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fireboneson A former Uber engineer's disaster story

It sounds almost like it is a kind of fuzz-testing then; I'm interested in what percentage of problems uncovered were problems in the spec or undefined behavior, versus problems introduced by the simulated annealing itself.

fireboneson Ask HN: Please stop writing tutorials/tech articles on Medium

Medium is not StackOverflow, it limits the number of articles that can be freely read.

On the other hand, StackOverflow simply limits the number of interesting discussions that can be had.

fireboneson Zoom rolled their own encryption scheme, transmit keys through servers in China

If Zoom supports stock background filters or modes, that would seem to be another massive source of repeating plaintext, depending on the implementation.

fireboneson Ask HN: How do you encourage a culture of written communication on your team?

* Lead by example.

* Steer ad hoc discussions toward the issue tracker--whether via stories or spikes.

* Don't let Slack/IRC/Teams be the place decisions are made and documented. They're good tools for conversation starters and finding throw away answers, not good as a record of design and decisions.

* Always be steering ad hoc conversations towards outlets that provide reusable context when it becomes clear that there's something of substance. This could be steering towards issue trackers, wikis, knowledge repos, README.md files, etc.

* Realize that many people aren't natural writers, and accommodate them.

* Hire for writing ability. Find a balance and pair writers with talkers.

fireboneson Gmail of an old man with 0 mails blocked

Had a similar situation with my mother's iPad and Yahoo. YahooMail wouldn't allow a password change because my mother, having suffered an injury, moved and gave up her landline phone number, and had no alternative verification mechanisms set up. The native iPad mail app still connected via a cached credential, but those credentials can't be backed up. The iPad power failed sporadically, so she lost contact with people, with no way to transfer credentials to her new device (on the rare instance the iPad would briefly start), and no way to reset the YahooMail password. The only solution I heard that might work is to buy a paid yahoomail account on her behalf (assuming there's some way to verify her identity) and see if someone in support can get her back on the right track so that she can keep getting her spam and point anyone contacting her to her new address.

I hope this stuff gets easier before I get to my 90s.

fireboneson The Myth of Self-Reliance: An encounter with Emerson’s essays

There is a lot of wisdom in this post. I think there are some people who have a knack for recognizing talent, value, whatever you want to call it, and protect and/or share their own social capital to encourage (boost?) what they see and remove impediments to it flourishing. It's not a guarantee, but it might be a signal. If the baseline is a 1 in 5000 shot at the NBA, there still may be 10 of those deep boosters among the 5000 who do the same things, but come up short. Yet 10 kids reduced their odds from 1 in 5000 to 1 in 10.

fireboneson Ask HN: “Give the hardest job to the laziest person“

Great story, although I really thought the punchline would be "Fast forward two years when a new firmware programmer took over, pushed a change that caused the rushed format detection to be skipped, and destroyed all our telemetry data on all readers."

fireboneson Uber, losing billions, freezes engineering hires

I don't know. The proposition to a non-chain restaurant in the suburbs, of which there are very few to begin with, reminds me more of a Groupon situation where the restaurants come out on the short end. In this case, it's not because they have to discount, it's because it's their reputation that takes the hit for Uber taking too long to deliver. Plus, a lot of local restaurants' margin comes not from the markup on the food, but the markup on the drinks. Many already offer carryout anyway.

fireboneson The Banana Trick and Other Acts of Self-Checkout Thievery (2018)

In most of the groceries stores around me, discount logic is applied after the the total is completed. So voiding after you completed scanning and were ready to pay would have been legit, but maybe not so much if you didn't wait until payment time.

fireboneson Tesla Enters “Whistleblower Hell”

Issuing additional RSUs for retention is something which, with their positive cashflow, they absolutely would do (handled by share repurchase) if the stock price dropped to the point it made rational sense. Who wouldn't stick around at Apple if they're printing money and your RSUs have a basis of $1?

fireboneson Ask HN: What major trend in tech were you wrong about?

My failures were ones of optimism about an open web.

1) When the semantic web didn't emerge, I got excited by embedded microformats as a way that many of the same benefits to be achieved in terms of computable knowledge.

