HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

ecshafer

10,618 karma · joined May 19, 2017

I am a software developer in upstate NY. Java, Rust, Web Development.
submissionscomments
ecshafer··on Disruption with Some GitHub Services – Resolved
Vitess is a distributed mysql database. Github could very well be managing it entirely on their own. I have only seen people managing their own vitess, its entirely open source afaik.
ecshafer··on Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices
As opposed to the Jack Dorsey days of twitter where you would be banned for mildly right wing opinions, even if they were factually correct. That wasn't a political project?
ecshafer··on One corner of China’s internet is insisting that the Tang Dynasty never existed
Many of the more esoteric conspiracy theories are hard to debunk. Lets take the earth if round, prove it. You can bring up many cases, sails disappearing behind the horizon, goemetry, etc. but actually doing these measurements and calculations cold is pretty hard. And whenever you bring up a fact, they will dismiss it out of hand. Tectonic plates, I believe they exist, I have seen the evidence in books. But I doubt I could prove it, I've never really studied geology or anything like that. And if I were to debate someone who believes they weren't real, I would probably lose as they would bring up obscure papers, incidents, etc. which I wouldn't be able to refute well.
ecshafer··on Public services are increasingly strained by LLM-written appeals for benefits
This is good I think. I have a friend that worked for a Law Firm / NGO / Charity kind of thing, whose primary purpose was writing appeals for benefits to the VA. These were benefits that the person in question was legally entitled to, but required outside legal assistance to actually attain. Regardless of your personal opinion on defense, VA fraud, etc. it would seem good that people who are legally entitled to a benefit are more easily able to attain the benefit.
ecshafer··on Coconut oil jet fuel matches kerosene's efficiency in engine tests
Ethanol was always a political thing, and not technical. It was passed because it would triple the price of corn.
ecshafer··on Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border
Samuel Tunick is white...
ecshafer··on Micron announces $10B research hub in Boise
The Clay fab is moving along, lots of trucks going through there. So I think it will be built, assuming the local NIMBY and Progressive contingent don't have their way and block it somehow (God knows they put up enough arbitrary hurdles in their way).
ecshafer··on I should have loved biology (2020)
I like this blog and its a romantic view of Biology, and I agree with the sentiments. However I would say its a narrow view of large issue: Lack of Rigor and Depth in School. Biology doesn't get enough into the nuts and bolts, and instead focuses on regurgitation of facts, with not enough experimentation. Mathematics doesn't have enough of a focus on rigor, proofs and building models from first principles, just a formulaic approach of decomposing equations and fitting them into patterns to solve. History is a list of facts, with a little bit of essays connecting ideas, where you might say how the Leviathan affected Enlightenment thinking but you don't actually read the Leviathan, and learn how Napoleonic warfare changed things, but don't read primary evidence.

Just about every subject is interesting if you are able to take a really good hard look at it, and construct it from first principles.

