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DannyBee

31,531 karma · joined June 21, 2011

Xoogler just enjoying life for a while after a long time in tech. I'm also an open source lawyer.

If there is anything i can help you with, feel free to poke me.

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DannyBee··on Fast Remediation Is the New Trust Model (JFrog and OpenAI Zero-Day Findings)
My guess is someone was going to release a very unflattering article about them so they tried to get ahead of it by doing this
DannyBee··on Glue bonds to nonstick surfaces and wipes clean with ethanol
Yeah I have been playing with 3d printing nylon and pps versions because pure pe filament are harder to find. They also often have really really poor layer adhesion and crazy levels of warping.

PPS is not that expensive if you know some of the more specialized filament vendors.

Anyway like I said my use case is weird and may even be transient.

I can think of other use cases, but most are coatings related (Ie using Teflon as a removable masking material, etc).

The removability is actually much less interesting than the ability to strongly bond Teflon.

DannyBee··on Glue bonds to nonstick surfaces and wipes clean with ethanol
I have a weird use case, but this is actually wildly useful to me.

I use teflon (sometimes nylon, but mostly teflon) painter pyramids/holders/etc, because i spray finish stuff that is very good at adhering to lots of things, and are acetone based - VOC compliance pretty much forced acetone into solvent based stuff. This in turn pretty much makes finishes melt into anything except PE, nylon, teflon, even if they wouldn't otherwise.

To keep the pyramids and things where i want them, i have magnets glued into them. But because it's PFTE, the magnets don't really stay adhered well, even with (currently) specialized adhesives and i end up regluing them after every few times, often before the project finishes.

What i really want is an adhesive like this one, where i can glue the magnets in, but also remove them after the project finishes, because i'll go soak the pyramids in solvent or something to clean them, but don't want to damage any magnet coatings.

DannyBee··on Glue bonds to nonstick surfaces and wipes clean with ethanol
This website often suggests totally bad ideas, like brittle epoxies for bonds they shouldn't be used for.

The truth is nowadays you can just choose your favorite brand and they almost certainly have a correct, and good, adhesive selector.

For example, for loctite, you should just use: https://www.henkel-adhesives-selector.com/

DannyBee··on How Has Roman Concrete Lasted for Millennia? 1,900-Year-Old Latrine Offers Clues
I don't remember Obama pretending it was being caused by political agitators, etc.
DannyBee··on How Has Roman Concrete Lasted for Millennia? 1,900-Year-Old Latrine Offers Clues
You can also just see it with cement board - if you pour water on top of it, it will eventually migrate through and drip.
DannyBee··on [dead]
It’s been running for 14 days, the hallmark of reliability (for AI anyway). Just like using monthly numbers before you’ve even made it a month
DannyBee··on Optimization Solver as a Service
Sure. If it supported commercial solvers for me it would definitely be more valuable. I do think it’s fairly crazy to pay for remote solving using public solvers - the case you give is uncommon enough that whoever has it would probably want their own infrastructure to deal with it. Beyond that the current setup of trying to sell a single call solver as your advantage when the customers who might buy it for real need flexibility of various sorts doesn’t make sense to me.

FWIW-By supports pyomo they mean I can install their python package and hand a pyomo model to their solver API. I don’t want that. I want to use pyomo’s solver API which is how I interact with all other solvers

In the end I just don’t see who they are selling to. If their advantage is a single call solver for different model kinds, which is what they spend the most time talking about, that could be done with a small python package, and would already exist if it was a big issue

DannyBee··on Never argue with your boss (2009)
Everyone in this story sucks.

As a manager, the people I hired were almost always smarter than me or better than me at various things. That's why i hired them.

I did my best to make sure they were empowered to solve the problems the org needed solving.

Why would I not want their opinions or viewpoints, especially if they differed from my own?

Heck, why would i try to enforce my opinion or viewpoint in the first place?

Not realizing this makes the boss here a crappy manager. Yes, lots of crappy managers exist (for many reasons - one commonly overlooked one being that technicaly knowledge/etc is often shared and discussed much more than manager or organizational knowledge. So it doesn't proliferate as easily and quickly. There are many other reasons, some simpler, some more complex)

Truthfully, I resolved many many more arguments between people (within my own org or between orgs) than between me and someone else.

