Hacker News Reader

imsofutureon There are no "rogue" AI agents

They absolutely set up the agents to hack stuff with a prompt like "hack this site" -- they just imagined that their lazy half-measure precautions would prevent it from actually happening. They were defeated by a combination of bad luck, poor planning and tenacious agent ideation.

imsofutureon U.S. sanctions against the A/I Collective

We should have LLMs decide.

imsofutureon AI 2040: Plan A

This is earnestly one of the stupidest things I've ever read.

imsofutureon Every AI Subscription Is a Ticking Time Bomb for Enterprise

Not only that, but the API rate amounts being pearl clutched over in the article are still relatively trivial. 10k a month is not nothing, but when 10k a month enables a team of ~10-20 engineers, that's pretty good leverage.

imsofutureon Stoat removes all LLM-generated code following user criticism

It will be a painful decade until those who have already lost this weird ideological war ever realize it.

imsofutureon Corporation for Public Broadcasting ceasing operations

Superficially this is 'just' partisan politics, but I wonder if it's actually much more of a death knell for traditional media.

imsofutureon Human

The hubris that circulates around LLMs is astounding.

imsofutureon Sudden Loss of Undocumented Workers Threw Tech Supplier into Upheaval

I don't really care if companies are finding it hard to suddenly abide by the law. That was your burden from the start and you chose to avoid it.

imsofutureon 6 Raspberry Pis, 6 SSDs on a Mini ITX Motherboard

Not to be too glib, but "a bunch of things that should have never been allowed in production, compounded by non-existent monitoring, and poor understanding of how <thing> works" is the cause of most outages.

imsofutureon CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?

This is exactly the general hypothesis behind https://100dollarceo.com

imsofutureon New model could explain old cholesterol mystery

I believe the focus on LDL as 'bad' has been misguided. It's an improvement from 'all cholesterol is bad', but we just don't understand very much about how it all works, and so as we discover more, we slowly refine our understanding.

A lot of the theory about why LDL is 'bad' is based on the fact that arterial damage is repaired with the stuff, causing plaque. There's no evidence that LDL is causing the damage, just that it has a role in how it's fixed (in an ultimately detrimental way).

imsofutureon Green recovery must end the reign of GDP, argue Cambridge and UN economists

Private property entirely depends on violence -- that's not hyperbole, there's ultimately no other compelling force to enforce societal norms and rules (see: police).

It's only our familiarity and compliance with the system that prevents us from encountering that violence.

imsofutureon Icelandair letting go its flight attendants and shifting their duties to pilots

Literally flight attendants exist to help with the safety of passengers in any sort of abnormal situation. That they serve beverages is just kind of the thing they do when there's not a critical safety function.

imsofutureon Advice to new managers: don't joke about firing people

If you're a manager, your job is to do things that make you uncomfortable.

Yep, one thing I noticed when I moved into a management role, was that the things that would make you move along as an employee, are the things it's now your job to fix or deal with. Maybe this is obvious, but there's kind of a visceral shift in perception that goes along with it.

imsofutureon Advice to new managers: don't joke about firing people

An experienced CEO joined a mid-sized company that I worked at a few years. His opening line, in his first all hands was a joke about firing the people who were a few minutes late to the call. It was obviously a joke, but you really can't make a worse impression and he was gone within a year.

imsofutureon Remote work means anyone can take your job

> I'm an outsider, but I'd guess that the people worth $600,000 Facebook salaries are already living there.

Myopic

imsofutureon Ask HN: What startup/technology is on your 'to watch' list?

Cadence https://cadenceworkflow.io/

imsofutureon Show HN: Flight Instruments in Snap SVG and JavaScript

Looks great. I have have a mind to make a VOR + map combo sometime, but I haven't mustered the effort yet.

imsofutureon Ask HN: I want to resign with nothing lined up

It's not a great job market (and unlikely to wildly improve), but you're young and have savings. There will never be a better time to feel the satisfaction of quitting because you plain just don't like it there.

Some of the other comments have advice like trying to get furloughed, and all those seem worth a shot, but yeah.... just walk!

imsofutureon Aviation industry tries to go green

I know that for piston engine aircraft, it is critical that the engine be properly warmed up before takeoff. Otherwise, the engine would likely stall shortly after liftoff, leading inevitably to a crash. This is a common cause of accidents.

This is not true. Engine start to takeoff is usually at least a few minutes, but there is no critical temperature factor for the engine (barring extreme heat or cold).

It's a lot like a car, you don't want to overly stress by flooring it when cold, before oil is circulating comfortable -- but running for 10s of seconds is plenty to get going.

imsofutureon Show HN: CEO, Decision Making as a Service

I think that's kind of the point: analyze the context, make an impartial decision.

imsofutureon DigitalOcean is laying off staff

It just means tech company these days.

imsofutureon Revenue Generating Drinking Fountain

People don't trust a random pipe that serves up free water literally because of the business model of selling a basic commodity like water.

"Ewww look at that dirty TAP water ugh, get some beautiful island fresh water in this bottle!" Of course, it's the same water anyway, but now someone has made money off it.

Capitalism (and since saying that word makes people so mad, let's say "capital seeking behavior" instead) is so hilariously perverse, we've now got advertisement supported tap water, because we advertised tap water v1.0 into obsolescence. And then realized tap water v2.0 (bottled water) actually had unintended consequences (plastic). So THIS time it'll work! Tap Water v3.0!

imsofutureon Revenue Generating Drinking Fountain

Thanks, I hate it.

imsofutureon Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work

Everything is politics.

imsofutureon Telepresence Robots – An Interview With Double Robotics

Yeah, don't think so.

imsofutureon California bans private prisons

Completely agree. The problem is not that capitalism is just blanket bad, or something reductive like that, but instead: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20956786

Capitalism specifically enables a meta-game of spreading as dogma.

imsofutureon California bans private prisons

I don't disagree, but our current socioeconomic/government system leads us to wildly bad situations where we have privatized industries hellbent on extracting every last cent possible from disadvantaged populations (in every sense of the word) and then using that money to further their aims and resource extraction via influencing legislature.

It spreads, it's self perpetuating, it's sick, and it is a disease.

imsofutureon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2019)

NetApp Kubernetes Service | Senior Golang Developers | REMOTE (US timezones) | Full-time

NKS offers customers a simple click-to-deploy production Kubernetes cluster across clouds and on-premise. My team builds application management features on top of this platform, using tools like Golang, Tekton, KNative, Helm. Example projects: develop secure tunnel for remote access to on-premise clusters, design buildpack workflow for building and deploying services directly into Kubernetes clusters, build GraphQL API for exposing remote cluster logs and metrics.

We're looking for experienced developers to write applications and tools in Golang. Kubernetes experience is nice, but not required.

Apply: https://remoteok.io/remote-jobs/74603-remote-senior-software...

imsofutureon Ask HN: A colleague is leaving. How to investigate what went wrong?

Are you their friend? "Hey, why are you leaving?"

Not their friend? Why on earth would you think they owe you an answer to any of the questions you listed?