Hacker News: williamDafoe

New comment by williamDafoe in "Author of "Careless People" banned from saying anything negative about Meta"

williamDafoe — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 16:04:45 +0000

These non disparagement contracts are typical in silicon valley. Databricks offered me a tiny amount of money and expected me to sign when they fired me on a whim after my stock grant quadrupled in 9 months. There was no warning and no review, just fired. They fired my 2 managers within the year, too, probably because they were fools.

I told them to fuck off. I should have continued with the lawsuit, probably.

But in american courts its "heads i win tails you lose" with labor laws - according to my lawyer wins are in the low single digits for discrimination lawsuits.

New comment by williamDafoe in "Valve: HDMI Forum Continues to Block HDMI 2.1 for Linux"

williamDafoe — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 19:19:55 +0000

Then you wouldn't have 3G cellular. Or 4G. Or 5G cellular. It costs tens of millions of dollars to drive around san diego in those vans taking traces of a new cellular system design and discovering improvements so that the standard works everywhere else on earth (San Diego is a worst case that's comparable to Hong Kong.). We wouldn't have CDMA cellular. Or LTE cellular. Recall that CDMA cellular was 3x more efficient in bits/second/Hz than 2G/GSM, so that cell phone providers could literally give you a free phone or PAY YOU to throw away your phone and they would still come out ahead, financially.

New comment by williamDafoe in "The past was not that cute"

williamDafoe — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 23:00:19 +0000

My wife is obsessed with a woman in Scandinavia who makes videos glorifying cottage life in the wilderness in Scandinavia ... I guess this is similar ...

New comment by williamDafoe in "Average DRAM price in USD over last 18 months"

williamDafoe — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 02:11:35 +0000

An air conditioned barn with space for 100,000 cattle!

New comment by williamDafoe in "Ask HN: Quality of recent gens of Dell/Lenovo laptops worse than 10 years ago?"

williamDafoe — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 00:25:31 +0000

Don't go ANYWHERE near a macbook pro 2019. Piece of garbage. I had to set mine to 100% fans and it went from 100% to 0% battery in 70 mins when I was streaming a meeting PLUGGED IN WITH A 90W CHARGER! The next time I buy Intel is NEVER.

New comment by williamDafoe in "Ask HN: Quality of recent gens of Dell/Lenovo laptops worse than 10 years ago?"

williamDafoe — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 00:22:11 +0000

I'm had 15 months of daily usage (8+ hours per day) of an Asus S16 and it's been pretty great. I haven't been lugging it around very much - mostly just using the 10 cores at my desk to run minikube and WSL and Windows and also gaming on it and I upgraded the SSD to 2GB. I was a longtime thinkpad bigot (T41, T42, T60, T430, T460s) but their near-complete shunning of AMD CPUs has been a FAIL. This laptop had some MediaTek WiFi issues and STILL doesn't always come out of sleep, but the 16" oled is fantastic, it's thinner and lighter and FASTER than a macbook air, I love the build quality and ceraluminum ceramic coating, and it plays just about any 3D game you can think about ... The 31 watt power limit clips all the performance off the hx370 / 890m GPU (32GB RAM) so I went with the hx365 / 880m GPU (24GB RAM). The low amount of RAM is my only complaint.

New comment by williamDafoe in "John Giannandrea to retire from Apple"

williamDafoe — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 00:11:51 +0000

If it's not a new color, or a new switch between stainless, aluminum, or titanium, Apple seems unable to manage their tech stack.

New comment by williamDafoe in "Microsoft makes Zork open-source"

williamDafoe — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 01:44:49 +0000

I have an original line printer printout of 1970s "Adventure" (translated from Fortran into C for UIUC's CAC PDP-11/70 running UNIX v7.) Adventure is the father of Zork. Zork is a clone of Adventure.

New comment by williamDafoe in "Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'"

williamDafoe — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 19:02:49 +0000

Google X is a complete failure. Maybe they had fei-fei on staff for a short while but most of her work was done elsewhere.

New comment by williamDafoe in "Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'"

williamDafoe — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 18:58:51 +0000

The minimum cost of capital just to run fusion experiments is probably $100m. And the power bills are probably almost as high as the ones from OpenAI, which is to say, they are the highest power bills in the history of mankind ...

New comment by williamDafoe in "Eight Million Copies of Moby-Dick (2014)"

williamDafoe — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 18:40:47 +0000

I have a feeling the author compressed 8 million copies of Moby Dick with LZW compression using a huge token cache, then printed the binary results in a 1000-page book. Each successive copy would become smaller and smaller.

