jonathanyc

Agreed. I'm reading some complaints in the thread about being told to "just read the source code" for internal tools at Meta. When I worked at Apple we didn't even get the source code!

Actually you raise a great point. My answer might have focused too much on the monetary side. I agree 100% that if it's a chance to work on something you'll be proud of with people you enjoy working with then it can be worth it!

Depends on equity. Standard equity for founding engineers is definitely way too low; the chance of the company failing is still 100x higher than if you join as engineer #10, but you don't get 100x the equity (unlike the founders!).

I'd never heard of this before. The name didn't make sense until I read this:

> Metallic means are generalizations of the golden ratio (n=1) and silver ratio (n=2)...

Are there any applications?

I was curious whether this used a locally-hosted LLM because I knew of Mozilla's sponsorship of Llamafile. Was funny to see that they use the term "locally hosted" in a novel way:

> Orbit currently uses a version of Mistral LLM (Mistral 7B) that is locally hosted on Mozilla’s Google Cloud Platform instance.

I only want one feature from Swift: faster type-checking. If you write a few lines of math, or a moderately complex SwiftUI expression, suddenly the typechecker starts timing out. Swift is the only language I've ever used with this problem.

https://hachyderm.io/@evanw/109859384302551859

https://www.cocoawithlove.com/blog/2016/07/12/type-checker-i...

https://danielchasehooper.com/posts/why-swift-is-slow/

This isn't mentioned at all in the announcement so I'm kind of disappointed.

I didn’t learn this until recently but in psql you can use \e or \editor to open the current line in $EDITOR. It helps a lot.

It’s a good idea! For some reason Postico’s built-in query viewer doesn’t seem to follow them, unfortunately.

> In looking at roost networks of bank swallows in Ontario you can identify that, “Oh, some bank swallows at night are actually going to different roosts from where their babies are,” and the adults will often trade off. We don’t know why, but they will sort of wander around and travel a hundred or more kilometers to a different place between nights.

That is actually pretty surprising to me. The weirdest insight from animal trackers I’d previously heard was kind of similar—that wolves regularly travel a lot further than scientists would have expected—but trading off roosts is a whole different level.

Your comment history tells me you don’t use HN to have interesting conversations. Have a good day!

The way Apple product management works is that everyone is always demoing stuff up the chain and ultimately to Tim. They’re reverentially referred to as “Tim demos” internally. If Tim likes it, you get tons of resources.

The downside may be that in the pathological case you’re implementing stuff just for Tim. Another downside is you can’t really demo e.g. high-quality backwards-compatible SDKs to an exec.

The upside is you end up with a pretty coherent and un-fickle set of products. Unlike Google, Apple doesn’t have a roster of five (?) competing chat apps that it constantly changes.

Not OP, but I personally put off using a UI for years before finally trying a few and eventually settling on Postico for Mac. I still jump to psql often, but for me it's an accumulation of small quality-of-life improvements:

- results are formatted nicely by default; no more doing a first query, getting too many columns so results wrap unreadably, then changing the columns for a second query, and so on

- manually editing rows is as easy as with a spreadsheet; of course hopefully you don't have to do this often...

- I can change common filters & sorts in the UI with a few clicks instead of having to change SQL; sure, the SQL would only require typing a few characters, but if it's 2 clicks vs. 8 characters, it's still a small win

Downsides are:

- the GUI has an interface for saving queries, but it refuses to let me save them to a subfolder of my project; it wants to save them all in some global location. This doesn't seem good for sharing queries

- if you are doing more complicated sorting or aggregation, it's still easier to just go to psql than to fiddle with the GUI

I mostly like the reMarkable as a note-taking device because if I want to send someone a diagram from my notes I can send a clean image instead of having to scan. I got the Kindle Scribe when it came out and the latency with turning pages and handwriting is a lot better, but I've read that the new reMarkable has improved that so I'm optimistic.

With both the Kindle Scribe and reMarkable I'm kind of disappointed that there isn't an easy way to automatically back up PDFs of notebooks. When I last checked, it looked like the third-party projects for exporting reMarkable files are not too popular currently.

I realized I'd lost some journal entries over the years that I'd put in e.g. Evernote, and currently I'm facing having to digitize a bunch of Video8 Sony camcorder cassettes, so having a system that automatically backs-up to a futureproof format is pretty important to me.

I think the link is broken; it doesn't send me to an article with the title of the post, just to the blog itself.

The article mentions that "many people seek ways to bypass probate, and the law offers several avenues for doing so" but doesn't mention that in California a holographic will is sufficient to avoid probate. You just need to handwrite a will with a witness present. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm speaking from experience. A few years before my father passed away, he wrote a will literally telling us that it was "just in case," but it ended up saving us a lot of trouble. We went to an estate lawyer who told us that the will was legally sufficient to avoid probate.

No offense, but I feel kind of silly only realizing now that you’ve been responding without having read my original post. I already paid the $300, I already talked to a tax lawyer, and the letters after the first one were not automated. If they’re scammers, it’s weird that I paid them by typing irs.gov into my address bar. I wish you all the best.

Ironically, the last time I checked, the built in screencapture command-line program hadn’t been updated to use ScreenCaptureKit yet. The company I was contracting for ended up shelling out to it because its window picking UX was a lot better than ScreenCapureKit’s. (You can’t do this if you’re sandboxed, though, AFAIK).

A friend told that at the trading company he worked at, traders set up distinct sounds for alerts.

I was hoping someone with a more direct source would comment in the thread but a quick Cmd-F doesn’t turn up anything!

I was sympathetic to the argument that the IRS is overburdened with work before.

