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Benjammeron It's easier than ever to de-censor videos

This is the nerdiest way I've ever seen someone talk about John Cena

Benjammeron What if we made advertising illegal?

I think the only reason that demand is endless is due to how profitable it is to sell that attention to advertisers...

Benjammeron What if we made advertising illegal?

If the influencer is actually giving good advice because it's illegal to pay them to promote a product, is that such a bad thing? What sci fi are you talking about?

Benjammeron Getter-Setter Pattern Considered Harmful

I mean I was just trying to have a conversation you don't have to try and roast me with quote-quips and absurdist comparisons... What is happening to this platform these days?

Benjammeron Getter-Setter Pattern Considered Harmful

Often, imo, this depends on where you want to put the validation complexity. You can move validation to the front end and "prevent constructing bad states" through a combination of good UI and front end data validation, i.e. validate all the pieces of an entity to make sure the eventual Entity will be valid. But the opposite trade off would be to keep your front end simple, and have the data represent anything that is possible in the UI, and then you can validate anywhere in your stack that you want or where it makes sense for any engineering reason. You can still validate the UI models on the front end before sending them over the wire. You can validate at the endpoint and return HTTP codes. You can run logic in your database to massage/correct/fix the data any way you want. You could even throw things into a queue for post-processing later on, or send to another server for processing, whatever you want.

In theory it sounds great to say "just prevent construction of bad states," but this is a complex problem in professional software that involves coordination between programmers, designers, and product managers to get the UI features into the right place where preventing the construction of bad states doesn't lead to a frustrating UI experience for users. It's often far simpler, more pragmatic, and less complex in terms of coupling in both software and humans to just accept whatever state the UI gives you and figure things out somewhere else where you aren't bothering your users so much.

Benjammeron Chain-of-thought can hurt performance on tasks where thinking makes humans worse

non c'est un pipe

Ability to generate words describing emotions are not the same thing as the LLM having real emotions

Benjammeron Magnetically levitated space elevator to low-earth orbit (2001) [pdf]

One thing with a space elevator that makes it so much more efficient than rockets is precisely because you don't necessarily need the payload itself to supply this horizontal acceleration. The space elevator is attached to the ground at one end, and the other is way up in orbit. There must be forces in play _already_ for the entire thing to stay standing, before you get to any concept of a payload/car. Part of the idea of building the elevator in the first place is to solve for these orbital forces in a generalized way independent of the payloads themselves. It's like strapping various sized rockets to your various specific payloads, versus building a generalized model of a rocket ship, and then just putting the various payloads inside the generalized rocket ship. Space elevator is a further evolution of the concept. You don't even need to use the rocket ship abstraction anymore. You're generalizing/abstracting the orbital transition itself into the structure of the elevator, and then just send things up and down it. The payload now only needs to worry about moving along the elevator, the elevator itself has already "solved" for the orbital horizontal acceleration by nature of its structure existing in the first place.

In terms specifically of mass/energy conservation, as the other reply said, energy is borrowed from either the earth's rotation and/or kinetic energy from a counterweight at the end of the elevator up in orbit.

Benjammeron I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

1. I’ve worked at multiple companies that absolutely have expert interviewers who design the interview questions and then teach mid-level engineers how to proctor them correctly. It’s like one 30 minute meeting, it’s not that big a deal.

2. All tech companies I’ve worked at since around 2015 have completely standardized interview questions, sometimes also hosted in a GitHub repo where any employee is free to comment or even open a PR to request a change. Every candidate gets the same questions. This thing where “faang” interviewers just pull a random LC question out of their ass is complete insanity to me. An organized set of questions takes a senior engineer like a week to organize and commit to… And if your questions can be memorized and recited by rote memory and the candidate can do well on it without the proctor knowing, then your questions are BAD or your proctor is a moron.

3. I’ve never worked anywhere where I would describe the interview like this. Even the startup where I was the first engineer and there was no formal “test”, it was an hour long chat with the technical cofounder where he grilled me about coding skills and past experience/accomplishments. I won’t take a job if the interview isn’t asking me things that focus on my existing experience and skills, it’s a red flag about the company culture in general.

As for your “universal problem,” I disagree with fatalistic takes where you just throw your hands up and say “whatever shall we do” all the while YOU are the one benefitting from the system that cannot be changed. This is how simple-minded people think about the world.

