Hacker News: wayfinder

New comment by wayfinder in "Apple built iCloud to store billions of databases"

wayfinder — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 17:42:18 +0000

And you start on the journey when you first learn about hash maps or binary trees.

New comment by wayfinder in "App store to be 'split in two' ahead of EU iPhone sideloading deadline: report"

wayfinder — Tue, 16 Jan 2024 07:20:05 +0000

Expecting people to know what makes an app store safe is like expecting people to know how to change their spark plugs. It’s a niche skill. The only people who are going to know are into the hobby.

Your average person does not have “computers” as a hobby.

In the same vein, I’m not going to give you shit that you don’t know how to change your spark plugs off your head even though it’s so basic.

New comment by wayfinder in "Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get Windows 10 update installed"

wayfinder — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 16:59:50 +0000

A good reliable system pretty much has error handling every step of the way, down to crash-first programming at the very end.

It’s more possible to recover from errors higher in the system but you can’t predict every problem so you need layers of error handling at increasingly lower levels with different recovery expectations.

New comment by wayfinder in "Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get Windows 10 update installed"

wayfinder — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 16:56:19 +0000

Same. I shut down a ticket last week that would create an “final” error handling path that happened to re-invoke half the code paths that could error.

New comment by wayfinder in "Hertz to sell 20k EVs in shift back to gas-powered cars"

wayfinder — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 05:24:29 +0000

Insurance is not free money. Hypothetically say I was losing a car once per month… then my premiums would reflect that. The purpose of insurance in that hypothetical would be to insure against losing 2 cars per month but I would be paying for that first lost car in full because at that point, it’s not a risk… it’s a consistent monthly cost.

New comment by wayfinder in "Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier (2022)"

wayfinder — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 10:06:30 +0000

I own the Aranet4 sensor (highly recommend) and I’m in the US with not particularly great sealing and my sensor will read a 600ppm jump in a matter of 30 minutes.

I basically have to keep the window in my bedroom open 24/7, even when it’s cold outside, just to keep my CO2 levels in the healthy range otherwise it will be pushing 2000ppm in the morning.

New comment by wayfinder in "Google Cuts Jobs in Engineering and Other Divisions"

wayfinder — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 09:52:28 +0000

Google is good at making algorithms and tech but product development and long term vision have never been its strong points.

New comment by wayfinder in "How meta built the infrastructure for Threads"

wayfinder — Mon, 08 Jan 2024 09:32:24 +0000

Instagram has like 2 billion users and I got spammed the shit out of to open a Threads account.

That’s like saying it’s impressive I made a million dollar company after my dad gave me 2 billion.

New comment by wayfinder in "Just because you can doesn't mean you should: the element"

wayfinder — Mon, 08 Jan 2024 09:28:51 +0000

Practically speaking, if you have to involve any libraries or tooling one day, if you stuck to standards or de-facto standards, you save yourself some pain because you got a lot interoperability for free.

New comment by wayfinder in "Clicks – Physical keyboard for iPhone"

wayfinder — Fri, 05 Jan 2024 13:22:36 +0000

I would be more down if it wasn’t tied to the generation of phone.

Also I’d love a keyboard with more buttons personally. I know I’m in a tiny minority here but I get ~70 WPM on an iPhone keyboard but if I have to do symbols or anything it goes down to like 4.

I know you can buy a separate Bluetooth keyboard but then you need to rest your phone and stuff.

New comment by wayfinder in "Show HN: Better Seater – Wedding seating chart optimizer"

wayfinder — Wed, 03 Jan 2024 07:32:59 +0000

If anyone wants to build this by themselves, I recommend using an optimization solver library like OptaPlanner. It basically implements standard optimization algorithms you can read in academic papers (which are interesting to read!) so you don’t have to.

You can probably write a basic planner in under an hour with all the constraints you can think of. You can just continue to fiddle with the constraints and weights until you are happy without having to worry about duplicates or errors.

I’ve used it to solve cost optimization problems for companies I’ve worked with and it works really well.

New comment by wayfinder in "AI can find your location in photos"

wayfinder — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 08:58:46 +0000

There are people that can do this and you can also do this in the iPhone Photos app.

New comment by wayfinder in "Apple wants AI to run directly on its hardware instead of in the cloud"

wayfinder — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 20:36:59 +0000

13 GB a lot? What year is it? 1995? If Apple or Google wanted to add 1 TB to their phones, it wouldn’t cost them anywhere near what they charge us to add 256 GB.

A copy of GTA V takes like 100 GB.

New comment by wayfinder in "Google's True Moonshot"

wayfinder — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 08:17:56 +0000

Unsurprisingly, they already integrated OpenAI into Windows. You can ask it questions and pass it files.

New comment by wayfinder in "Delta Dental says data breach exposed info of 7M people"

wayfinder — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 17:41:09 +0000

I used to work at a medium-sized non-tech company (<200 employees) that had a fair amount of IT staff. Stripe is expensive asf and we always talked with banks and payment processors directly.

We never stored CVVs or any of that insane nonsense though. Our systems only ever saw CC info in transit but they were never stored on-site.

God I miss that company. Working with smart people is great.

New comment by wayfinder in "Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted"

wayfinder — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 15:54:41 +0000

Google just spends millions of dollars building a product then dumps its own baby on the streets.

Then goes and makes new babies.

New comment by wayfinder in "Idempotency"

wayfinder — Tue, 12 Dec 2023 15:38:32 +0000

Instead of idempotency you can return a 4xx error too. You use idempotency because it’s logistically less complicated for the client.

New comment by wayfinder in "Idempotency"

wayfinder — Tue, 12 Dec 2023 03:29:35 +0000

It gave me an intuitive understanding of state machines and idempotency is one solution to transitions.

If you start with State A and a call changes it to State B, what does running the call again do? A->B? But you’re already at B. Shit’s going to break. Redesign your system.

New comment by wayfinder in "Idempotency"

wayfinder — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 17:52:02 +0000

The only reason I knew about idempotency is because growing up I was a little shit and I learned that you could break a LOT of electronics by getting it to do a second thing midway before finishing doing the first thing.

If it had a screen and buttons, I would try to break it.

So I started striving for highly reliable systems not because there are professional bad actors out there or spammers or to achieve high performance… but because there’s another little shit out there.

New comment by wayfinder in "A warrant showing the U.S. government is monitoring push notifications"

wayfinder — Sun, 10 Dec 2023 19:12:57 +0000

In 2006, Mark Klein working for AT&T leaked it. It was in the news.

Snowden did his leak way later in 2013.