Hacker News Reader

vellumon Dynamicland 2024

I had always been curious as to what his thoughts were on generative AI, but he stopped posting a while back. Now, you can find his thoughts in the Dynamicland FAQ. tl;dr - he's not a fan. https://dynamicland.org/2024/FAQ/ https://dynamicland.org/archive/2017/Is_this_the_civilizatio... https://worrydream.com/quotes/?search=kerosene

vellumon Prompt Caching

You can try AWS Bedrock or Openrouter if that happens. They both have the Claude API.

vellumon Chain-of-Thought Hub: Measuring LLMs' Reasoning Performance

From OpenAI's RLHF paper[1]: "By default, when we train a PPO model on our API distribution, it suffers from an “alignment tax”, as its performance on several public NLP datasets decreases." On the HELM[2] site, you can see accuracy benchmarks for InstructGPT <OpenAI model> vs baseline models. The InstructGPT models perform worse on a lot of benchmarks.

1 - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.02155.pdf

2 - https://crfm.stanford.edu/helm/v0.1.0/?group=question_answer...

vellumon Has ChatGPT Been Neutered?

It's the "alignment tax". From OpenAI's RLHF paper[1]: "By default, when we train a PPO model on our API distribution, it suffers from an “alignment tax”, as its performance on several public NLP datasets decreases." On the HELM[2] site, you can see accuracy benchmarks for InstructGPT <OpenAI model> vs baseline models. The InstructGPT models perform worse on a lot of benchmarks.

1 - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.02155.pdf

2 - https://crfm.stanford.edu/helm/v0.1.0/?group=question_answer...

vellumon 81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending

Goodhart's law - When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure

vellumon Ask HN: Tips to relearn how to care about my job?

You don't have to care about your job. Most people have about four good hours of work in them. Just do your four hours, and take the rest of the day off. No job is worth burnout.

vellumon Ask HN: Quit a job if you don't fit in the team?

You should find a 100% remote job. If other people are there full time, but you're only there 0-2 days a week, you're never going to be that close with them. You said you're happy when you're at home, but going into the office makes you anxious. So you shouldn't have an issue working at home full time.

vellumon Ask HN: Best HVAC system for a new house?

David Heinemeier Hansson gave a great talk on air quality and touched upon various HVAC systems. One thing that really stuck out, was his claim that you need 80 CFM per person per room. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRqh8oLY7Ik

vellumon On whether changes in bedroom CO2 levels affect sleep quality

Have you thought about installing a screen door in your bedroom? You could also look into reinforcing it with chicken wire or hail cloth to keep the cat out.

vellumon Richard Branson suspends Saudi Arabia’s investment over missing journalist

Ordinary Yemenis don't attend cocktail parties at Davos.

http://www.nrttv.com/EN/News.aspx?id=5863&MapID=3

vellumon Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience Level

This lists L1-4 salaries at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

https://blog.step.com/2016/06/16/more-salaries-twitter-linke...

vellumon “Rest and vest”: engineers who get paid and barely work

This is a thing with a lot of couples when they retire. They're not used to being around each other 24/7 and drive each other crazy.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/09/divorce-after-50-re...

In Japan, they call it Retired Husband Syndrome, and it affects 60% of older women there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retired_husband_syndrome

vellumon Shared thoughts after 6 years in Pentesting

If you're entry-level and don't have a network, certs help you get through the HR filter. Once you're mid-level, you can use your network and experience.

vellumon A homeless man who turned his life around by offering book reviews

The article never explicitly mentioned him finding a new place to live. I found this reference in a people.com article:

Eventually, Dladla was able to pay rent again and even earned extra income that he used to start a book club for kids in a local park

http://people.com/books/homeless-man-who-sold-book-reviews-t...

vellumon We analyzed thousands of interviews on everything from language to code style

Each moment of silence makes the interviewee feel more tense. Instead of staring at them, why not leave the room while they read through the code and collect their thoughts?

You could even have HR do it. When they arrive, HR hands them the code and instructions. Then, they read it for 15 minutes, until you walk in.

vellumon Too many prisons make people worse

Check out some of the companies here. They hire based on trial projects (mostly unpaid).

https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards

vellumon Chinese Offer to Eat Denmark’s Oyster Problem

>The Baltic is heavily polluted by all sorts of heavy metals

Not like China's waters are any better.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25822200

vellumon What Happens When You Send a Zero-Day to a Bank?

CERT and the Zero Day Initiative handle disclosure for you, in some cases.

https://vulcoord.cert.org/VulReport/ http://www.zerodayinitiative.com/about/

vellumon Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process

A better analogy would be if hospitals had doctors do o-chem problems during interviews. Who would do better? The student who just took the class, or the doctor who's been practicing for 10 years?

Also, doctors look stuff up all the time.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/01/doctor-google-diagn...

vellumon Emotional, behavioral and social difficulties among high-IQ children [pdf]

>"trying to FIRE"

is FIRE an acronym?

vellumon Ask HN: Early signs that a company is failing?

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WarningSignsOfCorporateDoom

* No more free soda or coffee.

* Toilet paper quality suddenly drops.

* Someone comes by to measure your desk and cubicle, but refuses to tell you why.

vellumon Making Django CMS as easy to install as WordPress

If they just need a blog, I'd recommend using tumblr and a custom domain name.

vellumon Glot.io: Open Source pastebin with runnable snippets and API

https://www.nccgroup.trust/globalassets/our-research/us/whit...

vellumon Unintuitive Things I’ve Learned about Management

You need to talk to your people a lot, in order for them to get comfortable talking to you. 95% of the time, you're just shooting the shit. But 5% of the time, they'll have some critical information. Conversely, if you don't talk to your people, they won't volunteer this info out of the blue. You have to lay the ground work first.

vellumon How to Pass a Programming Interview

That's a double edged sword. Now, your code has to compile...

vellumon Technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary

People usually have a coffee date first, before doing dinner. Here, you're doing dinner first, and then lunch. The first pass should be minimal in commitment, and give both sides a chance to get to know each other. They pass fizzbuzz or something doable in 15-30 minutes, you have a short convo about the company, and then you move on to the second pass.

vellumon A Group of American Teens Are Excelling at Advanced Math

In California, districts supplement state funding with local bond measures.

http://www.bondbuyer.com/news/regionalnews/california-school...

vellumon San Francisco Bubble

They're too risk-averse. In SV, it's ok to fail. In Europe, it's not.

vellumon Why Are Corporations Hoarding Trillions?

According to this Bloomberg article, companies have $2.1 trillion sitting offshore for tax reasons [1]. They're probably waiting for Congress to let them bring home the cash, tax-free. However, the last time that happened (2004), it was done to encourage companies to create jobs. Instead, they spent it buying company stock. [2]

1 - http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-04/u-s-compan...

2 - http://www.theguardian.com/money/us-money-blog/2015/jun/13/r...

vellumon Top Books on Amazon Based on Links in Hacker News Comments

He made a snarky comment about Andrew Bartbeit's death, so conservatives gave him a slew of one star reviews. If you filter by "verified purchases", it's not as polarized.