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rsbrown

873 karma · joined March 24, 2010

I like to build stuff.
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rsbrown··on AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering
Name some? Because YeCun's break is the first big name I've seen strike out in a major fashion away from the LLM trajectory.
rsbrown··on Scrum Sucks
I have my own (and many) criticisms of Scrum, but this article is so poorly written that I cannot say whether the author's views align with my own. I couldn't make it beyond the first few paragraphs.
rsbrown··on China: The Disappearing Millionaires (2019) [video]
I'd take anything Guo Wengui says about the Chinese gov't with a grain of skepticism. Steve Bannon has been running around promoting Guo's story as part of the larger anti-China Trumpist narrative.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/26/guo-wengui-chinese-bill...

rsbrown··on Software made me loathe my car
> I think the market will be quite unforgiving to the car brands that do not prioritise software quality in the future.

The market got us here. Why the fuck would you expect it to get us out of this mess?

rsbrown··on Four-day week trial: study finds lower stress but no cut in output
Treehouse’s abandonmnent of the 4-day work week suspiciously coincided with their taking on a Series B round of funding. I’m implying they were pressured to drop it by investors. This was followed by significant layoffs.

Furthermore, no formal analysis was done of the Treehouse experience.

Nothing conclusive can be inferred from the Treehouse experience until/unless they release data and a rigid analysis is done.

rsbrown··on [dead]
nm, throwing 500 errors again lol
rsbrown··on [dead]
nm, status page now up and showing service connectivity errors.
rsbrown··on [dead]
Not just you, service seems completely offline. Status page is an nginx 500 error.

https://status.slack.com

rsbrown··on Apple Pay may have sunk Clinkle
I fail to see the point of this article. Apple should have thought twice before launching Apple Pay because the author feels this guys is a rising star? We should feel bad for him because the world's most valuable company validated his startup's thesis? Come on.
rsbrown··on Hackers Spawn Web Supercomputer on Way to Chess World Record
Met Ruan and John at the Hack Reactor open house two weeks ago. Super nice guys and Smidge is a great concept. Really happy to see it get some recognition.
rsbrown··on Judge Says Mathematical Algorithms Can’t Be Patented
Well, this is how our system works. There is nothing stopping me from filing suit against you for posting this comment because it hurt my feelings. Then the judge throws it out because there's no basis in the law for my claim.
rsbrown··on Why you should starve yourself a little bit each day
I'm curious -- what's the prevailing methodology for defining the "proper amount of food and nutrients" for an individual?
rsbrown··on FedEx Overcharged Customers for Years, Sealed E-Mail Says
There are businesses whose sole offering is a service to audit your shipping invoices to ensure that you are not being overcharged. One, started in Memphis in the late 90s to specifically audit FedEx deliveries, is now a division of IronData:

http://transportation.irondata.com

rsbrown··on Y Combinator Founder Paul Graham Issues New Warning to Start-ups
This was my favorite line from the article, actually.

The quote in question: "Practically all start-ups internally are disasters"

Not just "often", but "practically all" start-ups. It's true in my experience, and not necessarily a bad thing. Of course, it would be great if everyone acted thoughtfully, didn't let ego get in the way, planned things just enough (but not too much), etc., but that's not just not the way it happens.

Acknowledging this fact, getting okay with it and still forging a highly functional team in the midst of such chaos and tragedy is the key. That's a tall order.

rsbrown··on PonyDebugger: Chrome Developer Tools for Native iOS Apps
This looks like a really valuable tool to have in the iOS development arsenal.

It also underscores my loathing for cutesy, irreverent naming conventions.

rsbrown··on ViaCycle (YC S12) Is A Zipcar For Bikes, Coming To San Francisco Soon
Done and done. Thanks for the response.
rsbrown··on ViaCycle (YC S12) Is A Zipcar For Bikes, Coming To San Francisco Soon
Yo, ViaCycle team: stop what you're doing right now and get an email signup form deployed to your homepage ASAP.

I saw the headline, read the article, got excited, landed on the homepage, looked for San Francisco on the list of programs... then left the site, disappointed. You won't get a lot of opportunities to capture customers like the one you just got (and lost) with me.

