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acwan93

907 karma · joined January 2, 2020

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acwan93··on Gateside by TSA Precheck
I read somewhere that Pittsburgh airport was trying to do something like this cause the stores gateside were not available anywhere else.

In any case, like with airport lounges, it seems like “everyone” has some form of credit card that gives them Precheck/Global Entry for free, further dividing the commercial air experience.

acwan93··on Highest-ever ocean temperature measured as powerful El Niño forms
You’re correct that LA is usually hot (95F+) this time of year, but the humidity is what’s abnormal. The dew point in Disneyland was higher than in Disney World yesterday due to a tropical storm that dissipated west of the LA basin.

More tropical storms are approaching LA and that’s increasing humidity is why it’s sweltering.

acwan93··on Siri AI
That and going to Philz or Tartine afterwards. At one point both those places were on every Apple marketing copy.
acwan93··on United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert
Ben Stiller right? That’s Meet the Parents.
acwan93··on Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
If anything, coming across as “a little odd” can be a sign I’m actually talking to a human.
acwan93··on Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
Your perception of the reality is spot on. For this round I was hiring for entry level technical support and we had limited time to properly vet candidates.

Unfortunately what we end up doing is have to make some assumptions. If something seems remotely fishy, like that “Memory updated” or typeface change (ChatGPT doesn’t follow your text formatting when pasting into your email compose window), it raises a lot of eyebrows and very quickly leads to a rejection. There’s other cases where your written English is flawless but your phone interview indicates you don’t understand the English language compared to when we correspond over email/Indeed/etc.

Mind you, this is all before we even get to the technical knowledge part of any interview.

On a related hire, I am also in the unfortunate position where we may have to let a new CS grad go because it seemed like every code change and task we gave him was fully copy/pasted through ChatGPT. When presented with a simple code performance and optimization bug, he was completely lost on general debugging practices which led our team to question his previous work while onboarding. Using AI isn’t against company policy (see: small team with limited resources), but personally I see over reliance on ChatGPT as much, much worse than blindly following Stack Overflow.

acwan93··on Ask HN: What is interviewing like now with everyone using AI?
I don’t know the answer, but I’d like to share that I asked a simple question about scheduling a phone interview to learn more about a candidate.

The candidate’s first response? “Memory updated”. That led to some laughs internally and then a clear rejection email.

acwan93··on "We ran out of columns"
Dear god this is pretty much what I went through when I started taking over a company with a 35-40 year old codebase. Files spread everywhere, no consensus, and supporting customizations for thousands of customers who we didn’t know if they were even still using the system.

It took five years and the firing of the long-time “head” programmer until some meaningful change was made.

acwan93··on The Forgotten History of Chinese Keyboards
Relatively. The amount of diacritics on Vietnamese surpasses European languages so text rendering becomes a challenge if a naive developer doesn't test with Vietnamese.
acwan93··on Live NASA telescope feed for today's solar eclipse [video]
> I used to say this about seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time after seen pictures/video of it, but the eclipse was at least 10x that experience.

I said the same thing about seeing Tunnel View in Yosemite for the first time. It's the closest thing that I can say that describes the experience and the eclipse eclipses (heh) that.

acwan93··on Ask HN: Advice for a new father?
>Most advice you find online is useless. "Mommy-bloggers" have SEO spammed the internet with waste. It's either some form of extreme child micromanagement, or rituals designed for people with saint-like patience or time on their hands. Get your advice from real people - pediatricians, parents, friends, etc.

I wonder if someone else can chime in here, but I've found that ChatGPT's answers should be on-par with these mom-fluencers.

acwan93··on Ask HN: Advice for a new father?
As a crossing guard at my local high school told me: "Welcome to the Brotherhood!"

Every baby is different and you should take all advice with a huge grain of salt, including the ones listed here.

Don't be afraid to ask for help. Everyone pays attention to the child but you and your partner will need help too managing this new life transition. Even if you're not the birthing parent, you too have also gone through this massive change in time, mental space, and life meaning.

