Hacker News: shepardrtc

New comment by shepardrtc in "Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%"

shepardrtc — Wed, 06 May 2026 15:35:56 +0000

> uncover blockers that people haven’t surfaced on their own

I constantly reiterate to people, whether they're reporting to me or not, that they need to speak up when there's a blocker. I feel its a very telling skill of engineers whether or not they can communicate issues in an effective manner urgently and figure out the best course of action to unblock.

I've heard tales of 300k/yr engineers that just sit there and wait for a manager to ask if they're blocked, or just sit there until they're told what to do.

New comment by shepardrtc in "ML supports existence of unrecognized transient astronomical phenomena"

shepardrtc — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 20:51:39 +0000

Plenty of evidence has been found. For one, the US government has leaked/released a video showing instant acceleration of a flying object. Nothing on earth can do that.

New comment by shepardrtc in "ML supports existence of unrecognized transient astronomical phenomena"

shepardrtc — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 18:04:24 +0000

Why not?

New comment by shepardrtc in "Introspective Diffusion Language Models"

shepardrtc — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 14:47:21 +0000

Last year, there was a period of a week or two where I would see Gemini responses diffusing in. I don't know if they were experimenting with it, or if it was just an effect. It didn't last long, but it was interesting to see.

New comment by shepardrtc in "Node.js worker threads are problematic, but they work great for us"

shepardrtc — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 19:11:16 +0000

I built an algorithmic trader years ago just using Python, but for the hot paths I gave each algorithm its own function in its own file, and then I would compile the files with Cython. The speedup was pretty significant. I barely wrote any "Cython" stuff (meaning declaring variables and other minor assists). The code is still very much python, just with a few little extras that are easy to understand.

New comment by shepardrtc in "Oban, the job processing framework from Elixir, has come to Python"

shepardrtc — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 20:17:24 +0000

> Inaccurate rescues - jobs that are long-running might get rescued even if the producer is still alive. Pro version uses smarter heartbeats to track producer liveness.

So the non-paid version really can't be used for production unless you know for sure you'll have very short jobs?

New comment by shepardrtc in "Alzheimer’s disease can be reversed in animal models? Study"

shepardrtc — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 13:50:22 +0000

You may find this study useful: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09335-x

I've begun taking very small amounts of lithium orotate (5mg), among many other preventative measures.

New comment by shepardrtc in "Alzheimer’s disease can be reversed in animal models? Study"

shepardrtc — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 19:16:48 +0000

From multiple personal experiences, including both of my parents, dementia is a slow, horrible death where you are robbed of your dignity and end up dragging all of your relatives through a very long, very torturous hell. You will be drooling, pissing, and shitting yourself, all while slowly reverting back to a low IQ childhood mentality where you're very likely to have outbursts and verbally or physically attack the people around you. Your loved ones will be tormented, and if you don't have loved ones then if you're lucky you'll be tossed into a room and forgotten about by underpaid, overworked staff at some run-down nursing home. If you're not lucky you'll be laying in a gutter on the street until you die.

New comment by shepardrtc in "The effect of shingles vaccination at different stages of dementia"

shepardrtc — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 20:49:40 +0000

Yeah they looked at 120 people age 71 and above for that study. By that point its a little late.

New comment by shepardrtc in "The effect of shingles vaccination at different stages of dementia"

shepardrtc — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 18:14:11 +0000

Taking valacyclovir should help prevent or delay as well.

New comment by shepardrtc in "Everyone in Seattle hates AI"

shepardrtc — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 15:43:05 +0000

That makes sense. And its even worse of a reason. At least for people living in the US.

New comment by shepardrtc in "Everyone in Seattle hates AI"

shepardrtc — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 20:14:35 +0000

Ok so a few thoughts as a former Seattleite:

1. You were a therapy session for her. Her negativity was about the layoffs.

2. FAANG companies dramatically overhired for years and are using AI as an excuse for layoffs.

3. AI scene in Seattle is pretty good, but as with everywhere else was/is a victim of the AI hype. I see estimates of the hype being dead in a year. AI won't be dead, but throwing money at the whatever Uber-for-pets-AI-ly idea pops up won't happen.

4. I don't think people hate AI, they hate the hype.

Anyways, your app actually does sound interesting so I signed up for it.

New comment by shepardrtc in "API that auto-routes to the cheapest AI provider (OpenAI/Anthropic/Gemini)"

shepardrtc — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 20:15:39 +0000

For input,

- GPT-5.1 is $1.25 / 1M tokens

- You are $0.50 / 1,000 tokens

Output:

- GPT-5.1 is $10.00 / 1M tokens

- You are $1.50 / 1,000 tokens

Am I reading that wrong? Is that a typo?

New comment by shepardrtc in "Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts"

shepardrtc — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 00:31:18 +0000

I had terrible anxiety as a child and what I experienced dramatically affected the core of who I am. It is engrained in me and I struggle with it daily, though after decades I have surpassed a good portion of it. If a small dose can help someone have a somewhat "normal" childhood, then its worth a try.

New comment by shepardrtc in "Inside Amazon's engineering culture: Lessons from their senior principals"

shepardrtc — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 14:41:49 +0000

I think you're missing a more human point: people dislike the effect of hiring and firing thousands of people with zero consideration. They hire thousands because it makes management look like they're ramping up to solve problems, and then they fire this many people because it makes management look like they're cutting costs to be more efficient. It's all about management keeping up the illusion that they're "on top of things", when in reality they're just playing number games.

There's empathy involved in the revulsion toward this kind of process. Please take time to consider that not everyone fired is a $300k/year rockstar programmer who can just as easily walk over to Meta or Google for a job. I know of people who have uprooted their lives and work under the idea that if they do a good job they'll stay on, when in fact the reality is more like gambling and they could be fired at any point.

New comment by shepardrtc in "Inside Amazon's engineering culture: Lessons from their senior principals"

shepardrtc — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 14:32:44 +0000

I pulled myself from a recent Amazon interview process because of how bad they are. At first I had the opinion that this could be interesting and exciting, but the more I thought about how they treated people, the more I realized that the internal culture must be terrible. And honestly I just don't need to be involved with any of that.

New comment by shepardrtc in "Karpathy on DeepSeek-OCR paper: Are pixels better inputs to LLMs than text?"

shepardrtc — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 16:24:59 +0000

Sounds like those ML "scientists" were actually just engineers.

New comment by shepardrtc in "DeepSeek OCR"

shepardrtc — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 15:01:17 +0000

How does this fair with the Vidore benchmark?

https://huggingface.co/spaces/vidore/vidore-leaderboard

New comment by shepardrtc in "Rapid amyloid-β clearance and cognitive recovery by modulating BBB transport"

shepardrtc — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 21:16:53 +0000

If the herpes virus can increase the odds of getting Alzheimer's, then taking valacyclovir is another thing that can be done to reduce the odds.

New comment by shepardrtc in "TurboTax’s 20-year fight to stop Americans from filing taxes for free (2019)"

shepardrtc — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 15:00:12 +0000

The IRS does have a free filing service called Direct File: https://directfile.irs.gov/

The Trump Administration is trying to get rid of it, but its been so successful and so well-rated that they're having trouble doing that.