Hacker News Reader

kaiuhlon Anthropic apologizes for invisible Claude Fable guardrails

Not sure I’ve seen someone so openly hostile on HN in a while. Read the guidelines, and please share your thoughts in better faith.

kaiuhlon Photographer built a medium-format rangefinder

I don’t see it mentioned here yet in recommendations: Pentax 6x7 is an outstanding camera, especially paired with the 105mm f/2.4 lens. Some of my favorite photos ever have come from that pair.

kaiuhlon Ruby Blocks

That’s just a performance optimization because blocks are typically only invoked, not passed or otherwise manipulated. If you want to do anything with the block, you pay a tiny tax and have a Proc instance.

kaiuhlon Ruby Blocks

Blocks are actually instances of the Proc class. There are helper methods to handle blocks passed to methods in a lightweight manner but you can also accept the block as a method argument, e.g.,

  class Integer
    def times(&blk)
      i = 0
      while i < self
        blk.call(i)
        i += 1
      end
    end
  end

kaiuhlon RubyLLM: A delightful Ruby way to work with AI

But in general, ruby code only passes anonymous functions and, in those cases, the syntax is beautiful.

kaiuhlon Type 1 diabetes reversed by new cell transplantation technique

We spend a large portion of the federal budget on human death prevention. It sounds like hyperbole, but anyone dying from administrative changes is literally “world ending” for them.

If a plan to cut bureaucracy was somehow analyzed to find that we could save 5% of the US budget in exchange for 10,000 lives, reasonable people might consider otherwise. To take these changes against life-saving organizations without first analysis of consequences is pretty reckless.

kaiuhlon FedNow Is Live

Yes, and only next day settlement. Because there’s no real time authorization, payments have two business days after settlement for the banks to report ordinary failures like insufficient funds.

How quickly a bank responds in that window depends greatly on the bank. In practice at decent scale, we see banks using every possible hour of that two day window to fail transactions.

An ACH debit made on Friday night technically has until open of business Wednesday to fail.

kaiuhlon FedNow Is Live

ACH has many of the same consumer protections as credit card networks. The window is 60 days instead of 90 days and the dispute outcome is always in your favor—merchants cannot respond to the dispute or win.

kaiuhlon Ask HN: Is it just me?

Also, you're self-aware enough to ask if it's you or not, without an obvious bias towards it not being you. That makes me think you're doing pretty good.

Empathy and a desire to be a better human are underappreciated values in this industry. I’ve made this a pillar of interviewing at companies I’ve worked at over the years; it’s better to hire kind people with a capacity for growth and skills in the right direction than to hire folks with all the necessary skills and experience at the time of hire but with poor social skills or a lot of dogma.

kaiuhlon A golden age of consumer convenience is passing

The irony of the article behind a paywall.

kaiuhlon The case for bad coffee (2015)

Agreed. I buy 5lbs from them at a time and keep it in the freezer. It’s usually frozen two days after they roasted it. I then refill the hopper on my grinder as necessary and use a pour over (chemex with a metal filter). It’s fast and easy and tasty. But I will also drink any coffee and enjoy it.

kaiuhlon Stripe Financial Connections

I work at one of the companies that integrated Financial Connections during its beta, moving from Plaid Auth. We use the link to bank accounts for instant account verification and as a fraud signal for ACH payments. However, we definitely can’t do a better job than Stripe could at risk analysis, provided they had access to metadata on the bank account when processing the payment and could provide insights from their entire platform. Now they do.

I’d guess the big benefit here, besides taking some of Plaid’s existing customers, is what’s possible now that Connections lives alongside the other things Stripe offers like ACH, loans, and identity verification.

kaiuhlon Show HN: Just Launched an App for Dads

This sort of shaming about how exactly someone should be, and how they’re failing to live up to expectations by not doing what parent is doing, is presumably exactly why this material exist. Thanks for illustrating to everyone why this might actually be useful.

kaiuhlon About those lava lamps

Left alone to our own willpower, most of us would be less accomplished. We'd live in dirtier houses, wash the dishes less, and treat ourselves less well. It's the promise of others seeing our accomplishments, being around our mess, or seeing us naked that keeps us doing right by ourselves. Doing chores is a chore, but social pressure and acceptance is a powerful drug.

kaiuhlon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2015)

REMOTE - Developer - Portland, OR - http://teamtreehouse.com

We're hiring five backend developers. Any language experience is fine, but you'll be working primarily with Ruby and Coffeescript.

At Treehouse we're on a mission to make technology education affordable and accessible for everyone in the world. Come join us and do the best, most meaningful work of your career.

https://teamtreehouse.com/jobs/at-treehouse-14dc98d6-2fc9-47...

kaiuhlon At some startups, Friday is so casual that it’s not even a workday

Sunday was just an example. Nobody is stopped from working if they're movitated to do so, but we generally discourage each other from working overtime unnecessarily. I personally work 32-hour weeks regularly and still contribute meaningfully.

