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burutthrow1234

249 karma · joined March 24, 2024

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burutthrow1234··on Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years
It's been a change in the past 10 years but I would say women are still systemically under-compensated, under-levelled, and encouraged to move into less prestigious roles like product, design, etc. The perception that women are better at "soft skills" means that we get pushed out of technical tracks into coordinating work, managing people, and sometimes just straight up babysitting male devs. Those career paths lead to lower lifetime comp and less "impressive" titles.
burutthrow1234··on USB and the Myth of 500 Milliamps
One of my favorite intern projects was cutting up power traces on USB hubs and connecting them to a giant bus bar so we could put multiple amps through them without tripping fuses on the host machine. Testing some very non-compliant hardware.
burutthrow1234··on Supreme Court rules ex-presidents have immunity for official acts
What if the President orders the Vice President to shoot someone in the street?

What if the President signs an Executive Order directing himself to shoot someone in the street?

burutthrow1234··on Supreme Court rules ex-presidents have immunity for official acts
"Change the law" versus "change the constitution" are two very different things.

The US couldn't pass the ERA, which just enshrines women's rights in the Constitution. Anything more controversial like "the President can't do extrajudicial murders" would be an endless partisan battle

burutthrow1234··on Supreme Court rules ex-presidents have immunity for official acts
I can't tell what your stance is on the al-Awlaki assassination? If the leader of a country orders an extra-judicial killing, especially of one of their own citizens, that seems like it deserves criminal penalties.

People get very judgemental when Putin assassinates defectors, but when Obama does it it's ok?

burutthrow1234··on Four lines of code it was four lines of code
`strace -c` will show you wall time per call and not just the volume of syscalls.
burutthrow1234··on Do I Regret Being 'Just' a Software Engineer?
Kaczynski has a few good points about the dehumanizing effects of industrialization, but man is his extremely long screed about "leftists" tiresome. You could give that chunk to Joe Rogan or Tucker Carlson and it wouldn't feel out of character.
burutthrow1234··on Do I Regret Being 'Just' a Software Engineer?
Lots of respect to Jacky for writing this. The tech industry truly pays enough money that you can lose sight of solidarity with other workers. Even as shit gets worse and more human rights are privatized you can stay insulated. I once had a coworker brag about how he paid 10k a year for a special medical service to see the doctor faster. Public transit sucks? You just Uber from your condo everywhere. Housing crisis? Idk I got my fully renovated 3-bedroom house downtown.

If you're reading this, just on a tactical level for job hunting one thing I would say is to remove the (+/-) part of the resume. People can do the math on the duration if they care. Maybe even just put the years. I hope you're able to find something that isn't quite as dismal as 99% of tech jobs

burutthrow1234··on Ask HN: What is the best code base you ever worked on?
I worked with someone who insisted on using fx for DI in go. It's so antithetical to the entire Go philosophy, I don't even think it's an "advanced feature". It's just bringing Java cruft to a language where it isn't necessary and making everything worse.
burutthrow1234··on I found a 1-click exploit in South Korea's biggest mobile chat app
> However, in better-run and not-so-corrupt societies like Korea, it's not necessary and probably downright harmful.

South Korea was under varying levels of dictatorship from the Korean War until the Sixth Republic in 1987. Roh Tae-woo, the first president after authoritarian rule, was imprisoned for corruption. Roh Moo-hyun, the President from 2003-2008 was investigated for corruption and died by suicide rather than face charges. Lee Myung-bak, his successor, was imprisoned for corruption. Park Geun-hye, his successor, was imprisoned for corruption.

I don't know that South Korea is the poster child for a "better-run and not not-so-corrupt" society.

burutthrow1234··on Ask HN: Those of you who've left the SWE world, what did you transition into?
Nothing is gonna give you good, consistent comp like writing software. I'm sure some sales people do very well but "eat what you kill" also means lean months, and sometimes whether or not deals close is outside of your control.

My advice is to just get a tech job where you can coast, work from home, and knock out a couple tickets a day. Have lots of flexibility to see your kid and take vacations while they're young. Some places offer 4 day weeks and you still take home 6 figures.

Sales Engineering or Customer Success would be an interesting pivot but you usually make less money and have less flexibility than SWEs

burutthrow1234··on Ask HN: Why do message queue-based architectures seem less popular now?
I think "message queues" have become pretty commoditized. You can buy Confluent or RedPanda or MSK as a service and never have to administer Kafka yourself.

Change Data Capture (CDC) has also gotten really good and mainstream. It's relatively easy to write your data to a RDBMS and then capture the change data and propagate it to other systems. This pattern means people aren't writing about Kafka, for instance, because the message queue is just the backbone that the CDC system uses to relay messages.

These architectures definitely still exist and they mostly satisfy organizational constraints - if you have a write-once, read-many queue like Kafka you're exposing an API to other parts of the organization. A lot of companies use this pattern to shuffle data between different teams.

A small team owning a lot of microservices feels like resume-driven developnent. But in companies with 100+ engineers it makes sense.

burutthrow1234··on Calm Company Fund Is Taking a Break
> The problem with thinking everyone else is wrong is that usually it turns out they are not.

I don't know that this is objectively true. The more accurate thing to say is that sometimes it's better to be wrong in the same way as everyone else. VC investing seems to be mostly based on chasing trends and "pattern matching", so trying to do anything heterodox is going to be an uphill battle.

burutthrow1234··on Silicon Valley's best kept secret: Founder liquidity
This is a comment about brick and mortar businesses, I literally talked about having to personally guarantee a multi-year lease in the post.

And yes, some businesses are even harder due to regulatory requirements

burutthrow1234··on Silicon Valley's best kept secret: Founder liquidity
> Please let us all know how that's working out for you in 5-10 years. 4 months in and no stress? Must be easy riding from here!

