Hacker News: penciltwirler

New comment by penciltwirler in "Googlebook"

penciltwirler — Wed, 13 May 2026 04:24:05 +0000

"Chromebook" had a better ring to it.

New comment by penciltwirler in "Killed by Google"

penciltwirler — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 14:41:52 +0000

I think in Picasa's case, they learned from that and turned it into Google Photos. I don't think there's any shared code, but at least they learned from it from a product perspective. I would say Google Photos turned out great.

New comment by penciltwirler in "Kubernetes SidecarContainers feature is merged"

penciltwirler — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 15:20:08 +0000

There's lots of tools built on top of K8s to accomplish this tho. For example, Argo, Tekton, Flyte etc.

New comment by penciltwirler in "Canadians will no longer have access to news content on Facebook and Instagram"

penciltwirler — Sat, 24 Jun 2023 19:29:32 +0000

Does this affect Hacker News?

New comment by penciltwirler in "Unexpected downsides of UUID keys in PostgreSQL"

penciltwirler — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 20:25:19 +0000

Have a look at ULIDs

New comment by penciltwirler in "Canada’s Big Flex in Space"

penciltwirler — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 15:41:34 +0000

Lots of comments about Avro Arrow here lool. As a Canadian, I'm both proud and saddened by the fact that although we have elite engineering talent, that talent tends to be drained to the US.

Side note, just a couple decades after the Arrow, Canadian researchers once again lead the world, but this time in the field of AI, specifically deep learning. However, what happened after that? Google hired Geoffrey Hinton, and the industrial might of the US took over.

Perhaps this is inevitable given that we are much weaker economically compared to the US.

However, one last thought is that, aerospace vs software is not the same. For aerospace, yea I think you need a giant super power of a nation to keep it alive. However, software can be built by one guy in a garage. I'm not sure why Canada just let its dominance in AI "slip away".

Also side side note about Avro Arrow, is it just a weird naming coincidence that the two Apache projects exists: Avro and Arrow? I think Avro is named after the original British Avro company. However, I don't think Arrow has anything to do with aviation.

New comment by penciltwirler in "Show HN: Private, text to entity-relationship diagram tool"

penciltwirler — Fri, 09 Jun 2023 02:58:36 +0000

just use dbdiagram.io

New comment by penciltwirler in "Google Cloud Storage FUSE"

penciltwirler — Tue, 02 May 2023 23:23:15 +0000

Haha a lot of funny comments here. I think overall it's neither here nor there. You should be proud that the "elites" at Google copied your code ;)

New comment by penciltwirler in "What are transformer models and how do they work?"

penciltwirler — Sun, 16 Apr 2023 04:26:15 +0000

Just read the original paper "Attention Is All You Need". Cohere's founder was the guy who wrote that paper in the first place.

New comment by penciltwirler in "The Red Hat model only worked for Red Hat"

penciltwirler — Sun, 16 Apr 2023 04:09:31 +0000

Hold on... aren't there a bunch of incredily successful "open source" / "source available" companies? Databricks, Cockroach Labs, Hashicorp, MongoDB, Elasticsearch etc?

New comment by penciltwirler in "Most data work seems fundamentally worthless"

penciltwirler — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 14:52:57 +0000

I switched out of data engineering, and became a software engineer instead. I work on building the data infrastrue tools that I used to use. Maybe this only applies to me, but building the tools that I used to use is somehow incredibly satisfiying. I think it's because as someone who used to use the tools, I know what I want, and then I build it, completing the "cycle of needs".

So my advice to some of the data scientist/engineers out there is to go a little deeper into the tooling and try to understand how they were built.

New comment by penciltwirler in "Boeing to build braced-wing airliner, shooting for 30% efficiency gain"

penciltwirler — Fri, 03 Feb 2023 08:17:51 +0000

Why is NASA pumping money into Boeing? Isn't NASA's money mostly from public funding? Boeing on the other hand is a dying company.

New comment by penciltwirler in "Spotify is first music streaming service to surpass 200M paid subscribers"

penciltwirler — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 16:58:25 +0000

What's everyone's opinion on youtube music? You pay $11.99/month for YouTube Premium, you get both ad-free youtube (important on mobile), as well as music. Whereas Spotify is $9.99/month, but you only get music and podcasts. Granted Spotify has a much bigger library.

New comment by penciltwirler in "Microsoft held an invite-only concert for execs, 1 day before announcing layoffs"

penciltwirler — Sat, 21 Jan 2023 05:29:17 +0000

I think it’s a mix of “execs are the top dogs so they can decide to splurge a little on themselves”, the key is “a little”, I have no idea how much a private concert costs but anything less than $1M is probably considered “acceptable amount of splurge”

New comment by penciltwirler in "Bitwarden Acquires Passwordless.dev"

penciltwirler — Wed, 18 Jan 2023 16:16:56 +0000

One can easily self host a bitwarden server on digitalocean. https://bitwarden.com/blog/digitalocean-marketplace/

However, I'm curious what y'all think about the cost. A digitalocean droplet for the recommended specs (4 GiB memory) is $24/month. This is hard to stomach when you compare with Bitwarden Premium which is <$1/month. I guess it depends on how much you value your own data.

New comment by penciltwirler in "How to improve Python packaging"

penciltwirler — Mon, 16 Jan 2023 18:31:47 +0000

Just do what Go did.

New comment by penciltwirler in "Geoffrey Hinton publishes new deep learning algorithm"

penciltwirler — Thu, 12 Jan 2023 20:55:18 +0000

This is old news already.

New comment by penciltwirler in "ChatGPT won’t replace search engines any time soon"

penciltwirler — Sun, 08 Jan 2023 19:54:54 +0000

Why does every game have to be zero-sum? Why can't chatgpt live alongside search engines as just another category for results? Like "Images" and "Maps"?

In fact, I look forward to Bing integrating with chatgpt.

New comment by penciltwirler in "Google Employees Brace for a Cost-Cutting Drive as Anxiety Mounts"

penciltwirler — Wed, 28 Dec 2022 16:58:08 +0000

Everyone already knows Google is tightening up, but no actual mass layoffs yet. There's no new information here.

New comment by penciltwirler in "State of OpenID Connect Providers"

penciltwirler — Thu, 22 Dec 2022 17:15:04 +0000

Dex is also an interesting project in this space. It can act as an OIDC provider, but can be extended with other providers via "connectors".

https://dexidp.io/