Hacker News: mrwh

New comment by mrwh in "Meta's Internal Research"

mrwh — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 16:45:27 +0000

Meta is relentlessly obsessed with metrics. Want to launch something? Show the metrics. What to show impact and value? If there's not a metric for it, it doesn't exist. It's a way to say you are being as objective as possible while also being able to avoid the utterly obvious when it suits you, which is frequently.

New comment by mrwh in "AI Has Plunged the Book Publishing Industry into Utter Chaos"

mrwh — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 14:31:54 +0000

Curious that technology will send us back to the world of Michelangelo and the Medici and so on. No more professional artists funded broadly, just pets of the rich.

New comment by mrwh in "That time when I failed the Microsoft interview"

mrwh — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 14:08:04 +0000

In my corner of the Faang world it's been 20 years since that sort of brain teaser was asked. We switched to coding problems that require dynamic programming!

New comment by mrwh in "Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights"

mrwh — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 14:37:18 +0000

And a husband who works and his wife who doesn't, should she get a vote? The commentators here are responding exactly to the spirit of what was said, there's no confusion on what's really being implied here. Namely, the destruction of the entire basis of democracy, which is one person one vote.

Another way to express the general disgust: that proposal is saying, "we're going to take away your power, but we'll still look after you, pinky promise!"

New comment by mrwh in "Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights"

mrwh — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 14:33:05 +0000

I don't know why you're being downvoted, gross is exactly the word for it.

New comment by mrwh in "Taylor Farms Called White House to Try to Delay Cyclospora Recall"

mrwh — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 14:07:31 +0000

I tend to think the risk is the point. It's an in-group marker, getting very sick every so often for no good reason shows commitment. Which of course makes it doubly pointless as a suggestion to the general public, but the fact that it's a bad idea doesn't mean that for the in-group it's a bad idea. (I mean, it _is_ a bad idea, you understand though.)

New comment by mrwh in "AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion"

mrwh — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 21:49:51 +0000

Kinda want to push back on that. It's not like engineers are separate from operations, not really. A lot of operations is just what engineers have been socialised to do.

New comment by mrwh in "What does Jeff Bezos think is going to happen?"

mrwh — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 20:28:05 +0000

I used to read the New York Times on my kindle. It was great: delivered each morning, no waste paper by the afternoon, a simple subscription, etc. I was on my 4th kindle at least, which says more about the use I got out of them than their endurance. And then the service disappeared for reasons I never really understood.

New comment by mrwh in "Job: Head of Stonehenge"

mrwh — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 04:50:36 +0000

It's £64K, not $64K (which is indeed about the median in the US). So, not bad.

New comment by mrwh in "The old world of tech is dying and the new cannot be born"

mrwh — Fri, 15 May 2026 14:22:55 +0000

Indeed! China is leaning heavily into AI as state policy, as the solution to its looming demographic crisis. Any advantage the US has is going to be brief. It'll be like comparing the high speed trains in China with the high speed trains in California...

New comment by mrwh in "The old world of tech is dying and the new cannot be born"

mrwh — Fri, 15 May 2026 14:20:31 +0000

Worth reading, well written.

We just finished watching a 90s Dennis Potter TV series, Lipstick on your Collar. Strange and mannered, and about in part the preparation for Suez at the end of empire, by an elderly leadership that hadn't realised that the British empire was already done (and at a time when the young were only interested in America, the new power). More stupidity than malice there. What we're getting today looks like both.

New comment by mrwh in "Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them"

mrwh — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 16:24:14 +0000

What happens when unemployment hits 25%, and youth unemployment hits 50%, in a democracy? That's the real terror here, not hacking.

New comment by mrwh in "If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?"

mrwh — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 18:32:14 +0000

Speaking for myself, an awful lot of what makes me happy are things I am forced into doing. Work makes me happy, but if I didn't have to work I'm sure I wouldn't. If I had complete freedom my life might become quite lonely and sad.

New comment by mrwh in "Books are not too expensive"

mrwh — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 16:21:17 +0000

That's right. In today's carriage to San Francisco my very unscientific observation it's: three reading books, thirty on their phones, ten resting with their thoughts.

New comment by mrwh in "Books are not too expensive"

mrwh — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 14:56:39 +0000

I've found some wonderful books at estate sales. A poet's annotated books of poetry, for example.

New comment by mrwh in "Books are not too expensive"

mrwh — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 14:54:38 +0000

Tangential, and very anecdotal, but I've been seeing more books on the BART. While almost everyone is hunched over their phones of course, it feels like there's a growing number reading a paperback. (Oddly? it's been a while since I saw a kindle.)

New comment by mrwh in "Meta removes ads for social media addiction litigation"

mrwh — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 14:18:32 +0000

Meta wants to be an impartial platform only and exactly when it suits them to be.

New comment by mrwh in "A brief history of instant coffee"

mrwh — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 23:46:44 +0000

Actually yes, around double the wattage. It's one of the things English people notice when they move to the US (true!).

New comment by mrwh in "We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do"

mrwh — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 23:07:23 +0000

That's absolutely it. Cheaters or chumps, neither of whom should be encouraged.

New comment by mrwh in "Is it a pint?"

mrwh — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 20:01:27 +0000

_Human_ body weight. I grew up measuring everything in kilos apart from people, which has I guess what amounts to its own wholly idiosyncratic scale, the stone, that no one I've since met outside of the UK has heard of.