At the same time, the person arguing with their boss doesn't realize (until much later) their job is not to be technically right. Technically right/good is one of many aspects that are often getting traded off against each other. One thing they seem to not have discussed at all is "is this worth arguing about?". Does this choice really matter? What was the worst thing that happens if they don't do it the way they were arguing about. How likely is that really to happen, and if it does, can you tell early enough to do something about it? etc.

Reading this story feels like someone dragging out an argument continuously that simply didn't need to be argued about at all because it didn't matter enough.

The takeaway isn't that you should avoid arguing with your boss (as others say, you should run away from bosses you can't disagree with). The takeaway is that you should stop and think about whether this is really an argument that needs to be had, instead of arguing about everything because it's not perfect.

DannyBee··on Optimization Solver as a Service
In this particular case they are power usage and rate optimization problems to do peak shaving/demand shifting with a combination of batteries and optionally, solar. It tells you the max you can save, the amount of battery/solar you should have (including the pareto front because sometimes it's like 2x the battery for $5 more in savings), and how to program the inverters.

For free, mind you, this is not part of a paid offering on my part.

These are easy for the case of non-demand rates (IE the rate just changes at x hour to x price), and can be solved by HIGHS/et al in a second or two. You can actually prove there is at least one optimal solution that only changes inverter programming at a rate change point.

They are actually quite complex when the rate has a demand charge (IE you are charged not just for x price per kwh, but also some amount * max demand usage of any single hour in a month).

The max demand charge is usually 80% of the bill.

The complexity is because recharging the batteries (particularly without solar) is the same as any other load from a demand perspective. So they have to be trickled (or charged from solar), etc. On top of that, lots of inverters have a limited amount of TOU slots you can use (for example, sol-ark inverters only support 6 periods). Which constrains it painfully. Gurobi can solve it in about 30 seconds. HIGHS takes around 15 minutes to solve it for 2 years of hourly history data.

DannyBee··on Optimization Solver as a Service
Not if i have to pay for it and use a different API?

Remember, NEOS is both free, and pyomo already supports it natively without me changing anything - i can use both neos and local without any issue.

Why would i move to something with a different API that i have to pay for?

DannyBee··on Optimization Solver as a Service
NEOS will let you run this stuff on cplex/gurobi/etc (IE much faster than the backends behind quicopt), for free, is integrated with pyomo/etc, and has like an 8 hour time limit.

Often, the difference on "harder" problems is 10x or more.

I have problems that gurobi solves in 30 seconds that take 15 minutes or more for ~every non-commercial solver (or-tools, HIGHS, ipopt, etc).

But right now, this wouldn't even be interesting to me to use even if they actually were fronting commercial solvers, because they can't actually run it any faster and having this ".solve" API does nothing - pyomo already does that for me in practice.

DannyBee··on The classifiers Anthropic puts in front of Fable are too zealous
the ancestry predicate at the beginning of the formal problem statement here is dominance, at least as applied to their rooted trees.

Because it is a rooted tree, only DFS intervals are required to determine ancestry.

You can detect whether a new blocking loop is going to be formed through online dominator maintenance/online cycle detection, etc, during optimization, rather than use a heuristic, if you wanted to.

Not sure it's practically faster, but that's at least the graph-theoretic answer.

In practice, outside of the suggested heuristic, I have to imagine you'd normally throw branch and bound at this, using some lazy-cut for the blocking loops (IE you can keep any of these edges but not all of them) and let it go to town.

The paper (at least, this paper) doesn't compare that to what they did, and i'd be shocked if someone hasn't tried this before, so not sure it's useful.

I'll also say you can get existing AI models to tell you the above, but you have to push them a bit most of the time step by step. Just handing them the whole overall problem, as described, and saying "what are the graph theoretical problems related to this" it sort of gets lost.

Probably because the LLM isn't doing a good job of predicting graph-theoretic words when the language is not graph theoretic, but if you translate it into a graph theoretic language piece by piece, and ask it about that, the prediction becomes better :)

DannyBee··on CarPlay Is Additive
I used to refuse to buy cars without carplay. For many of the reasons I expect others do.

I have a rivian, and my wife has a car with carplay. I've had rivians for years now. I don't miss carplay when i drive my Rivian.

In truth, I used carplay for 3 main things - navigation that didn't suck, listening to music on the apps i wanted to, and reading text messages out loud.

Rivian has made those things not suck. So i don't miss carplay.

On my wife's car, those things suck, badly, without carplay.

I'm sure there are people out there who heavily depend on carplay for other things, and thus, it really does matter if they have carplay or not.

and maybe a day will come when the features carplay could provide me are as shitty on the Rivian as they are on my wife's car, and i'll start demanding it again.

