Hacker News: tezzer

New comment by tezzer in "What shall I teach my son?"

tezzer — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 04:18:00 +0000

One example: I worked for an Alphabet company with some very, very accomplished people. When the drawdown on the project came, the people who were bi- or multi-lingual all kept their jobs. They were more useful in more situations for a multinational project. The 36 people let go probably wish they'd spent a little more time studying Japanese, Spanish or Norwegian.

New comment by tezzer in "Bankrupt Trucker Yellow Loses Ruling over $6.5B in Pension Debts"

tezzer — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 16:57:29 +0000

Pensions pay (paid?) regardless of how the stock market is doing, and they pay for life. They grow with inflation, and you don't need to know anything about stocks, markets, funds, rebalancing or anything else to benefit. It was an elegant weapon for a more civilized age. If it wasn't mismanaged and raided. Incidentally, today only 1/3 of working Americans have 401ks.

New comment by tezzer in "WHO aspartame brouhaha"

tezzer — Tue, 18 Jul 2023 01:03:51 +0000

Mentos sugar free gum (since I have some handy) has xylitol, sorbitol, mannitol, maltitol, aspartame, acesulfame, sucralose and "sucrose fatty acid esthers"

I seem to recall most xylitol gums also have aspartame, but Mentos is the only one I had handy to check.

New comment by tezzer in "Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?"

tezzer — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 18:37:57 +0000

I was working with a decoder for the LD-CELP voice compression algorithm. The machine it was running on was compute-bound and the playback stuttered a lot. I dug into the code, then went to the papers describing the algorithm, then went back into the code and modified a piece of it to be better tuned to the data I was processing. In the average case I probably made the code worse, but in my specific case I sped up the thing by 30x. That gave me confidence in a few things:

1) I can figure out issues in other people's implementations.

2) The best solution may not be the best solution for you, and my hunches on optimization might be correct

3) It's fun to look like a wizard to your peers

New comment by tezzer in "NASA solved a $100M problem for five bucks (2012)"

tezzer — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 06:53:58 +0000

The centrifuge itself- you get a little nausea as it spins up, and then it feels like forward Gs; an elephant sitting on you or the bottom of a dip in a roller coaster that never stops. Even at higher Gs it's just a continuous crushing that makes it arduous to breathe, but they never spun us civilians up to the point that anything seemed life threatening.

But then on some of the vibration runs (they did a bunch of different frequencies), there was this overwhelming all-focusing urgent need to make it stop. It just felt wrong, and dangerous, and there wasn't room in the head for anything but this worry that something dreadfully wrong was happening. It pushed out any other thoughts.

The target runs (and this was a decade ago so I'm dragging through memory) were mostly just visual effects, though. Everything was bouncing around and you couldn't focus on anything well enough to read; and there was a bit of the worry in my thoughts but not the panic from other frequencies.

New comment by tezzer in "NASA solved a $100M problem for five bucks (2012)"

tezzer — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 22:07:12 +0000

Yes, in the experiment we had to touch highlighted groups of numbers on the screen during some phases, do simple math on groups of numbers, or read out numbers. One of the harder parts is repeatedly reaching out to touch the screen under G forces, your arms get really tired really fast.

New comment by tezzer in "NASA solved a $100M problem for five bucks (2012)"

tezzer — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 21:51:02 +0000

I was a guinea pig for this experiment- they spun us up in the centrifuge, vibrated the chair in a simulation of launch forces, and had us doing reading and manual tasks. There are parts of your brain that nope out at certain frequencies, it's a remarkable feeling.

New comment by tezzer in "The West's historic drought is threatening hydropower at Hoover Dam"

tezzer — Thu, 18 Aug 2022 02:32:06 +0000

Nobody talks about ozone because global cooperation led by science and public policy fixed the hole. Come to think of it, maybe we should talk about it more.

