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vikinghckr

867 karma · joined November 7, 2018

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vikinghckr··on Google, Nvidia, and OpenAI
You have been perma banned from HN fyi
vikinghckr··on Google, Nvidia, and OpenAI
No, that's charity, which while morally great is not sustainable at scale and in the long run.
vikinghckr··on Google, Nvidia, and OpenAI
Yes giving people with fewer resources an option to pay with their attention is a morally good thing for society, actually.
vikinghckr··on Google, Nvidia, and OpenAI
It's the exact opposite. Advertising-based model is why the poorest people in the poorest countries in the world have had access to the exact same Google search, YouTube and Facebook as the richest people in the US. Ad-supported business models are the great equalizers of wealth.
vikinghckr··on Google, Nvidia, and OpenAI
Advertisement is unquestionably a net positive for society and humanity. It's one of the few true positive sum business models where everyone is better off.
vikinghckr··on Google, Nvidia, and OpenAI
Who do you think his 30-40K paying subscriber audience are?
vikinghckr··on Not your run of the mill Chromium based browser
Very interesting read! One question I have is, since the architecture involves quite a thick client on top of base Chromium, and the client seems to be platform-specific (Swift/OSX in this case), how is the team thinking about the overhead of building all this for each platform -- Windows and Android specifically, but also perhaps iOS?
vikinghckr··on Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI
What did they have you don't?
vikinghckr··on Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI
Well, enjoyment or happiness is tricky to measure because happiness = reality - expectation. So people in the 1820s might've been "happy" enough because they simply didn't know a better life like today's was a possibility. There's no reason to think they were happier than today's population though. And certainly, you as someone who experienced today's conveniences will not be happy long term if all those were taken away suddenly.
vikinghckr··on Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI
Well, for a start, it's safe to assume you're not a woman or a minority. And even if you're a young healthy white male, your quality of life would be significantly worse in the 1820s. Not only would you lose access to a lot of the everyday conveniences of life today, you're also far more likely to die a young and painful death from any number of disease.
vikinghckr··on Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI
That this even needed to be said on a forum like HN baffles me. I suspect it's a result of decades of mainstream political/cultural doom-and-gloom propaganda.
vikinghckr··on Shopify employee breaks NDA to reveal firm replacing laid off workers with AI
The median quality of life is MUCH higher today than 100 years ago. And bottom 1%-tile quality of life might be 1000 times better. All thanks to advance in technology and increased productivity.
vikinghckr··on Launch HN: Pynecone (YC W23) – Web Apps in Pure Python
I'm not exaggerating but this might just be the highest impact library I've seen. As a backend developer who has lots of great project ideas but bail at the thought of having to use JavaScript and HTML, this library is a godsend!

My only question is why it took so long for someone to implement it? And where are the equivalent libraries for Go, Rust and Java?

vikinghckr··on Testing Without Mocks: A Pattern Language
Thanks! Injecting the data itself is an interesting approach!
vikinghckr··on Testing Without Mocks: A Pattern Language
Thanks! I really like the idea of the instrumented ExampleKeyValueStore class which can be defined like this:

  class ExampleKeyValueStore {
    ExampleKeyValueStore(KeyValueStore wrapped);
    int hit_count();
  };
That means I can use the real KeyValueStore as a dependency while still testing the caching behavior. Cool!
vikinghckr··on Testing Without Mocks: A Pattern Language
Hi, I really enjoyed the piece! How much to test at each layer of abstraction has always been something that's bugged me. This article provides a nice strategy.

I still have questions about a few scenarios though. Let's say, I have two classes like this:

  class KeyValueStore {
    int64 Get(Key key);
  };

  class CachingKeyValueStore {
    CachingKeyValueStore(const KeyValueStore& wrapped);

    int64 Get(Key key);
  }

Here, the `CachingKeyValueStore` class is a wrapper around the `KeyValueStore` class, and its purpose is to simply maintain an in-memory cache (instead of RPC calls or Database calls). How would you unit test the `CachingKeyValueStore` class? So far, using Mocks have been my only strategy, because behavior-wise, both classes have the exact same outputs for the same inputs.
vikinghckr··on PyTorch 2.0
What I really find interesting here is that PyTorch, a library maintained by Facebook, is winning the marketshare and mindshare due to clean API, whereas Tensorflow, maintained by Google, is losing due to inferior API. In general, Google as a company emphasizes code quality and best practices far more than Facebook. But the story was reversed here.
vikinghckr··on Coping strategies for the serial project hoarder
Considered using Bazel? Perfect for what you described.
vikinghckr··on Gender-Based Pricing in Consumer Packaged Goods: A Pink Tax?
The paper literally reaches the opposite conclusion to what you just said.

