HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

mentat

2,070 karma · joined September 30, 2010

You can contact me at jfburns ((at)) gmail ((dot)) com.

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/1mentat; my proof: https://keybase.io/1mentat/sigs/la6OVrEkrrjxpm0dCi276b2B5nUCMUw59rFH0EU_IXc ]

submissionscomments
mentat··on Dithered QR Codes
This made me wonder if you could do it with color and apparently you can: https://1mentat.github.io/qr-code-shenanigans/
mentat··on Can you reverse engineer an ASIC?
30 minutes with /goal for the solution from Sol w/ high.
mentat··on Temporary Cloudflare accounts for AI agents
You’re very sure because you’ve built one at scale? This is such peak HN. And you have plenty of other people who have never built a billing system at scale to agree with you. The OP is right, this is in fact very very hard for the reasons they say.
mentat··on My stages of learning to be a socially normal person
The idea that most people who are doing professional public speaking are reliable narrators is a bit quaint. There is a lot of room for framing that you have to allow for story telling. If you think that all story telling is about reliable narration, you're going to have a tough time being successful at it or interacting with others who are.
mentat··on Don’t teach during code reviews
I ask a lot of questions on code reviews as it's usually less easily perceived as conformational and I have come to assume that I'm missing context when something is really off. Assume that coworkers are competent but may either have or lack context. If your coworkers are genuinely incompetent, then a new position might be better than fighting though PRs.
mentat··on Canada buys 88 F-35 fighter jets for $14.2B
Wasn't aware that Canada had moved to 1940s Europe...
mentat··on John Carmack Leaves Meta
Saying this seriously a few decades after computers were room sized is I think a bit short sighted. Betting against technical progress especially in density / materials / weight is not a good bet.
mentat··on Bipartisan Legislation to Ban TikTok
You don't think the US government requires information sharing?
mentat··on 5.1 Magnitude Earthquake Near San Jose, CA
Seemed even a bit longer before that on the peninsula coastside. The whole thing felt magical, to even know that much beforehand.
mentat··on TSMC to begin 3nm chip production next month
See regulatory capture.
mentat··on U.S. Mass Shootings On Rise No Matter How You Define Them
That was designed as a fundamentally subversive set of lessons. I doubt we even have the will to make an accurately subversive movie version of Diamond Age (look at what happened to Altered Carbon), much less create that sort of "book".
mentat··on Amazon Elastic File System Update – Sub-Millisecond Read Latency
Being on call aligns incentives. If it's someone else's problem when what you just design and build then it will operate less well.
mentat··on White hat hacker awarded $2M for fixing ETH-creation bug
Really exceptional response. A surprising number of people aren't aware of moral constitution, practically, even though this was a core topic for at least the last few hundred years. Interesting times we live in.
mentat··on White hat hacker awarded $2M for fixing ETH-creation bug
I don't think big bounties are capital gains.
mentat··on Reasons for servers to support IPv6
What kind of firewall work didn't have default drop? Once you take that off the table you really do have a problem but I've only seen that one in 20 years of professional work.
mentat··on Hellofresh employees' open salary initiative
It's plenty for people who already have a pile of cash. That seems a bit problematic right?
mentat··on Please don't use Discord for FOSS projects
Thank you for your straightforward appraisal. Makes me take Matrix a lot more seriously.
mentat··on Tell HN: AWS appears to be down again
You don't have health checks?
mentat··on Pfizer and Biontech provide update on Omicron variant
How can you look at rate and range of mutation and make blithe comments on how many will die based on original covid rates?
mentat··on Pfizer and Biontech provide update on Omicron variant
"Remain obsessed" with transmission of a highly contagious virus that has shown significant ability to mutate at scale? That sure seems worth being obsessed about. When it mutates to spread past all current defenses then consistently kill because we failed to stop current spread it will indeed be "depressing".
mentat··on Go 1.18 will embed source version information into binaries
Yes, exactly. That OP needs to know the time is the problem being solved.
mentat··on An Honest Look at Urbit
Yes, and a few orders of magnitude more expensive.
mentat··on How we built an auto-scalable Minecraft server for 1000+ players
Have you looked at something like fly.io to do physical placement near players globally while still supporting consistency?
mentat··on Ask HN: Why is YouTube adding “&pp=sAQA” to video URLs?
This seems the most like case to me. Google loves their query PBs.
mentat··on America has a drinking problem
You have to pass difficult standardized tests to qualify for these spots though. It's not like 50,000 people can just decide they want to be doctors. It depends on ability as measured by testing ability which generally still relates to economic ability in aggregate.
mentat··on Apple tells Telegram to take down protestor channels in Belarus
There is no general case. The idea of the general case is fundamentally a tool of oppression. Human moral encounters and decisions are personal.
mentat··on CRDTs are the future
> The major downside of having an “always syncable” data structure is that it gets really big, really quick

Perhaps it would be prudent to read the actual article before tossing off this sort of comment since it's indeed the whole point?

mentat··on The Saturation Effect in Fuzzing
Do you know of any good writeups for this particular kind of process? I too did fuzzing of network devices before it was called fuzzing and am interested in trying it again with modern tooling.
mentat··on AWS Snowcone
$60 + $6 per day after 5 days. It adds up, examples at bottom: https://aws.amazon.com/snowcone/pricing/
mentat··on Tell HN: Triplebyte reverses, emails apology
There are what, 15000+ engineers competing for that many fewer jobs? Getting fired for looking for new work looks much more possible now than it did 3 months ago.
Page 1 of 34Next →