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throwiforgtnlzy

62 karma · joined April 9, 2024

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throwiforgtnlzy··on Ask HN: Those who have recently undertaken a job hunt, what was your experience?
While I nuked my LinkedIn about 8 years ago because I was 1-2 from 96% of Silicon Valley and spammed by un-targeted recruiters incessantly... more importantly, my contacts and I didn't talk so keeping it was meaningless performative business theater.

MAANG companies (excluding N) are requiring relocation and RTO (hybrid, near an office). Also, their tone has shifted to where their recruiters feel like they hold a monopoly on in the business relationship power dynamic.

Perhaps shrinking corporate real estate holdings of properties and lease should be prioritized over burdening employees with additional relocation, commuting, and housing costs.

throwiforgtnlzy··on EVs are lowering Bay Area's carbon footprint
Around 1981-1985, smog was quite bad in the SF Bay Area. It was a horrible brown-yellow.

I don't think most people appreciate how far away it is to reach Mt. Hamilton or how precarious the road up it is. Took a couple of gfs on drives up there.

I used to bike up Hicks Road near Mt. Umunhum.

Other good vantage points: the top of The Dish route behind Stanford and the observation deck of the de Young Museum.

throwiforgtnlzy··on Tech giant with 30k employees has no return-to-office policy
Seems aligned with early Netflix culture of hiring and treating employees like adults rather than like children. They still appeared to be hiring remote employees as of September of 2023. [0]

0. https://www.teamblind.com/post/Does-Netflix-do-remote-hires-...

throwiforgtnlzy··on Cheap Mortgages Deter Workers from Relocating for $250k Jobs
Yep. While startup salaries are, and have always been, a joke, it's corporate cost of living adjustments (COLAs) that are a worsening joke when they fail to account for true COL differences. If a megacorp insists on relocating you from Austin, TX to Menlo Park, CA it should include a 75% TC raise or it would be a pay cut and wouldn't make economic sense. It's imperative that rational employees hold corporations accountable and refuse to be underpaid because not doing so hurts everyone else in the industry.
throwiforgtnlzy··on Wiring Your House for Networking
Update for 2024:

Step 0. Don't bother with obsolete Cat 6 or lower cable because it's just not worth the effort over Wi-Fi. If you're going to do it, buy a 1000' spool of CMP Cat 8 UPoE-rated premise wire (~$1000-$1500 USD), punch down tool, J boxes, punch down receptacles, semi-flexible plenum large conduit that doesn't have ridges, cable fish tape, wall-mounted quarter 19" rack, 90 degree drill and hole saw with various lengths of extensions (usually from about 1' to 10' or longer for tall walls), and a punch down patch panel.

Step 1. Run conduit and J boxes first to a central closet or to a garage in most instances. This is the labor-intensive, hard part but it makes running multiple cables through it much easier. Larger homes may need a second closet or second conduit hub area and more conduit to a main patch panel.

Step 2. Easily slide wire in using a fish tape, 1 to 4 cables per box depending on the location. It's so much easier with semi-flexible conduit.

Step 3. Test each cable using iperf3 with an RPi and laptop, or borrow a commercial 10GbE cable tester like a DSX2-8000.

Step 4. Drop in a 10 GbE U/POE++ switch that doesn't sound like a jet engine.

Option: Instead of, or in addition to, Cat 8 wiring, run fiber.

throwiforgtnlzy··on Microsoft starts testing ads in the Windows 11 Start menu
Sorry, I'm not your VAR rep. https://letmegoogleforyou.com/?q=buy%20windows%2011%20enterp...
throwiforgtnlzy··on Support contract required techie to lounge around in a $5k/night hotel room
C. 2003-2011 between contracts, I used to offer high priced on-site datacenter hardware, OS (incl virtualization), and software support on Craigslist for anywhere from SF to San Jose, Newark, and Fremont. Some interesting incidents and profitable times.
throwiforgtnlzy··on Ask HN: Where did you first learn to code?
C. 1990, Turbo Pascal IDE, trial and error.

Around 1994, I managed to get to a Computer Literacy bookstore.

throwiforgtnlzy··on Microsoft starts testing ads in the Windows 11 Start menu
A retail Windows license isn't the same as an enterprise Windows license. Retails Windows licenses started with ads for OneDrive and Office in Settings, but now that they're reverting to their old, shameless ways, they're putting ads everywhere else too for retail users.