In any case, any sort of price control is bad for the consumer, so I'm opposed to the idea on principle.

vikinghckr··on Web 3.0 – The Great Con
I don't have examples of people getting banned by banks/PayPal for legal activities using crypto, no. But that doesn't mean crypto-based solutions can't fill that void in the future. Note that I never claimed crypto is the "only way" to solve this issue. But, it's a promising alternative. Any centralized solution for these use-cases are tricky because they're niche and don't probably have the necessary scale. Not to mention, any centralized solution is always carries censorship risks. If you have a decentralized, usable, non-crypto alternatives for these cases, I'm open ears.
vikinghckr··on Web 3.0 – The Great Con
First of all, the fact that you completely ignored the first point about perfectly legal "racist", "sexist", "anti-vaxx" behavior being enough to get you banned from PayPal/banks means you accept that there are valid LEGAL use cases of crypto.

As for your suggestion to "talk to your government", yeah I'm sure that will go down well with the Iranian regime trying to crack down on anti-hijab protestors.

vikinghckr··on Web 3.0 – The Great Con
> Are all crimes, right? Banks will take your consumer money (provider management does get more complicated) for gambling and porn these days

Not necessarily. For example, PayPal has recently introduced "acceptable use policy" where they can freeze your account without you violating the law. Banks also have done the same for being "racist", "sexist", "anti-vaxx" etc. All of those things are perfectly legal in the US. So your assertion that only illegal activities require use of crypto is false.

And that's before we get to the fact that just because something is "illegal" doesn't mean it's good to have this banned. Pretty sure the ongoing Iranian protests are illegal.

vikinghckr··on In Canada it's illegal to call yourself software engineer
Good. It makes little sense to be a software engineer in Canada in the first place. Can earn double the salary for the same work by moving to the US.
vikinghckr··on Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture
Meanwhile Google and Facebook internally use VS Code based IDEs as their official developer tooling. Pretty sure their legal teams have considered any legal risks with licensing.
vikinghckr··on Programming in the Apocalypse
Never. I'm not changing any part of my lifestyle to prevent any climate disaster. I'm all for technological solution to climate change. In case that's not enough, I'm happy to face the consequences. But I'm still not changing my lifestyle.
vikinghckr··on Tech Companies Coddled Their Employees. Now They're Firing Them
As someone who works at big tech company, the reality couldn't be further from the truth. This is one of the hottest job markets I've seen. Amazon, who are known to pay worse than other FAANGs, recently increased their compensation massively to attract new hires. Microsoft is going to give a one time lump sum to everyone to stop attrition. I don't know where the author is coming from tbh.
vikinghckr··on Improve equity in software by not negotiating salaries
Equity in salaries is all good and well, but it's not going to convince anyone to take a pay cut to join your company. For example, I flat out refuse to hear about any offer that's <$400K a year. I'm not going to join test double for $200K just because that's what they pay everyone.
vikinghckr··on Lazygit: A simple terminal UI for Git commands
Very interesting project! This is one area where I always felt git was worse than mercurial. Latter has extremely useful tools like `hg hisedit` and `hg split`, for which git didn't have a counterpart.
vikinghckr··on Creating my awesome Windows 10 dev setup
Because Windows 10 is the best Operating System in the universe? It seems like HN is full of folks who last used Windows back in 2005 or something and are painfully out of touch with modern Windows.
vikinghckr··on Ask HN: Who's using a third party company for tech screens? Is so, why?
What you mentioned isn't that different from interviewing with a human on the other side. All interview performance is kept on record at most companies. For 5/10/15 years or even more.

That's why it's not a good idea to interview at a place when you're unprepared. Not only are you wasting both your and the company's time, but you're also hurting your chances of getting an interview call from them in the future.

I have seen a lot of people I know make this mistake -- not preparing enough for a interview, failing badly, and then applying to the same company 6/12/24 months later, and not even getting another interview. Very frustrating.

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