<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: rprospero</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rprospero</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Fri, 17 Apr 2026 19:48:11 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=rprospero" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rprospero in "How IMAP works under the hood"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's been an odd running theme for me today that I've misinterpreted posts.  Up until your final sentence, I thought that the thesis of your post was:<p>The standard document may say one thing, but what people do in the real world is the real standard.  If your software has issues with the world's most popular IMAP server, you need to adjust your software to be compliant with the standard.<p>I'm personally more sympathetic to your actual conclusion, but it's odd how often a single argument can be used to support two conflicting beliefs.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 31 Mar 2025 15:59:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43536486</link><dc:creator>rprospero</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43536486</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43536486</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rprospero in "FIDO Alliance publishes new spec to let users move passkeys across providers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm curious if you count Pass (<a href="https://www.passwordstore.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.passwordstore.org/</a>) as not being "in town" or if it has issues with user freedom that I'm ignorant of.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 17 Oct 2024 12:49:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41869178</link><dc:creator>rprospero</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41869178</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41869178</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rprospero in "Inside the "3 billion people" national public data breach"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>When I was in the Boy Scouts, a local judge came to speak with us about the legal system.  I asked a similar question and he admonished me that innocent people never wind up in court.  He explained that every person who is in a trial (criminal or civil) is guilty of <i>something</i>.  A judge's job was merely to determine if the prosecution or plantiff was correct about <i>what</i> the defendant was guilty of. He was very annoyed that ignorant people, who had never been to law school, kept spreading this nonsense that some defendants were innocent.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 15 Aug 2024 11:43:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41254882</link><dc:creator>rprospero</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41254882</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41254882</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rprospero in "Phish-friendly domain registry ".top" put on notice"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The COM file exploit worked <i>because</i> it is relatively unknown.  I remember a worm going around when I was in grad school where you'd get an e-mail with a link to <a href="https://giftcard.customerservice.savemoneyonanew.tv/amazon.com" rel="nofollow">https://giftcard.customerservice.savemoneyonanew.tv/amazon.c...</a>.  Users who had been through the phishing training would see the HTTPS at the beginning and the amazon.com at the end and know that this was a legitimate Amazon email.  The e-mail instructed them to click the link and "open the PDF file".  Users would click the link, down load the COM file, and the open the file, installing malware all over the machine and forwarding the worm to all their contacts.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 25 Jul 2024 11:25:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41067272</link><dc:creator>rprospero</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41067272</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41067272</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rprospero in "Panic at the Job Market"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The truth is that, if a candidate competent enough to work for us, then they can get hired by a firm thirty miles down the road who pays way better than we do.  Thus, one line of questioning during the interview process is figuring out why the candidate wants to work for US instead.  Usually it's because they want more exciting work or are interested in the work we are specifically doing.  If someone just wants ANY job, it's a red flag that they've applied to the wrong place.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 18 Jul 2024 16:14:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40997111</link><dc:creator>rprospero</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40997111</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40997111</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rprospero in "Panic at the Job Market"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I also find this thread interesting from the opposite direction as someone not in the Bay Area.  In the past ten years, the longest job interview I had was two hours long.  Honestly, most of the interviews I've been in (on both sides of the table) have been closer to half an hour.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 18 Jul 2024 15:45:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40996776</link><dc:creator>rprospero</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40996776</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40996776</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rprospero in "The struggle to understand why earthquakes happen in America's heartland"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Honest question:  how often do you do Tornado drills in Japan?  A quick look look at the wiki[1] indicates that you do get them, but fairly rarely.  