New comment by williamDafoe in "FyneDesk: A full desktop environment for Linux written in Go"

williamDafoe — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 18:07:59 +0000

So to summarize - Fyne is a (? cross-platform ?) library for GUI apps, and you believe it's more productive than existing libraries, so you wanted a native window manager because ... exactly why? what exactly is the savings or advantage?

New comment by williamDafoe in "Don't Become a Scientist (1999)"

williamDafoe — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 16:44:59 +0000

If you only understood how White Hot and Stone Cold a research field can be! Five years ago crypto was white hot and today it's almost Stone Cold! People get intoxicated with the money beams that get blasted at people in the white hot subfields but realize that only 5-10% of phds are majoring in the white hot subfields and they simply got lucky 5 years ago to pick that subfield and all that attention hopefully lasts for 10 years which is enough time for them to get tenure or succeed with a startup! if the field isn't white hot for 10 consecutive years they will get fired at tenure time!

New comment by williamDafoe in "Don't Become a Scientist (1999)"

williamDafoe — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 16:28:42 +0000

When last I looked there were three physics faculty in the United States for every two PhD students. That's because there just aren't any industry jobs for physics PhDs. Assuming a 40-year career, that means one job every 13 years for those two PhDs (one graduating every 3 years) to compete for - so a 1 in 4 chance of getting any physics job! Which is completely insane it's a lucky thing there are trillions of computer science jobs for these unemployed physicists to take - and take them they sure do!

New comment by williamDafoe in "Don't Become a Scientist (1999)"

williamDafoe — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 01:24:10 +0000

The oversupply has extended from phds down to bachelor's degrees. With 37% of Americans getting bachelor's degrees it doesn't mean anything anymore and is wasteful overtraining. I'm no Trumper but somebody has to stop the greedy life-wasting that academics have created by overfunding a lot of stupid duplicate research and excessive college educations by people who never have an impact...

New comment by williamDafoe in "Don't Become a Scientist (1999)"

williamDafoe — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 01:11:26 +0000

This is 100% true but by the early 1990s computer science Phds were ALSO in the shitter because of all the 1990 layoffs and the total shutdown of industrial basic research and so every industry CS PhD was trying to get a professorship job so they could continue to do research after all the researchers in industry had been laid off!!! Science is a pyramid scheme and a very shallow pyamid with 80-90% cuts at every level !!!

Computer science has become the worst profession of all now because all the OTHER scientists say, "it's okay if I can never have a career in a scientific field I'll just switch and become a computer scientist!" And most of them will work for food ...

I graduated in 1993 when there were 20 usa positions for the 1000 CS PhDs. "That's okay" you say? "How many were from top schools" you say? 200, thats how many PhDs were from top 10 schools ... So, 10:1, a 90% cut ...

I did get a tenure track job (outside the usa - in canada) but could not afford the incredibly low pay in the most expensive city in north america (income vs housing costs ratio).

New comment by williamDafoe in "I am giving up on Intel and have bought an AMD Ryzen 9950X3D"

williamDafoe — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 10:29:53 +0000

Just FYI Google runs their data centers at 85 degrees F (about 30 degrees C). I think Google probably knows more about how to run Intel CPUs for longest life and lowest cost per CPU cycle. After all they are the #5 computer maker on earth. What Intel is doing and what they are recommending is the act of a desperate corporation incapable of designing energy-efficient CPUs, incapable of progressing their performance in MIPS per Watt of power. This is a sign of a failed corporation.

New comment by williamDafoe in "I am giving up on Intel and have bought an AMD Ryzen 9950X3D"

williamDafoe — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 10:26:51 +0000

"Stronghold" is a joke phrase, is it not? Intel had ZERO progress in integrated graphics from 2013-2020. ZERO. That's the reason why "it works so well" - because they NEVER improved the performance or architecture! Sure, they diddled with the number of CU's, but as far as graphics architecture, they never changed it, and it was POOR to begin with (couldn't do 1080p esports very well ...)

New comment by williamDafoe in "I am giving up on Intel and have bought an AMD Ryzen 9950X3D"

williamDafoe — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 10:23:13 +0000

A badly optimized CPU will take excessive amounts of power. The "failure in choosing cooling solutions" excuse is just the pot calling the kettle black.

New comment by williamDafoe in "I am giving up on Intel and have bought an AMD Ryzen 9950X3D"

williamDafoe — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 10:22:27 +0000

The 7000 series of CPUs is NOT known for running cool, unlike the AMD 5000 series (which are basically server CPUs repurposed for desktop usage). In the 7000 series, AMD decided to just increase the power of each CPU and that's where most of the performance gains are coming from - but power consumption is 40-50% higher than with similar 5000-series CPUs.