With a Windows Enterprise license, all of the ads can be turned off, or at least that was the practice.

throwiforgtnlzy··on Bash's sadly flawed smart (programmable) completion
It depends. It's better than nothing that can be ^C'ed.

Here's a naive, partial implementation that runs in <500 ms so long as there's an existing dnf cache:

   command_not_found_handle() {
    local pkgs
    readarray pkgs < <(dnf rq --whatprovides "$1" -C --qf '%{name}\n' 2>/dev/null | sed '/^$/d' | sort -uVr)
    if (( ! "${#pkgs[@]}" )); then
      echo >&2 'Command not found and no package provides it according to the dnf cache'
      return
    fi
    echo >&2 'Command not found, but offered via the following command(s):'
    pkgs=("${pkgs[@]/#/    dnf install }")
    echo >&2 " ${pkgs[@]}"
  }
throwiforgtnlzy··on Defeated CEOs are now conceding hybrid working is here to stay
FYI: Meta is de-facto insisting on RTO and not offering a remote option for new employees.

This trend has nothing to do with productivity and is all about the egos of control-freak managers "maintaining control" over employees in a way that wastes employees' time and money and harms the company's reputation.

throwiforgtnlzy··on Dependencies and resilience
Platform-based, such as Squeak and Etoys (not eToys) or like with VMs such as JVM or BEAM.

The problem you describe is solved by introducing capabilities such as in seL4. Without beginning with a capability, something cannot do something else.

throwiforgtnlzy··on Apple to expand repair options with support for used genuine parts
Yes, that would be a good idea™ but I don't think that's conflict. Apple had uses all sorts of excuses and technical limitations to prevent repairs including parts pairing.

The solution is there need to be parts available for reasonable prices in the first place. There are no reasonably priced parts for iPhone Pro 13 and onwards. My friend's cell phone repair chain has lost a lot of business because they can't fix many types of Google Pixel, Samsung, or Apple devices for reasonable prices.

throwiforgtnlzy··on DNS over Wikipedia
Begs the Q: Why is someone using Google when DDG and Startpage exist?

Can't someone !w piratebay and click the link?

throwiforgtnlzy··on Bash's sadly flawed smart (programmable) completion
Yes. 15+ year zsh user here. When dealing with bash, try to sneak in PackageKit-command-not-found and bash-completion.

And when running a shell, do it like this:

    docker run user/image:tag -it --rm bash -li
Also, zshdb, bashdb, and shellcheck are good stuff™ too.

My mantra is all programs and widely-used company tools should have current man pages and shell completions. The whole "Go look at a web page" for "help" is slow, distracting, and lazy.

throwiforgtnlzy··on If Inheritance is so bad, why does everyone use it?
While I don't use the ecosystem, I like the way Go approaches it with interfaces by being minimal, expressive, and flexible. It something works like something else according to a minimal specification, it's the same. There's no sealing off things or top-down mandates that require changes to other people's code. Rust traits aren't exactly the same because they require changes to everyone's code to follow an exact model that cannot be retrofitted to existing code without additional work. One downside (it may not be the case today) with the Go model is requiring a type to fulfill one or more interfaces requires additional hoops such as no-op init() interface assertions.
throwiforgtnlzy··on The simple beauty of XOR floating point compression
That's probably it. Thanks for easing my perpetual forgetfulness!
throwiforgtnlzy··on The simple beauty of XOR floating point compression
Waves across I-35 to Reality Labs.

Sounds like something Numba should include perhaps.

I retired from HPC around the era of iPython, Open MPI, Infiniband, OFED, GPFS/Panasas/Lustre, Rocks Cluster, and Condor/PBS/SGE.

throwiforgtnlzy··on The simple beauty of XOR floating point compression
IIRC, there was a WAV-era audio format that used PCM delta compression by recording differences rather than absolute values.
throwiforgtnlzy··on Amazon virtually kills efforts to develop Alexa Skills
Alexa's platform is really, really bad in 4 dimensions: it's antiquated with limited fixed action patterns, it just doesn't work correctly, its skills aren't adequately maintained, and it's developer hostile.

On the first part, if a skill doesn't support a precise sentence structure, it becomes difficult to use or simply doesn't support features users expect to use using natural language.

On the second point, not all Alexa devices work with IPv6. I have an Echo Show 15 here that simply refuses to play BBC News and other "Flash Briefing" items when IPv6 is enabled. Really? It's 2024 now. Did the whole factory reset, reboot, and so forth dances.

