Hacker News: longdustytrail

New comment by longdustytrail in "Half the men in Seattle are never-married singles, census data shows"

longdustytrail — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 20:55:00 +0000

Tacoma has gotten much much nicer over the past 20ish years and the aroma jokes are mostly vestigial at this point.

My best friend moved down there a few years ago (a family member sold them their house under-market and the price was too good to pass up). We all made our jokes but I’ve been down a lot and I actually really like it. It’s not that much harder to get to than west Seattle

New comment by longdustytrail in "Half the men in Seattle are never-married singles, census data shows"

longdustytrail — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 20:49:40 +0000

Also not accurate. I have a 2 year old in daycare in Seattle and the ratio is 8:1. I believe it’s 6:1 or maybe 4:1 for infants. I’ve never heard of 2:1 that would be absurd

New comment by longdustytrail in "Madison Square Garden's surveillance banned this fan over his T-shirt design"

longdustytrail — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 00:37:29 +0000

An interesting precedent for sure but it’s worth noting that a company tried and failed to use this precedent to argue that spam filtering is a violation of the first amendment

New comment by longdustytrail in "Madison Square Garden's surveillance banned this fan over his T-shirt design"

longdustytrail — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 00:17:45 +0000

This is absolutely not true in my experience (MLB, NFL, NBA). It’s very very common for one person to buy tickets for their whole party (this is how you make sure you’re sitting together) and there’s no part of the purchase or checkin flow where you’re even asked for the names of the people in your party.

Maybe for Taylor swift tickets or something they have stronger rules but it’s definitely not true as a matter of course in American major professional sports that each ticket holder needs to have their identity on file

New comment by longdustytrail in "xAI has acquired X, xAI now valued at $80B"

longdustytrail — Sat, 29 Mar 2025 02:30:16 +0000

It’s true that all money is made up, but not in the same sense OP means.

Like I could give you 20 dollars and it’s made up in a sense, it’s just a piece of paper, but also you can go to the store and buy things with it.

Whereas if you’re an investor in a company and the CEO does some self dealing which nominally values your shares at 20 million, you can’t go spend that. It’s even more made up

New comment by longdustytrail in "Show HN: I built a modern Goodreads alternative"

longdustytrail — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 05:55:34 +0000

I agree with a lot of your top 5 so I’ll try to continue

5: I enjoyed sections of this book but as a whole I didn’t like it

4: had some cool ideas and there were moments when I got excited but the execution wasn’t there. Basically an amateur with a good idea

3: readable but unsatisfying. I finished it but was roasting it in my head the whole time

2: garbage. Bad story idea and bad writing. Nothing good to say except that it seemed like the author was trying

1: offensive. Celebrity cash grabs, polemics, etc. no artistic value whatsoever, author was not trying to write a good book. “Book” is just a format here

New comment by longdustytrail in "Facebook's Little Red Book"

longdustytrail — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 03:21:36 +0000

When I started at Facebook one of things everyone did during orientation was to put up a diff changing the default text of the search bar at the top of the homepage. This was a good way to familiarize people with the end to end flow of making changes. They didn’t say this explicitly but I think it was also intended to give people a “holy shit” moment when you realize that your silly code change is one button press away from 10 figure page views.

The idea was you make the change, take a screenshot of the result on your dev instance, get it stamped by your “mentor” and then abandon it. AFAIK this had been going on for a while before I got there.

Fast forward a few months and I see a sev pop up. “Default text on www.facebook.com search bar says ‘I am a search bar!’”

New comment by longdustytrail in "What will enter the public domain in 2025?"

longdustytrail — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 03:18:19 +0000

Ok but you’re gonna have a hard time convincing me that (morally) HBO should have been able to make game of thrones without cutting a check to the guy who created it

New comment by longdustytrail in "Malware can turn off webcam LED and record video, demonstrated on ThinkPad X230"

longdustytrail — Thu, 28 Nov 2024 01:09:01 +0000

This doesn’t seem that wild to me. Zoom already prompts me to unmute my microphone when I cough.

New comment by longdustytrail in "Writing in Pictures: Richard Scarry and the art of children's literature"

longdustytrail — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 18:39:29 +0000

I “read” cars and trucks and things that go for my 2 year old every night. He recently found out that goldbug is on every page and now he won’t let me turn the page until we find him. It’s genuinely a lovely book. We got ours from buy nothing, it’s very old and taped up and it has a bunch of writing in it by a kid named Max.

New comment by longdustytrail in "Sam Altman: Long con was "child's play for me""

longdustytrail — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 20:22:01 +0000

Anthropic

New comment by longdustytrail in "Why Don't Tech Companies Pay Their Engineers to Stay?"

longdustytrail — Fri, 06 Sep 2024 05:57:02 +0000

There are many people who don’t get asked about their regrets when they’re older. And there are many people living lives of quiet desperation.

New comment by longdustytrail in "OpenAI Pleads It Can't Make Money Without Using Copyrighted Materials for Free"

longdustytrail — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 03:00:52 +0000

Etymologists use it a lot. I went down an etymology rabbit hole a while back looking for the origin of a phrase and google books was immensely helpful

New comment by longdustytrail in "I hate Stripe, so I'm going to build my own payment processor"

longdustytrail — Tue, 03 Sep 2024 04:17:31 +0000

I think patio11’s blog is exactly what you’re looking for. Probably scroll back to the earlier posts to find more fundamental stuff like what you’re asking:

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/

New comment by longdustytrail in "Snowden: The arrest of Durov is an assault on the basic human rights"

longdustytrail — Tue, 27 Aug 2024 04:15:29 +0000

Is he a Russian puppet or isn’t he? If he can’t speak on ukraine for fear of being killed by Putin then everything he says should be viewed through that same lens

New comment by longdustytrail in "Elon Musk is being ridiculous. Companies are free to choose where to advertise"

longdustytrail — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 03:59:16 +0000

First off yes I (and I think 99% of people) would be totally fine with your closing hypothetical. Why would I care about CNN’s ad revenue? Never even enters my mind.

But more fundamentally your frame totally omits brand safety, which is kind of the whole ball game. A group that exists to evaluate brands safety thought that changes to Twitter made it less brand safe and said so. It’s like suing a bond rating agency for downgrading your rating

New comment by longdustytrail in "Ask HN: Can anyone from Crowdstrike explain the back story?"

longdustytrail — Sat, 20 Jul 2024 18:05:34 +0000

I happen to be on vacation with a former crowdstrike employee right now, they said none of their old coworker/friends are saying anything. I’m guessing internal comms went out to lock everything down

New comment by longdustytrail in "Ask HN: What is in C-00000291*.sys?"

longdustytrail — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 17:40:41 +0000

This is just generic speculation

New comment by longdustytrail in "Pinned Tweet Ordered by UK Court – Craig Wright Not Satoshi Nakamoto"

longdustytrail — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 19:40:07 +0000

Judges don’t run campaign ads

New comment by longdustytrail in "Living Computers Museum to permanently close, auction vintage items"

longdustytrail — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 19:07:23 +0000

The same thing happened to another one of Paul’s wacky passion projects, the Cinerama theater. That ended up being taken over by the Seattle Film Festival after being shut down for a few years.

My impression is that Paul died somewhat suddenly and simply didn’t make arrangements to keep these things going. His sister is not interested in them so she’s winding them down.

It’s too bad he didn’t set up some kind of endowment before he passed. Maybe he didn’t want to or maybe he just didn’t get around to it.

I wonder what will happen to MoPop/EMP. AFAIK that’s always been a financial black hole.