I honestly don't know your cultural perspective on them.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tornadoes_and_tornado_outbreaks_in_Asia#Japan" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tornadoes_and_tornado_...</a><p>I grew up on the edges of the New Madrid fault area and, while earthquakes were never discussed, we did tornado drills about every two months while in school.  After I entered the workforce, that got closer to once a year, but you were still expected to have a plan and supplies.  It was basic emergency preparedness, like any sensible person.  Granted, big F5 tornados are rare, but small ones were common enough to not even be noteworthy.<p>Having left that region as an adult, it was a small culture shock meeting people who never had this kind of training.  After all, the places I've visited all experience tornados, though not as often as my old home town.  Still, the usual attitude I encounter is "I've never seen a tornado - they don't happen here".  It's true that tornados don't happen often, just like my birthplace hasn't seen a serious earthquake in my lifetime, but they do happen.<p>I guess that's why I'm curious about your experiences.  I've never been to Japan and I've read enviable reports of your disaster preparedness, but I honestly have no idea how your schools and culture handle tornados.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 18 Jul 2024 14:44:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40996052</link><dc:creator>rprospero</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40996052</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40996052</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rprospero in "As an Employee, You Are Disposable (2023)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Many things about that company were not idea - the founder left his CEO position in handcuffs.  However, the policy was <i>not</i> communicated to new and future hires in any manner.  So why would anyone stay?<p>The founder was <i>very</i> public with other companies in the area about both his policy of firing 10x developers and hiring any warm body that could put a resume in his hand.  He told stories at local business meetings of the various people he hired who couldn't find a computer and were fired on the same day.  So, when you found out what the corporate culture was like after about a month on the job, you had two options.<p>1. Stay on for a year.  This cemented to every hiring manager that you were a 1x developer (because you kept the job), but absolutely not a 10x developer.  You might get a junior developer position somewhere else, but never more than that.
2.  Immediately quit the job.  You now had a one month stint at the firm on your resume.  Every hiring manager in town knew that 5% of people with a short stint were good developers and the remaining 95% were people who just finished "COBOL for Dummies".  You'd best just leave the gap in your resume if you didn't want your resume in the trash.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 12 Jul 2024 14:31:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40945921</link><dc:creator>rprospero</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40945921</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40945921</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rprospero in "As an Employee, You Are Disposable (2023)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I happen to work at a government job partially because I saw how my father was treated by the private sector.  However, our institution is failing at the requirements that you put forth.  The government ministers complained back in 2015 that the independent quantitative measurements weren't accurately capturing employee productivity.  As you would expect from Goodhart's law, there certainly were certain employees being underpaid and overpaid, respectively.  Thus, the measurements were scraped.  However, the bureaucracy has prevented a new set of metrics from being put into place.  As a result, I've been working for eight years on what I was told would be a six-month probationary salary because there is literally no mechanism for anyone to receive a raise.  Thankfully, recent events are looking like this might change to something sane in a year or two, but the last proposal I saw for someone moving out of the bottom of a salary bracket was: "candidate has won awards from professional bodies in at least three countries across at least two continents".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 12 Jul 2024 14:17:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40945799</link><dc:creator>rprospero</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40945799</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40945799</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rprospero in "As an Employee, You Are Disposable (2023)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>When I was young, my father worked for a place where asking for a raise was a fireable offence.  The founder had been a pioneer in the modern cattle-not-pets attitude toward servers, except he applied it to developers.  When an employee asked for a raise, it meant on of two things:<p>1. The employee was a vain troublemaker who had over-value what they were worth in the market.  Firing them would not only remove an inefficiency from the system (as they were likely not to work as hard if they believed that they were underpaid), but it would also helpfully remind the other developers that they were all expendable.<p>2. The employee was a 10x developer who was vital to the company processes and could command a much higher salary somewhere else.  Even if you gave them a raise today, they could be hit by a bus tomorrow.  The best course of action was to simply rip off the band aid.  Fire the employee, have security immediately escort them from the building, and begin triage to ensure that the critical systems that they wrote/managed could be handled by the next resume in HR's pile.