HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

aetimmes

576 karma · joined April 17, 2013

@NVIDIA. Former employers: Princeton University, Bloomberg, Twitter, SeatGeek.
submissionscomments
aetimmes··on Woman in Brazil enslaved for 55 years by 3 generations of the same family
Because exploitation is a two-actor system and poverty is a unary operator.
aetimmes··on IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark
Last I checked, they're on Fastly who already support IPv6.
aetimmes··on AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition crams 208MB of cache into a single chip
None. Every component is seeing huge demand.
aetimmes··on Make macOS consistently bad unironically
I think we're already seeing the operating systems that AI can build, and I don't think they've been an improvement.
aetimmes··on Miscellanea: The War in Iran
Only a small fraction of a typical barrel of oil is allocated to energy generation. The majority goes to transportation/industrial use-cases. The transportation usage can be allayed with sonar energy, but the industrial use-cases cannot.
aetimmes··on GPT-5.4
> is extremely woke

What does this mean to you?

aetimmes··on I'm not worried about AI job loss
Datacenters were very automated when RAM was infinite. As the world becomes compute-constrained, the economics may increase the demand for smart hands mixing-and-matching server components to turn two broken servers into one working server.
aetimmes··on Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update
Running ad blockers for me is a matter of principle. The amount of tracking and telemetry that exists on the Internet is 1. massively invasive from a privacy perspective and 2. massively wasteful from an energy, bandwidth and time perspective.

If you have something worth selling, then sell it.

aetimmes··on Mexican Navy ship crashes into Brooklyn Bridge leaving two people dead
Jumping into water from roughly the height of the Brooklyn Bridge is generally what people do when they _want_ to end their own lives.
aetimmes··on Google Play sees 47% decline in apps since start of last year
It's called "20 BlueStacks instances in a trenchcoat"
aetimmes··on Harvard's response to federal government letter demanding changes
And under the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
aetimmes··on US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China, 20% on EU
Optimistic to assume that the US will have voting in 3.5 years.
aetimmes··on Utah becomes first US state to ban fluoride in its water
You're free to get your water straight from the ground, then.
aetimmes··on War story: the hardest bug I ever debugged
(disclaimer: I know OP IRL.)

I'm seeing a lot of comments saying "only 2 days? must not have been that bad of a bug". Some thoughts here:

At my current day job, our postmortem template asks "Where did we get lucky?" In this instance, the author definitely got lucky that they were working at Google where 1) there were enough users to generate this Heisenbug consistently and 2) that they had direct access to Chrome devs.

Additionally - the author (and his team) triaged, root caused and remediated a JS compiler bug in 2 days. The sheer amount of complexity involved in trying to narrow down where in the browser code this could all be going wrong is staggering. Consider that the reason it took him "only" two days is because he is very, _very_ good at what he does.

aetimmes··on So you want to build your own data center
I think the word GP is objecting to isn't "your own" but rather "build".

For people who have taken empty lots and constructed new data centers (ie, the whole building) on them from scratch, the phrase "building a datacenter" involves a nonzero amount of concrete.

OP seems to have built out a data hall - which is still a cool thing in its own right! - but for someone like me who's interested in "baking an apple pie from scratch", the mismatch between the title and the content was slightly disappointing.

aetimmes··on Bluesky is on the verge of overtaking Threads in all the ways that matter
I mean, it's all just quicksort under the hood, right? By extension...
aetimmes··on Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson
> Right before the recent Twitter acquisition, the various bits of info that came to the limelight included the "minor detail" that they had more than doubled their headcount and associated expenses, but had not doubled either their revenue or profits.

Every tech company massively inflated their headcount during the leadup to the Twitter acquisition because money was free.

I interviewed at Meta in 2021 and asked an EM what he would do if given a magic wand to fix one problem at the company. His response: "I would instantly hire 10,000 more engineers."

Elon famously did the opposite and now revenue is down 80%.

aetimmes··on Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson
Google search is dying because of business reasons, not technical ones. The ads branch is actively cannibalizing search quality to make people perform more searches and view more ads.

"Microservices" have nothing to do with it.

aetimmes··on Speeding Up Your Website Using Cloudflare Cache
Care to explain why?
aetimmes··on Ask HN: Going low-level – what to learn next?
Read through Understanding Software Dynamics by Richard Sites and work through the example problems in the book.

He discusses exactly what you're describing (L1/2/3 cache hit rates, their performance implications, how compiler optimizations can fool us into thinking we have a good hit rate, etc).

Also take a look into Intel VTune and Processor Tracing to understand how performance counters like Instructions per Cycle are calculated.

aetimmes··on GPUs Go Brrr
Even if you're not familiar with the "go brrr" meme (which is the only use of meme-idiom in the article and is used exactly twice), its meaning is easily inferred via context clues from the opening paragraphs.

Good writing is also entertaining and engaging.

aetimmes··on How to hack the Jacksonville Jaguars' jumbotron
The incidents that occurred were minor but had the potential to be much worse (for instance, if he had figured out how to upload and display one of the items from his personal multimedia collection).
aetimmes··on HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 explained
cmd.exe is a terminal emulator and PowerShell is a fully-formed scripting language (that Windows desperately needed). This analogy doesn't work the way you think it does.
aetimmes··on K8s Service Meshes: The Bill Comes Due
Ultimately, in the age of massive cloud compute, the constraining resource in an organization is engineering hours, not CPU/memory/bandwidth. And even then, I've yet to encounter a system (outside of massively parallel MPI-based HPC) where saturating network pipes became the bottleneck for a system before CPU/memory utilization.

Microservice architecture means there's lot of data flying around, but it keeps local resource utilization predictable.

aetimmes··on Starlink's laser system is beaming 42 petabytes of data per day
> the things he's done are amazing

The things he's _purchased_ are amazing.

aetimmes··on Dynamic programming is not black magic
I don't understand why you would use tail recursive functions for fibonacci ever and hence its relevance for dynamic programming. It can be solved with a simple equation with one input parameter. Solution left to OP as an exercise.
aetimmes··on Tech Hubs Are Losing the Talent War to Everywhere Else
The financial sector in NY was never going to let a non-compete ban happen.
aetimmes··on Mitchell reflects as he departs HashiCorp
Nomad is dead in the water.

When you talk to Consul support engineers, they assume you're using kubernetes, and are confused if you tell them you're using Nomad, _a product that their company makes_.

aetimmes··on Firefox Keeps Getting Faster
> Firefox gets into the adblocker business

This would be an abysmal decision all around. Firefox doesn't have enough market share to command any sort of price for this, and selling ad-blocker access would immediately destroy all trust in Firefox as a product.

aetimmes··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2023)
It's a psyops campaign run by DevOpsers/SREs to enable them to actually write code instead of being 100% ops.
Page 1 of 5Next →