ecshafer··on Malicious Rust crate Arrayref runs a build-time payload
These very small dependencies that are then later causing issues either due to malicious nature or incompetence, have become pervasive in computing (for some reason). I think that these should be less of an issue now than ever. Outside of the largest, most critical dependencies, you really shouldn't be pulling in small libraries anymore. Just generate the code via AI. AI is not great at large scale programming I think, but its amazing at snippets of code. Something I ran into recently, I needed to use FFT2 on some matrices, and what I was using didn't have an existing solution. Converting some numpy fft2 tests to my target language, and having a full native implementation of fft2, and an accompanying test suite so it will behave exactly like numpy fft2. A few minutes and a few thousand lines of code later, I have a trusted implementation. Saves me an external dependency, some weird glue code, and an attack vector.
ecshafer··on Children's stunted lungs show recovery in ultra low emission zone
Anecdata I was living very close to a busy highway, and my young daughter was wheazing when she had a cold, we had to give her medicine via a nebulizer. When we moved out to the country more, far away from any major roads, these issues all disappeared within a couple months.
ecshafer··on Ask HN: Does anyone else feel like nothing matters anymore?
As a backend/full-stack engineer I still receive at least a few linkedin recruiter messages a week.
ecshafer··on In 1962, Egypt's Missile Program Lost Its Key Scientist Without a Trace
The wonderful book "Rise and Kill First" is a history of Israeli assassinations, with their policy of going after the "head of the snake". There are some interesting sections on how Israel used assassination to inhibit missile programs in the Middle East, including Egypt. Its a pretty easy read despite being long.
ecshafer··on Spaghettifying DRAM
This is so cool. Outside of a cool demo, and maybe some black hat type stuff, this is surely dangerous, a bad idea, and shouldn't be done in prod. But pure hacker ethos at its heart.
ecshafer··on Bluesky's active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app
Bluesky and Threads both have a fundamental issue in that their entire pitch is "We are like Twitter, but we are not run by Elon Musk, a Republican." Which only energizes the most radical, fringe, terminally online, who happen to be the ones that were most disliked on regular Twitter in the first place. When you whole pitch has zero appeal to 95% of people, its dead.
ecshafer··on Every Company Needs a Cassandra
I am not sure how this is Cassandra. Cassandra didn't say bad things. Cassandra knew the future and know one believed her, making her helpless to see doom unfold. The author even mentions the myth, but Cassandra didn't point out uncomfortable truths. There are tons of complainers in companies, automating it with AI isn't going to do anything.
ecshafer··on Amazon Is Creating the Biggest Pollution Source in the Country
I don't see why this isn't obvious. Terafab is a FAB not a datacenter.
ecshafer··on AMD acquires Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models in silicon
That is insanely fast. I had it generate a basic C FFT library that can handle multi-dimension arrays, and it was instant.
ecshafer··on AI fuels more than half of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge – Interpol
Tesla is imo overvalued and has been for a long time. Its bankrupted a lot of pretty savvy investors in the last 10 years trying to short them because its obviously over valued. Market irrationality vs solvency and all of that.
ecshafer··on Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
This is why Microsoft is good, there is an entire industry around fixing their nonsense. They are being a job creator!
ecshafer··on Taylor Farms has rewritten its cyclospora statement four times in sixteen days
Good. Restaurants are hectic to work in. Menus can change quickly, and many dishes are being cooked and prepped at once. Cross contamination chances are high, so if a restaurant MUST say an allergen is not in X,Y,Z they basically can't have it in their restaurant at all.
ecshafer··on The American Grilled Cheese Sandwich Essay (2024)
The most important lesson about Grilled Cheese that I have learned is that you can buy a mix of expensive cheese, get a nice fresh loaf of sourdough bread, high quality grass fed butter. You can really make an exquisite, amazing, grilled cheese that would cost $25 at a mediocre restaurant with a side of fries. However, a 4 year old will prefer one made out of kraft singles on white.
ecshafer··on Superlogical
Taxes paid was actually what was said.
ecshafer··on Kalshi attacks a Wisconsin law banning election bets as 'voter suppression'
A big difference I think is that Progressivism was based on Christianity and Utopian Socialist ideals in the 1800s and 1900s (at least in the United States). So it was much easier for them to support child labor laws, pensions, banning drinking and gambling, etc. by looking at it from the perspective of protecting the poor and destitute, making the nation strong, etc.. Even the Imperial Germans did progressive programs from a paternalistic conservative approach. People were pointing to the Gospel or Rerum Novarum. Not progressivism is more rooted in anarchism or marxism. Which is why they have a lot more saying to remove property rights. Or they will push for legalizing drugs and abolishing prisons, despite that obviously making society worse, but the state, property, etc are all evil.
ecshafer··on Kalshi attacks a Wisconsin law banning election bets as 'voter suppression'
I am hard-line on this. Sports betting and prediction markets should be banned. Casinos should be banned. Scratch offs should be banned. Its feeding into the worst tendencies of people and hurts the most disadvantaged families. People playing a poker game with their friends, or buying a super bowl square at their bar isn't great but at least it was off to the side and hidden. We have a large chesterson's fence level experiment in society where all of these good ideas the progressives have had to keep society civil and healthy in the late 1800s and early 1900s, have slowly been removed, to terrible results.
ecshafer··on Teach yourself programming in ten years (1998)
There was a webcomic abtruse goose that made fun of that book by humorously showing what you would have to do to get it done in 21 days.

https://gabrielcoarna.com/2010/11/05/how-to-teach-yourself-c...

ecshafer··on Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude
So $1-10k in Chinese model time, thus why we must ban them.
ecshafer··on MAI-Cyber-1-Flash inside MDASH
Azure is the second largest cloud, and run majority linux. So probably.
ecshafer··on MAI-Cyber-1-Flash inside MDASH
At least Geist looks nice. Corporate Memphis has always been ugly, beyond ugly even, its an insult to aesthetics itself, an insult to all of life.
ecshafer··on Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey
Henry Nowak would as well.
ecshafer··on Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey
How many people has the US sent to jail due to saying naughty things on Twitter vs the UK? If were going to speak of authoritarianism. Just due to ensuring free speech and right to bear arms the US is possibly the least authoritarian developed nation outside of maybe Switzerland.
← PreviousPage 3 of 34Next →