Hacker News: markatto

New comment by markatto in "Virtual violin produces realistic sounds"

markatto — Wed, 06 May 2026 22:18:39 +0000

Lutes, even!

New comment by markatto in "Bun is being ported from Zig to Rust"

markatto — Tue, 05 May 2026 03:00:15 +0000

This is just a matter of priorities - I use LLMs to write code every day and I have never put a single line of code up for review that I didn’t read and understand.

New comment by markatto in "Battle for Wesnoth: open-source, turn-based strategy game"

markatto — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 18:59:02 +0000

It's turn based, the most similar game I've played is probably Fantasy General. Closer to Advance Wars or Fire Emblem than Warcraft.

New comment by markatto in "Epoch confirms GPT5.4 Pro solved a frontier math open problem"

markatto — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 04:27:51 +0000

I tried this with Claude - it has to be explicitly instructed to not make an external tool call, and it can get the right answer if asked to show its work long-form.

New comment by markatto in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2026)"

markatto — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 20:16:21 +0000

Your HN jobs page lists comp as 24-48k, is this accurate?

New comment by markatto in "Are compilers deterministic?"

markatto — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:50:53 +0000

It matters for things like verifiable builds.

New comment by markatto in "To kill mammoths in the Ice Age, people used planted pikes, not throwing spears"

markatto — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 01:33:51 +0000

This is similar to how wild boar was hunted in Europe - there were special spears made with extra crossbars to reduce the chance of a boar reaching the spear holder after being impaled.

New comment by markatto in "The Seattle Public Library is reducing maximum digital holds"

markatto — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 06:12:04 +0000

A half century? Surely that must be a typo?

New comment by markatto in "Southern accents could cost job seekers a 20% wage penalty, study finds"

markatto — Sun, 28 May 2023 05:47:40 +0000

I’m surprised that this doesn’t get talked about more - I’ve worked with plenty of women, minorities, and immigrants at large tech companies, but I can’t recall a single person with a southern accent.

New comment by markatto in "Why the Ferrari F355 sounds so good"

markatto — Mon, 08 May 2023 15:08:54 +0000

I think that you should mention that this is specific to 90 degree v8 engines - other engine designs can have similar crankshaft / firing order trade offs but would not be described as “flat plane” or “cross plane”.

New comment by markatto in "The Messy Page Or: why I don't like greenfield projects"

markatto — Mon, 08 May 2023 02:50:25 +0000

That’s not their best hardware deal, but you also have to understand that you are paying for rack space, electricity, bandwidth, on-site staff for repairs, etc. They are actually absurdly inexpensive compared to competitors.

New comment by markatto in "How is it even possible to cheat on a musical performance practical exam?"

markatto — Sat, 06 May 2023 17:27:04 +0000

The piano is not the canonical model of a scale - it’s just a bit more visual than some other instruments. I went to music school and primarily play guitar and violin but can sort of play some keys. I could definitely figure out pretty much any scale on a piano but couldn’t just sit down and immediately play most of them.

New comment by markatto in "Why Steam Deck Is One of the Most Significant PC Gaming Moments in Years"

markatto — Wed, 08 Feb 2023 15:00:16 +0000

I have found that even 2D games (eg Hades) aren’t reasonable to run at 4K, but basic gui desktop with a terminal emulator works fine.

New comment by markatto in "Why Steam Deck Is One of the Most Significant PC Gaming Moments in Years"

markatto — Wed, 08 Feb 2023 14:57:19 +0000

There’s still basically one with a couple storage options - they have shipped with different fans though. My (fairly recent) unit has very reasonable fan noise.

New comment by markatto in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2023)"

markatto — Thu, 02 Feb 2023 18:57:03 +0000

Location: SF Bay Area

Remote: Prefer to work in-office, but would consider remote opportunities.

Willing to relocate: Possibly, for the right opportunity.

