HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

Nathanba

787 karma · joined October 28, 2018

submissionscomments
Nathanba··on It's the end of observability as we know it (and I feel fine)
I was initially agreeing with the article but it's a clever marketing piece. Nothing changes, these graphs were already really easy to read and if they weren't then they should be. You should already be capable of zooming into your latency spike within seconds and clicking on it and seeing which method was slow. So asking the AI will be more comfortable but it doesn't change anything.
Nathanba··on RFK Jr.: HHS moves to restore public trust in vaccines
Next time they shouldn't lie nonstop about almost every single thing during a pandemic. Then you can expect people to follow you. People don't like to follow proven liars, whether they did it with "good intentions" is ultimately irrelevant. Someone with good intentions can also bring you to ruin.

1. They lied about masks, first it was irrelevant whether you wore one or not, then they changed their mind and suddenly masks were super important and you just have to wear one or else. The truth is that it probably helps a little because duh, you have some cloth in front of your breathing, it probably catches some particles but definitely not all all the time. Saying that scientific truth evolved is utter nonsense, experts definitely always knew particle size and mask efficiency. They just didn't care and didn't do their job figuring it out and telling people the real efficiency.

2. They lied constantly that vaccines are super safe and super effective, outright attempting to gaslight you that "nobody" dies to vaccines. Which is just a flat out lie. People absolutely died from vaccines and always have. Just stop lying about it.

3. The U.S president himself lied that you will not spread it anymore if you get vaccinated. All lies. And it was definitely already known at the time he said this, frankly it's common sense.

3. They lied about herd immunity which is basically impossible to achieve.

4. Deals with vaccine companies were kept secret, that doesn't exactly inspire much confidence to follow guidances when everyone knows how much money can corrupt.

5. They mounted a massive coercion campaign and constantly shamed everyone in the most pathetic ways possible with patronizing TV coverage. Colbert's little vaccine dance is historic at this point.

6. They strongly suppressed alternative points of view from other scientists and doctors. These were not flatearther tier people, they made good points and many were and are well respected people. And yet they were suppressed anyway.

And after all this you come here with a very generic comment about how disappointed you are that people didn't come together on a base truth. I'm disappointed that you seem to have no complaints and offer such a generic, apologist view of the past.

Nathanba··on Caffeine induces age-dependent brain complexity and criticality during sleep
caffeine seems to accumulate though, very soon it won't matter how late in the day you took your coffee today because there is still some amount in there from yesterday too. Personally I'm trying to drink as little coffee as possible now, sleep is too precious. I cannot risk having this constant negative health impact on my life.
Nathanba··on Denmark to raise retirement age to 70
But employees are not just pure net gains. If you hire a bunch of "retirement jobbers" you will still have to manage them. It sounds logical at first that you simply hire a few older people for lesser pay but in Europe the question is also why a 65 year old would accept a far lower paid job if he can simply go back on welfare and get paid the same? The reality will probably be that most old people will be unemployed so long that nobody wants to hire them even if they could hire them for a very low amount. People at that age will have a lot of pride built up, they are not going to want to stand in a supermarket for 3h a day either. Is society really going to force them? So far they are barely even willing to force young people to get jobs.

Just because you can hire a 68 year old to do content moderation or be an assistant teacher... does not mean that anybody actually wants him around at that age and that he will be a net gain to the environment. His speed and ability at work is inherently going to limit other people's speed in some way or form,not even just that. Even his vibe, his impact on the team. These things are all things that people consider during hiring. It's the concept of "the chain is only as strong as its weakest link" I suppose.

Nathanba··on You can choose tools that make you happy
I mostly agree and I think this is the reason why languages like Python or Ruby succeeded so much. People simply want to use a beautiful, easy to type, easy to read language. They don't care that it's slow and actually quite terrible at runtime and hard to test and so on. They want it anyway because it looks good and feels good. This is also why I've said from the start that I don't believe in ziglang despite all its features. It simply looks too ugly and you can't make that go away. One counter point could possibly be that golang code is also a bit ugly and it succeeded on its technical merits. But it's not quite as bad and the ugliness is voided by a lot of language simplicity.
Nathanba··on At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work
it doesn't have to be precise enough anymore though because a perfect AI can get all the details from the existing code and understand your intent from your prompt.
Nathanba··on I'd rather read the prompt
right and getting a family is also just a box to check and eating food is a box to check and brushing my teeth is just a box to check and on it goes for every single thing in life. If we all just checked boxes then we'd not be human anymore.
Nathanba··on Apple App Store guidelines remove ban on encouraging external payments in US
That makes no sense, using Paypal or Stripe is very normal on the web. There is no reason why it should be any different in apps except for Apple trying to gaslight us.
Nathanba··on Unauthorized experiment on r/changemyview involving AI-generated comments
I think we are at the point where I can tell that these posts are not worth reading but they could easily be human posts not worth reading. And the few posts that I would consider useful enough to read are essentially just condensed lists of real arguments so it has value for the sake of just the raw text
Nathanba··on AGI Is Still 30 Years Away – Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu
true and with AI I can look into far more subjects more quickly because the skill that was necessary was mostly just endless amounts of sifting through documentation and trying to find out why some error happens or how to configure something correctly. But this goes even further, it also applies to subjects where I couldn't intellectually understand something but there was noone to really ask for help. So I'm learning knowledge now that I simply couldn't have figured out on my own. It's a pure multiplier and humans have failed to solve the issue of documentation and support for one another. Until now of course.