<p>The line I will always remember is:  Developer are like eggs.  They are heavily undervalued, but also will crack under too much pressure.  Thankfully, like eggs, you can buy them for cheap in packs of twelve, so it doesn't matter if you break a few.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 12 Jul 2024 12:00:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40944726</link><dc:creator>rprospero</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40944726</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40944726</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rprospero in "Simple tasks showing reasoning breakdown in state-of-the-art LLMs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> It's impossible to plan without an internal monologue<p>I once had a teacher claim that people who claimed to have aphantasia were lying, because those people have read books and it is impossible to read a book without picture the scene in your mind's eye.  Are you citing the same source that she was?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 05 Jun 2024 17:13:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40587599</link><dc:creator>rprospero</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40587599</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40587599</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rprospero in "M 4.8 – 2024 Whitehouse Station, New Jersey Earthquake"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Even more self-explanatory is "<i>Duck</i> into the bathroom.  <i>Cover</i> the toilet seat with toilet paper. <i>Hold</i> your bladder until you're on the toilet."<p>I'm still not sure what I'm supposed to be holding onto.  Do I briefly cover my head with my arms, then stop covering my head to <i>hold</i> onto the table?  Do I <i>hold</i> onto my head while I cover it?  Do I cover my loved one's head and they cover mine, sharing our last moments in a loving <i>hold</i>?<p>Now I'm beginning to wonder if I made a massive assumption that I would be covering my head with my hands.  That's what I would do during a tornado, but maybe I'm supposed to be covering my head with a blanket so my hands are free for the <i>hold on</i> part?<p>Honestly, my facetious <i>hold</i> my bladder advice seems more apropos than anything I've managed to come up with for part three.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 05 Apr 2024 15:53:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39943941</link><dc:creator>rprospero</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39943941</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39943941</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rprospero in "Proton Mail says Outlook for Windows is Microsoft's new data collection service"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>What I find extra-annoying about the tracking is that it stopped pretending to be helpful.  I remember chatting with my spouse on Google Messenger around 2012.  We were discussing what to have for dinner when whatever the google assistant was called at the time popped up a message<p>"Traffic is unusually heavy right now due to an accident on Kirkwood. If you want to pick up a pizza from Avers and be home by six, you should leave work in the next seven minutes."<p>Was it creepy?  Hell yes, but at least it was useful.  The companies haven't cut back on spying on me, but, in an effort to pretend that they aren't, they've stopped sharing the useful information with me.  Instead, they keep it to themselves to mine for the perfect car advertisement to send to a guy who doesn't have a license.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 05 Apr 2024 12:57:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39941805</link><dc:creator>rprospero</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39941805</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39941805</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rprospero in "What is a pig butchering scam? (2023)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You're right that this place is ridiculous.  However, as I mentioned in a cousin comment, I don't see the stigma and you haven't done a good job of explaining it.<p>Is it because the word "pig" implies that the victim hasn't kept Kosher and that the scam is god's punishment for that?  Is there a general consensus that people who are "butchered" deserve to be murdered?  This stigma was obvious and immediate for you, but I'm not picking it up.  I don't wish to perpetuate the stigma, but you haven't shared what it is.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 21 Mar 2024 17:09:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39781384</link><dc:creator>rprospero</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39781384</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39781384</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rprospero in "What is a pig butchering scam? (2023)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm also in the UK and I'm not seeing the victim blaming part of it.  I don't think it's a great term, given that I had no idea what it meant until I read the article.  Then again, I would have assumed "financial grooming" was a service offered by a concierge banker to lower my direct debits.  Out of the two phrases, I do feel that saying "my uncle is being butchered" will get law enforcement to act more quickly than saying that he's being "groomed".<p>I'm obviously missing some context or nuance here, since you're the second person to identify the connotation.  Is it the "pig" part?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 21 Mar 2024 17:01:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39781260</link><dc:creator>rprospero</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39781260</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39781260</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rprospero in "Why I use Firefox"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Concrete examples:<p>The web interfaces for both Jitsi and Zoom fail to recognise my web camera.  