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zallarak

817 karma · joined August 26, 2010

zain at za1 dot co
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zallarak··on Thanks HN for 15 years of support and helping me find my life's work
You guys changed many lives including my own.
zallarak··on Scaling PostgreSQL to power 800M ChatGPT users
Anyone have any idea of what their caching strategy may be? I think that may be the most interesting and impactful thing here.

ChatGPT is definitely the snappiest web UI of any LLM.

zallarak··on The Peptide Craze
Ah yes, thousands of people benefiting from cheap and effective drugs that can’t be patented because they naturally occur. Of course it doesn’t work. /sarcasm

The medical field has a terrible problem in terms of literature reproducibility and ethics. The beta blocker scandal is a great example.

zallarak··on Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm
This may be a naive question: why ARM and not RISC-V?
zallarak··on Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm
This may be a naive question but why ARM and not RISC-V?
zallarak··on Next.js is infuriating
Agreed. I've run into so many issues with documentation and sane defaults, and the Vercel team response is to always gaslight you into thinking you've done something wrong.

The truth is, its just poorly designed software.

Where it shines is batteries included for getting started. They realized if you have low activation energy requirements, you will win a critical mass of people who put up with your crap. A good metaphor for devtools overall.

zallarak··on America's assassination attempt on Huawei is backfiring
This outcome couldn't have been more obvious.
zallarak··on Get your work recognized: write a brag document (2019)
Ironically I think these types of exercises are part of the problem at major software companies; terrible efficiency and over hiring.

Because you need to “brag” to get rewarded, everyone ambitious has a list. And each list is nearly impossible for middle managers to evaluate. Someone may solve a hardcore engineering problem that has no business impact. Another person might redo some docs. Someone may create a design system version. Lots of token achievements, but not real work.

Real work should stand on its own and competent managers should be able to identify it. Mediocre managers rely on lists, so then people start showing up to work and making lists.

zallarak··on Safer: A better alternative to SAFEs for startup financing?
This doesn't make sense.

1. The top 3% seed-stage investors are killing it. 2. This seems to be engineered for the bottom 90% of investors. To squeeze out some yield. But venture capital is ruled by the power law. 3. Forcing seed stage tech founders to think about this complexity makes no sense.

zallarak··on Show HN: Localias, securely manage local devserver aliases
I really appreciate that this was released to work cross-platform.
zallarak··on Working at a startup is overrated, both financially and emotionally
I've worked at 3 startups, founded 2, and worked at 1 bigco.

2/3 startups had excellent returns in the form of equity. Life changing over time. Startups: 66% hit rate.

Bigco was mentally draining and sucked. Bigco: 0% hit rate.

Starting the first company was a failure, but the second one seems to be doing pretty well. 50% hit rate.

zallarak··on Show HN: Online Learning Resources for Homeschooling
Love the age + free filters. First I'd heard of Swift Playgrounds! I wonder how they decided which ones to include. Also, first time I've seen learning resources broken down by apps, games, videos, etc. To be honest, it makes a lot of sense.
zallarak··on Goodbye, Clean Code
As PG said, take on as much technical debt as possible: it’s literally leverage.

Now sometimes “clean” code is the worst of both worlds. It wastes time and isn’t really clean.

zallarak··on The senatorial governance of Bitcoin: making (de)centralized money
Clarifications (this comment perpetuates some common misconceptions):

- A single bitcoin "transaction" can actually have thousands of inputs and thousands of outputs. So energy "per transaction" or "transactions per second" is not analogous to a typical monetary transaction.

- Bitcoin does not compete with literal credit card transactions (although some use it like that today). I'd compare Bitcoin on-chain transactions with how nation-states settle their central-bank ledgers with gold. Gold is the best comparison to Bitcoin because trading in hard gold is "final". Credit card transactions happen on a higher level in the financial stack. As does cash. As do bank transfers. All of these bubble down into interbank transfers that eventually settle on the base layer of central banks. So compared to shipping and securing gold, Bitcoin is quite cheap!

