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ernoppon Fuck it, make it anyway

As an engineer, your job is to solve problems with the tools & resources at your disposal. AI is a tool that vastly improves your capacity to solve problems.

But inside that engineer is also a creative person enjoying manually writing code, and that inner person going to have an increasingly bad time at work (but can perhaps keep enjoying this as a hobby).

ernoppon Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

https://ernest.oppet.it/

I blog about books, podcasts, courses I've done, product management thoughts du jour, and the occasional rant

ernoppon If we lose the Internet Archive, we’re screwed

The case for doing what they did is that it helped a lot of people access books (eg school curriculum ones) in the middle of Covid (not everyone knows how to pirate things).

Not saying it was the right move but you can see where they're coming from, they wanted to help people.

ernoppon British scientist Kristian Anderson changed his view after NIH funding

Someone on Twitter said:

> You do realize that grant was issued several years before 2020? This is just how much was paid in 2020

> This is extremely misleading

ernoppon Fitbit users will have to sign into Google from 2023

Can you expand a bit on the quality of Google's internal practices with user data? eg what would an engineer on Google Photos need to do to be able to access my photos, if possible at all

ernoppon Is this the simplest (and most surprising) sorting algorithm?

No one repping the old drop sort. Just returns the first item of the list, which happens to be an ordered list. Simples.

ernoppon Show HN: Ampie – See HN or Twitter discussions mentioning the page you are on

I just hope there won't be too much of a performance impact on my browser or the page load times

ernoppon Show HN: Ampie – See HN or Twitter discussions mentioning the page you are on

Awesome! I've always wanted something like this to exist. Thanks for building it <3

ernoppon Busting the 10x software engineer myth

Here we go again.

ernoppon A Pint a Day (1996)

Yep, it's not delicious.

ernoppon People are realizing that degrowth is bad

Yep, accounting for carbon offshoring lowers the difference (US emissions gain 7% if you count consumption not just production, and China's lose 14%) but it still holds that China emits more per capita.

https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2

ernoppon Ask HN: I joined a FAANG and it is awful

It's much easier to move teams than move companies, so worth having a look around at other adjacent teams you could move to.

ernoppon I am often asked if I will “return to cryptocurrency”

It's from Preston Byrne (added this in my original comment).

The reason I think it's relevant is that posts like Palmer's attack only the "scam side" of crypto (the 99%) without acknowledging the "new paradigm" (1%) side

Yes there are scams, yes there are pumps and dumps, yes there are insiders who control too much liquidity. But you also have to do justice to the promise of the tech.

It was not previously possible for anyone with an internet connection to take out a loan via a decentralised protocol (MakerDAO), or exchange assets via a decentralised contract (Uniswap), or have a digital proof of authenticity (NFTs). And all of this without middle-men taking fees, opaque leverage throughout the system (see Archegos) and gating access to only certain participants (the richer half of the world who have a bank account).

These days I tend to send skeptical folk this writeup on the problems with centralised finance, and associated DeFi solutions: https://john-street-capital.medium.com/fintech-3-0-re-archit...

ernoppon I am often asked if I will “return to cryptocurrency”

"You can believe that 99% of crypto is bullshit while also believing that the 1% that isn't will change the world" - Preston Byrne

ernoppon Building Permanent and Censorship-Resistant Blog with Ethereum ENS and IPFS

Thanks, I didn't know. I've updated my original comment

ernoppon Building Permanent and Censorship-Resistant Blog with Ethereum ENS and IPFS

Nice post.

For permanent storage you should check out https://www.arweave.org/ rather than IPFS + centralised pinning services like Pinata. With Arweave you pay a small upfront fee to have the network store your file forever.

It's the promise of IPFS+Filecoin but actually live and being used (eg by the Internet Archive). There's some decent tooling & docs for it too: https://github.com/ArweaveTeam/arweave-deploy

Edit: Filecoin is also live and being used, I was out of date. https://docs.filecoin.io/store/

ernoppon UK regulator clamps down on Binance

DeFi protocols don't have KYC/AML systems. All they know about is your wallet, and from that wallet you can buy any token, borrow/lend, add liquidity to a market-maker pool, etc.

ernoppon UK regulator clamps down on Binance

Indeed. There was a great article in the FT on this looming battle recently:

> Human society, the historian Niall Ferguson says, oscillates between the dynamic of a metaphorical “tower” and the “square”. Sometimes institutions or leaders control social groups in hierarchical ways, just as church towers overshadowed medieval European cities.

> At other times, horizontal networks shape events, operating like crowds in ancient city squares. The “square” used to work best in small, face-to-face groups, but digitisation now enables peer-to-peer systems to operate on a massive scale.

> Now, however, a “tower” dynamic is entering the frame. On Wednesday, the Bank for International Settlements (the central bankers’ bank that, in a delicious irony, occupies an actual black tower in Basel) issued a striking report that lashed out at the “square”.

https://www.ft.com/content/9481d93d-c7ef-4749-9916-bc860d538...

ernoppon Why Computing Students Should Contribute to Open Source Software Projects

The French equivalent to Lambda school is https://www.42.fr/ which actually predates Lambda by 3 years and is operating at larger scale (29 campuses worldwide). It's also free unlike Lambda.

ernoppon Working at a startup is overrated, both financially and emotionally

Spot on.

I've been working in startups for 10 years (my whole career so far) because I was optimising for learning, not financial return. I made the bet that startups would be the fastest way to learn (breadth of tasks, workload, exposure to more senior people etc) and I am allergic to larger company bureaucracy.

ernoppon Dutch MPs had a call with deep fake imitation of Navalny's Chief of Staff

Could we do that with a low-enough performance hit?

ernoppon Earth Restored – 50 restored images of earth released

I wonder how we could get more people to experience this effect... Something like what Stewart Brand did by pushing for and publicising the first whole earth picture (in part via the Whole Earth Catalog) but more for the internet age.

I was toying with an idea of a site called "Get Some Perspective" where you'd start off with a FPS view and as you scroll you gradually zoom out, eventually to the whole observable universe. You could send this link to people if they're being short-sighted, callous, etc and hopefully instill a bit of the Overview effect in them...

ernoppon Earth Restored – 50 restored images of earth released

I love this quote from Edgar Mitchell (Apollo 14) on seeing Earth from the Moon:

You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, "Look at that, you son of a bitch."

ernoppon Monolith First (2015)

He can write all the posts about software engineering practices he wants his server is still down right now :)

ernoppon Clover Health: How Chamath Lured Retail Investors into a Broken Business

Apparently there is a 1 year lock-up period for the sponsors & directors during a SPAC [1]

Which I guess means it's harder for e.g Social Capital to do a pump & dump (in the case of Clover they couldn't sell until June 2021 at the earliest)

[1] https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2018/07/06/special-purpose-a...

ernoppon How Boston Dynamics Taught Its Robots to Dance

> You mentioned that Spot is now robust enough to dance all day. How about Atlas? If you kept on replacing its batteries, could it dance all day, too?

ernoppon I spent eleven years working on this Line Rider track

Wow, that makes Omniverse II and other massive projects even more impressive...

ernoppon Former Tesla Programmer's anecdotes about problems

Was very short-form but the mobile app Secret had a fair amount

ernoppon Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

I made https://lessnoise.net/, which recommends who you should unfollow on Twitter (right now it's very basic and just shows you who tweets the most out / is noisiest of everyone you follow)

Would love to hear any feedback!

ernoppon Free Ross Ulbricht

Permitting sales of illegal drugs & services is a defining feature probably worth mentioning.