Hacker News: protontorpedo

New comment by protontorpedo in "Fake Books"

protontorpedo — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 06:29:00 +0000

I'm pretty sure this comment was generated by a language model. If that's the case, congratulations.

New comment by protontorpedo in "Ask HN: How do you deal with rude interviewers?"

protontorpedo — Wed, 11 May 2022 14:48:31 +0000

Let me politely disagree with you. I conduct interviews regularly and often the candidate's perception about of own performance doesn't match reality. More often than not, they are worrying about aspects of their code that we don't really care about, or concerned about some mistake they made. It's better if both sides just commit to completing the interview, even if you have strong feelings it isn't going anywhere.

New comment by protontorpedo in "I thought I’d have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35 (2020)"

protontorpedo — Thu, 07 Apr 2022 10:54:11 +0000

Thank you for a good laugh. I feel exactly like that, although I work a cushy tech job instead of fixing dishwashers, I know I don't have what it takes to make the history books. Hell, not even a history blog.

New comment by protontorpedo in "I thought I’d have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35 (2020)"

protontorpedo — Thu, 07 Apr 2022 10:44:40 +0000

But you're right! All our truths were invented by someone else(s), down to the language we use to write these replies.

New comment by protontorpedo in "Bearer tokens are just awful"

protontorpedo — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 19:47:30 +0000

I don't understand. Even if you had a cryptographic challenge mechanism to be verified by specialized hardware in the client, if I control the client then I must be able to "poke around in the API" from it anyway. I think your best bet to prevent this is to to detect abnormal client behaviour and block it.

New comment by protontorpedo in "Finding Waldo in π"

protontorpedo — Fri, 01 Apr 2022 13:15:39 +0000

This is the whole joke of pifs.

https://github.com/philipl/pifs

New comment by protontorpedo in "Almost 37 years after its launch, someone found an Easter egg in Windows 1.0"

protontorpedo — Thu, 24 Mar 2022 21:02:14 +0000

That's absolutely fair and I'm not trying to imply that cheap entertainment is all bad. It was more of a reaction to the parent comment, which seemeed to imply that the endeavour wasn't worth it.

New comment by protontorpedo in "Almost 37 years after its launch, someone found an Easter egg in Windows 1.0"

protontorpedo — Thu, 24 Mar 2022 13:34:53 +0000

With the enormous amount of time we all waste in cheap entertainment this days, I think the willingness to spend as much time digging and tweaking and hacking is to be celebrated.

New comment by protontorpedo in "I live in the country with the most expensive Apple products on the planet"

protontorpedo — Wed, 09 Mar 2022 07:52:59 +0000

I lived in Brazil, and my well-off friends bought their Macs smuggled from Paraguay. Still, at Paraguay prices a MacBook Pro used to cost about 10x the minimum wage.

New comment by protontorpedo in "I have no capslock and I must scream"

protontorpedo — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 08:00:26 +0000

Curiously, this last sentence matches almost exactly how a Portuguese speaker would write English phonetically.

New comment by protontorpedo in "Heuristics that almost always work"

protontorpedo — Wed, 09 Feb 2022 08:11:56 +0000

Where I come from, companies don't waste real estate with monitor rooms for security guards. Instead the monitoring is outsourced, and the security guard has a fixed position and a set number of patrols they need to do.

New comment by protontorpedo in "Searching for Susy Thunder"

protontorpedo — Thu, 27 Jan 2022 08:12:12 +0000

As a counter argument, social engineering is hacking through a different interface. You're still exploiting vulnerabilities, but in a low-tech, process-based system. But I agree that we should use different terms.

New comment by protontorpedo in "Ask HN: How do you get out of a rut?"

protontorpedo — Wed, 26 Jan 2022 17:13:38 +0000

The original question was about "how to break out of lethargy", and I think it might work for that. I think some people need "momentum" to get invested into what they want to do; the motivation doesn't come until they're deep into it. But yeah, like you said, it might not be enough in the long run.

New comment by protontorpedo in "Ask HN: How do you get out of a rut?"

protontorpedo — Wed, 26 Jan 2022 11:04:17 +0000

I get your point. But my opinion is that you will benefit more from a method to get things done, than from just waiting for your mood to improve. I rather not take drugs if I don't have a health condition.

New comment by protontorpedo in "Ask HN: How do you get out of a rut?"

protontorpedo — Wed, 26 Jan 2022 09:29:47 +0000

If you're anything like me, or anything like 90% of humanity, you can't rely on motivation to progress in life (whatever your idea of progression is). None of the platitudes or self-help-shaped advice you read here or on Reddit will help you with that. You can't trick yourself.

What works for me is, as much as I don't like the word, discipline. I take an hour every week to review my routine and plans, when I'm inspired and motivated. The rest of the time, when I'm not motivated, I spend executing what I wrote down. In the beginning you will feel miserable, angry, and sad. But after a couple weeks you get used to being your own boss. No matter what you feel (unless you're physically ill), just do what's written down and defer the decision making process (is this what I should be doing) to that planning hour.

New comment by protontorpedo in "Are We Really Engineers? (2021)"

protontorpedo — Wed, 19 Jan 2022 21:21:31 +0000

Does it even matter? It doesn't, this is like comparing apples to oranges. The biggest reason there is more rigor in other fields is because they are less iteration-friendly.

I personally call myself a programmer, even if my job title says engineer.

New comment by protontorpedo in "Trust-Busting as the Unsexy Answer to Google and Facebook"

protontorpedo — Fri, 15 Oct 2021 15:27:18 +0000

I'm not even American and don't live in the US, but I can't see why any government would undermine it's own national companies when they are big players in the international markets, especially when facing competition from (potentially) state-backed competitors. Breaking up utilities? Sure, they operate only domestically, there's little to lose in terms of power projection.

New comment by protontorpedo in "A search engine that favors text-heavy sites and punishes modern web design"

protontorpedo — Fri, 17 Sep 2021 07:23:10 +0000

I searched for "Starlink satellites" and found this Y2K-style Canadian UFO blog [1] explaining it isn't aliens. I might just waste my weekend with this search engine.

[1] https://www.ufobc.ca/Reports/stringoflights.html

New comment by protontorpedo in "U.S. and key allies accuse China of Microsoft Exchange cyberattacks"

protontorpedo — Mon, 19 Jul 2021 13:36:02 +0000

It looks like cyber warfare, as well as espionage, is considered pretty much fair game in geopolitics nowadays. I wonder where the line is drawn that would make it an act of war. In any case, a direct attack from the Chinese government towards it's main trade partners (US, Germany and Japan among them) sounds crazy to me.

New comment by protontorpedo in "No More Movies"

protontorpedo — Tue, 06 Jul 2021 06:25:24 +0000

> Passive Media Consumption is Fundamentally Bad

Reading books is passive media consumption too. You could reframe this article (with substantial changes) to talk about books, wine, food, board games, music, or anything else you can appreciate as a hobby.