Hacker News: yblu

Felix Hill (DeepMind AI scientist) has died

yblu — Fri, 03 Jan 2025 09:29:59 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/DrJimFan/status/1874959979553427815

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42584088

Points: 14

# Comments: 3

New comment by yblu in "Being Raised by the Internet"

yblu — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 05:01:10 +0000

used to be one of the “sharers,” maintaining a fairly popular blog, writing tutorials on platforms like DZone and CodeProject, answering questions on StackOverflow, and creating open-source projects that collectively amassed millions of downloads.

At one point, I decided to monetize one of my open-source projects by creating a commercial fork. That’s when a group of people, none of whom had contributed to the project in any way, started a witch hunt over a few super trivial lines of code they accused me of “stealing” from contributors. Despite having the full support of all actual contributors, the backlash from these outsiders left me drained and disillusioned. So I stopped sharing my work and contributing to open source altogether—and honestly, I’m happier for it.

To all the Jimmy Millers who genuinely appreciate the goodwill of creators: be aware that there are people who will leech off it or even destroy it.

New comment by yblu in "Show HN: InstantDB – A Modern Firebase"

yblu — Sun, 25 Aug 2024 05:39:41 +0000

This looks awesome. Maybe a stupid question: appID is public, does it mean anyone can query everyone else's database if they know the appID?

New comment by yblu in "Let's Build a Compiler (1988)"

yblu — Thu, 25 May 2023 15:17:39 +0000

This series got me into coding languages for work and fun. I wish more books about complex topics were written this way... For anyone who's interested, Jack Crenshaw did an interview in 2009 and touched upon how he wrote this series. [1]

[1] http://www.trs-80.org/interview-jack-crenshaw/

DHH: The luxury of working without metrics

yblu — Wed, 24 May 2023 18:24:22 +0000

Article URL: https://world.hey.com/dhh/the-luxury-of-working-without-metrics-02e5dbac

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36062124

Points: 6

# Comments: 3

New comment by yblu in "Rodney Brooks on GPT-4"

yblu — Sun, 21 May 2023 14:44:33 +0000

Okay, maybe I shouldn't have mentioned the worst possible outcome. Let's use the words of Sam Altman, the risk here is "light out for all of us", and let's just assume it meant we would still live, just in darkness. Or whatever plausible bad case outcome you could imagine. Do you see any negative outcome is possible at all? If you do, would you at least be cautious so that we could avoid such an outcome? That would be the behavior I expect to see in leading AI scientists and yet...

New comment by yblu in "Rodney Brooks on GPT-4"

yblu — Sun, 21 May 2023 14:38:04 +0000

You disagreed with me, but at least you acknowledged there was risk, even though we could disagree about the odd or potential impact. Yet, folks like Yann LeCun ridiculed anyone who thought there was a risk AI could endanger us or harm our way of life. What do we know about experts who are always confident (usually on TV) about things that haven't happened yet?

New comment by yblu in "Rodney Brooks on GPT-4"

yblu — Sun, 21 May 2023 04:59:50 +0000

What I found disheartening was many of those scientists, especially those on the "nothing to worry about" camp, seemed not to entertain the thought that they could be wrong, considering the scale of the matter, i.e. human extinction. If there's a chance AI poses an existential threat to us, even if it is 0.00000001% (I made that up), should they be at least a bit more humble? This is uncharted domain and I find it incredible that many talk like they already have all the answers.

California proposes 4-day work week without pay cut for large companies

yblu — Mon, 18 Apr 2022 02:26:53 +0000

Article URL: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/12/california-considers-a-32-hour-workweek-for-larger-companies.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31066647

Points: 16

# Comments: 8

New comment by yblu in "US mortgage rates hit 5% for first time since early 2011"

yblu — Fri, 15 Apr 2022 20:14:00 +0000

Wonder what will happen to house prices. Flatten out or drop soon?

US mortgage rates hit 5% for first time since early 2011

yblu — Fri, 15 Apr 2022 19:48:24 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-14/u-s-mortgage-rates-hit-5-for-the-first-time-since-early-2011

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31044929

Points: 7

# Comments: 4

New comment by yblu in "Someone noticed the Axie Infinity hack 6 days ago"

yblu — Tue, 29 Mar 2022 19:45:41 +0000

They lost their money on the short position because the price went up, instead of going down. Had other people noticed about the hack as early as they had assumed and the price went down as they had assumed, they would have made a lot of money.

Someone noticed the Axie Infinity hack 6 days ago

yblu — Tue, 29 Mar 2022 19:03:06 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/cobie/status/1508844556649132033

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30846933

Points: 4

# Comments: 3

New comment by yblu in "My boundaries as an open source developer"

yblu — Wed, 16 Mar 2022 23:50:11 +0000

I used to maintain several popular open-source projects and contribute to even more popular ones. It was always fun at the beginning, especially because I built them for my own needs. But I kept getting asked to fix bugs or improve things even long after my needs had expired. I tried the donation route for a little while but it didn't go anywhere - I received maybe a few hours worth of money (versus hundreds if not thousands of hours I had spent working on those projects). I also tried releasing a paid version for one of the projects and got buried with hate mails and, unfortunately, online abuse. That was when I stopped working on open-source and I'm happier than ever.

I'm very happy for people who make it from doing serious open-source work. I think they deserve it. But at the same time I feel bad for those who build or maintain no less serious or popular work and yet couldn't make enough to worth even a portion of the time they'd spend.

How Figma made their app fast (2018)

yblu — Thu, 13 Jan 2022 20:09:29 +0000

Article URL: https://www.figma.com/blog/figma-faster/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29926114

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by yblu in "Ask HN: Working with large code base for the first time"

yblu — Wed, 22 Dec 2021 06:17:22 +0000

Debugger is your friend :)

Start by adding breakpoints for some key actions of the app. Then step through the flows with the debugger. First pass you can just step over functions to get the high-level idea. In subsequent passes, you can step into functions that seem important. Rinse and repeat until you understand those actions well. Then move on to other areas in the app.

This works because you can see the actual end-to-end execution flow (not always clear from reading code), inspect runtime data (impossible by reading code) and even change the runtime data (variables, DOM) to validate assumptions about how the code works.

New comment by yblu in "From Node to Ruby on Rails"

yblu — Thu, 16 Dec 2021 21:39:12 +0000

I'm sorry, but how is this simple?

New comment by yblu in "Books that changed my career as a software engineer"

yblu — Sun, 28 Nov 2021 20:47:48 +0000

> what relevant software have they actually written

I think Fitnesse [1] is quite relevant. That said, not a lot of FOSS work from someone like him, to put the things he preaches in large and complex projects that we can look at the source and learn from.

[1]: https://github.com/unclebob/fitnesse

New comment by yblu in "Ask HN: Simplest stack to build web apps in 2021?"

yblu — Tue, 23 Nov 2021 07:44:39 +0000

> The nice thing about building like this for me is that the journey from nothing to something is short and so much is supported out of the box.

This sounds really tempting :). Thanks!

New comment by yblu in "Ask HN: Simplest stack to build web apps in 2021?"

yblu — Tue, 23 Nov 2021 07:32:54 +0000

I've just finished watching the 1st video, it's awesome. Thanks for sharing!