Hacker News: projectileboy

New comment by projectileboy in "DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes"

projectileboy — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 20:13:53 +0000

Frankly, this doesn’t matter. What matters is that an unofficial agency of the executive branch is deciding unilaterally - with no oversight - to stop payments that were voted on by Congress. Even if Musk and team were geniuses and doing brilliant work, it would be outside the rule of law.

New comment by projectileboy in "Musk says DOGE is halting Treasury payments to US contractors"

projectileboy — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 04:01:04 +0000

Hacker News tries to avoid political news in general, but it seems warranted in this case because Musk is a major figure in the tech industry, and also because it appears he’s using a small number of young engineers from his companies to gain access to and control over systems at OPM.

New comment by projectileboy in "The Origins of Wokeness"

projectileboy — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 21:44:50 +0000

I just picked this one at random today; took about a minute to find something: https://www.startribune.com/mom-ids-son-as-teen-left-with-br...

I’m relieved to read that racism isn’t as bad as I think it is.

New comment by projectileboy in "The Origins of Wokeness"

projectileboy — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 19:32:53 +0000

This is a weird hill to die on for a billionaire. Is wokeness a problem? If I recast it as an assault on free speech, sure. But exactly how bad is this assault? I sure hear a lot of really rich people talk about wokeness, despite the proclaimed suppression of their speech. And is it as much of a problem as racism, sexism, homophobia or other forms of bigotry endemic in our society?

New comment by projectileboy in "When the U.S. tried to replace migrant farmworkers with high schoolers (2018)"

projectileboy — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 06:28:26 +0000

I live in Minnesota. I hear what you’re saying, but I would say two things: in general, teenagers here are not being somehow denied farm work that they really want but is unavailable; and there’s a pretty big difference between Minnesota/Iowa summer heat and picking cantaloupes in inland California. The big difference being about 20 degrees on average, with more sun.

New comment by projectileboy in "3blue1brown YouTube Bitcoin video taken down as copyright violation"

projectileboy — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 11:02:39 +0000

I apologize in advance for not offering something constructive to say. I just wish anyone here who is younger could see the difference between what the promise of the web was in ‘95 and what it has become. Such a burning pile of trash, it’s heartbreaking.

New comment by projectileboy in "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint [pdf]"

projectileboy — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 07:15:44 +0000

Is there some reason why Edward Tufte isn’t being properly being credited anywhere? This is copyrighted material.

New comment by projectileboy in "Seyfert Galaxies"

projectileboy — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 16:46:24 +0000

Hear, hear. The design subordinates to clear presentation of static content. Most newspapers and magazines would benefit from a similar approach.

New comment by projectileboy in "Ask HN: Is ChatGPT down?"

projectileboy — Thu, 26 Dec 2024 22:53:56 +0000

Would you be willing to elaborate on the ways in which the $200/month subscription is better than the $20/month subscription? I’m genuinely curious - not averse to paying more, depending on the value.

New comment by projectileboy in "The chocolate of the future will have less cocoa or none at all"

projectileboy — Tue, 24 Dec 2024 17:03:14 +0000

The difference between what cocoa farmers get paid vs what chocolate companies make selling their product is so enormous that I find this article incredibly offensive. But the chocolate industry has a very long history of this kind of shameless exploitation.

New comment by projectileboy in "Fogus: Things and Stuff of 2024"

projectileboy — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 23:07:14 +0000

I’d be surprised if they had, working on what you work on! I’ll bet you would find them interesting in other ways, though. I’ve had a ton of success using them as study guides in other areas (e.g., biology).

New comment by projectileboy in "Popeye and Tintin enter the public domain in 2025 along with Faulkner, Hemingway"

projectileboy — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 03:18:35 +0000

I read most of them with my kids when they were little; I used to just gloss over certain panels…

New comment by projectileboy in "Devin is now generally available"

projectileboy — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 21:06:45 +0000

I can’t really be too specific. But I can say that at least one pattern of problem it tackles very effectively is: “we’re migrating from X to Y, and it’s going to touch a ton of files, and the nature of that migration is much more involved than what we can reasonably hope to accomplish with sed and a bash script.”

New comment by projectileboy in "Devin is now generally available"

projectileboy — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 18:24:02 +0000

I understand why you would have that impression, but for what it's worth, my team has been helping other teams internally to use Devin, and we also did due diligence and experimented with OpenHands, as well as try rolling our own solution. While OpenHands is cool for what it is, neither it nor our homegrown solution came within a mile of doing what Devin could do.

New comment by projectileboy in "Devin is now generally available"

projectileboy — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 18:20:33 +0000

I work with a team at Nubank that has been using Devin. I would say that it doesn't quite make sense to compare it to Claude 3.5, because Devin isn't really like Copilot; it's more like an assistant to which you can assign a project. We're using it only for particular use cases, but for those particular use cases it's like having a superpower.

New comment by projectileboy in "Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT"

projectileboy — Thu, 21 Nov 2024 05:43:36 +0000

Thank you for this comment; articles on the rising costs of college almost always uncritically treat it like a law of nature, and rarely have I seen articles that attempt to study in-depth the extent to which college administrations have become bloated, self-perpetuating jobs programs. All while at the same time departments are cut, professors are expected to do more with less, and more and more classes are pushed on to adjunct faculty who get paid a pittance. Until this is addressed, any efforts to improve the ways in which students finance their education is just a band-aid.

New comment by projectileboy in "SICP: The only computer science book worth reading twice? (2010)"

projectileboy — Sun, 17 Nov 2024 20:28:51 +0000

I think this was mentioned in a Paul Graham essay from many years ago, but half the battle in tackling a new area of study is finding out what the best books (or papers) are. There aren’t that many, and yet it’s hard to know what they are if you aren’t already well-versed in the field.

New comment by projectileboy in "Unit tests as documentation"

projectileboy — Fri, 18 Oct 2024 16:02:15 +0000

They express behaviors, yes, but they do not express intent, or any broader context. I’ve been on more than one project where well-meaning developers forbid comments and additional documentation because they felt that the only documentation should be the tests, and the result was always a complete lack of understanding as to why anything worked the way it did.

New comment by projectileboy in "Tell HN: DigitalRiver/MyCommerce stopped paying vendors since July"

projectileboy — Fri, 18 Oct 2024 05:29:11 +0000

As soon as they got bought out by a private equity firm (10 years back) it marked the beginning of a long, slow end.

New comment by projectileboy in "Why don't we use awnings anymore (2022)"

projectileboy — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 04:18:03 +0000

I can’t say enough good things about The Craftsman Blog. Was my primary source for learning how to rebuild my 100-year-old double-hung windows. Lots of good stuff to explore.