Also, unless there's extenuating circumstances, don't make any big life changes (new job, divorce, new house) in the first year. You aren't in the right headspace.

acwan93··on The world nearly adopted a calendar with 13 months of 28 days
I had to look up that last bit. There was a system I was working with whose developers told me “Assume Eastern Time” all the time (I'm on PDT/PST)…until the daylight saving time change in March. I missed some data from their end and their developers told me to “just fetch again and correct your code”

> While it may be safe to assume local time when communicating in the same time zone, it is ambiguous when used in communicating across different time zones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Time_zone_designators

acwan93··on Map: The states in favor of daylight saving time all year long
It’s also entirely possible if permanent DST passes and gets repealed (again) we’ll be back to where we are now 60 years later.
acwan93··on The Darién Gap
It's cheaper to ship something from Shanghai to Los Angeles than from Bogotá to Cartagena, or so my classes taught me when I took a class on Colombia's economy.
acwan93··on Tech doesn’t make our lives easier. It makes them faster
The Catholic church has tried:

>On New Year's Eve 1930, the Roman Catholic Church officially banned any "artificial" means of birth control. Condoms, diaphragms and cervical caps were defined as artificial, since they blocked the natural journey of sperm during intercourse.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/pill-ca...

acwan93··on WiFi without internet on a Southwest flight
Flighty leverages the Apple Push Notification Service (APN), which the iMessage infrastructure also uses. It's why you can receive notifications in flight but can't act on them.
acwan93··on Abandoned and little-known airfields
>As population centers shift and housing gets built, people move in next to noisy airports and then say to themselves "Holy shit, I moved next to an airport and it's loud. How could I have known? Surely this is the airport's fault!" and they go complain to their city.

Harrison Ford makes a similar case about KSMO and why it's important to continue investing in general aviation.

>“Of course then they do a survey among Santa Monica voters. ‘What are the ten things that most need to be done?’ Number ten on their list is to get rid of the airport. But number one on their list is traffic congestion. [Lowers chin, raises eyebrows, points at me.] I rest my case.”

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a43965150/harri...

acwan93··on IKEA-Oriented Development
You need one when building a Hemnes or Billy. The back of the nightstand/bookcase is a sheet that you slide in and hammer in with nails.
acwan93··on Ask HN: Why aren’t planes boarded back-to-front?
United and Delta tried during the pandemic to improve social distancing [1] but switched back once travel came back, and I'm guessing this kind of boarding ended up being slower. It turns out the Southwest way (random boarding) was still the fastest.

>Loading back to front just moves the line inside the plane, but is not significantly faster than loading from the front to the back.[2]

[1]: https://thepointsguy.com/news/back-to-front-boarding-coronav...

[2]: https://thepointsguy.com/2012/10/travel-science-improving-ai...

acwan93··on Dell to layoff 6,650 employees as demand for PCs plummets
Even PCs that are nearly 10 years old can still keep going when you add more RAM and use an SSD. We’ve done that for work computers for non-devs and it’s been going great.
acwan93··on Number of CS degrees on the verge of suprassing all humanities degrees
Berkeley EECS alum: is it true that CS61A (the intro course) is now moved to Haas Pavilion (the basketball court) and there are 45 TAs? I remember the professor at the time I was there said that CS61A was only impacted during the dot-com bubble, and it seems like it's back again.
acwan93··on Massive Southwest Airlines disruption leaves customers stranded
Slight tangent on this and something I've always wondered: if something as basic yet extremely crucial as scheduling software is outdated (SWA might very well be on a mainframe or transmitting CSV files in an FTP server and that server could've acted up), how on earth are they expected to scale and adopt new tech? It seems like a ticking time bomb and gross mismanagement.

Fortunately I'm not flying this week, but I've already seen and experienced numerous meltdowns from SWA in the past. If this doesn't signal a wake-up call to invest in tech infrastructure for any company I don't know what else will.

acwan93··on The maddening mess of airport codes [video]
Cryptic codes and abbreviations are surprisingly prevalent in more places than you'd expect. Anyone working with EDI documents in medical or retailers has first hand knowledge.
acwan93··on What happens to all our tech after we're gone?
Feel like there's no real difference now. People today who don't use (or don't want to use) password managers keep their passwords/credentials in the Notes app or some combination of "most used symbols and numbers".
acwan93··on Nearly Half of San Franciscans Have Been Victims of Theft, New Poll Says
What I don't understand is why this is simply normalized. My friends in the Bay Area refuse to leave anything in the trunk of their own car, even if no one has seen them put it in the trunk in the first place.

How is this okay?

acwan93··on AWS us-east-2 outage
In all seriousness, we've been deploying everything on us-west-2, and it seems to have dodged most of the outages recently. Is there something special about that data center?
acwan93··on Snapchat Stock Down by 38%
It's not just Snap that does it. Instagram and Facebook did the same several years ago when I quit, and I haven't received any nag emails in a long time from them.
acwan93··on Rare ‘triple’ La Niña climate event looks likely
Anyone here know if the thunderstorm events in SoCal earlier this week is a result of this?
acwan93··on Sunsetting Atom
I really wanted to use Coda (now Nova [1]) from Panic, but I kept coming back to VSCode. VSCode seems to be the path of least resistance.

I think I’ll try it again after seeing the news about Atom.

[1]: https://nova.app/

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