HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

gunshai

421 karma · joined June 11, 2019

submissionscomments
gunshai··on Silver coin boom in medieval England due to melted down Byzantine treasures
An interesting side effect of clipping was essentially the discovery of Gresham's Law. The Bad Money drives out good money. While essentially understood/internalized by the merchant class plebiscite(heh) for thousands of years, wasn't formalized until the mid 1800s.

For clipping it means that when new coinage is minted that money is typically horded and the clipped coins are kept in circulation because they are deemed less valuable then their nominal value (the initial weight of the coin).

Why would someone use something more valuable in an exchange when the thing that's less valuable will suffice?

Gresham's Law would end up plaguing monarchy's and various governments for millenia and still to this day really.

We vastly under appreciate the very basic technology used to solve problems that existed for pretty much the entire world for thousands of years.

gunshai··on Silver coin boom in medieval England due to melted down Byzantine treasures
Ya there isn't much here to dispute. However one side effect of this type of valuation was essentially the trust in measurement systems.

This created barriers to entry for valuation of money in the form of owning a scale that required higher precision in weight estimation. On top of that one can imagine that dispute that a merchants scale (this still probably happens even today) cheats was most likely common place.

It's fairly easy to imagine a cleverly placed point of additional friction can "tip the scales" in a merchants favor.

All that to say it would have been good to be in the "measurement" business way back in the day. Hell it's still a good business today, but we need it far less for the exchange of coinage/money which I think is a pretty great thing.

gunshai··on Silver coin boom in medieval England due to melted down Byzantine treasures
Ya it's this guy apologies for not posting the link.
gunshai··on Silver coin boom in medieval England due to melted down Byzantine treasures
If you look closely in the first image you can tell that some of those coins are "clipped" then the coin with ridges is not clipped.

The ridges are to mitigate "clipping" which is the process of removing JUUUUUST enough metal from the coin as to not raise suspicion and people trade with them, but not enough to raise suspicion and get ... well killed by the Monarchy.

Learning about the history of money and how it completely shaped the world is pretty fascinating. There is a guy at University of Arizona who has a course on Youtube that covers this subject, HIGHLY recommend.

gunshai··on Banner blindness
I thought that's what the article was going to be about tbh.
gunshai··on Give AI curiosity, and it will watch TV forever (2018)
Ya I think they are called loot boxes
gunshai··on Give AI curiosity, and it will watch TV forever (2018)
This seems highly suseptible to what a human might consider irrelevant randomness. Given random images just shuffling indefinitely a curious individual will just give up and say, even though I can't predict the next thing it doesn't pertain to the domain of curiosity.
gunshai··on Give AI curiosity, and it will watch TV forever (2018)
How many loot boxes would it open under the same criterium?

/s

gunshai··on U.S. states sue Instagram owner for making social media addictive to kids
> This is how they got the tobacco companies to pay damages

I'm not against this, but consider that those damages are future unknown liabilities from when the product was first sold.

Do we really think that southern tobacco farmers or how ever far back the tobacco industry really goes, there was a forethought about the potential harm? I'd wager no, they saw a market for a product that people liked at the time I'd wager the entire idea of addiction was hardly understood when the industry started. From my historical knowledge addiction as a form of profit was first discovered by the East India Trading company as it was the first entity to trade opium to the Chinese, which by the way literally kept the English Monarchy from going bankrupt(more of a factoid then a piece relevant to my response).

My overall point is, we discover some harms because of scale or after long periods of time both of which are future liabilities. The discussion is WHEN we discover these harms at scale how do we handle them. Emergent harm is a society level issue, but for many products it's almost beyond a secondary or tertiary effect.

> I think at the least it's a matter of truth in advertising if you're aware of common negative side effects your product has and you don't disclose them. It's dishonest.

This isn't something I outright disagree with however the solution is one of incentive. It's clear that in the game of future liabilities for products as I think we can agree societal level harm is typically the more costly one both from a bottom line standpoint and from a human health or human harm standpoint.

The incentive here is pretty obvious sounding the alarm of harm is not in the interest of anyone profiting on it.

gunshai··on Defence against scientific fraud: a proposal for a new MSc course
> To date, the response of the scientific establishment has been wholly inadequate. There is little attempt to proactively check for fraud: science is still regarded as a gentlemanly pursuit

There is no incentive mechanism, it has been the problem all along. The peer review process is clearly inadequate or not up to the task in its current form.

gunshai··on U.S. states sue Instagram owner for making social media addictive to kids
There are trade offs and harm for nearly every product/thing.

If you can think of something that when used does not have unintended harm please let me know.

I agree that the topic of future liabilities is pretty sticky and seems highly case dependent.

gunshai··on U.S. states sue Instagram owner for making social media addictive to kids
> Should you be able to knowingly create a product which harms consumers and provide it to them while failing to disclose that fact?

With only this question as a guide the answer should be a resounding yes. Mainly because there are trade offs for everything. The downside to every trade off can be harm.

There are an immeasurable amount of ways harm can manifest, also answering no to this questions clearly incentivizes less, not more product transparency. I so desperately want to restate the question in a manner that accounts for the inevitability of discovered future liability, however it's not coming to me at the moment.

gunshai··on U.S. states sue Instagram owner for making social media addictive to kids
>Thirty-three states including California and New York are suing Meta Platforms Inc. for harming young people's mental health and contributing to the youth mental health crisis by knowingly designing features on Instagram and Facebook that cause children to be addicted to its platforms.

Incase anyone wants to look at an actual document which I didn't see linked in the article

https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/b68f2951-2a4b-4822-...

gunshai··on Major outages across ChatGPT and API
How are you integrating it in to your work flow?
gunshai··on The false positive rate of AI detectors and its effect on freelance writers
Pretty sure we are going to see a rise in the use of Oral Exams.