* Pasted and modified from an earlier comment I made on HN.

zallarak··on Promiscuous cookies and their impending death via the SameSite policy
So these cookies may die but it’s a perpetual arms race. Browser fingerprinting will (or has) replace(d) cookies for tracking purposes.
zallarak··on The Value of Grey Thinking (2016)
Interesting because to me, “Grey Thinking” is the norm in governments. That’s how they get away with being so wasteful.
zallarak··on Federation is the Worst of all Worlds (2018)
Federation is actually quite centralized and explicitly so. DNS resolution is “federated”.

Proof of work is the opposite end of the spectrum; maximally decentralized yet slow.

The worst of all worlds is proof of stake / stake-based consensus. It’s expensive yet super fragile.

zallarak··on Congress asks if developing slightly fewer medicines is OK if it lowers prices
The compound effect of lost progress might become more significant over time.
zallarak··on Python at Scale: Strict Modules
This article is among the best argument for using a typed language I’ve yet seen.
zallarak··on Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index
I am comparing it to settling gold in that a settlement is "final". You can reverse a credit card transaction, a bank wire, etc. You cannot reverse a Bitcoin transaction or Gold shipment without significant risk and cost.

Example that leads me to believe central banks still settle gold: https://www.bullionstar.com/blogs/ronan-manly/bank-of-englan...

zallarak··on Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index
Clarifications (this website perpetuates some common misconceptions):

- A single bitcoin "transaction" can actually have thousands of inputs and thousands of outputs. So energy "per transaction" or "transactions per second" is not analogous to a typical monetary transaction.

- Bitcoin does not compete with literal credit card transactions (although some use it like that today). I'd compare Bitcoin on-chain transactions with how nation-states settle their central-bank ledgers with gold. Gold is the best comparison to Bitcoin because trading in hard gold is "final". Credit card transactions happen on a higher level in the financial stack. As does cash. As do bank transfers. All of these bubble down into interbank transfers that eventually settle on the base layer of central banks. So compared to shipping and securing gold, Bitcoin is quite cheap!

- Adding to the above point; if Bitcoin succeeds in beind "adopted", it would not mean we no longer use credit cards. Credit cards would just port their underlying mechanism on top of Bitcoin instead of fiat moneys.

zallarak··on Richard Stallman defies push by 27 GNU Project developers to end his leadership
What has Stallman done that is so bad? I can't seem to find anything specific. Not asking to be controversial, but seeking to understand.
zallarak··on Launch HN: Sparkswap (YC S18) – Buy Bitcoin Instantly over the Lightning Network
Wow, this was seamless. It auto-detected my lightning wallet, and the purchase was instant.

As far as I know, this is literally the only way to get Bitcoin on lightning directly with USD.

zallarak··on 100 million dollars to reshape the economics of the web
Interesting that Ripple affiliates are sponsoring this.
zallarak··on I've reproduced 130 research papers about “predicting the stock market”
Some of the smartest people I've ever known from college became professional stock market investors and traders. Not a single one of them has significantly outperformed the market.

I think of stock market investing as a white collar gig economy job. Both depend on some central entity, which makes a killing (brokerages in this case), and have extremely low barriers to entry.

zallarak··on Stripe's API was down
If you have super high throughput, it would be worth temporarily (and very securely) caching transaction parameters to handle downtime.
zallarak··on Ask HN: Password manager with best experience on Linux?
How do you handle password rotations? I am intrigued regardless.
zallarak··on Ask HN: Starting Your Own LLC?
Through what context did you help out hundreds of creatives? Just curious. Do you do tax advisory for a living?
zallarak··on My Budget – free, open-source offline cross-platform budgeting
good time to plug a great paid option: https://actualbudget.com/
zallarak··on It seems that Google is forgetting the old web
My guess is that Google prioritizes new content over old with the argument that it is more relevant.
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