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zwilliamson

147 karma · joined March 11, 2010

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zwilliamson··on CarSized: A way to visualise car dimensions
My whole family worked for a major car manufacturer. My mother was the first woman tin smith hired there. I grew up loving cars (rural living). But now I’ve lost the love. I think mainly after seeing what they do to amazing cities like SF and Seattle my heart has changed. We need to subsidize and promote better personal mobility options. My daily driver is a Riese & Muller Load 60 e-cargo bike. I’ve had it since 2020. I’ve lived in multiple cities and it is an ideal personal mobility setup. My dog rides around with me too! Why am I the only one in this town riding around in one? It’s not a money problem. I see people buying secondary cars to drive 2 blocks to the grocery store. Is it a safety issue? Very fixable. Are people lazy? Absolutely, but they can be motivated.

In the US we had a massive infra bill pass. How much is going to local pedestrian and cycling infrastructure? Just so frustrating the stranglehold cars have on us.

zwilliamson··on A corrupt file led to the FAA ground stoppage – also found in backup system
I bet a “corrupt file” means somebody accidentally dropped a table
zwilliamson··on Flexport slashes 20% of global workforce over weak 2023 volume forecast
I’d be curious to get Peter Zeihan’s thoughts on this. Flexport’s business is built around globalization and trade. What if Peter is right and we are seeing it all unravel before our eyes right now? Trading paradigms shifting to regional groups of countries. I wonder if this is on the radar for companies like Flexport

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_the_World_Is_Just...

zwilliamson··on Why Not Mars
Perhaps fly around in personal size drone ships. Hop between different air ship settlements. I would find that more climatic than the barren Martian surface.
zwilliamson··on Mortal Kombat 2 source code leak reveals unused animations and sprites
I'm curious if any of the mk1 or mk2 actors/models went on to bigger work in their careers. It would be hard to top revealing to your young adult grandchildern you were Jax in Mortal Kombat.
zwilliamson··on Why Not Mars
Good read. Perhaps we need a competing Venus religion? Consider building a floating airship community in the upper atmosphere of Venus. Perhaps we could also control contamination easier being close to edge of space where we could put waste into an orbit for collection and disposal at a later time.

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

Doesn't this seem like a much more exciting and compelling option compared to landing on Mars?

zwilliamson··on Gripes with RSS after one week
I’d love to see a podcast + RSS feed client app
zwilliamson··on Gripes with RSS after one week
Maybe a couple git reverts/rebases away from bringing it back? :)
zwilliamson··on Gripes with RSS after one week
I agree. Their email client, Thunderbird, is an amazing open source product. They definitely have the background on how to build a top notch standalone client.
zwilliamson··on Gripes with RSS after one week
What if Firefox picked up the proverbial RSS feed torch and took it to the next level?
zwilliamson··on 2022 was the year of Linux on the Desktop?
Steam Deck + SteamOS is a catalyst in the making. You pretty much have to use Flatpak for application installation otherwise you risk your installs getting wiped out when Steam does a distro upgrade. You get a managed desktop experience with the setup. When you couple the Steam Deck with a good dock you have a great desktop computing experience.
zwilliamson··on Tell HN: Siri provides Apple Music link when sharing current song on Spotify
Yes, the business context is holding back such amazing innovation for voice assistants like Siri! There are also a couple apps I use, one being brain.fm, which I would love to see integrate with Siri for voice control but I believe they don’t because they have to pay to integrate with Siri. Or is Siri integration free from an app developer perspective?
zwilliamson··on San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
Just pay for a top of the line port-a-potty cleaned and purged daily. Will be cheaper and won’t look that bad. I used to hang out at the park daily with my dog. It would work out just fine.
zwilliamson··on DevOps is broken
It takes really good engineering leadership to build a platform team. With the wherewithal to follow through on migrations and marketing of the platform. Also, sourcing the right people internally and elevating them. These engineers become true full stack (the whole OSI model) engineers and their work most definitely shouldn’t be thankless or taken for granted by product leaders. I’ve seen efforts like this fall apart in very ugly ways due to a lack of leadership.
zwilliamson··on DarkForestSim: A Netlogo Simulation of the Dark Forest Hypothesis
Dark Forest theory best portrayed in the 2nd book of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past series by Liu Cixin (sci-fi at its best)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23168817

zwilliamson··on Is dictation on iOS 16 broke for you?
I’m a heavy user of dictation via Siri and keyboard on iPhone. iOS 16 completely broke it somehow. Curious is all iOS 16 users having same issue?
zwilliamson··on Email doesn't suck – it's email clients that need improving
Same! I’ve been using HEY for a couple years now. I hope they do something similar for my calendar needs.
zwilliamson··on Ask HN: How to keep my daughter busy while tickling her curiosity
Include some of her friends when possible. Make up for lost social time over the past couple years.
zwilliamson··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (July 2022)
Location: Seattle Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Maybe Technologies: Kubernetes, Terraform, Python, Go Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zanew Email: zane . W / hey.com

A gladiator of production k8s with 5+ years of experience. 15+ years overall tech work experience. Check out my github for public open source projects I’ve created and contributed to. https://github.com/sepulworld

Team leader, top contributor, mentor, knowledge sharing

zwilliamson··on MIT researchers propose Brazil-sized fleet of “space bubbles” to cool the Earth
Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson covers this topic well via some insightful sci-fi story telling. I think his concept of a sulfur cannon(s) is more realistic and likely to be implemented in near future.
zwilliamson··on GitHub incident – now resolved
Maybe they need to hire high end talent? Anyone have experience with their recruiting process?
zwilliamson··on Wasting time in tech interviews
Ive been trying to negotiate interview processes (I have 15+ years experience, staff/principal level). Been relatively successful getting adjustments at smaller startups (approximately 10-20 engineers).

It seems anything larger I run into push back. Perhaps maybe the size of the company may be a key indicator? Maybe as a company scales you can’t be dependent on hiring managers knowing how to hire good people so you rely on filter mechanisms that are cheap and lazy.

zwilliamson··on Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2022
SREs reign supreme in Individual comp again.
zwilliamson··on GitHub Copilot is generally available
Needs a full metrics dashboard on usage.

Some counters for…

CopilotRecommendations CopilotRecommedationIterations (Number of saved changes to initial recommendation) CopilotRecommmedationSaves SkipToNextSuggestion

Metrics on my code that is used by copilot by others would be nice to see.

zwilliamson··on GitHub Copilot for individuals available without waitlist, with free trial
I would like to see a full telemetry dashboard on how Copilot is helping me. Plenty of metrics to bubble up to end user.
zwilliamson··on The brain has a ‘low-power mode’ that blunts our senses
Psilocybin high powered mode
zwilliamson··on Ploopy open source thumb trackball
I enjoy the foul language “no cheap shit.” Not quiet the level of the pit viper sunglasses site but close!
zwilliamson··on Divideby10.engineer
all this talk about the 10x and 1x engineer lately. What about the reciprocal? divideby10 or the 'x by 10' engineer. They are real too.
zwilliamson··on Graham Hancock – The Amazon Mystery
Graham Hancock‘s insight into the latest Amazon civilization discoveries.
zwilliamson··on ‘Mind blowing’ ancient settlements uncovered in the Amazon
I would be curious to hear author and researcher Graham Hancock’s take on this. His theories on human history based upon archeological evidence are very interesting. He predicted old new kingdoms were yet to be discovered in Amazon basin. Fingerprints of the Gods was one of his good reads
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