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projectileboy

4,377 karma · joined February 20, 2007

Trying so hard to be less dumb...
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projectileboy··on Distributed Systems Classics (2017)
I suspect this is old news for you, but just in case you haven't heard of it, check out Feynman's Lectures on Computation. A surprising amount of the book is still relevant, and it's fun how much he always brings everything back to the physics.
projectileboy··on Distributed Systems Classics (2017)
Obligatory shout out to Morris and Kaashoek's class at MIT - they update the reading list every year, and it's always great: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/
projectileboy··on Volkswagen Just Built an EV That Can Go Nearly 900 Miles on a Charge
I partially agree, but this doesn’t totally address the range issue. There are big sections of the western US (for example) where the existing EV ranges are a dealbreaker.
projectileboy··on .name Termination
We keep expecting for-profit organizations to behave as governments. And this is an especially easy sell in the US, where government has been vilified for decades as part of a long propaganda game run by those who wish to privatize and steal those things which should rightfully exist in the public domain. But for-profit organizations, by design, will never ever ever behave in the public interest, and it’s foolish to expect otherwise. This is not a criticism of the author; this is a criticism of ICANN, and the subcontracting of governance.
projectileboy··on Why OOP Exists
A good book for appreciating the OO mindset is Object Thinking by David West.
projectileboy··on Google kills Earth AI generator after one day
Google has always been a technology company, never a product company. It’s very deep in their DNA.
projectileboy··on Taylor Farms Called White House to Try to Delay Cyclospora Recall
Well… the system mostly worked for a pretty long time. As I used to tell my kids, if you try hard enough to break something, you’ll probably succeed.
projectileboy··on Advertise in ChatGPT
It is impossible to overstate how utterly horrible and dystopian this is. I have not been one to reject AI, but they seem hell-bent on driving me to that conclusion.
projectileboy··on Mathematicians still don't know the fastest way to multiply numbers
For anyone interested in digging, check out Karatsuba's algorithm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karatsuba_algorithm), Strassen matrix multiplication (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strassen_algorithm), and Toom-Cook multiplication (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toom–Cook_multiplication).

Of course, there are also implementation considerations. For example you can speed up Strassen by recursively breaking down the matrix into sub-matrices in parallel, but only down to a point - once the sub-matrices get small enough, it becomes faster to simply do a straight Strassen computation. And it depends on your hardware. For something seemingly so simple, you can go pretty far down a rabbit hole!

projectileboy··on Paxos Made Simple (2001) [pdf]
More enjoyable to read this within a broader context: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/
projectileboy··on Software, from First Principles
Congratulations! This is incredibly well done. Please consider creating a “part ii” that expands on the entire thread to one level of greater detail.
projectileboy··on DOGE's only public ledger is riddled with mistakes
Frankly, this doesn’t matter. What matters is that an unofficial agency of the executive branch is deciding unilaterally - with no oversight - to stop payments that were voted on by Congress. Even if Musk and team were geniuses and doing brilliant work, it would be outside the rule of law.
projectileboy··on Musk says DOGE is halting Treasury payments to US contractors
Hacker News tries to avoid political news in general, but it seems warranted in this case because Musk is a major figure in the tech industry, and also because it appears he’s using a small number of young engineers from his companies to gain access to and control over systems at OPM.
projectileboy··on The Origins of Wokeness
I just picked this one at random today; took about a minute to find something: https://www.startribune.com/mom-ids-son-as-teen-left-with-br...

