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slewison You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)

I know exactly who she's talking about! When I was at the unnamed company I worked on a project that he retained control over and said no to a lot. We found that if we sent him a very well reasoned, documented and measured change he'd say yes.

I was there when the no swap policy was under lots of active discussion. It was there to ensure that application authors could have strong expectations on how long a memory access would take. Imagine trying to provide evidence that removing the "no swap" policy wouldn't affect any of the applications that were running across a very large infrastructure.

Her point really resounds though, this person was referred to all the time in conversation, "well, we probably couldn't get this past X". He was mythical. In general that was often a good thing. Making changes that could have such a broad impact should be well reasoned. But it's also quite annoying, having a nagging voice inside your head that just says "no", seemingly disconnected from the actual source.

slewison Launch HN: FeaturePeek (YC S19) – Front-end review for the whole team

We’ve been using this at my company for a couple months. It’s so important to visually verify PRs for frontend work, but we weren’t doing it nearly often enough, because there is a barrier to checking out and running a branch. Feature Peek makes it so easy that it this naturally became part of our work flow. We’re building better software. Thanks guys!

slewison A “bike platform” that temporarily swaps one car parking space for ten bicycles

Anecdotes dont override the claim of “default” here.

slewison Monte Carlo methods – Why it's a bad idea to go to the casino

Great article showing how easy it is to experiment with probability using Monte Carlo methods. You don’t need any fancy libraries or deep mathematical knowledge.

Of course you should always try to have a deeper understanding if you want to make serious conclusions. But I felt this article got the concept across really concisely! Nice work.

slewison Apple Is Giving Design A Bad Name (2015)

This is your company’s fault, they chose the wrong tool for the job.

slewison Show HN: Ultimate Plumber – a tool for writing Linux pipes with live preview

A potential solution is to create a user who has no or limited write access, and modify up so that it always switches to that user.

I wonder if there’s a way to do this without requiring the creation of a new system user. Some way to revoke all write access for the current process.

slewison Groq, a Stealthy Startup Founded by Google’s TPU Team, Is Raising $60M

I'd add one more: they need to be able to ship new product at the cadence of Nvidia, Intel et al. Showing wins in the lab is very different from getting that product to market before the next round of improvements from competitors overtakes you.

And then you need to do it again.

Interestingly for me, the annoyances of the new MacBook have faded into the background (no escape key, worse keyboard). I learned to hit ctrl+[ in vim, and don’t mind the keyboard until a key sticks for a little while.

Meanwhile I can’t imagine going back to the thicker form factor.

I don’t mean to downplay people’s issues, and Apple definitely didn’t do a wonderful job here.

But I do find that my day to day experience is net positive. Humans are very adaptable.

slewison Move deliberately, fix things: How Coinbase is building a cryptocurrency empire

Nothing’s easy with growth at the rate Coinbase has experienced!

slewison Dropbox S-1

Equal ownership of something that’s likely to be zero.

slewison Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

What do you mean “the same in the grand scheme of things”? By what metric?

slewison Physicists Uncover Geometric ‘Theory Space’

Can you recommend some reading material, maybe a textbook, for folks who want to get into the details?

slewison Brave expands Basic Attention Token platform to YouTube

Brave could return the payment if it’s not collected after some time.

slewison Update: We Will Replace Your Logitech Harmony Links

Would you pay a monthly fee for a remote?

slewison The quest to evolve neural networks through evolutionary algorithms

Cliff-hanger! Can you elaborate on why asexual reproduction might perform better?

slewison Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee

That was my share, the total was $2750. Also, I didn't mention, but I paid $2k for my own one-bedroom for half that time. That same one-bedroom would be $3k today.

Salaries at Google have scaled with cost of living, so it seems relevant to me.

slewison Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee

Here's my counter-anecdote. I hesitate to do this but I think it's nice for aspiring software engineers to have details.

I moved to San Francisco in 2006 straight out of college to work at Google as a SWE. I was $27k in debt (student loan + credit card). My rent was $1450 at the time (2 bedroom with a roommate in a nice part of town), and I took out a $26k loan to buy a car. I'm not particularly frugal.

I did well at Google, left in 2010 with >$200k saved, and used that to fund my entrepreneurial adventures from then til now.

I was very fortunate to land that job, YMMV.

slewison Google Has Spent Over $1.1B on Self-Driving Tech

They've likely spent way more than that, since the article's number is only through the end of 2015:

"Between Project Chauffeur’s inception in 2009 and the end of 2015, Google spent $1.1 billion on developing its self-driving software and hardware"

slewison Introducing Atom-IDE

Can you comment on when/why you might use IntelliJ/VS over VSCode? I've recently switched to VSCode from vim, and haven't really used full IDEs since college (except for small amounts of mobile app development).

slewison Sonos: users must accept new privacy policy or devices may “cease to function”

The devices don't persist groups across reboot, so if they power-cycle (which can happen if they update), you have to regroup everything.

slewison Beyond the boring blockchain bubble

https://www.smithandcrown.com/icos/

Mostly memes and mindless speculation, but you can get an idea of sentiment here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/

That's the tip of the iceberg.

slewison Martin Shkreli is found guilty of securities fraud

It'd be interesting to hear why you'd like 4-6 years. I'm not judging your preference or response, really just curious.

slewison Kubernetes 1.7 with Tim Hockin [audio]

Ooo, I want to layer on the thockin love! When I was fresh out of college in 2006 Tim and his team (then the BIOS team at Google) were the friendliest, geniusyiest, most patient group a new grad could hope for. Thanks for the mentorship Tim! -Shawn

slewison Audi claims the A8 is the first production car to reach Level 3 autonomy

There are no specific hardware requirements for any of the levels of autonomy, that I'm aware of.

slewison Learn Python 3 the Hard Way

The Python Language Reference is pretty good if you're already experienced: https://docs.python.org/3.6/reference/index.html

slewison Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

Take a look at Basic Attention Token and the Brave browser.

slewison Attempt to Reverse a $55 Million Ether Heist

I'm glad the hard fork happened, because it makes clear and public that there is no "coding around" the possibility of human oversight. Better for that to happen early than late IMO. And people sure still seem to be onboard.

slewison BasicAttentionToken Roadmap 1.0

The browser is ad-free and tracker-free by default and they've stated a few times that it will remain so. Business concerns aside, it really does significantly improve my mobile browsing experience (I'm using it on iOS).

slewison Analyzing Token Sale Models

Not a single comment here actually addresses the content of the article. Just pointing that out.

slewison Backblaze Hard Drive Stats for 2016

I don't think I can comment on that! Sorry. Someone who is working on storage at Google today would have a better idea of what's public vs not.