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sb8244

1,553 karma · joined December 2, 2013

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sb8244··on I resigned from Anthropic today
Awareness and morality I suppose. Which generally doesn't matter in the capitalist AI race.
sb8244··on Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team
This breaks down because Tailwind is not monetized, is completely free, and hasn't indicated it won't be.

There is a corporate side with other features that has never been free. I pay for it because it's great.

I'm not sure if you're purposefully misstating it at this point or not. Several people have corrected you and you seem to double down incorrectly each time.

sb8244··on I canceled my book deal
Writing with Pragmatic was such a great experience. Definitely a blessing that I was able to do that.

My experience with writing and royalties is just so different than this author's experiences.

sb8244··on LLVM AI tool policy: human in the loop
It adds accountability, which is unfortunately something that ends up lacking in practice.

If you write bad code that creates a bug, I expect you to own it when possible. If you can't and the root cause is bad code, then we probably need to have a chat about that.

Of course the goal isn't to be a jerk. Lots of normal bugs make it through in reality. But if the root cause is true negligence, then there's a problem there.

AI makes negligence much easier to achieve.

sb8244··on Show HN: I wrote a book – Debugging TypeScript Applications (in beta)
Pragmatic has an inhouse book compiler. Most authors write in markdown and there's some special XML features you can use as well for it. Of course code linking is a first class feature.

It's a pretty nice system, actually.

sb8244··on We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs
That's a strawman. It is not really related to the main point and I'm not sure of the point you're trying to make (maybe that tension exists?)

Obviously things take as long as they take. I've always been an educator of this back to the business leadership. In my experience, most business people truly have no freaking clue how a product gets built and code gets shipped.

Giving proactive updates (meaning not the day it was expected to be done according to last update) are important part of a professionals working life. There's always a tension between business and engineers. Engineers just generally don't do that well with tension and try to minimize it, or complain about it.

sb8244··on We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs
If the bug affects 1 customer and the feature affects the rest, is the old feature complete?

It's not binary.

sb8244··on When your hash becomes a string: Hunting Ruby's million-to-one memory bug
Are we reading the same article?

Also, you do realize that writing is taught in an incredibly formulaic way? I can't speak to English as second language authors, but I imagine it doesn't make it easier.

sb8244··on When your hash becomes a string: Hunting Ruby's million-to-one memory bug
I read it just fine and everything made sense in it.

I would spend similar time debugging this if I were the author. It's a pretty serious bug, a non obvious issue, and would be impossible to connect to the ffi fix unless you already knew the problem.

sb8244··on South Korean workers detained in Hyundai plant raid to be freed and flown home
The article makes it sound as if there were govt negotiations to have them sent home. It is light on details though, but with that many people of a friendly nation / corporation I imagine they get treated differently.

I interpreted that to mean they may not have permanent US immigration issues vs "being deported".

sb8244··on I accidentally became PureGym’s unofficial Apple Wallet developer
"if we build that feature, we'd have to own it."

"You're right, keep it on the 2028 roadmap"

That would be my experience in tech at least.

sb8244··on Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY does not scale
My understanding is that mnesia is sort of a relic. Really hard to work with and lots of edge / failure cases.

I'm not sure if it should be salvaged?

sb8244··on Nitrogen Triiodide (2016)
I made this for my high school chemistry project. We made it in the morning so it would be ready for our afternoon class.

It was drying in the chemistry back office and there must have been a draft. It exploded during a silent study hall.

Somehow they let us remake it for class that afternoon. We tried to put it on the floor as a joke, but our teacher was wearing sandals that day (no lab). She wasn't happy about it.

I originally got the idea (and prank idea) the previous year from a retiring chemistry teacher.

sb8244··on Why is AI so popular when nobody wants it?
Maybe my position on this is obvious, I honestly don't know a lot of how others see it.

Preface: I'm generally an AI skeptic.

There are a LOT of people who are doing "business work" for a living, which is significantly different than hands-on coding. AI gives these people a way to just automate all of the (maybe necessary) work that they don't want to do.

The final product being 80% good enough is fine. It is done and doesn't require them to spend time on something they don't want to do.

More often than not, it is at 80% today.

sb8244··on More users are watching YouTube on TV than mobile
I watch Youtube almost exclusively on TV. It's great as a cable replacement. The key for me was when my new TV actually had a decent built in TV OS and hardware. So scrolling and using the app isn't painful like it has been on past TVs or external plugin devices.
sb8244··on Patterns for Building Realtime Features
Realms matter. I don't really feel that holding terms hostage between hardware and software worlds is worth much energy.

People that know enough to care will know within 1 second what the article is about.

"Soft real-time" is probably the correct term here, but that is actually more confusing for 99% of people.

"Interactive" is not descriptive. "Duplex" is certainly not obvious.

sb8244··on Three-quarters of the land is drying out, 'redefining life on Earth'
A Pollyanna approach is not the answer (and rarely is.) I believe you've missed my point.

