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bbarn

3,972 karma · joined September 11, 2013

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bbarn··on Pentium II at 600Mhz with Voodoo 3 Emulated on 86Box with M6 Mac Mini
But can it emulate having two voodoo II's and a desk fan pointed at it?
bbarn··on Norton Neo Browser
Pétain was a soldier with what, 50 years of experience when he made that choice?

He picked the wrong side obviously, but is it also possible he did what he though was best for France? Both things can be true.

bbarn··on Norton Neo Browser
I like one called Total Commander - the UI feels dated by damn am I fast with it.
bbarn··on Norton Neo Browser
It's definitely one of the saddest stories in our industry. Peter Norton's books literally taught me to program as a teenager, and now his name is synonymous with mal/bloatware.
bbarn··on Iceland votes on whether to restart talks on joining EU
Not sure how it would affect home mortgages but the majority of icelanders are on mortgage plans that the principal remaining rises with inflation(I forget the name, I left a few years ago) - and will never likely pay them off.
bbarn··on Get your Windows license refund
Because they don't license it for and support it running on millions of different combinations of models, hardware, etc. MacOS can be clean only because it has such limited scope of what it has to handle compared to windows/linux
bbarn··on The August 17 outage
Exactly this. I've seen production level trading systems grind to a halt over a simple bug and no matter what tests you have in place, it happens.
bbarn··on What Apple and Google are doing to push notifications
Uber is especially bad here. I live rural, but when I travel I use it (and uber eats sometimes) when I'm out of town. At this point I uninstall the app and only install it when I know I might use it because it's so invasive with marketing crap. Even more annoying is the fact that why yes, I would love a burger delivered but there's literally nothing your service can get me to my home.
bbarn··on Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989
I can't remember, could you buy a math coprocessor for it?

I know my 286 you could pair with a 287 next to it.. not sure if it really made a difference you could discern outside of hyper-specific uses though.

bbarn··on How to talk to anyone and why you should
If anyone doesn't know where to start - start in places you're stuck next to people. Like in line to check out at the grocery store. I have struck up dozens of conversations looking at the belt and guessing what they're making for dinner. People who like to cook love to talk about cooking.
bbarn··on Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android
I still use it on iOS, and I've tried to remove all other keyboards, but Apple still just seems to "make up" keyboards I don't know are installed. Or switch keyboards on me mid-typing a word to a weird native one I also don't show as installed. It used to be very occasionally this would happen but now it's so repeatable since 26 I can almost not use my keyboard.

One caveat, I have an Icelandic keyboard installed on there. Sometimes web controls will force an input box to a US english keyboard (or numpad), which is annoying but at least that's sort of covered by a spec. What really drives me nuts is when I'm mid typing on the swype keyboard and suddely it switches to a completely square grid keyboard with up and down quotes in the autocomplete (which is not actually autocompleting or correcting(which while technically correct has almost completely fallen out of popularity since the dawn of the internet)

bbarn··on How London became the rest of the world’s startup capital
Working for London startups in the past, I've found they're much more polite, but much less honest and straightforward. There's a layer of britishness you have to get past sometimes to get to what people really want instead of directness.
bbarn··on Toll roads are spreading in America
Except the impact of even gas prices going up has added to costs in basically anything delivered by truck. Every tax you put on that just eventually ends up in consumer hands.
bbarn··on Toll roads are spreading in America
It was very much on and off for many years. It was intended to cover the costs then go away. Instead they installed stream lined overhead tolls to not have to wait at the toll booth anymore and now it's just a perpetual tax.

It's also partially owned by outside investment (specifically the skyway from Indiana)

bbarn··on We invited a man into our home at Christmas and he stayed with us for 45 years
I had a similar issue living abroad. My wife had a work visa (which was the reason we we moving) and I was allowed to go being a spouse, but once there getting a permit to work for myself was impossible without a job, and a job was impossible without a work permit.

There were ways around it, but it took finding a job at a really big company to make it work - they had dealt with it and had HR people that specialized in it. Once "on paper", I was pretty free to move around. I would not be surprised if their method was just putting in all zeros in the system or something until the permit number came back.

bbarn··on We pwned X, Vercel, Cursor, and Discord through a supply-chain attack
I mean, as a hiring manager, a fresh grad with multiple bug bounties tells me a lot about their drive and skill, so I'd agree. It's a great differentiator.
bbarn··on How to Attend Meetings
I think the cultural norm of a stance like this for attendees will condition people over time to follow the opposite side of things.
bbarn··on A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs
I think it's just an unfair comparison in general. The power of the LLM is the zero risk to failure, and lack of consequence when it does. Just try again, using a different prompt, retrain maybe, etc.

Humans make a bad choice, it can end said human's life. The worst choice a LLM makes just gets told "no, do it again, let me make it easier"

bbarn··on Hidden interface controls that affect usability
That was the point of the article. Users with knowledge of how it works can do it fine, but new users can't.

Your average dev who's never used vim or vi will start frustrated by default.

bbarn··on You are what you launch: how software became a lifestyle brand
I can in here to be snarky about this because it drives me nuts and screams "I'm so artsy" that it's aggravating. But you beat me to it.
bbarn··on Human coders are still better than LLMs
Honestly, if you're not doing it now, you're behind. The sheer amount of time savings using it smartly can give you to allow you to focus on the parts that actually matter is massive.
bbarn··on Human coders are still better than LLMs
The thing is, it is replacing _coders_ in a way. There are millions of people who do (or did) the work that LLMs excel at. Coders who are given a ticket that says "Write this API taking this input and giving this output" who are so far down the chain they don't even get involved in things like requirements analysis, or even interact with customers.

Software engineering, is a different thing, and I agree you're right (for now at least) about that, but don't underestimate the sheer amount of brainless coders out there.

bbarn··on Human coders are still better than LLMs
They will also not be offended or harbor ill will when you completely reject their "pull request" and rephrase the requirements.
bbarn··on Unauthorized experiment on r/changemyview involving AI-generated comments
Assuming power stayed automated, I wonder if all life on earth just vanished, how long AIs would keep talking to each other on reddit? I have to assume as long as the computers stayed up.
bbarn··on 2,031-HP Hennessey Venom F5 Evolution Claims 0 to 200 MPH in 10 Seconds
My late father in law worked with them engineering the previous version of this car. It's about maximizing performance and engineering challenges. Many of the engineers are seasoned veterans of large car company's engineering teams, or racing teams. This is a playground for them to figure things out that you just don't justify on consumer cars.
bbarn··on 2,031-HP Hennessey Venom F5 Evolution Claims 0 to 200 MPH in 10 Seconds
My late father in law worked with them in developing the previous generation, and he was 6'4".
bbarn··on Googler... ex-Googler
I think his statement could have benefited from and/or implicitly in the list of titles.

I certainly care very deeply about my people, and letting someone go is a last resort after trying to work things out. My boss cares that I care.. their boss.. we're numbers.

bbarn··on Eight or more drinks per week linked to brain lesions
Yeah, the fact that 40% get them regardless makes the slight increases seem.. statistically irrelevant?
bbarn··on Eight or more drinks per week linked to brain lesions
Of those who never drank, 40% had vascular brain lesions. Of the moderate drinkers, 45% had vascular brain lesions. Of the heavy drinkers, 44% had vascular brain lesions. Of the former heavy drinkers, 50% had vascular brain lesions.

So, I read this as "If you're a heavy drinker, it's better than being moderate or ever stopping"

Statistics are fun.

bbarn··on Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think
The difference is HN is a community curated feed, not an advertiser and for profit curated feed.
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