An LLM startup with enough partner biz dev/sales talent could combine IoT API integrations from enough manufacturers to side-step the boring and limited Apple Siri, Google Hello, and Amazon Alexa oligopoly hegemonies and self-destructive platforms like IFTTT to execute on a compelling, competing replacement making good on all 4 points. However, I don't think giving away computing resources for free is necessarily a scalable business model but it's fair to charge a reasonable micropayment subscription to host and run your code and data.

throwiforgtnlzy··on Apple to expand repair options with support for used genuine parts
Q: So will they "recalibrate" my iPad Pro to restore FaceID working with a third-party display repair?

A: No, of course not. Apple still says "We don't offer such a service but you buy a new one."

throwiforgtnlzy··on Embed Crystal code directly in Ruby
Sorry, it's a been feature in a number of languages for decades. Perl has it at least as early as 5.005 in 1998. So naturally, Ruby had it since at least before 1.6 / 2002. Java added it in 2011. It didn't work with Python 2.1 from 2001, but I found it was added relatively late in PEP 515 in 2016 with Python 3.6.

As a latecomer, C23 went with ' just like C++ did almost 10 years earlier with C++14.

throwiforgtnlzy··on Embed Crystal code directly in Ruby
Well, there's Idris which is eager fp like OCaml but looks like Haskell and has dependent typing.
throwiforgtnlzy··on Embed Crystal code directly in Ruby
Tried crystal several times over the years. Each time, I encountered Crystal bugs, surprises, oddities, and missing pieces such that there was no viable path forward to adopt it for anything serious. Elixir + Rust with rustler is pretty compelling as a scalable, viable alternative.
throwiforgtnlzy··on First languages of North America traced back to two groups from Siberia
The 3-part documentary Do You Speak American? (2005) is also interesting on the evolution of English (and non-English) accents.
throwiforgtnlzy··on Harvard will require test scores for admission again
* Unless they happen to be scholarship students. Scholarship students traditionally have to work harder than everyone else because they can't afford to buy homework or tests, or to pay people to take tests for them. One potential mark against them is the possibility of grade inflation endemic to the institution, but this maybe more or less variable in a particular STEM discipline.

Also, state research universities didn't/don't have as much grade inflation because they're intent on "competing" in the ranks without having the legacy, endowment, or name branding that Ivy's and Pac-NN's, so typically all they have (outside of NCAA sports $$$). University academic department staff are worried about bolstering their public image and of winning the approval of accreditation organizations.

Frame of reference: Most all of my college-prep public high school friends went to Harvard, MIT, Stanford, or CalTech while fewer, like me, went to University of California universities (UCs) like Berkeley or UC{LA,SD,SB,D}. I'm only certain of a few certain universities of that era were more or less more rigorous by comparing notes on specific courses and how team participation was regulated fairly or not. In 2001, we had a intro networking course requiring creating a forked caching HTTP/0.9-1.0 network web proxy server as one project of many.

throwiforgtnlzy··on Texas Legalizes Kei Trucks
Stanford, for many years, was allowed to run a similar brand of narrow width imported trucks that fit between bollards around campus because they are/were their own municipality (and own ZIP code) on their own property. As such, I don't think they had State of CA license plates, had to pass Smog Check emissions tests, or had any sort of formal homologation.

In general, accepting random vehicles without proper homologation review by the DOT is an unwise and dangerous process. On the other hand, small and limited use vehicles for explicit use not on public roadways should also be possible.

throwiforgtnlzy··on OpenTable is adding your first name to previously anonymous reviews
It's no longer an assured impossibility that if certain populist political-religious extremists attained power, they wouldn't impose censorship and mandate requiring licenses and identity verification to use the internet.
throwiforgtnlzy··on NYC startup founder Sophia D'Antoine dies after being struck crossing street
The US is a corrupt, dysfunctional civilization that won't even do anything to stop mass shootings, so it certainly won't stop speeding or ensure corners don't get cut in the design or manufacturing of passenger transportation machines. The authoritarian-inspired consequences you suggest won't be applied fairly or properly, a priori.
throwiforgtnlzy··on Apple alerts users in 92 nations to mercenary spyware attacks
Don't worry, reality and time will find a way to make reality worse than anything a fiction writer could've conceived in the past. Even Brave New World seems quaint now.
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