HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

jwlake

449 karma · joined September 16, 2014

submissionscomments
jwlake··on Key principles on in-game virtual currencies in the EU
They just need to also make it illegal for Apple to take more than the credit card fee on in-app transactions and it might make some sort of economic sense to comply with this grab-bag of stuff in Europe.
jwlake··on We hacked Gemini's Python sandbox and leaked its source code (at least some)
Is there any reason it's not documented?
jwlake··on The FAA’s Hiring Scandal
I love how people think managing 1M people and 100 people are different. In both cases it's all delegation. You can't oversee more than 10 people in any realistic sense.
jwlake··on The FAA’s Hiring Scandal
The real key is to stop reporting those characteristics of the workforce.
jwlake··on TikTok divestment law upheld by federal appeals court
I'm pretty sure this is a big enough mote to let insta and youtube kill it.
jwlake··on USFS decision to halt prescribed burns in California is history repeating
I 100% agree with that, but the way pricing works is generally not sufficiently granular. You either get underpriced government backed plans, or a plan that does not take into account your actual circumstances. Eventually sufficient big data might be able to solve the pricing problem. Defensible construction will have cheap insurance and indefensible buildings will not be economically insurable. The problem is insurance is by county (lol) or by "city". Neither work in CA mountains.
jwlake··on USFS decision to halt prescribed burns in California is history repeating
The bigger the town the easier it gets. Towns have roads and parking lots and cmu commercial buildings that are mostly non-flammable. They also have water supplies and logistics infrastructure. Centralized defense is very feasible. Mountain roads and poor communications cause an underutilization of resources.
jwlake··on USFS decision to halt prescribed burns in California is history repeating
Firefighting makes the next fire worse. You need to have a theory that doesn't involve more expensive fire fighting every time someone builds a new house. This is general means defending towns and letting the mountainside burn.
jwlake··on USFS decision to halt prescribed burns in California is history repeating
No my point is stop overfunding firefighting. Over fund forest management.
jwlake··on USFS decision to halt prescribed burns in California is history repeating
Firefighting is only done to save property. People are completely beside the point. The problem is people don't know when they live in a town (defensible) and the countryside (you're on your own). In general the forest service is spending way too much time and resources in places that they should always let burn. You can actually build and live in a forest fire zone. Its much more convenient to ignore that though.
jwlake··on USFS decision to halt prescribed burns in California is history repeating
If they stopped funding that completely it would halt the problem. Fire is part of nature.
jwlake··on How the U.S. government could lower food prices
Cooking for yourself is cultural. If it's not in your culture you won't do it. Price controls won't fix food prices. Good luck having the government fix culture.
jwlake··on Ancient redwoods recover from fire by sprouting 1000-year-old buds
Massive fire suppression is uniquely human.
jwlake··on X Has Become a 'Global Sewer,' Mayor of Paris Says
lol unless you're in the business of publishing I'm unclear how this applies to you.
jwlake··on A chatbot that can't say anything controversial isn't worth much
It actually talks about Llama2 and how most chat versions are stupid but some aren't. Read past the first 200 words. :)
jwlake··on Ask HN: Is Express still "de-facto" for building Node back ends?
indeed. I hate projects that make changes for no reason. If it does everything its supposed to do and does it well, it's just done. Go work on something else.
jwlake··on Do not put plastic in the microwave
A good modern microwave is a fairly magical device, most people don't know how to use it right though. It's definitely useful the more you read recipes that specifically use it. It's like not a top 10 device but its like #11.

Check out peeled steamed asparagus in the microwave, quick, beautiful and delicious.

jwlake··on AWS: IPv4 addresses cost too much, so you’re going to pay
Yes the problem is NAT gateways are expensive, not free. AWS could easily run a "central" 6 to 4 in each region (not in your VPC), which the incremental cost of using would be near 0. Then you could use pure v6 (no IP charges). And actually be able to talk to things like github, stripe, apple, etc.
jwlake··on AWS: IPv4 addresses cost too much, so you’re going to pay
I run quite a few small production aws accounts for clients and this is a big increase to their bill. If you use a lot of t4g.nano instances, the IPs are more than the machines. I think the large customers that are 99% of the revenue won't care, but the bottom 50% of customers will notice.
jwlake··on AWS: IPv4 addresses cost too much, so you’re going to pay
Amazon really needs to put a ton of work into making v6 work for everyone on the server side or this is a very big price increase on the low end.

If they had a compelling case to do the devops work and then everythings fine, I wouldn't mind this at all. The reality is a ton of stuff is ipv4 only (cloudfront origins, albs require ipv4, etc etc).

They realistically need free NAT or free 6to4 as a transition plan.

jwlake··on Is ORM still an anti-pattern?
I'm always confused that ORMS don't standardize on a syntax where N+1 queries are literally illegal in all cases. With `forEach` and callbacks and everything you could easily have a syntax where you can't await until an `run` and curry everything into a single round trip. It lets you write "standard" javascript but disallows N+1 loops always.

Then people have to write "bad" code to N+1.

jwlake··on Ask HN: Is it just me or GPT-4's quality has significantly deteriorated lately?
You can use google's text-bison to get a pretty decent LLM without RLHF.
jwlake··on An open-source alternative to QuickBooks
Keep meaning to look into if you can get this through Stripe. :)
jwlake··on Apple is rewriting Foundation in Swift
I mean a realistic version of that comment is that you can use GTP* to make a set of unit tests. Then iteratively write a new version in swift to be bug compliant with the old version using GPT*. Then profit? The question really is why is swift <-> objc bridge so bad you need this software?
jwlake··on “Just a statistical text predictor”
Any sufficiently advanced statistical predictor is magic?
jwlake··on Inductive charging highway section to be built in Florida
I think just tanker chargers and wires would be more effective, like in-flight refueling. Also way more sci fi.
jwlake··on The more you save on a flash drive, the lighter it gets?
Its not all the useful to think about volts, but about charges. An erased cell is uncharged, a written cell is charged.

How the cell presents "voltage" has to do with exactly the wiring of the source and drain on the flash cell, not the basic structure.

The weight of the drive varies with the sum of the charged cells.

jwlake··on Safari releases are development hell
The problem I see with this is people assume that web platforms are platforms like the windows API where Microsoft doesn't like breaking things.

It's more like Xcode, where every point release breaks something. You need to design your software and your development pipeline to handle that.

Even Google isn't great in this but their continuous release schedule makes it less likely to break things in the wild because they get constant pushback.

jwlake··on Twilight: A Differentially Private Payment Channel Network
Look at this cool house I designed on sand.

It's odd to design a secure system and write a paper, when the security is based on something like TEE. There's tons of literature on breaking TEEs. I can't imagine anyone doing other than checkbox compliance with that level of security.

jwlake··on Musk’s inner circle worked through weekend to cement Twitter layoff plans
Wow, best change in years.
← PreviousPage 2 of 5Next →