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lph

1,178 karma · joined October 30, 2016

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lph··on Real-time feedback: My closing move in every interview
By the time an interview ends, a candidate usually has a good sense of whether it went well or not. I've interviewed hundreds of candidates and I would never jump into this feedback mode OP describes. There's not much point in giving positive feedback if they're already feeling good about the interview. If you give someone negative feedback (no matter how constructive) they're going to get defensive and want to plead their case; but it's the end of the interview and there's no time for that. OP says people express gratitude for the feedback, but what does he expect them to do? Anyone who doesn't appreciate it still doesn't want to tank the interview by appearing ungrateful. Never play psychological games in interviews.
lph··on Meta VR Glasses
These look like cool technology but coming from Meta is an absolute deal-breaker for me.

What are best competing products? My use cases would be productivity and watching movies; gaming, not so much.

lph··on They see your photos
Yeah, I know the point of this site is to give us a dystopian shock by showing us how much information Big Tech extracts from our photos, but it's inadvertently a pretty good advertisement for Google's Vision API. It did a fantastic job of summarizing the photos I threw at it.
lph··on Hacker in Snowflake extortions may be a U.S. soldier
I wonder how unique those floor tile patterns are? If that's taken on a military base in Korea, it might be possible to find the exact location of the photo.
lph··on Who Would Support Deploying the Military to Domestic Protests?
> The military’s professional norms are a check against a potential abuse of power.

Right. And norms might be a bulwark for six months or two years, and then they'll crumple against relentless assault. It's the same progression we've already seen play out in many areas of government with Trump's first term.

lph··on What it's like to staff the home of a billionaire
It sounds like a debutante ball for the newly-minted ultra wealthy
lph··on Temu's ad spend soars as it embarks on a marketing blitz
Every ad I've seen from Temu is either AI-fabricated non-existent products, or real products with impossibly low prices. I wish somebody would sue them into the ground for false advertising.
lph··on TV Detector Vans
Johannes Vonk and the Clogheads... now there's a band from the days when the bin man was hard
lph··on Oculi Mundi collection of rare and ancient maps
If you flip it from "Explore" to "Research", the UI becomes a lot more practical.
lph··on Miyazaki's 'The Boy and the Heron' makes clear the world is a fragile place
It's a shame, the Ameristan near-future dystopia parts of Fall were quite good, but the virtual world plot became increasingly silly. My mood would pick up whenever I landed on a chapter that got back to the "real world" plot.
lph··on Scammers posing as customer service agents on X as companies leave platform
I call it "trust arbitrage"
lph··on Demo-driven development (2021)
Such bad memories of the team where everything was oriented around the weekly demo: One day a week spent on throwaway work to make a demo run, and then getting yelled at for not being productive enough.
lph··on I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
No. Most companies have employees sign paperwork that prohibits them from doing exactly this.
lph··on I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
Excel is an ancient and complex beast. I get the appeal of building this project---it sounds fun---but trying to duplicate the Excel engine to the level of producing identical outputs is, frankly, bonkers. The author caught the one discrepancy they noticed, circular reference handling, but how many did they miss? How do they know different inputs won't cause it to deviate from Excel? I didn't get the sense from the blog post that this had extensive test coverage. Putting it into use for a business-critical financial calculation is a massive risk, but I guess that's how Uber rolls ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It would have been less fun but way, way less risky to wire a headless Excel up to a javascript front-end.

lph··on Google says it can’t fix Pixel Watches, please just buy a new one
Same. I had a terrible experience with Google CS and the original Pixel, which I ended up throwing in the garbage after less than a year because it was defective and they wouldn't do anything about it. Will never make that mistake again.
lph··on The Fall of Stack Overflow
The graphs in the post show the traffic decline starting around May 2022, months before ChatGPT was available. I'd wager the cause is a change in Google's algorithm. Most of the time I end up on Stack Overflow, it's because I've typed a question into a search engine.
lph··on Buddy Pond Cloud Desktop
This is lots of fun! Reminds me of Windows '93 [1]

[1] https://www.windows93.net/

lph··on PhD Simulator
I took so many damn showers in grad school.
lph··on Infinite Mac: Classic Macintosh system releases and software on a web browser
You can emulate Amiga software in-browser from the Internet Archive's collection [1], but AFAIK there's no emulated web system that's has a bunch of stuff installed on a hard drive like Infinite Mac does. The Amiga Forever [2] package comes with a lot of software you can run locally, but not through a browser.