Use mailchimp or something similar and you can fill this deficiency in a few minutes.

rsbrown··on MixPanel tracking API down
Suhail, with regard to impact on installed sites I agree that lost event data is not the end of the world. However, it's currently taking 20-30 seconds for requests (inserting the mixpanel js) to timeout. During the outage, it would be much less painful if the requests were failing more immediately.

I just sent this same message to support (at) mixpanel.com.

EDIT: just to reiterate -- the major problem isn't the API being down. It's the extreme timeouts being experienced trying to load a static JS file.

rsbrown··on Vim Creep
No, I didn't.
rsbrown··on Louis CK selling tickets to latest tour exclusively on his site
I don't consider a lead generator (i.e., sales affiliate) to be a middleman.
rsbrown··on Louis CK selling tickets to latest tour exclusively on his site
Indeed, he says as much in the message: it was a real challenge to find venues around the country that could work with our exclusive ticketing service under these perameters [sic]
rsbrown··on Louis CK selling tickets to latest tour exclusively on his site
This is phenomenal. I mean that both in the colloquial (it's fuckin' awesome) and the literal. Louis CK's direct-to-consumer efforts are a phenomenon that (I sincerely hope) are ushering in a new era of entertainment marketing and sales.

The plethora of middle men at all stages of the current state of the industry (talent discovery, production, distribution) are really destroying the art.

Kudos to Louis for using his success as a platform for change. I hope others in the industry will discover their courage and follow suit.

rsbrown··on Jury rules Google violated copyright law, Google moves for mistrial
"does it imply...?"

No. The judge has yet to decide this (much more important) issue.

More info here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3940322

rsbrown··on Jury rules Google violated copyright law, Google moves for mistrial
This headline and the terse article behind it leave it out enormously important aspects of today's events.

Mush more nuanced analysis here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3940322

rsbrown··on Interviews Can Be a Terrible Way to Identify Good Programmers
Yes, yes, 1000 times yes. Particularly the basketball team analogy at the end of the article really resonates with me.

To anyone wondering, "How could this possibly be true? How could so many companies be getting the hiring process so wrong?" I say: it's because they aren't focused on the goal. That doens't mean companies never achieve their goals, they are simply optimizing the wrong aspects of the process.

For anyone interested, the book The Goal by Eli Goldratt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_(novel)) illustrates this phenomenon very well.

rsbrown··on Google Drive vs. Dropbox Terms of Service
Excellent article. I particularly liked this observation regarding verbiage in the Dropbox TOS: "That language is definitely friendlier than Google's, but it's actually more expansive, since it's more vague."

As laypersons, we may feel more comfortable when companies avoid legalese and use straight talk, but that doesn't mean we are any more safer or protected.

rsbrown··on Introducing Google Drive... yes, really
As a satisfied (and paying) Dropbox user, Google is pushing all the right buttons for me with this:

- More storage space, lower price

- Ecosystem for 3rd-party apps

- Integration with existing Google services and two-factor authentication

I like Dropbox and would love to keep using them, but they will need to respond strongly and quickly if they want to keep my business.

rsbrown··on Why Objective-C is Hard
You had met at "... like broccoli or sexual intercourse". Great read, well written.
rsbrown··on Hacked: commit to rails master on GitHub
This was not a case of "Rails is insecure by default".

There's very popular idiom in Rails development of updating model data from a form POST/PUT in one line of code in a controller:

my_object.update_attributes(params[:object])

Because many users follow this approach, it made this hack widely exploitable. You can either assign parameters piecemeal in the controller or explicitly set the attr_accessible attributes in the model. There's nothing inherent in Rails that caused this vulnerability, rather it was programming practices by developers.

rsbrown··on Show HN: SimpleGeo Replacement (SimpleGeo will shut down March 31)
I'm not a SimpleGeo customer, but I can speculate what the number one priority feature would be: a migration path. Even if you haven't launched yet, design it, document it and share the steps for migrating. That would be a great "Show HN" post.
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