I also think that once robots are around it will be yet another huge multiplier but this time in the real world. Sure the robot won't be as perfect as the human initially but so what. You can utilize it to do so much more. Maybe I'll bother actually buying a rundown house and renovating myself. If I know that I can just tell the robot to paint all the walls and possibly even do it 3 times with different paint then I feel far more confident that it won't be an untenable risk and bother.

Nathanba··on Anubis Works
Tens of thousands of scraper bots for a single site? Is that really the case? I would have assumed that maybe 3-5 bots send lets say 20 requests per second in parallel to scrape. Sure, they might eventually start trying different ips and bots if their others are timing out but ultimately it's still the same end result: All they will realize is that they have to increase the timeout and use headless browsers to cache results and the entire protection is gone. But yes, I think for big bot farms it will be a somewhat annoying cost increase to do this. This should really be combined with the cloudflare captcha to make it even more effective.
Nathanba··on Anubis Works
Yes but the scraper only has to solve it once and it gets cached too right? Surely it gets cached, otherwise it would be too annoying for humans on phones too? I guess it depends on whether scrapers are just simple curl clients or full headless browsers but I seriously doubt that Google tier LLM scrapers rely on site content loading statically without js.
Nathanba··on Trump's Tariffs Wipe Out over $6T on Wall Street in Epic Two-Day Rout
>Trust is not important if they are afraid of you

I understand that argument I've never seen it spelled out by anyone other than me. I only brought it up as a last effort to explain the possible thinking behind these actions. It still won't make sense because even if you believe that you are the top dog and you can effortlessly bully others then you'd have to realize that you won't be the top dog in every situation all the time everywhere at the same time. There will be many instances where others who previously leaned your way for free will now look to get paid for leaning your way.

Nathanba··on Tesla is sitting on $200M worth of Cybertruck inventory
I actually think that the design is something people could get behind. People are painting and coating it with various cool color schemes, some of them look great. The problem is that the car itself just doesn't seem good enough and has far too many quality issues and problems. The windshield wiper itself is like a flagpole for all that is wrong with that car. Of course - who knows, I'm only repeating things I saw on social media in this case. In a german reddit post I saw about Tesla cars I read that Teslas are supposedly actually fairly good quality by now ... compared to the even worse german EVs which simply declare your car's software obsolete after 3 years and never update it again.
Nathanba··on “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams
Nobody is seriously claiming that all work on earth can be done by individuals. Obviously the master blacksmith that designs and leads the outfitting of the entire king's army with superior weaponry thanks to his personal leadership and expertise and care ... is not hammering every sword himself. But to call it a team sport is also highly misleading and to say that he hasn't been x10 is also just flat out wrong.
Nathanba··on “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams
that's a bad analogy because a single football player cannot ever deliver a match entirely on his own. A single developer can absolutely deliver a full product on his own, it's not inherently a team sport whatsoever. You could make this claim about many things, "blacksmithing is a team sport!" Nonsense.
Nathanba··on Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it
well the only issue I have with that is that coding is already a fairly easy way to encode logic. Sure...writing Rust or C isn't easy but writing some memory managed code is so easy that I wonder whether we are helping ourselves by removing that much thinking from our lives. It's not quite the same optimization as building a machine so that we don't have to carry heavy stones ourselves. Now we are building a machine so we don't have to do heavy thinking ourselves. This isn't even specific to coding, lawyers essentially also encode logic into text form. What if lawyers in the future increasingly just don't bother understanding laws and just let an AI form the arguments?

I think there is a difference here for the future of humanity that has never happened before in our tool making history.