Honestly VC-funded startups seem like a cake walk compared to actually starting a small business. Your biggest challenge is walking into a room full of rich dudes and schmoozing for your pay cheque. If you fail you get acquired and get golden handcuffs.

If you start a real business you can expect to take on debt, and you'll be personally guaranteeing it because nobody cares about equity in your boutique ice cream parlour. Plus a 5-year lease (which you will also personally guarantee).

burutthrow1234··on All three game console makers have now abandoned X integration
Except these integrations are used by the end users to post content to Twitter. If you really wanted to squeeze end users you could make them connect a premium account or something, but charging the console maker for the consumer's use of the integration is just stupid.
burutthrow1234··on After 6 years, I'm over GraphQL
GraphQL makes sense in the narrow context of "you have a high latency end-user and you're pulling in deeply nested social graph data". It didn't need to be a general purpose framework, but you don't get to start your own company and talk at conventions about the clever API design you did at Facebook for Facebook-only problems. The incentives are for (a certain type of) developers to act like this solution is a panacea and sell it as a revolutionary new architecture.
burutthrow1234··on In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them
In TFA, they're literally taking roads and turning them into housing near transit hubs? This policy goes hand in hand with densifying housing.
burutthrow1234··on After 6 years, I'm over GraphQL
GraphQL absolutely feels like a technological solution to an organizational problem. What if your front-end team wants to write crazy queries and your back-end team wants to build their resume doing Real Engineering, but what you actually need is just a CRUD app?

Now your backend devs aren't bored writing "business logic" and your front end devs aren't bored waiting for your backend devs. You have a new class of inscrutable errors and performance issues, but that's why you pay your backend devs the big bucks! Because some guys from a technical college couldn't possibly solve your issue, you need to pay 250k to people who went to Stanford or Berkeley.

burutthrow1234··on Ottawa wants the power to create secret backdoors in networks for surveillance
Clearing the people out of Ottawa took far too long. The local police were cozy with the truckers and the entire downtown of a metro area with a million people was shut down for a month.

People complain about left-leaning protests taking over a public park - these guys took over multiple public spaces in multiple parts of the city. About a square mile in the middle of the city.

burutthrow1234··on Retired detective: We got it wrong in Robert Roberson's death penalty case
The Supreme Court is extremely selective about what cases should be deferred to states and which should be the realm of the federal courts. They needed to federally abolish affirmative action in college admissions, but when a person is being put to death unjustly that's a state issue. If a website designer hypothetically refuses to design a website for a gay couple that's a federal issue.
burutthrow1234··on I'm tired of "AI" products wrapped over and selling at high rates
I think the current LLM trend is way overhyped. The thing these companies are doing, crucially, is extracting money from technologically unsophisticated companies and funnelling it into VC pockets. Silicon Valley bubbles are frequently incestuous. You make an HR platform and you sell it to other tech companies. You do sales analytics for tech companies. You make a bank that caters to only tech companies. The problem is that your customers all have the same risk profile as you - if interest rates go up and funding dries up you're all fucked at once. You're all just passing VC dollars back and forth.

The AI trend is luring in a wide range of non-tech businesses that aren't VC backed (ex. car dealerships). This is the golden goose for tech companies in a tough macro climate.

To be clear I think it's not adding real value for these buyers, but there's a tremendous amount of FOMO. The media has been complicit in selling AI as a panacea for small businesses in a tough climate, and the ultimate beneficiaries will be people grifting off AI hype.

burutthrow1234··on Demystifying the protobuf wire format
Yeah protobuf is a good IDL and encoding. Unfortunately gRPC makes some choices that make sense for internal RPCs in a large engineering org, but it's not good for external clients IMO.
burutthrow1234··on LPCAMM2 is a modular, repairable, upgradeable memory standard for laptops
This is kind of what Optane was in some incarnations (it's really terrible branding that conflates multiple technologies).
burutthrow1234··on U.S. Rules Apple Illegally Interrogated Staff and Confiscated Union Flyers
There's an important distinction because a police "union" is in opposition to any other workers and unions. The police are the tools of capital, they break up strikes. The cops aren't going to join you in a sympathy strike.
burutthrow1234··on Bytecode VMs in Surprising Places
VMs are a very interesting way to decompose a problem - you can implement the fundamental operations, test them thoroughly, and then generate bytecode and debug the bytecode implementation.

A couple years ago I thought about giving a presentation on a Golang VM I wrote to solve a simple problem, but it was seen as kind of a heterodox approach and I didn't want to deal with a million "umm acksully" questions about whether it was a real VM.

burutthrow1234··on London Drugs closes stores until further notice due to cyberattack
In Ontario my doctor sends prescriptions "electronically". In practice it's not clear whether this is like an email, or whether someone behind the scenes prints out the prescription and faxes it. Apparently the local clinic has a team that is solely responsible for faxing things on behalf of the doctors.
burutthrow1234··on Court upholds New York law that says ISPs must offer $15 broadband
Similar experience in Canada with our telecom cartel. They're legally required to allow other providers to use their lines but if you need support you're out of luck. We had multi-day outages routinely and a Bell tech couldn't find any issues. We finally switched to FTTH when it became available because we need reliable internet to work from home.
burutthrow1234··on Apple Vision Pro Customer Interest Dying Down at Some Retail Stores
How would that even work? Are you looking at your surroundings or your work? It sounds like a nightmare version of people staring down at their phones while shuffling down the street.
burutthrow1234··on Predictive CPU isolation of containers at Netflix (2019)
They're automatically predicting the limit _and_ figuring out binpacking into hyperthreaded CPUs and NUMA cores. K8s just pushes your supplied values down to the kernel, which is exactly what they're saying is inefficient.
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