I’m relieved to read that racism isn’t as bad as I think it is.

projectileboy··on The Origins of Wokeness
This is a weird hill to die on for a billionaire. Is wokeness a problem? If I recast it as an assault on free speech, sure. But exactly how bad is this assault? I sure hear a lot of really rich people talk about wokeness, despite the proclaimed suppression of their speech. And is it as much of a problem as racism, sexism, homophobia or other forms of bigotry endemic in our society?
projectileboy··on When the U.S. tried to replace migrant farmworkers with high schoolers (2018)
I live in Minnesota. I hear what you’re saying, but I would say two things: in general, teenagers here are not being somehow denied farm work that they really want but is unavailable; and there’s a pretty big difference between Minnesota/Iowa summer heat and picking cantaloupes in inland California. The big difference being about 20 degrees on average, with more sun.
projectileboy··on 3blue1brown YouTube Bitcoin video taken down as copyright violation
I apologize in advance for not offering something constructive to say. I just wish anyone here who is younger could see the difference between what the promise of the web was in ‘95 and what it has become. Such a burning pile of trash, it’s heartbreaking.
projectileboy··on The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint [pdf]
Is there some reason why Edward Tufte isn’t being properly being credited anywhere? This is copyrighted material.
projectileboy··on Seyfert Galaxies
Hear, hear. The design subordinates to clear presentation of static content. Most newspapers and magazines would benefit from a similar approach.
projectileboy··on Ask HN: Is ChatGPT down?
Would you be willing to elaborate on the ways in which the $200/month subscription is better than the $20/month subscription? I’m genuinely curious - not averse to paying more, depending on the value.
projectileboy··on The chocolate of the future will have less cocoa or none at all
The difference between what cocoa farmers get paid vs what chocolate companies make selling their product is so enormous that I find this article incredibly offensive. But the chocolate industry has a very long history of this kind of shameless exploitation.
projectileboy··on Fogus: Things and Stuff of 2024
I’d be surprised if they had, working on what you work on! I’ll bet you would find them interesting in other ways, though. I’ve had a ton of success using them as study guides in other areas (e.g., biology).
projectileboy··on Popeye and Tintin enter the public domain in 2025 along with Faulkner, Hemingway
I read most of them with my kids when they were little; I used to just gloss over certain panels…
projectileboy··on Devin is now generally available
I can’t really be too specific. But I can say that at least one pattern of problem it tackles very effectively is: “we’re migrating from X to Y, and it’s going to touch a ton of files, and the nature of that migration is much more involved than what we can reasonably hope to accomplish with sed and a bash script.”
projectileboy··on Devin is now generally available
I understand why you would have that impression, but for what it's worth, my team has been helping other teams internally to use Devin, and we also did due diligence and experimented with OpenHands, as well as try rolling our own solution. While OpenHands is cool for what it is, neither it nor our homegrown solution came within a mile of doing what Devin could do.
projectileboy··on Devin is now generally available
I work with a team at Nubank that has been using Devin. I would say that it doesn't quite make sense to compare it to Claude 3.5, because Devin isn't really like Copilot; it's more like an assistant to which you can assign a project. We're using it only for particular use cases, but for those particular use cases it's like having a superpower.
projectileboy··on Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT
Thank you for this comment; articles on the rising costs of college almost always uncritically treat it like a law of nature, and rarely have I seen articles that attempt to study in-depth the extent to which college administrations have become bloated, self-perpetuating jobs programs. All while at the same time departments are cut, professors are expected to do more with less, and more and more classes are pushed on to adjunct faculty who get paid a pittance. Until this is addressed, any efforts to improve the ways in which students finance their education is just a band-aid.
projectileboy··on SICP: The only computer science book worth reading twice? (2010)
I think this was mentioned in a Paul Graham essay from many years ago, but half the battle in tackling a new area of study is finding out what the best books (or papers) are. There aren’t that many, and yet it’s hard to know what they are if you aren’t already well-versed in the field.
projectileboy··on Unit tests as documentation
They express behaviors, yes, but they do not express intent, or any broader context. I’ve been on more than one project where well-meaning developers forbid comments and additional documentation because they felt that the only documentation should be the tests, and the result was always a complete lack of understanding as to why anything worked the way it did.
projectileboy··on Tell HN: DigitalRiver/MyCommerce stopped paying vendors since July
As soon as they got bought out by a private equity firm (10 years back) it marked the beginning of a long, slow end.
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