But the IRS spent a year harassing me about $300. If that’s the scale of supposed tax fraud that they’re spending staffing resources on I think their prioritization could be improved.

I appreciate that Congress is not trying to make the IRS’s job easier. But I found it hard to square their third letter with the idea that they’re not trying to be malicious.

I actually had to contact the DMV the same number of times to get my problem resolved, but at least they didn’t make up a new justification for the discrepancy after abandoning their first attempt.

Your tip to contact my congressperson is a good one and I appreciate it. As a high schooler I interned as a legislative aide so I know that calling in does do something. But I think my faith in the IRS was too high before this happened; I never thought they’d do something like this.

I’d like to invite you to consider what the differences between dogs and human IRS employees might be. When you equate them, you are not being very charitable regarding their intelligence or moral agency.

> I want you to look them in the eyes and tell them they are the bottleneck and take it a step further and explain why they are the bottleneck so you both are on the same page. “Tyler, you are my bottleneck. I have 45 days to make this video happen and I can not begin to work on it until I know what the contents of the video is. I need you to confirm you understand this is important and we need to set a date on when the creative will be done.” […] Every single day you must check in on Tyler and make sure he is still on track to hit the target date.

This sounds to me a lot like the idea in software engineering of being “blocked on” something. I wonder what jargon other fields use for the same concept. Could be cool to have a table cross-referencing jargon across fields, haha.

> They didn’t even bother to think about anything less than $100M.

I got a letter from the IRS for ~$300. I’m pretty sure the first letter was sent by some automated system of theirs with a bug, and the subsequent letters were some IRS employee trying to cover their ass.

Here’s the sequence of events.

- IRS: You misreported your gain on this one specific trade.

- Me: I checked and the trade is listed with the amounts you claim on the broker’s 1099-B that I sent to you. Here are the 1099-Bs with the transaction highlighted.

- IRS: We’ve already seen your 1099-Bs. Please prove to us the amounts sum to the aggregate.

- Me: Here is a spreadsheet showing all the transactions and the sums.

- IRS: OK OK. What about this other totally unrelated transaction then that is now being mentioned for the first time?

With every single reply, the IRS took months to respond. Each reply was literally just one sentence. They sent me periodic form letters just saying “we’re working on a reply” because apparently there’s some law saying they are required to reply within some number of days. The phone number they provided for me to call was literally just an automated system.

The unrelated transaction was for a huge amount on some stock I had not traded at all. At this point a friend referred me to a tax lawyer who told me to just pay the $300 so the IRS would stop harassing me. Paraphrasing the lawyer: “my rate is a lot higher than $300.”

This incident turned me against the IRS. I’m sorry about your relative but I have no hesitation vilifying them.

In contrast, the CA DMV once sent me a letter asking for $300 because a vehicle’s old registration hadn’t been cancelled. It was a hassle but every time I called in I got a human being, and on the last call the collections person saw the error in their database and fixed it on the spot. Frustrating but not malicious. The IRS on the other hand…

The story about the scrolls is a hilarious rollercoaster; I recommend reading the whole article.

Great article, especially loved the focus on history! I’ve subscribed.

> Lastly, as much as we like to bash Windows for security problems, NT started with an advanced security design for early Internet standards given that the system works, basically, as a capability-based system.

I’m curious as to why the NT kernel’s security guarantees don’t seem to result in Windows itself being more secure. I’ve heard lots of opinions but none from a comparative perspective looking at the NT vs. UNIX kernels.

> and a graphics driver interface that disables itself if it crashes too many times (yes really)

I actually ran into this while upgrading an AMD driver and was very impressed! On Linux and macOS I was used to just getting kernel panics.

It’s too bad whatever system Crowdstrike hooked into was not similarly isolated.

No rush! The crazy thing is it looks like I already had an account (!) but hadn’t signed up for anything. So I actually must have found your site in my search somehow, then maybe I hit the same payment issue? My username on your site is jyc.

> To be honest though, I think that Mastodon is an evolutionary dead-end. It had a huge head start in the space, but I am reasonably sure that it is not the future of the open social web.

Interesting, this was my layman's read too after a while of trying to get into it. To me it felt like it was opinionated but in ways that I disagreed with.

For example, instead of a separate UI for private messages, they just add another option to the visibility selector. From a technical perspective I suppose this is somewhat elegant, but from a UX perspective it felt wrong. I saw a thread where people disagreed with it and the maintainers told them to pound sand. Similarly with quote tweets.

I know you mentioned not trying to pick champions, but are there any alternatives that you thought were particularly interesting? I'm willing to put in a little time to try things out.

The other thing I want to note is I just tried to use the "Set up Auto-Pay" button on Communick and got the error "Could not set up auto pay. Please contact support". I'd love to sign up though.

I was actually searching for a commercial Mastodon host around a year ago. I would have been interested in your service but it did not come up in any search results. I remember checking out Librem One, but the signup process for that was very buggy. Other services were targeted towards people who wanted to host instances themselves, not just have an account.

Even now I can’t find your service in the first page of my search results. I ended up just setting up a recurring donation to Mastodon.social via Patreon.

Your service looks very cool. Just pointing out that it is very hard to discover even for people who are willing to pay, as the GP comment notes and hopefully providing a useful experience report.

> It was not trying to make money, or whatever

If Google Code succeeded, it’s hard to imagine that Google would not have tried to monetize it someday.

This also reminds me of Google’s (also initial) position on Chrome vis-a-vis Firefox: create a product “not trying to make money, or whatever” but just to limit the market share of a competitor.

The less flattering term for this in the context of anticompetitive behavior is “dumping”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)