Hacker News: piercebot

New comment by piercebot in "Linus on Rust and the Kernel DMA Layer"

piercebot — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 15:17:38 +0000

I actually think Linus has had some of his rough edges smoothed out over the years. This was not nearly as combative as it could have been or may have been in the past!

New comment by piercebot in "Ask HN: What is the most challenging programming course you have taken?"

piercebot — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 12:48:42 +0000

Finite Automata and the Theory of Computation.

Lots of Turing Machines and constructing proofs. I'm not sure I would have passed if it wasn't for my friend who worked with me on the homework.

New comment by piercebot in "Is AI the next crypto? Insights from HN comments"

piercebot — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 22:09:21 +0000

My private hypothesis here is that we're doing a better job as a society of encouraging "disconnection" from being "always online," which is documented to aggravate mental health issues[0].

It stands to reason therefore that the people who remain online to comment may have lower levels of mental hygiene by virtue of their ongoing exposure to the internet and social media, thus resulting in a gradual decrease in sentiment over time.

[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7364393/#:~:tex...

Return to the moon: The race we have to win (again)

piercebot — Fri, 21 Jul 2023 04:04:32 +0000

Article URL: https://www.space.com/return-to-moon-china-space-race

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36809861

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by piercebot in "Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?"

piercebot — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 13:17:14 +0000

I made a safe-to-wake light for my son out of a Raspberry Pi. It serves up a responsive website on the local network so you can manually change the lights or update the schedule.

Been running like a champ for over 3 years now, which has been the most pleasant surprise. I'm used to ecosystem entropy causing things to break.

I documented my adventures in a 6-part series: https://ajpierce.com/2020-01-04_safe-to-wake-pt1/

New comment by piercebot in "Ask HN: How's the job hunt going? (For those laid off)"

piercebot — Tue, 29 Nov 2022 17:58:25 +0000

Sure!

For the first job, I bill hourly for the time I spend working. Here, I develop web applications to validate machine learning models for a company; I help organize results in a way that allows ML engineers to easily "spot check" the results of ML runs on data through a web interface.

The second job I have is in the "web3" space developing applications that run on a specific blockchain in which I've specialized. Compensation here is based on milestones and paid out in cryptocurrency.

In both cases, I am transparent about the progress I'm making and compensated accordingly. The hourly rate I charge as a contractor brings in an equivalent salary to what I had as a full-time employee in about 900 hours per year, which works out to be about 18/hours per week if you assume 2 weeks off.

New comment by piercebot in "Ask HN: How's the job hunt going? (For those laid off)"

piercebot — Sat, 26 Nov 2022 21:34:39 +0000

I transitioned from full-time employment to contracting in April 2022. I am currently over-employed and working two gigs simultaneously.

All leads have come from my personal network or my reputation as a known entity in a relatively niche field.

Only trouble I've had is invoice approval and waiting for money to be moved, but it has always eventually come through.

Cashflow remains equivalent to when I was an FTE, but I'm working fewer hours per day and working on more interesting things. A lot of that has to do with transitioning out of management, I think. I don't miss it :)

New comment by piercebot in "Ask HN: Do you recall any book or course that made a topic finally click?"

piercebot — Mon, 14 Nov 2022 21:03:55 +0000

It took learning another language (Japanese) for me to finally make sense of my native language (English)'s grammar.

I still remember the day I learned the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs in Japanese and had that "ooooHHHHHH" moment in my head where all verbs everywhere finally made sense.

New comment by piercebot in "Ask HN: Hiring managers, which type of engineer is hardest to find nowadays?"

piercebot — Thu, 10 Feb 2022 18:44:30 +0000

What a luxury to work at a place where tickets are defined and work is scoped out for you :)

If you're chafing there due to the lack of autonomy, I promise there are places hiring people whose strong suit is tackling ambiguity in addition to software development.

New comment by piercebot in "Sonic 3D: Director's Cut (2019)"

piercebot — Wed, 05 Jan 2022 21:10:43 +0000

Are there any copyright concerns around doing this kind of thing? Surely SEGA will come after him for providing this as a free download?