[1] https://archive.org/details/lynx_Shadow_of_the_Beast_1992 [2] https://www.amigaforever.com/

lph··on Amount of work that once bought an hour of light now buys 51 years of it (2017)
...and the same folks who rail against immigration can often be found lamenting the low national birth rate. It makes one suspect their complaint isn't with the rate of population growth, but with its hue.
lph··on Show HN: I built an AI language teacher to get you speaking
This is outstanding. And the limitations of its speech recognition are actually a feature - it forces me to really concentrate on pronunciation. Now do Mandarin and take my money please :)
lph··on Apple Vision Pro: Apple’s first spatial computer
> 3,500 seems SO worth it if this can be used to comfortably replace external displays

Agreed, but that's a huge IF. The ergonomics problems with VR headsets are well documented - has Apple really managed to transcend them? I'm not gambling $3500 for a thing that probably ends up sitting in a drawer because it gives me neck cramps or eye strain or motion sickness.

If Apple wants to drive adoption they need to lower that risk. A way to have a trial period or a one-week rental would help.

lph··on What were the worst jobs for poor Romans in Ancient Rome?
Seems like only a matter of time before LLM-powered search is also injecting ads. "Ancient Romans had a difficult life with a variety of unpleasant jobs. But after work, they liked to kick back and enjoy all-new garum-flavored Doritos!"
lph··on Linda Yaccarino is the new CEO of Twitter
There are some people for whom Elon Musk could stroll into their house with a sledge hammer, smash through the walls, douse it with gasoline, and set it on fire---and they would still call him a visionary and a genius.
lph··on Bob Lee, former CTO of Square, has died after being stabbed in San Francisco
I'll go further than "sounds weird". It's a shibboleth that associates the speaker with certain misogynistic red-pill internet subcultures. Anybody who doesn't want that association should probably just say "women" instead.
lph··on His software sang the words of God, then it went silent
That quote from Schnee seems odd to me. I mean, what do you get if you try to decompile the binary? That output should be more useful than "a database of every phoneme it had ever uttered".

And, as someone else pointed out in this thread, there exists an ISO and an activation code at archive.org, and it should be possible to get this running in Wine or in a VM. Someone clever could probably patch the binary to make it run on modern Windows. The distraught rabbis should community-source a developer.

All of that said, even if the source code were to be found, it seems likely that further development of the core functionality might be dead. This was a man's life's work in an esoteric domain; it might not exactly be accessible code.

lph··on Amazon starts flagging frequently returned products that you maybe shouldn’t buy
It's absolutely trivial if you have a human review changes. But that's expensive. So I'd assert the problem is trivial but expensive, and Amazon lacks the proper incentives to do anything about it: they make money from fraudulent sales. It's a short-term incentive to not solve the problem. Sure, there's a long-term cost that this fraud slowly erodes Amazon's reputation, but it's hard to measure and its consequences are way beyond the horizon of the next quarterly report.
lph··on The Inverse Jim Cramer ETF
So if Jim Cramer recommends buying the Inverse Jim Cramer ETF, does it have to sell itself? I'm just asking the important questions here.
lph··on Is Seattle a 15-minute city? It depends on where you want to walk
It's possible, but you have to carefully choose where to live. I spent my 20's in Seattle with no car: I lived in an apartment-dense neighborhood close to shops and groceries (Capitol Hill), and relied on buses, walking, and biking for transportation. That was before Uber and Lyft, which would have helped to fill in the gaps. It was a fun bohemian lifestyle, but I wouldn't want to do it now that I have kids and have a much busier schedule. Buses here are really slow.
lph··on Is Seattle a 15-minute city? It depends on where you want to walk
It's not about rent so much as density. Seattle has this "urban village" concept where designated areas have zoning that allows apartment buildings and usually has a commercial strip. I'd guess the urban village map [1] overlaps the 15-minute zones pretty closely.

Outside of the urban villages, Seattle is comprised of neighborhoods of single-family homes. Those areas can't all be 15-minute walkable because catchement areas don't have the population needed to support those amenities.

But it's also certainly a class issue. The people walking to the grocery store are mainly the poor, students, and a small core of idealists who go out of their way to live a "city lifestyle". Everybody else drives everywhere. Which has a strange effect that wealthier neighborhoods are less likely to have things like a pharmacy, because the wealthier are in the habit of driving everywhere. I get my prescriptions filled at Costco, five miles from my house, even though the closest pharmacy is one mile.

[1] https://i.pinimg.com/736x/87/cd/9f/87cd9ffd44c33154445747de3...

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