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koolba

38,050 karma · joined December 12, 2014

CXO at a Fortune 500 company.

Please forward all complaints to hn dot username at the big G's electronic letter service.

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koolba··on Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants
Planning on storing it locally solves the problem of transport. Nobody wants an 18-wheeler hauling a couple tons of nuclear waste driving by their neighborhood. That’s regardless of how far away it’s going.
koolba··on SpaceX's president is floating a Tesla merger as the company begins trading
This is all because Musk doesn’t want to have two different corporate email addresses. The corporate synergies are secondary to the convenience of checking just one mailbox.
koolba··on The iPhone's Last Stand
Sadly access to knowledge strongly correlates with access to mindless entertainment that competes with the absorption of said knowledge.

If you grow up in a house in the woods with every math book known to man, but nothing else, you will eventually read them.

But if that house also has every comic book, porno mag, animal bloopers, etc, you’ll never pick one up.

koolba··on Confidential submission of draft S-1 to the SEC
Would be hilarious if they used an LLM to write it and it started hallucinating revenue streams and numbers.
koolba··on India's surprise baby bust
> It's also such a recursive problem

The recursive aspect is grandparents being 70+ rather than 50+ when they help out.

koolba··on India's surprise baby bust
Effort is definitely sub linear. And costs even more so.

Cooking for four kids clearly has more raw ingredients, but you also have more opportunity to buy them in bulk. The active cook time itself does not increase much either.

Hand me down clothing and books are all shared. The kids also help watch, teach, and entertain each other.

I feel sorry for children that grow up without siblings. But even more so for parents that that choose to not have any at all.

koolba··on India's surprise baby bust
> Even the ones that really want kids simply cannot afford to have one, because the price of living is simply absurd.

Perhaps the price of living to which you are accustomed to is absurd.

> I'm extremely fortunate to be working at a large tech company and I have good money, but even with my income having a kid would be financially ruinous for us.

Would it though? Couples having been raising children with much less for millennia.

> Daycare costs alone are ludicrous, somewhere in the region of 2000-3000 euros PER MONTH.

Children have a lot of economies of scale. If one spouse stays home to watch them, that covers as many kids as you have.

Spending time with grandparents is also common. This is both cost effective and facilitates generational knowledge and culture transfer.

koolba··on The ways we contain Claude across products
> Then it can blow it up all it wants. (Or a $3 VPS, as the case may be :)

Just make sure it doesn’t have ssh access to any other machines!

koolba··on Turkey Hacked the Hair Transplant Industry
How did it hold up over the past few years?
koolba··on Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?
It’s so good it even sees things that are not there!
koolba··on United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert
Not public but definitely written down and semi permanent. It’s like leaving a trail of breadcrumbs that could eventually lead to you. In this case, it gives a determined actor a specific course of action to follow (find the manifest).
koolba··on The four programming questions from my 1994 Microsoft internship interview (2023)
> The second one is absolutely trivial if you've ever read K&R (even if you're not allowed to just call strcpy())

The naive approach’s assumes you can iterate over the first string until it terminates.

It’s a bit trickier if you do not assume the memory regions cannot overlap.

See memcpy vs memmove: https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/memmove.3.html

koolba··on United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert
> What you are doing is the equivalent of paying some poor cashier in pennies while everyone behind you is forced to wait in order to get revenge for some decision made by executives ten rungs up the food chain.

These rules are not made by CEOs. They’re made by the people the populace has chosen to elect. Either directly or indirectly through inaction.

> It is childish and immature. And worse, it biases people against whatever point you’re trying to make in the first place. Please make the conscious choice to be a better person.

Again, what part of waiting for my turn is childish or immature? If the person in front of me is waiting for her turn I’m not going to complain. That’s the system we’ve arrived at.

> Since you are hell-bent on following all rules to the letter, you could at least commit to the bit and follow your luggage through the X-ray machine.

I think you’re misunderstanding my actions. I don’t hold up the line for no reason. I hold up the line until both me and my bags go through in tandem. Not a moment sooner nor a moment longer.

koolba··on United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert
> You are being an asshole to prove a point.