The teachers that don't want to use them will continue to churn out students that score high and don't know how to articulate a damn thing. Which may have been the status quo anyway.

Edit: I didn't like my original post

gunshai··on The Tyranny of the Marginal User
> the attention span of a goldfish on acid

I happen to have quite a long attention span on acid I'll have you know!

gunshai··on The Battle over Books3
Replace democratize with lower the barriers to entry. Yes it removes initial skill but typically doesn't remove the skill cap.
gunshai··on Lidar on a Chip Puts Self-Driving Cars in the Fast Lane
Ya probably hah
gunshai··on Lidar on a Chip Puts Self-Driving Cars in the Fast Lane
How does it work when there are millions of these chips out there. I'm not an EE but is the interference a trivial probablem at this point?
gunshai··on Lidar on a Chip Puts Self-Driving Cars in the Fast Lane
I'd probably buy Tesla stock if I thought they were going to announce this switch. It would mean real progress instead of what ever hell they're currently stuck in.
gunshai··on Solve your big problems by solving your real problem
This should surprise basically no one. I do aspire to be in a role where I can endlessly ask people why it is exactly they do the thing that they do.

All the while dodging the following scenario. "We just have to ask... What is it exactly that ya do here?"

gunshai··on Solve your big problems by solving your real problem
Phrased another way. What feature (if changed) would describe the highest chance of improving the success rate.

What are the features involved in success, which ones are levers that can be pulled.

Realizing everything is an abstraction for another thing that is yet another abstraction is in a way a freeing realization.

gunshai··on Fintech engineering mistakes (2022)
You're welcome, next time I'll try not to have a stroke at the end of my comment. hah. For some reason I can't edit it. shrug
gunshai··on Fintech engineering mistakes (2022)
The difference is small, but mostly as probing questions to interviewers. I take the mind the more you can speak the language the more comfortable people become with you.

Here's something small but I was doing a SQL interview one involved a a card_tx table with the amounts stored in integers values in cents. I immediately noticed this and chatted with the interviewer about this. My assumptions were wrong, and the floating point arithmetic was a simpler reason than what I was thinking.

Anyway you can display you have thought about relevant business problems to where you are interview engineers tend to have a strong reflex to engage the person more.

gunshai··on Fintech engineering mistakes (2022)
Shit, I wish I read this prior to my interviews at Cash App.
gunshai··on The 'fuck you' pattern (2021)
I also despise this pattern, it's the same on yelp. I have friends who swear by yelp (I'm not sure why) but every time I get sent links by them their desktop website seems to be purposely absolute trash and nagging me every 10 seconds to download their app and sign in.

I just refuse to deal with that kind of crap. I'm probably not the user they want on their platform and that's fine by me.

gunshai··on DeArrow – Solving clickbait on YouTube
Veritasium is a good example of this.
gunshai··on Anchor Brewing Company ends national distribution, kills Christmas Ale
>i really liked 2013 deschutes.

One of the large contributing factors to the rise in Deschutes during that time was due to their investment in technology because of their newly appointed Brewmaster "Brian Faivre" a computer science grad from UC Davis. While I never met him I saw the result of his and many others who championed consistency and quality via data collection about their production process. This dude was essentially scared away due to internal politics.

>but my impression is their distribution was too large to be able to capitalize on anything groundbreaking.

The distribution is all through large distributors Deschutes and every other "Largish" craft brewery has to sell their soul to the devil that is the "three tiered" system in order to not have to make investments in solo distribution. Given what I know about their production facility and the people there. It is completely geared to cash in on basically any beer trend that could exist. Their pilot plant is simply ridiculous, it's a fully automated 40 bbl split wort A/B testing powerhouse. The best beer you've never tasted has been made in that thing.

IMO Deschutes made many decisions that just ended up being a waste of money that severely crippled their cash position.

Lastly trends in the beer world are a flash in the pan at this point. I disregard Seltzers because it's a different process that doesn't directly involve wort production and therefore many craft breweries aren't set up to pivot to such a product.

One thing I attempted to stoke (not that this was at all my job) while working their is that marketing strategy should shift towards understanding that no consumer is loyal in the sense they always want to "try the new thing". This would have meant investments in better variety packing capabilities. If you didn't know variety packs are the highest velocity product, and my guess would be that any brewery that people think is good at all it's their highest velocity product as well. Time and time again I'd raise my hand and point to the metoric number for our variety packs (from a velocity stand point) and say "why can't we make investments that greatly bring down the cost and increase the production velocity for this product. Now you see brands like 10 barrel, Sierra Nevada basically doing just that.

gunshai··on Anchor Brewing Company ends national distribution, kills Christmas Ale
Sure, I oversaw their data historian and was a production analyst for their manufacturing facility in Bend. It is perhaps the most technologically advanced brewery systems currently.

From a manufacturing standpoint that isn't saying much, but from a brewing standpoint it's saying quite a lot.

Quite plainly they are making a bet on bringing NA beverage production in house and they can't pay me because "fresh" market conditions are squeezing them (pun intended).

There are multiple factors that make it really difficult to be a craft beer manufacturer. Primary of which is the three tiered system on distribution, this has been a blight on the beer industry for decades and isn't new.

Other trends such as a decrease in consumption of beer overall in combination with a HIGHLY saturated market place will pretty much seal the deal for the majority of mid-tier breweries that DO NOT have a loyal following.

I never signed an NDA so if you want to know more about my job ask away.

gunshai··on Anchor Brewing Company ends national distribution, kills Christmas Ale
I just left a job at Deschutes Brewery.

Craft Beer is in a real bad spot atm.

Page 1 of 8Next →