And then, I go backpacking or bike-riding or something that tends to be demanding physically and relaxing mentally—I find it helps me keep a healthy balance. I know there are plenty of people that don't crave that reprieve though, and that's totally okay as well.

There's weekends where I'm working on a particularly interesting problem where I'll work through the weekend because I want to. The big difference is the extrinsic pressure is missing. Nobody has to.

kaiuhlon At some startups, Friday is so casual that it’s not even a workday

We don't hire strictly front-end developers, only designers who can write markup, and developers.

kaiuhlon At some startups, Friday is so casual that it’s not even a workday

Nobody is stopped from working longer hours, but the expectation culturally is that you should probably be doing something else instead of working on Sunday.

kaiuhlon What Dreams May Come

As someone who was also diagnosed with skin cancer recently and who's mother is dying of metastatic cancer, I can particularly relate. It's amazing that simply being told you're sick can physically make you so. If you want someone to talk to, I'm available. Contact information is my profile. Good luck.

kaiuhlon Facebook Paper's gesture problems

Simple solution: swipe up on the carousel to make the cards full-screen, then browse. The whole UI works on this paradigm, so it may not be obvious at first, but it will be if this style of app continues.

kaiuhlon We work a 4-day week and just raised $4.75m (2012)

I've worked 40 hour weeks in a corporate environment (where it's often actually less than 40), 60 hour weeks in an agency, 32 hour weeks at Treehouse. I find that needing to physically commit to work five days a week is the crux—it makes very little difference how much time you're spending in the pursuit of it. I'm big into backpacking, so three full, available days makes a world of difference to me, not the amount of hours I'm expected to work.

kaiuhlon We work a 4-day week and just raised $4.75m (2012)

Treehouse developer here. It's actually four 8s.

kaiuhlon New closure allows camping mattress to be inflated in seconds

The opposite is actually true. I sleep a month a year on a camping pad, and it's well known among avid backpackers that air pads like that shown in the OP are most comfortable when under inflated enough to keep your hips just above the ground.

kaiuhlon The Perl Renaissance

I haven't read something so generalizing in a while. This is the technology-equivalent of saying that women are worse at programming than men because of their sex, or people that use Craftsmen hammers build better houses. Just because someone writes code in Ruby or Python does not assign them to one personality group and mean they are driven by similar motivations.

It sounds like you're talking about the most prolific speakers and code authors in each community who may in fact have their own personalities, but they don't define everyone who are simply using the best tool they can to accomplish their goals.

kaiuhlon The Cold Hard Facts of Freezing to Death (1997)

I agree with all of this advice.

The article describes one type of winter danger (extreme cold), but there's another equally dangerous condition it doesn't deal with — temperatures right around freezing.

A friend and I ended a snowcamping trip a day early yesterday because temperatures were ±32º morning and night. The result of the temperature staying just below or at freezing is that you get very wet. You get very wet just doing mundane tasks like shoveling snow because your body heat needs to shift the temperature of snow on your clothing by just a few degrees to melt. Being slightly unprepared for a night in these conditions is just as dangerous as being in the arctic (where you may be cold, but you'll definitely be dry).

kaiuhlon The Basement

You're correct—this is the basement of the Pittock. Upstairs are many, many closets for rent to shove servers in.

kaiuhlon Things I wish someone had told me about life after college

Share interests is spot on. To add:

People should share their friends and acquaintances more often. Mixing disparate groups of friends and quickly introducing new acquaintances to existing friends is a surefire way to build a community in the city you live in. This may seem old fashioned, but older folks need mixers—essentially friend referrals. If you get this ball rolling, it can cascade and you'll end up meeting people you truly connect with and share interests with. The easiest way to start is simply having a party where you allow coworkers to bring their friends. I've made really good friends by finding people that enjoy backpacking as much as I do and spending a night in the woods with them (for better or worse, heh).

My wife and I are having a Christmas party tonight where 40-50 people are coming. Hopefully out of that, two or more people will become better friends. 100% of these people are friends she or I have made after college, predominately through other people willing to share. For reference, we're in our late 20s.

Simply put, it's on you to build community after college. It doesn't get forced upon you like in a university.

kaiuhlon Flickr Has the Opportunity to Become the Next Flickr

Just because you have the institutional memory of Flickr during its fall from grace doesn't mean the rest of the internet, particularly the younger generation, does.

Instagram has proven that social networking around "artistic" photos has an audience. If Flickr can be the more professional, big-boy Instagram (maybe even with a website!), then I can see it attracting a new audience.

kaiuhlon Bitcoin Block #210 000 mined - reward halving

May I suggest a bookmarklet I created called PARTYMODE?

http://wenthiking.com/partymode

kaiuhlon Refining Ruby

I've been writing Ruby professionally for six years and this has never been an issue for me or folks I work with. Can you give a single example where you found a conflict in libraries that broke your application?