Hacker News Reader

EliRiverson The California job-killer that wasn't

If your claim disagrees with reality, should I believe reality or you?

EliRiverson Exploiting McDonald's APIs to hijack deliveries and order food for a penny

"September 29, 2024: I check the reported issues today and confirm they are all fixed."

This is the most amazing thing about this story. Not only did the company not threaten him, they actually fixed the issues.

EliRiverson Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

Nobody is going to sit and wait for a robo uber in the suburbs for ten minutes to go to the grocery store ten miles down the road.

I absolutely would do that. Sometimes I already do wait that kind of time for a taxi or bus. Having the robo taxi turn up in ten minutes from when I decided I wanted to go to the shop would be fantastic.

EliRiverson Health Insurance Companies Take Down Leadership Pages Following Murder of UH CEO

Sure, that's the insurance company itself. One way around that is for the insurance company to own the medical providers they send people to, allowing them to keep more of the premiums by cycling them around other companies. United Health has been doing these "intercompany eliminations" for years, trailblazing this method of keeping ever more of the premiums.

EliRiverson PR process killing morale and productivity

Oh, so you've met software engineers? :)

EliRiverson PR process killing morale and productivity

have the reviewer just adjust it themselves

Passive-aggressive minefield. Someone will see a change done to THEIR code, without the changer even asking, and it will feel like the person who did it is a passive aggressive dickhead. Resentment will brew, tempers will be lost. It will only get worse from there. Software engineers already aren't exactly known for their humbleness and ability to swallow their ego.

EliRiverson Only 5.3% of US welders are women. After years as a professor, I became one

Very few of the people saying "cisgender" say it in a way that suggests sixty years earlier they'd have dragged me behind a car for having the temerity to be that way.

EliRiverson How I ship projects at big tech companies

a project is shipped when the important people at your company believe it is shipped

Definitely. This can work very much to your favour.

There have been times when I have happily shipped a product containing issues and bugs that would be catastrophic for any customer using it, because I know that no customer actually ever will. The product is shipped and released, everyone is happy.

The catastrophic issues won't ever come up because that shipped product will never be used by anyone.

Big people are happy because the product is shipped.

Team are happy because big people have stopped causing so much friction in their desire to ship.

When the measurement becomes "have we slapped the label shipped on it", then that's what you get. A label.

EliRiverson Traceroute Isn't Real

"it shouldn't be used for debugging infrastructure you don't own/control/trust."

Yet people do, and they find it useful and it helps them solve problems and get results.

EliRiverson Only 5.3% of US welders are women. After years as a professor, I became one

"how are you gonna handle the real dangers of the profession where people need to know you have their backs"

Some dickhead flinging racial slurs at me all day doesn't make me feel that they have my back. Quite the opposite, actually.

EliRiverson Psychological safety vs. high standards: A misunderstood dynamic

Just today I was practicing how to tell my boss that one of the company's biggest problems is that failure and incompetence have no consequences. Great on recognising good work; atrocious at seeing bad.

I'm not asking for us to fire people; I'd like to see the consequence that people are guided and helped to be better at their jobs, and the company stops making the same errors over and over.

EliRiverson EU AI Act is much worse than you think

Aye; much of the various restrictions and requirements place on it seem pretty sensible.

EliRiverson Jaywalking legalized in New York City

We don't need to guess at probabilities.

We can look at the data. Aactual cities where jaywalking isn't a crime; they do not set the speed limit at 10, and it all seems to work fine.

EliRiverson Ozempic linked to lower Alzheimer's risk in people with Type 2 diabetes

Perhaps you could take your childishness elsewhere. It does grow tiring.

EliRiverson Ozempic linked to lower Alzheimer's risk in people with Type 2 diabetes

what could go wrong with screwing with the neurochemical reward system of the entire population

We already know what can go wrong.

We already did that decades and decades ago. Sugar, for example. Aside from so many foods being laced with it, you can now simply walk into a store and buy a kilogram of sugar and eat it. So many other examples. That ship sailed a long long time ago. All we can do now is nudge the dial the other way.

EliRiverson If we want a shift to walking, we need to prioritize dignity

So if it's not actually communist, but just authoritarian, what's the problem? And where's the authoritarianism with healthcare? In healthcare in the US, you can just go out and buy pretty much any legal healthcare you like - surely that's not at all authoritarian.

EliRiverson The Impact of AI on Computer Science Education

I see. And who will be providing that assessment of correctness? Will it be humans?

EliRiverson The Impact of AI on Computer Science Education

Did it not turn out that AIs creating output based on AI-created output, iteratively, pretty quickly turns into nonsense? That would suggest that we'll need humans always to provide training material, and for that training material to be meaningful, it'll have to be created by humans who know what they're doing.

EliRiverson If we want a shift to walking, we need to prioritize dignity

Land use planning is the most communist? Doesn't really seem to be run under priciples of common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange. How would one even have common ownership of land use planning?

As for making the healthcare industry blush; the healthcare industry in the US is brutally uncommunist.

Did you really mean communist? If so, in what way is land planning in the US operated under principles of common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.

EliRiverson If we want a shift to walking, we need to prioritize dignity

Public transport is ALWAYS worse than a car, it's slower, much slower

Well here's something odd. Just yesterday I was in a city crossing it from one side to the other, and it was so much faster by underground train than it would have been in a car. Yet your statement suggests that that real experience couldn't be true.

Perhaps it's more accurate to say that public transport is SOMETIMES worse than a car. What do you think? Might that be more accurate?

EliRiverson Crypto Mining Consumes a Mind-Boggling 2% of U.S. Electricity

It's been almost fifteen years and the principle use is crime and ponzi. Not only has it not been immediately beneficial, it's been without benefit for a long time.

EliRiverson Japan: Moon lander Slim comes back to life and resumes mission

As I recall, Armstrong chose the landing site personally, using the awesome power of looking out of the window and judging a good descent speed for touchdown. He avoided big rocks and craters.

EliRiverson Rolexes are in a spiraling crash as "the bubbles have popped" in collectibles

I still don't understand... I guess its about flexing wealth or personal reward.

Sounds like you very much do understand.

EliRiverson DOS on Dope: The last MVC web framework you'll ever need (2010)

Terry Davis in the comments. That was just the kind of thing that he'd like, poor soul.

EliRiverson Volkswagen Will Bring Back Physical Buttons in New Cars

you'll have to stop.

I understand a lot of people don't and this significantly increases the rate of vehicle collisions and other accidents.

EliRiverson Earliest Carpenters: 476k-year-old log structure discovered in Zambia

Perhaps I should reword my original comment. Here's the same meaning, expressed differently:

"Software engineers often have an unjustified belief that they are intuitive experts in fields in which they have no training or experience."

Including, very frequently, understanding written text.

EliRiverson Why are you so sure I'll lose?

And likewise, corporations have already been described as AIs: https://patternsofmeaning.com/2017/11/30/ai-has-already-take... et al.

EliRiverson Is Northern Ireland a failed state?

It would seem to indicate that he understands that there's a significant British element to Northern Ireland's history.

EliRiverson Earliest Carpenters: 476k-year-old log structure discovered in Zambia

Indeed; the simple thinking you apply to sort some numbers, or to understand a brutally simple logic such as a programming language spec, gives you incredible insight into all fields of human endeavour, past and present.

EliRiverson Remembering Jon Postel and the day he hijacked the internet (2012)

Sure, by all means; clear, specific requirements that precisely define are very welcome.

Then, once you've done that, recognise that what comes in will not match what you said and you can either have software that doesn't do what the users need and want it to do, or software that accepts input that doesn't quite match requirements.