2) I was always optimistic about P2P tech until I realized that we live in a world dominated by centralizing forces, both governmental and capitalistic. P2P can't exist in a recognizable form without some centralization that allows law enforcement or capitalistic gain from the service it attempts to provide.

In both cases, I underestimated the control that governments could exert, and the power to capture dollars and mindshare that centralization due to corporate profits would entail.

You see that in the web itself. The demise of RSS, the demise of the personal website, the reemergence of walled gardens. We're back to AOL, albeit with three or four players taking the role of one. What are hashtags but scaled up AOL keywords? What are Facebook groups but scaled up AOL forums?

The web of those dreams will only exist in the margins and never at scale. Like ham radio or hobbies outside the mainstream that don't scale.

fireboneson Vulnerability in the Mac Zoom client allows malicious websites to enable camera

Do you know if this vulnerability might manifest in other ways, and permit remote participants to force you into sharing or viewing your screen silently?

One of the first times I'd ever used Zoom was in a call with a startup trying to pitch my company on something. The remote participant said something later in the call that was uncannily prescient and related to notes I had in a separate application window. I wrote it off as coincidence, but the phrasing used (and the fact that it was an answer to a question I hadn't asked) seemed nearly verbatim to my written notes.

fireboneson Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

The forces of capitalism and most existing forms of government are anathema to decentralization (inherent in the crypto-blockchain premise). The idealism of decentralization exists only until it meets the overwhelming real world gravity of money. At which point blockchain tech and crypto could only thrive if carried out by hand-calculated hashes on paper transported by motorcycle and carrier pigeon.

fireboneson Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

Take a look at Google Reader, though. They got skewered for dumping that. But despite being shuttered years after RSS was a thing, even then it was limited to RSS wonks like a lot of us who were the only ones lamenting it (and the decline of RSS).

Fast forward to today and 10x to 1000x the number of us wonks are getting an overlapping amount of Reader's value (plus new value) from Twitter. The purging of Reader is a distant memory, but it doesn't mean it's necessarily bad to try a bunch of things and kill the non-viral losers (in a relative sense).

fireboneson Warren Buffett sells his Oracle shares, retains $44B investment in Apple

This is wise. Choose a company to work for the same way you choose a company to invest in.

fireboneson Middle School Misfortunes Then and Now, One Teacher’s Take

It was never a picnic and I go back farther than 20 years.

I'm not discounting new brands of terror, but propensity for cruelty is the constant--the medium of cruelty is the main difference.

fireboneson First contact made with melted nuclear fuel at Fukushima plant

What volume of sand would you need to make a difference? And at what rate does it collect Cs137 to reach 99%?

Would it be feasible to stack filters? (E.g., 0.01 * 0.01 * 0.01...)

fireboneson On Being a Principal Engineer

I've seen that too. And I've also seen some of the same people with very adaptable personalities who are continually learning and inquiring and who make working at such places tolerable.

fireboneson Ask HN: What are your rules-of-thumb for personal finance and saving?

All of the other posts are great for personal finance and savings. But at some point, if you have some money saved, look for opportunities where you can make no-risk decisions that earn you $XX or $XXX per hour spent implementing them. And value those decisions in terms of an hourly rate.

For instance, let's say you have some cash sitting in a brokerage sweep account paying 1.0% because you weren't paying attention. In <60 minutes over a few calendar days you can find an online savings account with high interest (say 2.2%), set up a transfer back and forth, and get a better rate. On 10K sweep, that's $120/hr gain annually. On $100K, it's $1200/hr annually. Although there, maybe you want to consider a bond at 2.5% and net $1500/hr.

Likewise, put expenses in terms of an annual rate. One less $5 coffee per week is $260/week annually. Then reframe in terms of your overall expenses. Over 10 years, that might get you 30 days closer to an early retirement.

The point is that you probably are overlooking very trivial opportunities to improve your lot. Convert the metrics into savings or earnings over time, and turn that into whatever future goal you have (early retirement, size of yacht, months of rent/mortgage, etc.) and you realize that with a very small amount of effort, you can have a huge compounding effect on your goal.

fireboneson Did Salinger Go Awry?

