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lostcolony

9,464 karma · joined December 17, 2013

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lostcolony··on Show HN: I built a site that finds the cheapest place to buy a book
Not parent, but I like, and try to direct money to, local bookstores that do events and provide spaces for small and local authors to reach the community.
lostcolony··on Layoffs at Meta starts next week, leaked on Blind
> That cannot be true.

> I know, it's Meta, but they can't be that blind.

You've not actually seen the kinds of decisions corporations execute on in the interests of shareholder value, have you?

Tech companies are better at using data to drive their decisions than non-tech companies; they are no better at using data -sensibly-.

If this actually happens (it's Blind), with the policy listed (it's Blind), the rationale is quite easy to explain - clearly, the one whose productivity didn't suffer -fired the right people-. The one whose productivity suffered -fired the wrong people-. The option you present, that some teams are actually sufficiently lean already, runs against the broad generality the CEO gave of "too many employees, but few work", ergo it can't be true.

lostcolony··on Google is shutting down Stadia
Yes necessarily, as I'm defining my expectations. If Google has made it so engineering doesn't participate at all in product direction, that means they're not letting their engineers work optimally in accordance with my expectations (whatever those are worth); the 'untested' case I mentioned before. Which, as you note, is why in other companies those individuals may not be as able to shine, since they're being measured against a number of other skills that form the holistic whole of "solving business problems", rather than just the subset of "solving technical problems".
lostcolony··on Google is shutting down Stadia
Only if you very narrowly define real engineering.

Google, collectively, may be among the best (I'm not hazarding an opinion) at solving technical problems.

I, however, expect good engineers to help with product vision, understanding and addressing customer pain points, and amongst the senior engineers especially, be effective at communication and helping manage upwards to achieve those ends. Somewhere, Google engineers are dropping the ball there, or are so detached from those problems that their abilities in those skills are untested.

lostcolony··on Adversarial Collaboration
So was "abolition".

You can decide you -disagree- with the ideas of 'social justice', or the implementation, or whatever, but I think you'll need a stronger case than "it's political" to warrant the dismissal of an educational institution trying to incorporate the term.

lostcolony··on Build your career on dirty work
Telling the VP to get stuffed, you're only going to do what comes through the proper chain of command, is just going to get you fired immediately rather than PIPed.

Not saying there wasn't a way through this that could have led to a positive outcome, but the key takeaway isn't "do the dirty work", it's "make sure what you're doing has an impact, and has visibility from the people in charge of personnel decisions affecting you". Less work but greater visibility > more work and worse visibility. Part of your job is ensuring visibility or you will get shafted.

lostcolony··on Meta cuts Responsible Innovation Team
Offering to pay someone for their silence sounds like bribery. Not accepting it, or otherwise ensuring that you're compensated properly for what that silence is going to cost you, doesn't turn that into blackmail. Twitter approached op, so to speak, not the other way around.
lostcolony··on Ask HN: Why don't we have 3 day weekends yet?
Even those that are only open 9-5 M-F are not that hard to keep operational with a 4 day work week. As soon as you have five people, every person gets a different day off during the week. Plenty of people will be happy to have days other than Monday and Friday as well; that breaks up the work week so you have it easier to recover, AND it lets you use that day for errands while everything is open.
lostcolony··on Too many Americans live in places built for cars – not for human connection
I don't think we need that level of density to warrant public transit. Singapore has one of the best public transit systems in the world (highest customer satisfaction rate), at 1/5th the density of NYC.
lostcolony··on Workplace surveillance is coming for you
You're focusing too much on the specifics of the hypothetical rather than the point of the hypothetical. If you can't get out to the abstraction, then in universe X, programmer B-Z all spend 3 weeks on a feature, and in universe Y, programmer B-Z all spend 1 week on a feature. So we've got an extra man year being burned, all to save a man week upfront. Extend to whatever point short of breaking the analogy you care to.
lostcolony··on Nobody wants to teach anymore
"Half the job is having fun"

You know, having known and being related to multiple teachers, I've not heard any of them express it as -fun-. Meaningful, important, challenging, yes, but not 'fun'. The two college professors I know have expressed it a such, but that's it. Of the teachers I had, I could see some of the advanced placement ('gifted') teachers viewing it as fun, because we were generally well behaved and smaller class sizes, but even there a common through line was taking advantage of the class' temperament and offloading the curriculum back onto us (i.e., "pick a topic in (X) to teach to everyone").

There is a tradeoff in lesson planning; there are resources around the proscribed curriculum (i.e., teach to the book), but that is decidedly not fun or interesting and the kids -will- misbehave more; the alternative for most classes (the advanced placement as mentioned above notwithstanding) is to prep something more interesting, but that requires using more time outside the classroom for 'work'.

Outside of the workday, which runs from 7-3:30 or so (and sometimes both before and after, if there are faculty meetings and things, or if they recruit from the teaching pool to help with kid drop off/pick up), there is grading, so it is not uncommon for a teacher's workday to run close to 12 hours.