How is waiting for my turn to go through the metal detector or be patted down being an asshole? I arrived before the people behind me and I’m following the security procedures of the airport.

It explicitly says to keep your belongings in your position at all times. To keep your bags in view. In fact they ask you if you ever lost sight of your bags.

If people don’t want to wait in line for people following the rules then let them be inconvenienced to the point where they will get the rules changed to speed up the process.

But I’m not going to give in to the stupidity of the security rules and forsake my own belongings to accommodate someone who doesn’t care enough to either come early and deal with the potential ramifications of the rules their elected leaders have chosen for them.

koolba··on United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert
By taking a stand and inconveniencing the world around me, I hope to induce change for everyone.

What’s the alternative? Lose track of my stuff or risk it being stolen?

koolba··on United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert
Very interesting, but a hell of a way to dox yourself for being on the flight manifest.
koolba··on United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert
> What's to prevent terrorists from going through TSA, waiting in the scanning line when everyone is still going through, and then planting a bluetooth device into someone else's bag? I never open my carryon once I have packed it.

I make it a point to hold up the whole line until it is my turn to go through the xray. It gets fun when they mandate a pat down in lieu of the millimeter wave scanner but refuse to have someone available for it.

It’s the only way to honestly say you have kept your bags under watch. If anybody tries to send in my bags without me , I immediately speak up in a loud stern voice, “That is not your bag!”

koolba··on I hated writing until I learned there’s a science to it (2024)
The software version of this (pre-LLM!) was to write tons of software till the patterns just click. I don’t see that continuing though.

Does anyone truly think we’ll have another generation of nerds hacking away for hours by hand to hone their trade? Or will it turn into a craft like woodworking?

koolba··on Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation
Is she paying for anything though?
koolba··on Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM
Yes you’re allowed paper. But it’s strictly worse than pure paper as the student is forced to copy the entire problem, possibly with errors.

It’s much easier to cross out a 4 and 8 to divide the latter (replacing it with a 2) then it is to copy the whole problem from scratch. Even more so for filling in angles or areas in a geometry problem.

koolba··on Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM
School boards to do not set curriculum or methods of instruction. At best they hire and fire the administration team. But even those positions usually have tenure.

So even a willing school board is unable to do more than rubber stamp the status quo.

koolba··on Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM
They got rid of paper because teachers are lazy and do not want to spend time grading things by hand.

I’ve spoken to the head of curriculum at a school asking why when given the choice of paper or digital format of a math exam, they picked the digital. I specifically mentioned it’d be inferior as students would not be able to draw atop geometry problems or cross out numbers when simplifying expressions.

The response I got was, “we encourage students to redraw the entire picture on paper as rewriting the entire question is helpful”.

It’s strictly worse. They know it is. And they do not care.

koolba··on The real cost of owning a home
Realtors are also notorious for recommending service providers that give them a kick back.
koolba··on Stripe is friendly to “friendly fraud”
Crypto does have the distinct cash like advantage of not having chargebacks. I don’t know of any other digital payment system with that property.
koolba··on Greg Brockman interview [video]
Especially when they pick which history be in the corpus for the next LLM.
koolba··on Toxic chemical leak at a manufacturing facility in Orange County
I wonder if they’ll try drilling or shooting a hole into the bottom. A semi controlled leak to disperse it locally. A mess for sure. But better than going up and out.
koolba··on Models.dev: open-source database of AI model specs, pricing, and capabilities
The future of sites like this (and by future I mean the present) is automated actions that infer what to do to keep the site up to date. Imagine a CI job with a single generic task of “keep things fresh”. Combined with some guard rails for deploying and validating, and you get a living site. It’ll figure out on its own to scrape HN for new sites that list models. Figure out their pricing pages.
koolba··on DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
Good or better? Curious which would be in either bucket.
koolba··on Show HN: Freenet, a peer-to-peer platform for decentralized apps
How does it work in practice? Is it sorted by timestamp and content hash for uniqueness?
koolba··on Show HN: Freenet, a peer-to-peer platform for decentralized apps
The submitter is the creator of the original Freenet. If anybody gets to decide what we will call Freenet, it’s him.
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