New comment by tezzer in "Meta is raising the price of the Quest 2 to 400 USD"

tezzer — Tue, 26 Jul 2022 17:58:40 +0000

I play Walkabout Mini Golf weekly with a group of far-flung friends. The courses are interesting, the physics feel right, and the audio is good enough it feels like we're standing around a course having drinks and goofing off. It saved my pandemic, and has been a great way to keep in touch with folks on a regular basis.

[1] https://www.mightycoconut.com/minigolf

New comment by tezzer in "Yep, I created the new Avatar font"

tezzer — Tue, 10 May 2022 00:14:54 +0000

I think it was a fine retelling of "Fern Gully"

New comment by tezzer in "Is going to the office a broken way of working?"

tezzer — Mon, 11 Oct 2021 22:04:22 +0000

I'm with you, 100%

New comment by tezzer in "The growing market of not cutting down trees"

tezzer — Tue, 24 Aug 2021 21:34:12 +0000

The optics of paying people in a culture not your own to not reproduce are problematic, yes? Besides, we know how to get people to have fewer children. Raise their standard of living.

New comment by tezzer in "No evidence that chance meetings in office boosts innovation"

tezzer — Thu, 24 Jun 2021 20:25:40 +0000

For what it's worth, I agree with you. We've developed entirely new capabilities that grew out of tangential conversation after in-person meetings. A few of our technical folks prefer remote work, largely because it saves them from stupid commutes. I've noticed the folks most against it are the ones who have historically built new things (myself included), and if I stick around I'm going to miss collaborating with them in person.

New comment by tezzer in "“Miss Shilling's Orifice” helped win the war (2020)"

tezzer — Thu, 20 May 2021 06:19:13 +0000

Harper's and the Atlantic have been doing long-form journalism since the 1850s. I think the form clashes with modern attention spans and ability to focus, but I still enjoy it. Since it persists, I don't think I'm alone.

Recipe web sites, however... padding, padding and more. Though Dickens was paid by the word, too, and it shows.

New comment by tezzer in "34% of remote workers would quit rather than return to full-time office work"

tezzer — Wed, 07 Apr 2021 23:28:57 +0000

I think that's an expense a company should be enthusiastic about paying- along with upgraded internet, sharing of power bills... maybe the occasional lunch delivery.

New comment by tezzer in "34% of remote workers would quit rather than return to full-time office work"

tezzer — Wed, 07 Apr 2021 23:17:49 +0000

So instead I should personally shoulder the real estate and infrastructure costs of working from home? No thanks.

New comment by tezzer in "34% of remote workers would quit rather than return to full-time office work"

tezzer — Wed, 07 Apr 2021 23:16:18 +0000

No, I'm not confusing anything. I'm stating my team made a great deal of progress when we got together in the office over a sticky problem; and attributing the progress to the random directions the conversation and problem solving effort took when we were in one room bouncing ideas off each other and poking hardware together.

New comment by tezzer in "34% of remote workers would quit rather than return to full-time office work"

tezzer — Wed, 07 Apr 2021 18:07:08 +0000

I don't think I want to pay for a bigger house; I already pay to be close to work. I've never had more than a 15 minute commute, and that has occasionally been an expensive policy!

I don't like co-opting my living space for work. It clutters things physically and mentally.

New comment by tezzer in "34% of remote workers would quit rather than return to full-time office work"

tezzer — Wed, 07 Apr 2021 18:04:58 +0000

Several do, the few times I've gone into the office and done a little problem solving with the folks who were there, we accomplished like a week of work in an hour. There's something about putting heads together that's hard to replace. Some of our folks have always been ~90% remote and that's fine, but I think they're missing out on one of the joys of engineering.

New comment by tezzer in "34% of remote workers would quit rather than return to full-time office work"

tezzer — Wed, 07 Apr 2021 17:54:07 +0000

I'm a software engineer. I can do my job 100% remotely. I can't wait to get back to the office. I like in-person collaboration, and I really like having separation between my work life and my home life. This year has been torture.