HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

thaneross

189 karma · joined December 4, 2017

submissionscomments
thaneross··on A warning about 'model welfare'
The writers flat out rejected Roddenberry's vision of a better future and here's a take on why. We've reached a point in culture of deep pessimism about humanity, and so the characters in Picard are just as dysfunctional as we are.
thaneross··on A warning about 'model welfare'
Every time I'm reminded NuTrek exists I get sad about what we've lost.
thaneross··on Oxide raises $200M Series C
This tends to come up every time flat structures are discussed and it seems like such a failure of imagination that anything other than strict hierarchies could work, despite plenty of counter-examples like Valve. Yes, some people do badly in an environment where you have to have convince people rather than use power to get things done. However the problems with traditional hierarchies are so well known people assume them to be innate. I'm tired of it being normal to have an incompetent boss.
thaneross··on Y Combinator will let founders receive funds in stablecoins
This is why we can't have nice things.
thaneross··on I switched from VSCode to Zed
Given the top 10% holds 87% of shares, it seems clear the stock market is primarily a tool to compound wealth. Having a surplus of money is table stakes to play.
thaneross··on The Junior Hiring Crisis
What if, and hear me out, we asked the people a new employee has been onboarding with? I know, trusting people to make a fair judgment lacks the ass-covering desired by most legal departments but actually listening to the people who have to work with a new hire is an idea so crazy it might just work.
thaneross··on Apple's Problem with Bodies
American culture still holds puritanical views of sex, and this article crosses the taboo threshold that 15 year olds are having sex.
thaneross··on Stategraph: Terraform state as a distributed systems problem
Unfortunately many providers don't expose all the state used to create certain resources through the API, so there's no way to download the real source of truth after the fact.
thaneross··on Do I not like Ruby anymore? (2024)
If your only exposure to static typing is six months of TS, what you are missing is experience. You're still on the learning curve and thus the cognitive load of explicit types is high, but with time the opposite becomes true.
thaneross··on Valve Software handbook for new employees [pdf] (2012)
A poor manager in a structureless org is only going to have as much influence as their popularity allows. While this may cause damage, it pales in comparison to a bad manager in a traditional hierarchy who has the power to force their decisions.
thaneross··on TikTok is harming children at an industrial scale
I agree people are reaching for the limited power available to them, but the objections to cancel culture aren't usually around voluntary consensual boycotts but rather the use of "social force". Destruction of reputation, demands for firing, deplatforming, doxxing, swatting, etc... the methods of harming a person over the internet.
thaneross··on America Is Backsliding Toward Its Most Polluted Era
Violating ethical beliefs when they are inconvenient is what I'd call "moral hypocrisy". Practically everyone is guilty of it to varying degrees.
thaneross··on Foreign visits into the U.S. fell off a cliff in March
Because nationality is an accident of birth and being unconcerned with causing harm to others is sociopathic.
thaneross··on Egoless Engineering
If it's clear someone is not acting in good faith, I can think of three options:

1. Find out why and try to fix it

2. Fire them

3. Embrace the low-trust environment by trying to mitigate the dysfunction with layers of bureaucracy

Strategy 3 seems quite popular, and to be fair it might be the only one that scales.

thaneross··on Subreddit Migration Directory
If Mastodon is any indicator, the Fediverse is already well optimized to create echo chambers.
thaneross··on Software effort estimation is mostly fake research (2021)
I hate to say it but from my 20+ years in the industry, this is the norm.
thaneross··on 21st-century editors should keep their hands off of 20th-century books
Why should a small group of activists get to decide for everybody which statues are allowed to stand?
thaneross··on Layoffs push down scores on Glassdoor – how companies respond
It tells you the company values process over efficacy. Interviewing, like practically any complex task is dynamic in nature. Following down a line of conversation with a candidate provides genuine insight into the individual and cannot be done mechanically.
thaneross··on Natives in Tech asks Apache Software Foundation to change name
These kinds of attempts at language revision rarely have anything to do with the people supposedly offended by them; they are an excuse to gain moral standing. The goal is to advance a particular political ideology, namely Social Justice, which its advocates believe is in the best interest of said minorities and thus doesn't require the consent of those they choose to speak for.
thaneross··on Tesla is becoming a partisan brand, says survey
Neutrality does not "implicitly support the status quo" unless you believe the status quo is stable or exists in a local maxima. That clearly isn't true however because the status quo is dramatically different today than it was historically, and I wouldn't attribute activism for the bulk of those changes.
thaneross··on This to That
I dry clean my suits. I thought that was the only way to clean them... am I missing something?
thaneross··on How does Windows decide whether your computer has full Internet access?
I think most people don't realize this given how normalized it is. Wealth is a mechanism of distributing limited resources, and thus profit seeking without concern for externalities or creating value makes everyone else worse off.
thaneross··on Story: “It would be career limiting..."
I have known very few managers who didn't routinely lie. The advantages of subtle (or not so subtle) manipulation are too tempting when trying to get something from someone.
thaneross··on GPU mining no longer profitable after Ethereum merge
One I'm interested in is graph databases powered with linear algebra (see GraphBLAS and RedisGraph). Putting the graph structure in a sparse matrix in GPU memory and doing matrix-multiplication to perform queries means you can effectively traverse the entire graph quickly by using the massive parallel nature of the graphics card.
thaneross··on You Don't Need Microservices
It's a fascinating set of priories that lead to these policies.

"We trust you enough to run your code in production but we can't let you read another team's code because you might steal it. Yes, the odds that anyone wants to steal the code for this mundane microservice are staggeringly low... and yes you're going to be less productive and more prone to serious bugs by being in the dark, but that's your problem."

thaneross··on 40% of Americans believe the Earth was created within the last 10k years (2019)
I wish they hadn't phrased it as "less advanced forms of life", but rather "earlier forms of life". It's a common misunderstanding that evolution favours what we humans would consider improvements, when in reality evolution has no goal.
thaneross··on Rust should not have provided `unwrap`
There's also this less generic lint: https://rust-lang.github.io/rust-clippy/master/index.html#un...
thaneross··on Kubernetes is a red flag signalling premature optimisation
Indeed. Hosted k8s has been low maintenance in my experience, much lower than managing a bunch of VMs. I think the common thread between people who have horror stories using k8s is either pains from self-hosting or teams who adopted it without experience and used the ample rope it gives to hang themselves.
thaneross··on Former Apple exec who enforced insider trading rules admits to insider trading
I'm not sure they are the majority opinion but I agree they are common. It's not surprising given the number of CEOs and venture capitalists on the site.
thaneross··on Leetcode Considered Harmful
You're missing my preferred option, pair program on a problem which requires skills relevant for the job. Have the candidate use their preferred tools, ideally their own laptop to minimize discomfort. Make the problem too large to get done within the time block but gives a variety of technical skills for the candidate to show off.
Page 1 of 2Next →