Hacker News: taion

New comment by taion in "Ask HN: Promoted, but Career Path Derailed"

taion — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 20:12:30 +0000

Good luck! Those were the behaviors that got you promoted to senior staff in the first place – so I would imagine that your org is actively expecting that you will continue them!

New comment by taion in "Ask HN: Promoted, but Career Path Derailed"

taion — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 15:38:22 +0000

Assuming your leveling matches standard bigtech leveling, it's generally expected at level 7+ that you are doing lots of cross-org work anyway, and have responsibilities at quite a high level. Unless you're one of those rare engineers at this level who is a deep specialist (in which case this team move scenario sounds unlikely), the value you add above someone at level 6 is just that you have breadth of experience and can lead cross-org and/or cross-functional initiatives.

No, nobody is ever fully in charge of his or her own destiny, but the entire point of senior staff engineers is that you have the autonomy to exercise protagonism separate from your org structure, in ways that managers and directors do not. So... do the cross-org collaboration thing – and not because it's what you feel like, but because as a L7, it's literally your job to do that!

New comment by taion in "Lines of code that beat A/B testing (2012)"

taion — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 01:07:45 +0000

You can do that, but now you have a runtime dependency on your analytics system, right? This can be reasonable for a one-off experimentation system but it's not likely you'll be able to do all of your experimentation this way.

New comment by taion in "Lines of code that beat A/B testing (2012)"

taion — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 21:00:12 +0000

The problem with this approach is that it requires the system doing randomization to be aware of the rewards. That doesn't make a lot of sense architecturally – the rewards you care about often relate to how the user engages with your product, and you would generally expect those to be collected via some offline analytics system that is disjoint from your online serving system.

Additionally, doing randomization on a per-request basis heavily limits the kinds of user behaviors you can observe. Often you want to consistently assign the same user to the same condition to observe long-term changes in user behavior.

This approach is pretty clever on paper but it's a poor fit for how experimentation works in practice and from a system design POV.

Why Did Supersonic Airliners Fail?

taion — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 16:42:47 +0000

Article URL: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-did-supersonic-airliners-fail

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39829939

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by taion in "My grandfather Paul Tillich, the unbelieving theologian"

taion — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 14:52:10 +0000

And in that sense Tillich isn't that far from, say, Aquinas, who is consistent about asserting that existence is not a "real" predicate and that God's existence is outside of the world and outside of space and time.

You don't even need to squint that hard to see a commonality between Tillich's notion of discussing God symbolically and Aquinas's notion of doing so analogically, not to mention the contrast between finite humans and an infinite God who is beyond understanding. And not to mention that apophaticism – the idea that positive knowledge about God is impossible – has been a feature of Christian theology since the beginning.

So much of this can be taken in ways that not only aren't outside the bounds of Christian orthodoxy, but also align with more sophisticated Christian philosophical understandings of God.

That much, of course, is not why Tillich is controversial!

New comment by taion in "How Ultrasound Became Ultra Small"

taion — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 06:39:07 +0000

That one is not going to be particularly useful at all. It's a linear probe, which means it's really only for imaging things near the skin. It's one-third of a typical set of probes: https://stanfordmedicine25.stanford.edu/the25/ultrasound.htm...

It's different from the MEMS-based devices this article talks about, which have the novelty of letting you do everything with a single probe. Though of course that comes with trade-offs.

New comment by taion in "How Ultrasound Became Ultra Small"

taion — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 06:20:32 +0000

Yes, they still require gel. That's just a matter of physics. Changing the transducer technology doesn't change that.

New comment by taion in "How Ultrasound Became Ultra Small"

taion — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 06:20:07 +0000

You're not allowed to buy these without an NPI number. And while ultrasound is relatively easy, it's still not really usable without some training. I think there have been some studies of training users to do ultrasound at home for a limited set of views, but it's not really a "pick it up and look around" sort of thing.

New comment by taion in "Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage"

taion — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 17:48:59 +0000

A big part of the point of that Construction Physics Substack is to explore these factors around innovation, productivity, and process change in the construction sector. I don't think it's really quite as simple as you imply: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-its-hard-to-innov..., https://www.construction-physics.com/p/sketch-of-a-theory-of...

Sometimes practices do reflect real constraints, rather than just path-dependence.

Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage

taion — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 13:41:59 +0000

Article URL: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/mass-timber-is-great-but-it-will

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39691119

Points: 184

# Comments: 775

New comment by taion in "Airlines Colluded to Ensure Onboard Food Would Be Awful"

taion — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 00:55:43 +0000

I'm not sure why this piece mentions deregulation. The drinks limit was in 1956, while the sandwich spat was in 1958 – but deregulation wasn't until 1978, two decades later!

The collusion in question seems to only relate to regulation, which prohibited the airlines from competing on price. The incentives obviously don't work out the same with deregulation!

New comment by taion in "737 Max anti-ice system fix is slow going"

taion — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 17:10:54 +0000

The Construction Physics Substack had a good piece on the economics of building commercial aircraft a bit ago: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/a-cycle-of-misery-the..., with discussion on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39339149.

It seems that, on paper, in this case specifically, re-engining rather than clean sheet made a lot of sense. Of course, we all know how things ended up in practice...

But at this point, if Boeing were to spend a lot of money on a clean-sheet design – even if they shipped it on time, would they have customers? It's hard to see how that would play out.

New comment by taion in "I no longer maintain my Emacs projects on Sourcehut"

taion — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 13:52:02 +0000

It's also not entirely a technical issue, anyway. In a vacuum the Sourcehut UX might be fine, but if people are used to GitHub-style UX, then they will have a hard time with Sourcehut and end up doing the wrong thing, like emailing the maintainer directly rather than using the mailing lists – through no fault of the mailing lists themselves!

New comment by taion in "Let Everybody Sing (2016)"

taion — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 21:12:07 +0000

It’s not uncommon for vocal music to have different conventions like this, especially which the pitch isn’t absolute so standard notation isn’t quite correct anyway. Note the use of neums for chant – and those are harder to learn!

New comment by taion in "All you need is Wide Events, not "Metrics, Logs and Traces""

taion — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 02:33:33 +0000

This is exactly right. This kind of structured logging is great, but it doesn’t replace metrics. You really want to have both, and simple unsampled metrics are actively better for e.g. automated alerting for exactly those reasons. They’re complements more than substitutes.

New comment by taion in "All you need is Wide Events, not "Metrics, Logs and Traces""

taion — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 02:31:17 +0000

You also lose accuracy because of sampling noise.

New comment by taion in "Sony Interactive Entertainment lays off 900 people"

taion — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 14:21:14 +0000

Matthew Ball had a good essay on this about a month ago: https://www.matthewball.co/all/gaming2024

The industry as a whole is facing huge financial pressures, Sony included.

New comment by taion in "How Does Bluesky Work?"

taion — Sun, 25 Feb 2024 02:28:25 +0000

That makes sense. So first they have to go closed-source before that attack vector is even feasible, and doing so would be sufficient on its own to raise alarms.

New comment by taion in "How Does Bluesky Work?"

taion — Sun, 25 Feb 2024 02:07:34 +0000

One thing I’m curious about here is how BlueSky can credibly commit to only use the open portions of the protocol. BlueSky appears to be de facto quite centralized – given that, it seems like there’s no technical reason why first-party BlueSky clients have to be ATProto clients. Obviously it would be a major betrayal of user trust to do so any time in the near-to-medium-term future, but it seems like the de facto decentralization of ActivityPub gives stronger guardrails here.