Hacker News Reader

nathanfigon Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis

(speculating) Multiplayer games with friends still provide a lot of the same healthy cooperation/conflict that play creates. But yeah I doubt it can be considered a whole substitute.

nathanfigon Play deprivation is a major cause of the teen mental health crisis

One major cause would not subtract another

nathanfigon As Actors Strike for AI Protections, Netflix Lists $900k AI Job

Not unlike software engineers objecting to their code being used to train their AI replacements.

nathanfigon What we know about LLMs

If you follow the Gartner model, there is usually a surge of high expectations right before a "trough of disillusionment" - but eventually the real applications do emerge. Humans are just impatient.

nathanfigon Insurance company drops customer saying a 'drone' took photos of clutter in yard

Two big issues worth discussing here IMO: 1) Privacy rights in the age of aerial photography 2) Consumer rights in the age of subscription-dependence

Property insurance historically has some of the best consumer protections, its one of the oldest "private subscriptions" that fills a critical need. But new technology can easily disrupt a balance of power set decades ago.

nathanfigon Tell HN: Today Is Global Accessibility Awareness Day

Consider that everyone who ages will someday require accessibility features. I suspect most developers will eventually find themselves wishing they had created a more accessible world.

nathanfigon Is Zoom Down?

Unable to get on any new Zoom calls (ongoing ones unaffected). Seeing "502 Bad gateway" but was an nginx error before. Have seen multiple reports of this. Might just be local?

nathanfigon Ask HN: What is something you built but never marketed?

Thank you both for the suggestions, I had considered adding some more expressive querying at a later stage, will have to consider these.

nathanfigon Ask HN: What is something you built but never marketed?

https://rapidstash.io

JSON document store that allowed you to access any part of the the JSON document by URL (object.nested.value becomes object/nested/value).

Had fun making it and the website above, but was not really interested in the promotion hustle.

nathanfigon Ask HN: How to deal with children's online habits?

Reading these comments it’s clear there is no consensus and that this is a crisis of sorts that has gone largely unrecognized.

Tech companies are innovating faster than parenting wisdom can evolve. New challenges on the horizon with the metaverse, AI, and an increasing share of products that can only function connected to the Internet.

nathanfigon On Leaving Facebook

Some people are very good at BSing their way through interviews, even technical ones. Those people also end up being very difficult to fire and are generally poisonous to culture. Asking them to code is a great filter, it’s hard to fool a compiler. It shouldn’t be the only filter, but for coding roles a coding interview is pretty critical.

nathanfigon DynamoDB 10 years later

I wonder if DynamoDB would be met with less criticism had it simply been named Dynamo Document Store.

nathanfigon DynamoDB 10 years later

That’s surprising to me, I consider DynamoDB to be far simpler than any relational DB including the alternatives you list

nathanfigon Ask HN: Strategies to land fully remote $250k+ job

It goes by a lot of names (sales consulting, solution engineering, sales engineering, etc) but sales engineer is probably the best literal descriptor: basically your job is to go to prospective customers and engage their engineers/architects and work with them to solve their problems using your company’s software or techniques. If you do a good job, the prospect signs up and you make a commission. Engagements vary- you might just be presenting slides, or you may be writing code to implement proofs of concept. Usually report to sales, which can be good or bad depending on sales culture at your company.

It can be a lot of pressure since it is a customer facing role and requires being able to solve technical problems on your feet (not unlike a whiteboard interview at times). Requires you to learn quickly (may have to consult on software that hasn’t been released yet and has no documentation, better be good at reading code and asking questions). Also often requires a lot of travel, hence remote okay.