But at least right now, that's not true, and so I think Rivian's choice is fine.

DannyBee··on Why I'm Forced to Say Farewell: Google Management Has Lost Its Moral Compass
Of course i realize how privileged it is. It seemed like useful information to the discussion, so i added it. I don't particularly care if people know how much or how little i made.

The vast majority of HN in the US is almost certainly within the top 1% of earners in the US (the cutoff is ~660k for households, ~450k for individuals), and the rest is probably within the top 10% (the cutoff is ~260k for households, ~150k for individuals). So overall it's a fairly privileged place, even if it likes to often pretend it's not.

In my life i've been both very poor and very rich. I'm now happy, and that matters a lot more than either.

I also happen to think it's fairly naive to believe that making lots of money makes it trivial to leave a place.

It's like believing having loved someone for 20 years makes it easier to get divorced.

DannyBee··on Why I'm Forced to Say Farewell: Google Management Has Lost Its Moral Compass
About 3x that, actually.

Timing wise, I happened to leave after my old grants expired and before my new grants would be in my account. I was a VP of engineering when i left. Google pays VP's quite well.

If there's a reason you want more exact numbers, poke me over email.

DannyBee··on Why I'm Forced to Say Farewell: Google Management Has Lost Its Moral Compass
Sometimes.

Sometimes not.

I left with more than 4 million in RSU's left.

Pretty much any Googler who leaves will be leaving lots of money on the table.

This is because they are usually 3/4 year grants, so it's pretty much impossible to leave without lots of unvested RSU.

There are some 1 year grants, but those are much more uncommon (~1%)

DannyBee··on Supersonic flight returning to US after half-century ban
There is no profit, which is why their is no service. The average profit margin is 4% on flying.

At this point, airlines make most of their actual profit from credit cards.

I forget who said it, but "airlines are banks that happen to fly planes" is true, at least profit wise.

DannyBee··on Reducing tick density along recreational trails in Ottawa, Canada
No, i mean not wearing PPE while spraying pesticides. Most of them wear gloves. Maybe long sleeve shirt/pants. Respirator/masks are very rare.

Permethrin is not well absorbed through skin anyway (0.5-1%). But easily absorbed by breathing it.

DannyBee··on Reducing tick density along recreational trails in Ottawa, Canada
That's easy - lyme disease. If you read the studies you linked, it even shows this very clearly.

The first study is talking about constant occupational exposure. By people not wearing basic PPE, over the course of many many years. It's like taking a shower in permethrin every day for 30 minutes. You can pretty much substitute lots of every day things that get absorbed by skin for "permethrin" here and it would cause some very serious symptoms.

The second study used 34mg/kg of permethrin. That is an insane amount, and one that you could not even likely get without intentional ingestion of concentrated powder form.

If you weight 150lbs, that is 2300mg. So a huge horse sized pill of permethrin, every day, will cause issues.

Shocking.

2300mg a day of most substances will cause issues.

Hell, 2300mg a day of most things will cause serious issues faster than permethrin

2300mg of vitamin b3 would destroy your liver very quickly (weeks/months).

2300mg of vitamin b6 would cause permanent nerve damage very quickly (weeks/months)

etc

The reason we don't classify all pesticides as equally dangerous is because they are not all equally dangerous.

Lumping them all together and painting them with a single brush is as unhelpful here as it is when it is done in any other context.

Permethrin is just a synthetic version of pyrethrin, which is extracted from chrysanthemums.

It is probably one of the least harmful substances you will ever be around.

Lyme disease is easily a much greater threat to people than exposure to permethrin and derivatives while hiking.

The exposure to wood dust and other small particles from disturbing the wood chips is probably a greater threat than the permethrin.

DannyBee··on Fable Converted Pylint to Rust
Agreed

It reminds me very heavily of being on woodworking forums as ever more mass automation happened, and the infinite arguments around whether using power tools/CNC/etc was still "real woodworking".

Lots of previously "hand-crafted" industries have dealt with mass automation. Software is not the first or the last. Hand-wringing by practitioners will change nothing, as it did not for any other industry. The vast majority of customers only care about the results, not the means. While there are some in the high end commission world who care about the art form, this is very rare and not sustainable for the majority.

History says folks would be better off learning how folks survived and adapted in those industries, rather than trying to argue about how worthless or crappy the change is.