You do, as you say, get summers off, but again, nearly all the teachers I know use that time to look for summer jobs, because the pay is so poor. Sometimes it's summer school or just independent tutoring, sometimes it's service industry work; nothing quite like running into your students from the prior year while handing their mom their McDonald's from the drive through. The only teacher I know who didn't (recently retired) do that had inherited their house, so had no rent/house payment to make, and -could- live, frugally, on a teachers' salary.

lostcolony··on Nobody wants to teach anymore
> Counterpoint: teachers' pay is great, it's just backloaded in pension plans.

Yet another counter counterpoint - there are still companies and government jobs with defined pension plans that pay far more than teachers. Even without those, there are still many, many jobs requiring a comparative amount of education, far fewer hours worked, and pay more even once you subtract maximizing 401k contributions yearly (let alone considering the added costs of buying school supplies).

lostcolony··on Twilio incident: What Signal users need to know
I did read it.

The point is that the mother is being charged with aiding her daughter to have an abortion due to evidence collected from chats they thought were secure, but which were still susceptible to a warrant.

Now, there are other charges. And the time the abortion happened it occurred while the 20 week ban wasn't being enforced, because the state knew it wouldn't hold up under Roe (and is only illegal and chargeable now, with the court having overturned Roe). So, yes, it's super interesting.

But the point is that police are charging someone for aiding an abortion due to texts the sender thought were secure. That's the entire relevancy. Anything else about this particular incident isn't germane.

lostcolony··on Twilio incident: What Signal users need to know
Why is it laughable? https://www.npr.org/2022/08/12/1117092169/nebraska-cops-used...
lostcolony··on IRS audits poorest families at five times the rate for everyone else
They don't ignore much larger sums; larger sums are much harder to automate detection of. So with the limited amount of manpower they have, far fewer are identified.

They can send a letter asking for documentation for everything the automated system flags. The automated system detects "simple" cases at a far higher confidence ratio, which tends to be lower income. Once you get upper income, with all manner of complicated itemized deductions, the confidence of the automated system is much lower, and the effort to ask for appropriate documentation, and verify it, is much higher, for a much lower expectation of return (since, again, low confidence from the system).

lostcolony··on An incident impacting 5M accounts and private information on Twitter
"We left our gun outside, unsecured, but no one has complained they were shot with it and we didn't detect any fingerprints on it when we finally noticed it wasn't locked up properly"
lostcolony··on NSA, NIST, and post-quantum crypto: my second lawsuit against the US government
Not really. For the same reason that "here's your github login" doesn't equate to you suddenly being able to be effective in a new company. You might be able to look things up in the code and understand how things are being done, but you don't know -why- things are being done that way.

A lot of the instances in the post even show the NSA giving a why. It's not a particular convincing why, but it was enough to sow doubt. The reason to make all discussions public is so that there isn't an after the fact "wait, why is that obviously odd choice being done?" but instead a before the fact "I think we should make a change". The burden of evidence is different for that. A "I think we should reduce the key length for performance" is a much harder sell when the spec already prescribes a longer key length, than an after the fact "the spec's key length seems too short" "Nah, it's good enough, and we need it that way for performance". The status quo always has inertia.

lostcolony··on Alex Jones must pay $4M in damages for Sandy Hook hoax claims
I think part of the problem with perjury is that if it's detectable you only have hurt your own case, and if it isn't detected it can't be tried.

This might be somewhat unique in that the perjury charges relate to hiding evidence as well (rather than just running counter to the evidence). And, obviously, that Alex Jones isn't a cop, so that particular fetishism of law enforcement the US operates under doesn't apply.

lostcolony··on Why study functional programming? (2012)
Sure, if you ensure that every bit of state is going to the ORM, and the ORM caches nothing. Of course, that tends to ensure that what is and what isn't side effect free is massively obfuscated, which seems like you're including some new negatives, but I will totally agree there are other ways to ensure state goes to the state store; I already did.
lostcolony··on Why study functional programming? (2012)
Once you start thinking that way, you start wondering why Objects, rather than (from Java) records, or (from most every other language) structs/tuples.

That is, why bundle functions with the data and encapsulate it as a new type that ties them together? It invites the very thing you're saying not to do; if you want to think of it as just data...then make it just data. Nouns only; no verbs. Even if you have a verb as data, treat it as a noun (i.e., a higher order function).

It's all translatable; you can break an object into functions and data, and create an object bundling functions and data, but, as you say, it's about how you think...and objects do not encourage you to think about the underlying data, but about the abstraction. And abstractions are leaky, don't translate well into new domains, and are much harder to communicate (both at an API level and between humans) than data.

lostcolony··on Why study functional programming? (2012)
>> in both cases the mutation of shared state was just moved to database and its transaction semantics. The FP code itself was about mostly stateless server-side processing. So, FP wasn't doing anything for us on that front.

Sure it was. While it didn't force devs to stop using mutable state, you just called out that it -did- force them to move that state out of the service and into something with ACID guarantees, and write their server code in a way that was far more stateless. That sounds like a win to me?

lostcolony··on FTC takes action to stop Opendoor from cheating potential sellers
>> The big part of rising housing prices or "scarce housing" or "demand exceeding supply" is really about desirable geographic locations.