New comment by piercebot in "Create ad-hoc ClojureScript scripts on Node.js with nbb"

piercebot — Mon, 20 Sep 2021 20:06:14 +0000

This is like saying "you can't really leverage Java well without knowing JVM bytecode." Which is to say: I also disagree with you :)

New comment by piercebot in "Create ad-hoc ClojureScript scripts on Node.js with nbb"

piercebot — Mon, 20 Sep 2021 17:15:00 +0000

I think the real advantage is scripting with a REPL in your IDE. Whipping up a script becomes trivial because you can test every data transformation (heck, every expression!) with a keystroke. There's no great way to do this in a language without s-expressions.

New comment by piercebot in "Global deforestation peaked in the 1980s"

piercebot — Tue, 17 Aug 2021 22:25:49 +0000

I wonder how much of this changed due to public sentiment driven by pop culture? Movies like Fern Gully[0] and TV shows like Captain Planet[1] definitely had a hand in shaping my generation growing up.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FernGully:_The_Last_Rainforest

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Planet_and_the_Planete...

New comment by piercebot in "SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night"

piercebot — Mon, 02 Aug 2021 21:35:56 +0000

What is it about America (or other countries) that makes you think this couldn't happen anywhere else?

New comment by piercebot in "SpaceX installed 29 Raptor engines on a Super Heavy rocket last night"

piercebot — Mon, 02 Aug 2021 21:34:39 +0000

Maybe not once you consider the R&D costs of figuring out how not to melt a solid gold Merlin engine ;)

New comment by piercebot in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2021)"

piercebot — Mon, 02 Aug 2021 18:59:16 +0000

BlackSky | Remote ;; Seattle, WA ;; Herndon, VA | Full Time | US Citizen

BlackSky is building the premier global intelligence platform. Our Platform delivers timely, relevant, and actionable information allowing our customers to make swift and informed decisions. In other words: we launch satellites and set up AI/ML pipelines on the torrent of data they send down. It's really cool.

You can see our business plans over at this SEC filing: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1753539/000119312521...

We're especially looking to staff up our Platform team, which is responsible for building the software that delivers the data and insights our customers need. We have open positions for front-end, back-end, and full-stack developers; our language stack includes Java / Python on the back-end, and JavaScript (React) on the front-end.

We're a fully distributed team; the company is just over 150 people now, and we've got teammates in over 20 states. 100% Remote is 100% OK. Due to ITAR requirements, we are only hiring US citizens at this time.

https://www.blacksky.com/careers/

New comment by piercebot in "DoorDash removing 1-year cliff for equity grants"

piercebot — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 21:06:18 +0000

Typically, there's a "cliff" after the first year, at which point it switches to quarterly.

So you get nothing the first three quarters, but after quarter 4 (your first year at the company), 25% of your 4-year grant is immediately vested. Every quarter after that is another 6.25% of your initial grant.

I believe the point they were trying to make in the article is that, instead of quarterly grants following the pattern of:

    [0%, 0%, 0%, 25%, 6.25%, 6.25%, ...]

It would instead follow the pattern:

    [6.25%, 6.25%, 6.25%, 6.25%, 6.25%, ...]

```

New comment by piercebot in "Apology"

piercebot — Thu, 17 Jun 2021 22:15:36 +0000

I'm not sure I would classify that as "talking plainly." Words like that would put anybody on the defensive, and being on the defensive does not make people receptive to positive change.

New comment by piercebot in "Well-behaved bubbles often make history"

piercebot — Tue, 15 Jun 2021 21:24:46 +0000

Blastomere links to Nick Szabo blog posts:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=blastomere

...links to:

http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html

New comment by piercebot in "Artificial spider silk provides sustainable alternative to single-use plastics"

piercebot — Thu, 10 Jun 2021 13:24:27 +0000

Thanks for pointing that out -- I've updated the title :)