I've gone through the permissions settings a dozen times and Firefox says that it sees camera, but it only displays a black feed.  Vivaldi correctly accesses the camera on both sites.<p>imascientist.org.uk makes it "impossible" to sign up for outreach sessions under Firefox.  The div with the sessions has a `max-width` parameter, but the contents are significantly larger than this width, resulting in the buttons being outside the rendering area and inaccessible.  I have to go into the dev tools and edit the CSS every time I open the page.<p>These are just the issues that I've dealt with today.  Don't get me wrong - I'm literally typing this in Firefox at this moment.  However, it doesn't help anyone to pretend that these issues never pop up.  I simply feel that the benefits outweight these annoyances.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 28 Feb 2024 16:28:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39540156</link><dc:creator>rprospero</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39540156</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39540156</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rprospero in "Edsger Dijkstra carried computer science on his shoulders (2020)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I had always heard that the "single exit" focus on "break" and "continue" was a misunderstanding.  When wild GOTOs roamed the earth, with was common for a subroutine to end by jumping to a new part of the code, with the jump location being different depending on conditionals within the code.   The "single exit" commandment was that a subroutine should always exit back into the routine that had called it.  That makes it less an injunction against a function having early returns and more a rejection of continuation passing style.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 26 Jan 2024 12:23:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39141860</link><dc:creator>rprospero</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39141860</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39141860</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rprospero in "Balancing engineering cultures: Debate everything vs. just tell me what to build"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> unless you actually build something, the money isn't going to arrive, and you'll be out of a job.<p>The sad part is that many employees have come to the rational and correct solution that the above is not true.  Out of the people I've known, more have lost their jobs to the results of C-suite malfeasance (e.g embezzling, illegal behaviour) than have ever lost their jobs to their own actions.<p>Conversely, unless the organisation you work for is exceptionally incompetent, your own personal failures shouldn't put them out of business.  Think about all the cancelled Google projects.  If the devs that worked on them had just come into work and played Minecraft all day, Google would still be in business.  My personal opinion is that, if the Google Reader devs had never delivered a product, Google would be <i>better</i> off today than it actually is because it wouldn't have such a devoted community angry at it for killing off a beloved product.<p>The navel gazing framework discussion is like selling your own lotto tickets.  If someone's number actually comes, you're on the hook for millions of dollars and probably broke for life.  However, a person with a risk taking mentality will recognise that the odds of someone winning the lotto is tiny and, barring that outcome, selling your own lotto tickets is free money.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 24 Jan 2024 12:28:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39116474</link><dc:creator>rprospero</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39116474</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39116474</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rprospero in "Haier Europe Eases Off on Legal Threat and Seeks Dialogue"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Support tickets don't increase costs.  Whether you have one support ticket or a trillion, the one guy responsible for clearing those tickets gets paid the same salary.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 22 Jan 2024 14:49:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39090046</link><dc:creator>rprospero</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39090046</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39090046</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by rprospero in "Relearning math as an adult"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The "if you are lucky and get a good text" is carrying a <i>lot</i> of weight here.  My school identified certain young students as having high mathematical aptitude.  While other students were learning the basics of addition and multiplication, the advanced students spent hours practicing multiplying nine digit numbers by hand.<p>The school was then always disappointed by by their performance in mathematics competitions.  After all, the other teams were "wasting" their times unimportant reading about algebra, geometry, and combinatorics while our team was "practicing" math with hours of manual long division nightly.<p>The practice is certainly vital, but it's useless without a <i>good</i> text to guide you.  Unless you're lucky and grab a good one on the first go, you'll need to read a few texts to find the good one.<p>I'd say that reading is as important to learning mathematics as breathing.  You'll be a lousy mathematician if you spend all your time focused on your breathing, but you'll be worse one if you skip breathing entirely.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 19 Jan 2024 15:41:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39056754</link><dc:creator>rprospero</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39056754</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39056754</guid></item></channel></rss>