Benjammeron I am sick of LeetCode-style interviews

So are we just going with a base assumption that interviewers can NEVER be trusted with anti-bias training and learning how evaluate people fairly? The examples mentioned in this comment section are all blatantly intentional biases that people are choosing to use. The amazing part is that all the “standard test eliminates bias” people seem to the most ignorant to where bias helps THEM. Forcing people to study for two months is blatantly discriminatory to age and family status, at a systemic level. While “this white straight guy might explicitly choose to give the other white straight guy an easy question,” is very subjective and intentional on the individual level. Like, employees can always choose to do bad things, in any situation. That’s why we have at-will employment…

Is the culture just so broken at these companies that it’s hopeless to expect people NOT to blatantly exploit the system for their friends? Why don’t people get fired for doing that?

Benjammeron Show HN: ChatGPT UI for rabbit holes

The way I think about it is LLMs are good at DOING for you, and poor at THINKING for you.

Benjammeron Sprint, T-Mobile Merger Killed Wireless Price Competition in U.S.

Why would it be a prudent move to take on the corporate real estate costs associated with RS if it was already a profitable retail channel? What does that change other than increasing overhead for Sprint? And if RS was working, why would converting them to solely cell phone stores make things any better?

Benjammeron Sprint, T-Mobile Merger Killed Wireless Price Competition in U.S.

They want to spend whatever billions it costs to consolidate the industry and then reap the monopolized profits down the road.

Benjammeron Sprint, T-Mobile Merger Killed Wireless Price Competition in U.S.

>before Softbank bought Sprint, they didn't have the capital to upgrade their 2G/3G network to LTE, much less consider a merger with T-Mobile.

I think both of us can be right at the same time though. Just because they had problems before the SoftBank acquisition as well doesn't necessarily make what I'm saying unreasonable. There was still sentiment in 2013 when SB closed the deal that regulators would not have approved of Sprint acquiring T Mobile [0], despite the struggles going on at Sprint at the time (that you describe). Sprint was definitely putting together a bid to acquire T Mobile, WSJ reported on it [1].

As you yourself said, Sprint was _dying_ at the time of the SB acquisition, but as far as large firms go, they were far from bankrupt yet. SoftBank simply twisted the dagger and then presented the corpse to congress instead of the dying patient.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2014/2/4/5376824/fcc-chief-reported...

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303293604579256...

Benjammeron Sprint, T-Mobile Merger Killed Wireless Price Competition in U.S.

>Sprint's goose was most definitely cooked

The reason their goose was cooked is because they previously were planning to acquire T Mobile, but SoftBank got back-channel info that it would never be approved by the anti-trust regulators. At the time they had Marcelo Claure running Sprint, basically a corporate "fixer" guy for SoftBank. So he ran the company into the dirt in order to make the merge feasible to regulators (e.g. - Sprint purchased a 33% stake in Tidal, the music streaming service. Or how they entered a partnership with bankrupt RadioShack after it got scooped up by PE, and decided it was a good idea to take over all the physical RadioShack locations and turn them into Sprint stores).

"Oh, whatever shall we do, our company is failing, you MUST let us merge with one of our primary competitors or we'll go bankrupt. No company at all is worse for consumers than a merged company."

Benjammeron Daniel Kahneman has died

We need O'Reilly: The Good Parts for books...

Benjammeron I used ChatGPT as a reporting assistant. It didn't go well

The problem is that people like this author are trying to literally treat it like a person instead of an LLM. Like honestly if you look at the linked chat convo early in the article, this person kind of just sucks at prompt engineering, imo.

"At times I was able to get the chat agent to give me what I wanted, but I had to be very specific and I often had to scold it."

You can't just half-ass a paragraph of disjointed system instructions into the user input and expect clean results, in my experience. You need to leverage the custom system instructions, give example responses if possible, and be very, very specific and direct with instructions. You need to explain the type of response you want, and you also need to describe any applicable constraints (or lack thereof) on the response content.

"When you are asked something, it is crucial that you cite your sources, and always use the most authoritative sources (government agencies for example) rather that sites like Wikipedia"

This is not sufficient to achieve what the author intends. It's written in a speech-like roundabout style (e.g. "it is crucial that"), and there's a typo right in the middle on an important word (than --> that). LLM can work around typos in most cases, but here it is vaguely possibly imo that this is what is causing it to continue citing wikipedia in responses.

"At times, the tool was too eager to please, so I asked it to tone it down a little: “You can skip the chit chat and pleasantries.”"

I have found in my experience playing with ChatGPT that this is just the completely wrong mental model to have of the tool in order to get what you want out of it. You have to treat it more like a prose-language programming tool, not like a person with emotions that you are conversing with...

Benjammeron Sequoia Captials Puff piece on SBF just before FTX's collapse

Have you heard the rule where, if a headline has a question, the answer is ALWAYS "no," because if the answer was "yes," then the article would simply be reporting on a fact and would assert it as a true fact and it would be a lot more convincing, no question required.