Technologies: Linux, Python, Rust, C, Kubernetes

I have been working in SRE/infrastructure roles for the past 13 years at employers including Google, Facebook, and several smaller companies.

I am interested in both SRE-type positions and roles developing systems software. I'd especially like to work with rust or on open source software.

My job search started a few days ago so I don't have an updated resume yet, but my work history can be found on my LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markatto

mark@marktmerritt.com

New comment by markatto in "Rackspace founder says it’s ‘on trajectory of death.’"

markatto — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 17:53:10 +0000

I had very mixed experiences as a customer in ~2009 - it was definitely possible to get through to someone very competent, but it was pretty difficult. We were trying to use their "cloud" VPS offerings (I believe it was openstack-based, and I liked the idea of supporting something more open than AWS), which were extremely buggy (for example, we had to default-retry every api operation multiple times in scripts because pretty much every type of call failed 40% of the time.) I generally had better success getting information about outages by reaching out employees I knew on freenode than I did through official support channels.

New comment by markatto in "As Carvana crashes, used car dealers, not buyers, stand to win big"

markatto — Mon, 12 Dec 2022 16:50:14 +0000

Why do you think the unit economics of Carvana have to be worse than a traditional dealer? Maybe they have to do more shipping of vehicles around, but they are less reliant on storefronts/sales staff. It seems likely to me that they overspent on marketing/gimmicks/badly timed top-of-market inventory, but that doesn’t mean that the business model fundamentally can’t work.

New comment by markatto in "Moving Away from UUIDs (2018)"

markatto — Tue, 22 Nov 2022 04:54:30 +0000

Yes, some hashes might not meaningfully hurt it, but they won’t add any entropy, which is the real problem.

New comment by markatto in "Ask HN: Impressions of Google SRE?"

markatto — Fri, 07 Oct 2022 20:21:55 +0000

1) I have more of a sysadmin background, so someone else will have to answer this. I will say that if you interviewed in the sre-swe track, transferring to a swe role is not difficult.

2) I have been on call for most of my career, but google is the only employer that has actually provided compensation. Depending on your lifestyle, the extra pto can be really nice (for example it’s easy for me to ski on less-crowded days), but as I’ve gotten older being on call has definitely gotten more painful (now that I have a serious partner, not being able to do things on the days she has off can be frustrating.) The actual difficulty/stress of the pages you get will be highly team-dependent, but SRE does a reasonable job of training and tracking pager load.

3) This is highly team-dependent, but there are many teams where systems skills are not a big deal. You need to be able to think in a reliability-focused way, though.

4) Some teams actually develop their own code, other teams rely on swe teams for most of the code. You will read a lot more code than you will write, and you will write less code than they say you will during the interview process. This is also true for SWEs - everyone spend more time big-company-ing than computer-ing.

5) I have not done this, but I have considered moving to a SWE role because there’s more open source opportunities on that side.

6) I’ve found google to be the best place to work of the mega corporations I’ve been, but honestly if the money was the same I’d prefer a smaller company. I’m better at tasks like “chase this bug though a bunch of layers until you find some weird kernel behavior” than “explain why your rollout plan is compliant with our reliability directives.”

New comment by markatto in "Apple, Google and Microsoft Commit to Expanded Support for FIDO Standard"

markatto — Thu, 05 May 2022 19:39:46 +0000

I use the "multiple security keys" approach, and the biggest problem is keeping track of which keys are registered with which services and making sure the list is up to date. A few examples of situations where this is a problem:

1) I don't keep all of my keys on my person, so if I want to sign up for a service when I'm not at home, I have to remember to go back and add my other keys at a later time. If I wanted to, for example, keep a backup key in an offsite location such as a safe deposit box, this would be even more painful.

2) If I lose a key, I need to go and change every service to deactivate the lost key and add my replacement key. This is both time-consuming and error-prone, as it requires me to keep a full list of providers that I use keys with somewhere.

3) Some providers do not even allow you to register multiple keys.