Nathanba··on European Cloud Computing Platforms
I guess nobody considers it price dumping because it's given away entirely for free. People only see it as price dumping when somebody offers something at a far lower price.. but nobody feels like complaining when somebody is so rich that they throw their money at you for free.
Nathanba··on Toward a Passwordless Future
Same here, I don't like passkeys for many reasons. Another reason is that I can't see the key that I'm using. Therefore: What if Bitwarden doesn't pick up the passkey? Tough luck, I'm out of options. I cannot manually create a passkey entry in Bitwarden because it's all hidden magic. If I notice that the password manager doesn't pick up a registration then I just add it myself. Not possible with passkeys.
Nathanba··on TSMC expected to announce $100B investment in U.S.
that's a nonsensically optimistic view given current events. It's far more likely that there is no security guarantee in a treaty form precisely because the US does not intend to help Taiwan.
Nathanba··on U.S. pauses all military aid to Ukraine
>In reality, that was always the case.

*while everybody made sure that they would band together to punish such behavior as the even bigger and stronger combined force

Nathanba··on Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting
it's not even about support, Trump wanted to extort Ukraine out of their resources without giving anything back. He failed to do so.
Nathanba··on Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting
The EU was united, namely in not bothering to help Ukraine. The US decided to want to help Ukraine and send weapons and set the tone and (slow) pace of the weapons that they sent. Only for them to pull the rug away later anyway. This is really terrible leadership, leaders who don't care about the results that they cause are poison. You can argue all day that it's sad and terrible that the EU wouldn't have helped at all. But under Germany's leadership at least this farce wouldn't have played out. You can argue then that it might cause problems later because Russia would be emboldened by a quick win in Ukraine. Fine but this is better now?
Nathanba··on The need for memory safety standards
I don't get it, what's the catch? Why isn't everyone using Fil-C immediately everywhere?
Nathanba··on OpenAI just put the final nail in the coffin of the open World Wide Web
Yes, it's even easier in this market with no regulations and less risk so browser and software automation via AI will happen far faster.
Nathanba··on OpenAI just put the final nail in the coffin of the open World Wide Web
People even let the cars drive on their own and they take their hands off the wheel. Letting an AI do a purchase is far less risky. People are fine with things like this as long as it appears to work reliably enough.
Nathanba··on Nobody cares
I've always been perplexed and dumbfounded by this to the point where it had a really bad effect on my life because I just couldn't believe that it's happening, in a sense my life was on hold. I couldn't believe that people don't understand the simplest things in life, that my own parents or brother or friends don't seem to care at all. I grew up with them at the same time after all, it didn't make sense to me. Even back in school when we were clearly not learning anything and the whole system was a joke, nobody said anything. Nobody cared. To me it was obvious that it can't be an IQ problem, they are human and go through the same systems as me and it doesn't even require intelligence to understand. What I ended up realizing much later is that people intentionally don't care and they intentionally make an effort not to know better. It's an optimization strategy that people develop consciously and subconsciously so that they don't have to do any more work, don't run into more risk, don't offend etc. They literally just give up while outwardly keeping up the pretense of caring.

I noticed the same thing that the article writer noticed: You can point out obvious problems to the exact person responsible for them and they will agree with you and later they still don't fix it. They just don't care, it's like you mentioned some geographical fact about a town in South Africa to them. A normal person would call this psychopathic behavior but now it's the human norm. I decided to cut people out of my life that don't care [about anything except themselves] because obviously there is just no point in interacting with them. To be honest, that's almost everyone in society. They are self benefit machines, hyper optimized for their own wellbeing. Fine, be a machine then but don't be surprised when I recognize you for what you are and I don't start playing tetris where the only outcome is benefit for you.

It's also sad how even in this thread on hackernews almost everyone disagrees with the author and they keep claiming that people do care about some stuff and it's okay and we are all human after all and so on. I want to emphasize: You aren't supposed to have to care about everything. But some people do in fact have jobs and specific duties and they are paid to care about them and still don't do it.

Nathanba··on Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs
Yes you need to read carefully and not let your own assumptions get in the way.

He did say: Filtering based on the owner's identity is bad. He did not say: Filtering based on the owner's identity is bad while that identity matches a person of color

Nathanba··on Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs
The irony is that he didn't say that at all and it's actually you who assumed this.
Nathanba··on Luigi Mangione's account has been renamed on Stack Overflow
Then it shouldn't be a problem to provide proof or at the very least a link to someone else providing proof.
← PreviousPage 4 of 16Next →