There's gotta be some corollary here where, if an article is nudging you to do something, you should always think twice, because if the thing was so good and popular, then the article would not be a "nudge," it would be a report about how many people are already using the thing, and would be trying to give you FOMO.

Benjammeron Throw away your first draft of your code

What this post says: "throw away the first draft of your code"

What every HN commenter is replying to: "throw away your code"

I've written software professionally for 14 years and just last week I wrote code for ~3 days and then decided I was on the wrong track, and checked out main and made a totally new branch, spent ~1.5 days re-writing my feature in a totally different way. I had come to realize the new way would be easier to write, MUCH easier to test, and a bit more maintainable long-term. Nothing wrong with throwing away un-merged code if you decide that merging isn't the right decision, and feel you have learned valuable lessons to inform the re-write.

Benjammeron Real-time messaging

I came out of college with a (not computer) engineering degree, and went into software. I totally flunked a software interview one time early in my career because they asked me how to implement "a real-time clock UI," and I spent the whole time asking questions trying to understand what they meant by "real-time," rather than just implementing a basic clock UI with 4 numbers, a colon, and a 1-second timer updating the UI, and calling it a day.

Benjammeron Dumb and Gets Things Done (2010)

It's along the same lines as Fred Brooks' "Second system effect," although not quite the same.

Benjammeron The impact of the ‘long peace’ on modern military capabilities

"We must respond to defensive fortifications that put missile batteries up outside our sovereign borders with extremely violent, extremely aggressive, expansionary excursions to conquer territory and move our border CLOSER to said missiles"

The logic makes zero sense, I'm sorry. It's still a "well, I wouldn't have to do X if you didn't do Y" mentality that completely and utterly shirks any sense of responsibility for one's or one's country's own actions. It's hogwash doublespeak used by BOTH abusers in messy interpersonal relationships, AND by international politicians playing realpolitik.

Benjammeron The impact of the ‘long peace’ on modern military capabilities

"If you would just do what I told you, you wouldn't get hit!"

Big yikes here...

Benjammeron My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)

It's driven purely by jealousy and an intrinsic sense of "fairness" that isn't very logical when you step back and think for a second. I've met plenty of people like this. They aren't thinking about how it's weird to want a terrible team at a terrible company to have a perfectly fair hiring process, and also imply that _they_ should be hired for this awful job as well. It's entirely looking at the price tag and being jealous. In other words, typical Blind culture.

Benjammeron More people are getting away with murder

Just repeat after me: "We don't have the resources for that"

Benjammeron Maybe you don’t need to talk to someone

There are many types of therapy (CBT, DBT, etc.) where the focus is absolutely not on "just talking" or "just letting it out." Therapy can give you a structured toolbox of exactly those "healthy ways" to deal with emotions and emotional stress, and you can work them out and learn how to put them into practice, with an expert alongside you helping and coaching. It is a catalyst to learning those healthy mindset techniques instead of spending time yourself figuring everything out heuristically.

(good) Therapists are emotional intelligence coaches, they are NOT "shoulders to cry on," quite the opposite in fact.

I worked with a therapist doing CBT for a while, and have recently been working with a career coach. Neither of them ever let me "ramble" or "just let it out" with anything. They stop me and force me to unpack and separate the emotions from the thoughts from the reactions, and logically think through what is happening and how I can react in a more healthy way.

Benjammeron Amazon pauses construction on second HQ in Virginia amid job cuts

How is the HQ selection process and surrounding drama related to customer obsession?

Benjammeron Show HN: A simple world flags game, my first web dev project as a beginner

Does this show a random flag each time? You could use a spaced-repitition algorithm to pick which flag to show based on correct/incorrect previous answers.

Benjammeron For your next side project, make a browser extension

If you don't want to actually write the code and deal with the browser webstores, you can also use an "extension builder" tool like https://www.pixiebrix.com/ to call APIs, move data around, and build simple UIs.

Benjammeron NYPD can use more than 15,000 cameras to track people using facial recognition

Do you say this about the road crews who build and maintain public streets and highways? What about the parks department? Should I pay a fee to enter Central Park for the day? Why can't public transit be a government service? Does everything need to be financialized?

Benjammeron U.S. fines airlines more than $7M for not providing refunds

A large chunk of people think that every product should be certified as 100% effective and that just being able to read two numbers and see which one is the smaller number is the absolute maximum amount of work that should be required to be an informed customer of any product on the planet. Any defect in the product is "a scam," yet, anyone who pays anything more than the absolute minimum viable option is a total sucker. It's honestly a very strange way to view the world that I don't really understand. My source is that my mother is an ardent member of this group of peole. I find that it mostly just leads to the opportunity to complain about everything and build up a complex around you being "slighted" by the universe all the time.