I'll state it again although I don't have good faith in this conversation: because the majority of people don't prioritize (or even believe in climate change), the tactics are going to be different than other social issues.

Literally look up any polling on the matter for "proof."

sb8244··on Three-quarters of the land is drying out, 'redefining life on Earth'
Gross generalization and characterization.

You can push for change while also recognizing that others don't respond well to it. Why? Because you need to adjust tactics to get the outcome you want.

Blindly "spreading hope" is just as lazy imo as saying everything is futile.

You have to live in the world the way it is, not the way you want it to be.

And let me be very direct: I'm close to positive the approach you've shared will not work. Sorry. It will be too late by the time people get onboard (when it's clear that the medium-term negatives will outweigh shorter term costs).

sb8244··on Three-quarters of the land is drying out, 'redefining life on Earth'
From my perspective, the feeling is people at large don't care. Likely because it's difficult, uncomfortable, expensive, or all 3.

Do I wish it wasn't that way? Yes. But what if it stays that way? Is there a solution then?

I'm not saying the fight shouldn't be had. I am saying that—at least in the USA—change doesn't really appear to be a priority unless the $ is there.

sb8244··on Phoenix LiveView 1.0.0 is here
It varies. Literally everything from how modals work, notifications, etc. all had to be written. The things that I take for granted in my React app were fairly complex to figure out.

I know there are paradigms to handle that now, although the details get complex in practice. For example, the idea of a "portal" in react is actually really important for layering modals and popups properly, but it can be difficult in LiveView.

The biggest single challenge I remember hitting was dynamic recursive forms (for example a logic builder). It took a lot of effort to get right.

sb8244··on Phoenix LiveView 1.0.0 is here
Congrats! This stable release is huge.

I built my (unfortunately) failed startup using LiveView for ~18 months. It was actually really good to work with and a great product experience.

I ended up integrating React into it as well for some particularly complex / mature libraries (react-grid-layout, WYSIWYG editor). Pretty seamless connection to backend LiveViews, and I tried to keep everything in LV as possible.

The biggest difficulty was hitting problems that I had solved 50 times in React, and had to solve from-scratch in LiveView. Once I figured out a problem, I could re-use it easily.

sb8244··on Fly.io outage – resolved
The proxy layer was the cause of yesterday's outage according to support.
sb8244··on Stripe Data vs. Open‐Source Alternatives: A MRR Example
Stripe's MRR number is NOT correct for my application (shows as higher by 1-2%).

I have an external script over their API that calculates MRR, and every single tool that calculates MRR has had a different number.

It's actually a huge PITA, although my custom script works well enough.

sb8244··on The anatomy of a 2AM mental breakdown
Some of the worst mistakes that I saw were from over-reaction in an active incident.

One of my programming mantras is "no black magic." If I don't understand why something works, then it's not done.

I take this same approach to an incident. If someone can't coherently identify why their suggestion will have an impact, I don't think they should do it. Now there may come a time that you need to just pull the trigger on something, but as I think back I'm not sure that was ever the case in the end.

It was wild to see the top brass—normally very cool and composed—start suggesting arbitrary potential fixes during an incident.

sb8244··on CrowdStrike accepting the PwnieAwards for "most epic fail" at defcon
Yea. Their contracts likely have clauses for all of that. I say likely, but we already know this is true because it's come out.

The thing is, crowdstrike isn't the only incompetent party here. Many major companies (looking at Delta) probably made it worse for themselves with a very poor response after.

So should crowdstrike pay beyond a reasonable measure because of Delta's poor response?

sb8244··on What happens in a mind that can't 'see' mental images
I describe myself as similar to parent post.

There is no wireframe. There's no visual component for me in any capacity. I have no ability to perceive a visualization of something.

But I know what something would look like if I could see it. I know what an apple looks like. I can know that things are connected or related without seeing them. It is fairly easy for me to "conceptualize" a graph, but there's 0 visual component even if closing my eyes.

I would love if I could wireframe visualize like that post you sent. That would be actually awesome, but I cannot.

sb8244··on Ask HN: What's (in your opinion) the best authentication method for web apps?
I don't mind email and password. With password managers it's really not a thing I think much about.

Depends on what you're building though. Enterprisey customers will often require SSO and Google OAuth tends to keep them happy enough.

sb8244··on Vista Equity writes off PluralSight value, after $3.5B buyout
I mean, it does work—just not at 1B of leveraged debt. The actual company financials look decently healthy.
sb8244··on Show HN: es6_maps, new Elixir syntax feature via runtime compiler hacking
I don't agree that this is magic. It's only "magic" because the language doesn't do it today (thus requiring the compiler extension.) If this were in the language itself, it would probably be pretty popular.

The argument against it feels like "because we've always done it this way."

sb8244··on Meta Horizon OS
Eh, I don't think this is a bad name collision. Nintendo doesn't really talk about stuff like this publicly, and searching for it is pretty much reddit + hacker news threads.

I'm sure there's a lot of internal code name collisions.

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