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ivankelly

62 karma · joined May 11, 2015

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ivankelly··on Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?
If everyone using Gmail permanently lost access to their gmail there’d be massive problems
ivankelly··on Bytecode VMs in surprising places (2024)
Quake had it’s own vm also
ivankelly··on Knitting bullshit
Yes, I saw. By giving up I meant I skimmed to the end. The images improve the article
ivankelly··on Knitting bullshit
I came in indifferent but it doesn’t take much to make me give up on an article linked on hacker news. I use it as bubblegum while waiting for a compile/prompt, intent ally for stuff that can be dropped easily. I saw her disclaimer at the end. My point was that the slop images make a more appealing article than if they were absent
ivankelly··on Knitting bullshit
I was a couple of images in before I sussed it. Bullshit images, but pleasing enough to look at. Without the images, it would have either been a big wall of text, which would have put me off reading, though I did give up about 25% of the way through after sussing the images and thus the incoherence in the argument. The images bring something to the article. They were cheap/quick to generate. The increase the potential payoff (more reader) without significantly increasing the cost. Without the images, the payoff(readers) would likely have been lower, below the cost of actually writing the article. Same goes for a history of knitting podcast or that video. Production costs would not be worth it for a very niche viewership.
ivankelly··on IBM didn't want Microsoft to use the Tab key to move between dialog fields
Arrow keys are giving swastika vibes, which I guess fits given IBM’s history
ivankelly··on College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work
There’s a big difference between using AI well and using it badly. Judgement is what needs to be learnt
ivankelly··on College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work
Not at all. It’s a tool. It can be used well and it can be used badly, the difference often being others things thought in a CS curriculum. But a well trained engineer using the tool will be more productive than that engineer doing everything by hand, so leaving that tool out of the curriculum is doing a disservice to the students
ivankelly··on College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work
Given the way things are going, not knowing how to use AI will be like coming out not knowing about revision control
ivankelly··on Leaving Google has actively improved my life
There’s queries and there’s queries. Many queries are effectively undefined bookmarks. You know this exists but haven’t saved it but your know a few key words to get to it. “Rustdoc moka api”. And then there’s the “I’m researching a subject queries”. Google used to be useful for both. But for the later case it send to have gotten worse. Which is irrelevant because LLMs are so much better. So people will use LLMs for these usecases. So Google search basically becomes a phonebook. And that’s easy to emulate. Their calculator is still my go to though
ivankelly··on The original vi is a product of its time (and its time has passed)
He's right man ^X^S

WTF, why isn't my terminal responding

ivankelly··on IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)
I recall CodeWarrior being the official ide for SymbianOS when I started there. And it sucked, but likely more due to the integration. I think sucky custom rarely working IDEs is what pushed me to full time emacs
ivankelly··on Why are hyperlinks blue? (2021)
They’re blue because pmarca was a democrat back then
ivankelly··on Why are there no good dinosaur films?
> At the time of Jurassic Park’s release, the meteor as the cause for the dino-extinction was still a nascent theory and more than a decade out from being cemented as fact.

This assumed me. Like many people who were interested in dinosaurs, the interest didn't last much past by early teens, so the "nobody knows for sure, maybe meteor" reason for their disappearance was the accepted explanation until something triggered me to look a 2 or 3 years ago and see that the science had changed.

ivankelly··on Tell HN: Help restore the tax deduction for software dev in the US (Section 174)
From the wording, it sounds like it applies to contracting non-US resident software development as well.
ivankelly··on What Bikini Atoll Looks Like Today (2017)
For a headline “what x looks like today”, I expected more pictures
ivankelly··on Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)
The bees in a swarm have filled themselves with food before swarming, so they’re stuffed, so it’s hard to flex the abdomen to make a sting
ivankelly··on Ask HN: My 12 year-old nephew just got diagnosed with ADHD, any advice?
Keep him away from cigarettes, vapes.
ivankelly··on Introducing S2
A interesting difference is the ability to have exclusive access to writes on the log (the fencing token). This allows you to use the logs as write ahead logs.
ivankelly··on Therapeutic Benefits of Alcohol?
The gripe water that parents in Ireland and the UK used to give to babies used to be a mixture of sugar and alcohol. 3.6%. They took that formulation off the market in the 90s though.
ivankelly··on Raft: Understandable Distributed Consensus
100% agree. I haven't read the raft paper in years, but I remember thinking there's just too much stuff in there. That stuff in important, but if you want people to understand what's happening they internalize the fundamental idea of being able to block other writers by bumping a number. Which is all covered in the single decree paxos section in part time parliment.
ivankelly··on Irish museum solves mystery of Bronze Age axe heads delivered in porridge box
The farmer is from Westmeath. The find was in banagher in co Offaly
ivankelly··on Irish museum solves mystery of Bronze Age axe heads delivered in porridge box
The oats in clonakilty puddings are all flahavans too
ivankelly··on The LaTeX fetish (Or: Don't write in LaTeX It's just for typesetting) (2016)
> nobody is making anyone do anything.

Not now. Now there’s plenty of ways to collaborate on a document. But 20 years ago, you couldn’t edit a word file on Linux and send it back in a form that hadn’t mangled the formatting. And everyone was using word for everything back then.

ivankelly··on Illegal host, electric shocks, slugs, leaks and no support – How Airbnb failed
> Note that in Portugal garbage is usually collected from nearby (unsaturated green colored) lidded trash cans and dumpsters owned by the city government or entities contracted to it

Is this uniform across all of portugal? In spain, it differs by neighbourhood. Where I live, you drop landfill rubbish beside front door between 20:00 & 22:00 and it gets picked up. 100m away in another neighbourhood they have underground depots that you drop it into. In the newer parts of the city they do have containers on the corner of each block.

ivankelly··on Postgres: A better message queue than Kafka?
Since they're already doing offload to S3 for older log messages, it seems like they could do this from the get-go and save a bunch of storage and interzone transfer costs in RDS. Depends on the log message sizes though of course.
ivankelly··on Show HN: Get conversational practice in over 20 languages by talking to an AI
100% this. Children make mistakes all the time, but they're not afraid to, especially at the stage they're first acquiring the language. But by the time you're an adult, you're much more cautious about appearing dumb, so you hold back.
ivankelly··on Timing of daily calorie loading affects appetite and hunger responses
One issue I've had with fasting in general, is that it puts my head into a "wired" state. This is fine during the day, keeps me focused at work, but if I'm in that state at night time, sleep becomes a problem.
ivankelly··on What Metric to Use When Benchmarking?
The missing dimension here is the percentage of time the program is running on the core. Even if the benchmark is using 3 seconds to run 11billion instructions, that doesn't tell you if the core is still idle 90% of the time because it's blocking on I/O. CPU bound work should pin the core. This is especially true on server side stuff, because if you are not maximizing the time on core, you are paying for CPU that is not being used.
ivankelly··on Cryptocurrency scam: Man swindled out of pension and life savings
name the celebrities at least.
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