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drchickensalad

452 karma · joined April 3, 2015

Staff Software Engineer in NYC

dr chicken salad gmail com

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drchickensalad··on The average American spent 2.5 months on their phone in 2024
In fact if it's not a voice call it should probably be excluded, lol. I feel like semantically right now being on your phone refers to looking at the screen actively, even though that's very much not the origin of the phrase. Yet, nowadays the meaning of the phrase probably excluded when you're holding it to the side of your head, as you're not looking at a screen at all.
drchickensalad··on The tech utopia fantasy is over
Yeah, I'm personally of the opinion that the 50s-60s economical benefits are not generally sustainable. Similar to China's rise up until now, it's the result of a one time boom often as a zero-sum game with other parts of the world. The humans on the planet are definitely getting a more comfortable life over time, but any individual state with our current political systems I don't feel ever leads to that 50s-60s level of purchasing power for a long time.
drchickensalad··on Show HN: From dotenv to dotenvx – better config management
Your "a single gitignore append" command overwrites existing .gitignore files. It should be `>>`
drchickensalad··on Wc2: Investigates optimizing 'wc', the Unix word count program
If you're like me, you need to stop thinking of it as "99% of call sites" and start thinking of it as "99% of iteration loops". I know it's super obvious on the face of it, but the implications is that most call sites can repeatedly fail but are totally overshadowed by insanely high frequency hot loops that it almost always predicts right (it's skewed, just like avg vs median)
drchickensalad··on Silicon Valley's best kept secret: Founder liquidity
> Also note that some comp numbers get heavily inflated by people incorporating stock value increasing between the equity was first issued and the stock actually vested.

Yeah ever since COVID this has really muddied the water, partially both up and down. Depending on the year combined with the type of company (large cap vs growth SaaS vs finance) you can massively swing the same exact "offer comp" into many communicated effective comps.

drchickensalad··on “Imprecise” language models are smaller, speedier, and nearly as accurate
Yeah LLM's are just a nontrivial stepping stone. Humans don't need to consume the entire set of worlds knowledge, repeated from thousands of different mouths coming from different angles, to be able to learn to output human like thought processes.

At some point we'll discover a mew algorithm/architecture that can actually continuously learn from its environment with limited information and still produce amazing results like us.

drchickensalad··on Show HN: I made a pixel art editor for Windows desktop
On mobile chrome samsung s21 ultra your cookie footer/modal is below the fold.
drchickensalad··on -2000 Lines of Code (2007)
That's such a limited view which creates terrible incentives.

If you work insanely hard solving a problem, you often end up with 0 loc + an incredible amount of understanding. If you slack off all day then spend an hour writing a bunch of sloppy code, you have way more loc than someone who worked all day to refine some simple clear performant code (which is then read 500 times before it's changed, hence the time is earned back with interest).

These scenarios don't have to happen for the disincentive to still affect the work people do; there's a continuous problem from the baseline to these extremes.

drchickensalad··on Picotron Is a Fantasy Workstation
Limitations and difficulty are the foundations of creativity.

Our current devices are almost unlimited.

drchickensalad··on Hackers found a way to open any of 3M hotel keycard locks
OMNY has had automatic fare cap for 2 years?
drchickensalad··on Why are most sofas so bad?
Yeah wow that's like $8k+ for an armchair in today's wages (including the historically inaccurate assumption they only work 8 hours too)
drchickensalad··on Why are most sofas so bad?
Aggregated reddit searches are amazing. Leads you to the gold mine that is american leather etc, which are often rebranded to more well known brands on a model by model basis. Lots of insiders on reddit with that info too.
drchickensalad··on Figure out who's leaving the company: dump, diff, repeat
...yes? That's why it's in movies
drchickensalad··on Leaked Microsoft pay guidelines – salary, hiring bonus, stock awards by level
220k base 350k stock
drchickensalad··on Pixel 8 Pro
The ratio of users who give a shit about 100ms of input lag on a 4 year old phone is tiny compared to devs who cared about typing lag 20 years ago
drchickensalad··on Show HN: Killport – CLI tool to kill processes running on a specified port
Why define the alias as a function instead of the whole thing as a function?
drchickensalad··on AWS staff spending ‘much of their time ’optimizing customers' clouds'
Have you seen the performance of standard ruby and python web frameworks in comparison? It's a massive difference
drchickensalad··on U.S. and China wage war beneath the waves over internet cables
You might enjoy the 99% invisible podcast
drchickensalad··on When did New York start building slowly?
There is the widest variety of deep cultural experiences, events, and food next door to you than anywhere else in the world. You never have a reason to drive, but are still in the US; no traffic jam, instead reading hacker news on a relaxing subway ride or walk into work. Retail businesses are no bullshit fast and efficient. Every type of job opportunity surrounds you. It's the safest comparable city in the US.
drchickensalad··on When did New York start building slowly?
0% chance that will happen. It greatly lowers property values which will cause every single owner on the path to come out swinging.
drchickensalad··on When did New York start building slowly?
Tokyo standards for residential are legendarily low. People demolish and rebuild when they buy a home because nothing is built to last even a moderate amount of time.
drchickensalad··on ‘Breakthrough’ obesity drugs that have stunned researchers
What's the drug?
drchickensalad··on AI Homework
didn't we also think that good chess and go play required good reasoning skills? is this just a higher scale version of that?
drchickensalad··on Smartphones wiped out 97% of the compact camera market
I use offline search all the time
drchickensalad··on Tell HN: Happy Thanksgiving
I rarely read the link and I always read all the comments. Often you can tell if the article is actually worth it in the process
drchickensalad··on U.S. annual inflation rate drops to 8.5%
I think you should try broadening your media bubble. There's many, many scenarios.
drchickensalad··on GameShell: A game to learn or teach the Unix shell
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/scripts
drchickensalad··on Show HN: I made a website to search for half loaves of bread
Well market forces for half loaves can leave them with an oversupply, and it's a quickly deteriorating product, and a sale speeds up getting rid of that inventory. The only alternative is to perfectly predict the future.
drchickensalad··on Final Fantasy 7: An oral history (2017)
FFT 1.3 is absolutely incredible too
drchickensalad··on Running C unit tests with Pytest
How do you add a side effect and still call the original in pytest? This is easy in rspec but everywhere I google people say there's no good way.

For example, you're calling code which internally does Too().bar() and you want to advance your time mock after it's called.

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