sure other artists/labels are looking at ways to game the system as well. In my opinion there needs to be a way to pay artists based on first time streams from new accounts.

New comment by kdowns in "Shopify Is Joining Twitter in Permanent Work-from-Home Shift"

kdowns — Thu, 21 May 2020 17:57:38 +0000

I'm very happy seeing this trend. I live in the midwest, away from the tech hubs so my options for work have always been very limited here. The standard advice is to move to one of the coasts to advance your career but I have friends and family here that I've known all my life. Abandoning those relationships for a job... I just can't do it, they mean too much to me. I would wager that there are many other talented people in this position that are seeing these opportunities open up to them.

New comment by kdowns in "A video game that lets you make video games"

kdowns — Sun, 23 Feb 2020 06:32:45 +0000

Refactoring I don't know but you can keep all your logic for some task inside a microchip then create input and output handles to hide the inner workings. Then you can publish that microchip as a element for other people to use in their creations.

New comment by kdowns in "Blockchain study finds zero success rate and vendors don't call back"

kdowns — Fri, 30 Nov 2018 21:59:07 +0000

I'm really not surprised. The most interesting thing about your business shouldn't be your choice in data-store.