If you’re a sociable engineer who likes variety and to travel, it’s definitely a good role to check out. If you meet your commission targets you will probably make significantly more than you would in a strictly salaried engineering role. Can be really flexible since work is largely driven by customer demand, just be prepared for some really intense weeks and late nights preparing for critical engagements.

nathanfigon I started a paper website business

Inspiring

nathanfigon Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice

The author mentions music as an exception because it has a long pedagogical history which enables deliberate practice.

nathanfigon Marketing is scary for a solo developer

FWIW I did not think you were shaming anyone; you recognized that he worked hard and did great work but has not been justly rewarded. I appreciated those examples.

nathanfigon This website has 81% battery power remaining

Conversely, you are losing the distributed computing gained by rendering on the client, and therefore need a bigger server to scale when needed. And HTTP caching can and should be used for API responses as well.

nathanfigon Microsoft’s new Windows prompts try to stop people downloading Chrome

I’m not sure what you mean- Chrome never tried to prevent me from downloading any other browser.

nathanfigon Daylight saving time is 'not helpful' and has 'no upsides,' experts say

We can make either time the permanent one and adjust accordingly, it’s the twice a year disruption that people hate. Especially difficult to explain to a child why their bedtime suddenly shifted despite established circadian rhythms.

It’s weirder to me that so many people care about which arbitrary number on the clock correlates to the position of the sun.

nathanfigon Imperfect Vaccination Can Enhance the Transmission of Highly Virulent Pathogens (2015)

> Conventional wisdom is that natural selection will remove highly lethal pathogens if host death greatly reduces transmission. Vaccines that keep hosts alive but still allow transmission could thus allow very virulent strains to circulate in a population.

Host death does not stop transmission of Covid-19 so I do not think this study is particularly relevant, if we’re reading it in that context.

nathanfigon The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

This kind of pattern hunting easily steps into a logical fallacy where meaning is derived from noise. We also need to know how many other viruses contain codons not typically found in other viruses. If in fact every virus has one or two unique traits, then we could likewise claim that all viruses are engineered. Not saying that is the case, just want to caution against the perils of searching for patterns in large data sets like this.

nathanfigon HaveIBeenPwned adds yesterday's Facebook breach

I presume they keep a table mapping email addresses to breaches and that's it.

nathanfigon Consciousness Is Just a Feeling

You can remove the antenna from a radio and remove the ability to hear the ballgame. That does not mean the game was happening in the antenna.

Before getting hung up on the idea of transmission, understand this is just an analogy: breaking something by removing a part does not prove much at all.

nathanfigon Fake_contacts: Android app to create fake phone contacts, to do data-poisoning

"Did this cause trauma" is not the bar we're trying to set here, any level of anxiety caused by tech companies misusing contacts is bad.

nathanfigon Judge in Google case disturbed that 'incognito' users are tracked

Man. So many comments responding with more descriptions of the world tech companies created. Fascinating how much even us tech folk don't realize how much of our work environment is subject to design.

nathanfigon (Very) Basic Intro to Elliptic Curve Cryptography

Does the EC function provide any guarantees around how often a given endpoint can be hit? e.g. over the course of infinite hops starting at point a, how frequently will point b be landed upon?

nathanfigon Don't Believe the Hype About Hypersonic Missiles

Yeah I was bothered by the lack of nuance in considering possible use cases.

nathanfigon Don't Believe the Hype About Hypersonic Missiles

Uhh so the author is saying that missiles designed to go faster will actually be slower because of drag? Is there a source on that claim or is it just speculation? I'm imagining someone at DARPA reading this and thinking, "Drag! Of course! That's why our missiles keep going so slow! If only we had thought of that!"

nathanfigon People with extreme views have trouble thinking about their own thinking (2018)

Fascinating. The paper emphasizes an important distinction: there was no measurable correlation between dogmatism and confidence, but rather between dogmatism and ability to correct one's own confidence in light of new evidence.

From the paper:

In line with our hypothesis, higher values of dogmatic intolerance were associated with reduced metacognitive sensitivity (study 2: β = −0.12, p = 0.032, R2 = 0.01; see Figure 3A), in the absence of any effect on perceptual discrimination performance (study 2: β = 0.02, p = 0.77) and controlling for key demographic variables (i.e., age, gender, education). Importantly, there was also no relation between dogmatism and overconfidence (study 2: β = 0.07, p = 0.26), suggesting a specific reduction in the sensitivity with which confidence tracks performance, rather than a bias in confidence.

Original paper: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(18)...