Hobby wise, sure, whatever, but as a business what happens is very clear

DannyBee··on Show HN: FablePool – pool money behind a prompt, and Fable builds it in public
Mixed in with all these aspirational positive things is some sad person trying to get a better Microsoft Teams client.

https://fablepool.com/projects/76

DannyBee··on Adopting the Parallel DWARF linker in dsymutil
Sure, but COFF and its variations are much less practically common in Unixes (ie ignoring PE)

In any case, it’s highly doubtful being different from ELF is offering real value to anyone at this point, it’s just nobody wants to spend time, money, etc to migrate when incremental change to their own formats gets most of what they want.

Though it is probably accurate to say apple probably has it the worst here. Mach-O tooling is almost certainly the least available out of ELF, COFF, and Mach-O.

DannyBee··on Associative learning turns DEET from aversive to appetitive in Aedes aegypti
Picardin is based on the chemical that makes black pepper spicy, which is why it does that if you get it your eyes or mouth.

DEET is a toluene derivative which is why it is super effective at melting plastics and doesn’t evaporate quickly

It was actually discovered by massive brute force chemical search for repellants

DannyBee··on Associative learning turns DEET from aversive to appetitive in Aedes aegypti
I always found DEET interesting because it is a toluene derivative, which is why it is remarkably effective at destroying plastics and such, in addition to being a repellant. Yet people spray it with abandon and then wonder what melted their watch or glasses or …
DannyBee··on Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection
#1 is a bluff. It would be really hard to drag it out and judges hate that. You are much more likely to end up paying the costs of the little guy as sanctions than bankrupting them or whatever.

This is also straightforward enough and enough evidence exists that it would be hard to drag it out.

DannyBee··on That Methyl Methacrylate Tank
Sure it can. So can Vitamin C though.

The overall point remains the same: the toxicity, both short and long term, of MMA, is comparable to lots of everyday substances that are both commonly eaten and inhaled.

It just isn't that toxic as far as chemicals go. That doesn't mean it would be like great for you but calling it "highly toxic" is tremendously overblown and doesnt serve anyone well to claim.

Let's save the highly toxic claim for things that actually deserve it. We don't have to sensationalize everything. I maintain my view that the explosion would likely be much much worse than the odds of significant respiratory damage from MMA.

Also note the sensationalization also causes placebo effect. People miles away started claiming "their lungs hurt" when

1. There was no leak

2. Even if their was and it was a conspiracy or whatever, your lungs have ~no pain receptors and your chest/pleura/etc would generally not hurt from MMA overexposure. Your throat would and your skin would, depending on concentration. But nobody complained about skin irritation when the is basically no way to end up with one without the other.

Etc.

Sensationalization of this hurt people so far more than the actual issue!

DannyBee··on That Methyl Methacrylate Tank
MMA is not very toxic. It has the same LD50 as vitamin C. Table salt and baking soda are twice as toxic as MMA, for example.

Additionally it is almost certainly not in vapor form at 100 degrees. In sunlight it will also polymerize to a solid pretty quickly.

As such you'd practically have to drink it inside to hit the ld50.

The explosion would be much worse than a release of liquid or vapor based MMA during the day, and here it almost certainly solidified at this point

DannyBee··on Breakthroughs for batteries could soon make them better
Bug me at my email, and i'll happily send you pictures/etc
DannyBee··on Toxic chemical leak at a manufacturing facility in Orange County
So MMA has a fairly high autoignition temperature - it's >815F (gasoline is like 475F).

It also has a fairly small explosive concentration range (2-12%).

(the inhibitors it gets mixed with are about the same autoignition temperature, but have higher flashpoints).

In any case:

1. The pinhole issue can be resolved pretty easily by making a big hole instead of a small one :)

2. MMA is normally stored at ~0psi. The increasing pressure here is from runaway polymerization boiling the liquid (the runaway comes from the polymerization being strongly exothermic). These tanks are not built to handle very much pressure, usually a few psi max. I doubt whatever the tank pressure is currently qualifies as the kind of high pressure you are talking about.

3. There is apparently a significant crack now that is relieving most of the pressure. Which is preventing it from bursting. Assuming the crack didn't exist before this all occurred (so far the prevailing theory is it did not, but who knows how it will turn out), it almost certainly started as a pinhole that propagated, so if it was going to ignite the way you said, it would have happened already. My guess - even if what you say is 100% correct, the pressure is never high enough to cause issues, even with pinholes.

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