Only to a point. Many desirable geographic locations have a lot of local factors that prevent additional housing from being built with the intent of housing more people (think homeowners defending their "property values", zoning laws, etc). Similarly, homes being "investments" means there's a self-perpetuating cycle; builders build luxury homes instead of multi-tenant buildings, because they know that's what companies want to buy (being flipped the easiest with the highest rate of return), so even when there is new land being developed, market forces push it to being an "investment" rather than housing people. Income inequality furthers this; why use the land and sell a modest home to a worker, when you could use the home and sell a luxury home at a much larger markup to the rich?

lostcolony··on FTC takes action to stop Opendoor from cheating potential sellers
You can have a profit motive driving behavior without something being an investment vehicle.

Cars are an example of that. Even when scarcity has driven the cost of cars up (such as during the recent pandemic), everyone recognized that more could, and would, be produced, and so no one viewed them as an investment vehicle, that adding time in somehow increased the value over the initial purchase price.

Housing is viewed that way. Part of that is due to location; there is innately a level of scarcity (not everyone can live in (insert city)), but there is also massive artifical scarcity. Even where there's room, there is NIMPYism and zoning regulations and etc that keeps enough housing from being built in areas people are able to live (i.e., close enough to civilization to be able to buy groceries without an hour long drive each way, for instance), forcing pricing up, in a positive reinforcement loop (scarcity = pricing goes up = people buying for the 'investment' rather than a place to live = more scarcity)

lostcolony··on MBS: A volatile millennial wields absolute power in Saudi Arabia
Oh, extremely. < 17% of the country is 65 years and older, and yet their interests represent a supermajority in Congress. It's one reason why climate change isn't being addressed; control is held by people who will be dead by then. For anyone younger it has to be a bit more nuanced, but at that age it's literally "I will barely experience the downsides".
lostcolony··on C++ Asynchronous Framework
Or even long term investment in the company. Look at where IBM is now vs where they were 50 years ago; Microsoft would be in the same place except for Satya Nadella completely reinvigorating the company. Who knows where some of the big tech companies now will end up in a decade or two given the shortsightedness that seems endemic.
lostcolony··on Kafka on Kubernetes: What could go wrong?
With one caveat - it explicitly calls out additional use grants. It's "please don't use this in a commercial product without paying me -or talking to me-".
lostcolony··on Kafka on Kubernetes: What could go wrong?
While still meeting most of the OSI criteria for being open source. It basically says "you can use the features covered by this license for most uses, except creating your own SaaS offering of this product", plus some of the typical boilerplate about ensuring the license travels with the code.

It's basically a license that was created in response to how Amazon has been operating, co-opting open source technologies (whose business models focused on creating SaaS offerings of their open source tech) and creating their own managed services, directly competing with the creators (Redis even called this out a few years ago when they changed their license, see https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/21/redis-labs-changes-its-ope...).

They also indicate that at some point the license will change to Apache 2 ( https://github.com/redpanda-data/redpanda/tree/dev/licenses ); it's BSL right now likely to give them enough legal protection to keep competitors who'd operate Redpanda as a SaaS away, while they build up the enterprise (paid) features (which has a separate, far more wordy, license). I'd imagine they'd look to make the switch when they feel they have enough value and customers of the enterprise features.

I don't work on open source, or anything licensed by BSI, and from such an outsider perspective you sound...very dogmatic.

lostcolony··on Glassdoor not so anonymous
Certainly, but it moves it from a "we just have some legally-should-be inactionable data laying around" to "we don't even have that data laying around".

The fact that it's impossible to comply with "who wrote -this- review" is probably sufficient, but "and we don't even readily have access to who wrote -a- review" can help prevent fishing expeditions, since presumably a judge will be less amenable to such fishing expeditions if you can show it will have negative material effect to comply, while still not providing any legal path forward to sue for the prosecution.

But that also makes assumptions both of user counts, and rounds of hashing. 50 million users (seems reasonable with Glassdoor), with a sufficiently slow hash that takes a second to compute (easily done) means you'll have to wait a year and a half for results for a given company, or start to parallelize things, and, oh, look, now you have dev time and CPU resources and, well, this has a materially adverse effect on our business, and we'll be left with usernames we still can't release since this discovery order only is valid for this -one- review, and we have no way of knowing which it is.

lostcolony··on Glassdoor not so anonymous
Yeah. Definitely Streisand effected themselves. Wonder if they can sue their own legal counsel for causing themselves so much monetary loss (given that's the grounds they're using to de-anonymize the reviewers)?
lostcolony··on Glassdoor not so anonymous
"The same employee cannot write multiple reviews" - they can create new accounts.

But even if you want one account to not write multiple reviews, you can flag that an account wrote a review for a company without tying it to -what- review.

You can even disassociate that; hash usernames with the company and store that to track who has written a review. Then, you can only confirm that a given user account has written a review for a company, but not which review is theirs, and given a company you can't determine what users wrote those reviews without attempting to hash every username against it.

And that's if you -absolutely- have to try and prevent an account writing more than one review (again, noting that you can just create another account).

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