For all the Catcher hate in this thread, the short story collection "Nine Stories" may be more interesting to those who quit on Salinger based solely on traumatic coerced readings of Catcher.

fireboneson We Still Live Within the Mediated, Alienated World of “The Moviegoer”

Fascinating that it beat out both "Catch-22" and "Franny and Zoey" for the award in 1961. Perhaps, as the author implies, it was its introduction of experience outside of the Heller/Salinger milieu that readers found refreshing for a change.

fireboneson Los Angeles Accuses Weather Channel App of Covertly Mining User Data

I love this 3-day graph the best:

https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=<your latitude goes here>&lon=-<your longitude goes here>&unit=0&lg=english&FcstType=graphical is my favorite.

Just substitute your XX.XXXX latitude and your YY.YYYY longitude (negative from 0 if you're in the US) for the <> and their contents as variables.

There's also a tabular form of this. Very dense in terms of hourly forecasts. I tend to plug in various lat/long changes to figure out when a storm is going to blow into the kid's sporting event clear across town. Each degree of latitude or longitude is 68.3 miles, so you can usually just adjust the URL to get a pinpoint forecast...which is useful in metro areas where you might be traveling 40-45 miles to an event.

fireboneson How Criminals Steal $37B a Year from America’s Elderly

Have they been scammed before? Or been made as good marks?

I've got an elderly relative who fell into something that I swear followed a lead generation funnel. Accepted some semi-legitimate domestic computer services help (optimize your PC and scan for spyware by some company from Utah), only to have the full hammer come down a few weeks later with a follow up from an Indian call center that commandeered her PC, made fake deposits to her bank account, turned on her camera and showed he could see everything, and insisted she purchase $500 in iTunes cards to pay for the malware removal. After wising up, the same center called her multiple times daily for more than a year from various spoofed numbers.

If they're getting calls every 30 minutes, it's likely they've become a qualified lead in some way, by something they've done.

fireboneson Ask HN: What is something I should and can be automating right now?

That's pretty cool that it never goes down and you don't ever buy at $60 and sell at $59.40.

fireboneson Ask HN: What is something I should and can be automating right now?

Agree that it is far more likely to do that with small numbers rather than big numbers. But that is something entirely different than finding a sustainable scheme giving 10% per month returns.

Sustainable should mean that 500 readers of HN each individually managing their little $2000 nest egg ($1 million aggregate) making independent decisions should be able to collectively be sitting on $3.13 million after a year.

You don't get sustainable 213% returns without a commensurate, sustainable level of risk to go with it. But if you're able to do it sustainably with 3x ETFs, congratulations.

fireboneson Ask HN: What is something I should and can be automating right now?

I, too, would like a bot that generated 213% annualized compound returns.

fireboneson Large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency: study

I give the post credit in that it provoked your comment and some potentially enlightening discussion for someone not entirely familiar with the study of human behavior (like me). For instance, I would have thought that twin studies might be considered reliable for purposes of accounting for genetic confounds with respect to aspects of human behavior. It sounds from your comment that they are not.

On the OP getting warned, it wasn't immediately clear to me if the objection was more about a) knowledge that Matthew Yglesias didn't read the study and therefore was not in a position to summarize his analysis with a pithy analogy and be quoted, b) the use of any pithy analogy itself, or c) the use of an analogy that seemed to explain a confounding issue? There seemed to be some additional, non-obvious context missing (at least to me) that led to the warning.

fireboneson Seven Strings Over Iowa

Missed opportunity: the cult film "Six-String Samurai" set in post-apocalyptic Las Vegas and featuring the Russian-American music of the Red Elvises could have instead been entitled "Seven-String Samurai."

But I don't know whether the Red Elvises ever played a seven-string guitar. And their style wasn't exactly up the lines of old, traditional Russian music.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-String_Samurai

fireboneson Ask HN: 40+ Career Advice?

Also, keep in mind two things. First, that cost of living compounds just as investments do, albeit at a different rate. Second, that at some point, gains on investments will ultimately be taxed. If your projection spreadsheet doesn't take all of this into account, you might be underestimating what you need and the value of the fact that you're a good earner now. Big props for controlling expenses--that will be the biggest factor in determining when you can bail.