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bfung

1,866 karma · joined June 10, 2009

https://bfung.github.io/

https://benson-guides.blogspot.com/

fung [dot] benson [at] gmail [dot] com

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bfung··on Techniques I use to create a great user experience for shell scripts
Only one that’s shell specific is 4. The rest can be applied any code written. Good work!
bfung··on Ask HN: Is a Masters in CS/Engineering worth it for a mid-career PM?
There's an extra qualifier here, where are there Software Engineers past 40s that started in their 30s. I'd don't see many, if at all, that are basically at entry level and end up doing PM/TPM work (not that it's not important, but not worth degree for!)
bfung··on Be a thermostat, not a thermometer (2023)
> I'm skeptical about the idea that we can simply "choose" to be thermostats.

Well, it’s like most things, it takes practice and time to be good at it if natural talent isn’t there.

Sure, things out of our control can trigger emotions, but one incredible ability of humans is to rationalize those emotions and act in more constructive ways than to immediate react back.

It can be quite liberating and fun to understand and process these things, much like understanding code and data structures in order to recombine them into things you want to achieve.

bfung··on iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max
https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/battery-replacement

Fill in the form and send your iphone 11 in for battery replacement.

I've done this a few times w/different iphone models, works great, no fuss. The several days w/o the phone is nice forced social media detox.

bfung··on ARM or x86? ISA Doesn't Matter (2021)
> Here in this article we’ll bring together research, comments from people who are very familiar with CPUs, and a bit of our in-house data to show why focusing on the ISA is a waste of time

Very amateur-ish question and counterpoint from me: how is Apple M1 performance and power consumption so good compared to the other laptop cpus then?

bfung··on Nearly half of Nvidia's revenue comes from four mystery whales each buying $3B+
Clickbait title. Even the article cites the number from Jensen’s interview.

https://youtu.be/NC5NZPrxbHk?si=8uQ4zdMU02f4X1Hc (at 1:41)

Hyperscalers & Meta.

(Corp speak 101: Hyperscalers = AWS, GCP, Azure)

bfung··on Los Angeles is in a 4-year sprint to deliver a car-free 2028 Olympics
^^^ this. LA is such a sprawl, public transit barely covers all the places people want to go to.

Any improvement is welcome, hopefully it won’t regress after Olympics, but wouldn’t be surprised.

bfung··on Ask HN: How do you work as a tech lead?
Not technically a tech lead anymore, in people mgmt for last 10yrs, but still code at least 60% time and still scrappy.

1. at least 2x a week, group meets on Mondays and Friday to set weekly expectations, 1:1’s as needed weekly or bi-weekly

2. bi-weekly

3. See 1.

4. Documentation is part of “definition of done”.

5.& 6. Start the week with making sure everyone understands their week’s tasks, have a demo Friday to see what was finished. Then pair as necessary - maybe check-in Wed w/juniors. For seniors and up, know and track the multi-week goals.

bfung··on Markdown is meant to be shown (2021)
> Maybe I don’t know much about Markdown…

Says the inventor of it, 20yrs ago. https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

bfung··on A year of Meta's news ban in Canada
Other curiosity/follow-up questions:

* has this impacted biases or political stances (extreme or middle) in any direction?

* has this impacted individual happiness in any way?

bfung··on How fast can a human possibly run 100 meters?
Strategy is only good for really, really good runners.

At ~160m, (similar to the 200m), at-pace speed for the pro is already all-out for the average person.

bfung··on Panic at the Job Market
The job titles in the different industries are pretty interesting, also, that inflate/confuse things.

At financials (and sometimes sales departments), you have, from most junior to senior: 1. Associate 2. Analyst 3. Vice Presidents 4. Directors (MD - Managing Director)

Whereas in software/tech, it's usually Directors that are subordinate to Vice Presidents.

bfung··on WebVM is a server-less virtual Linux environment running client-side
server-less - like the server that runs the browser that the VM runs inside.

/sarcasm

bfung··on No more boot loader: Please use the kernel instead
Yo Dawg, I herd you like bootloaders, so I put a bootloader in your kernel so you can boot w/a kernel while you boot a kernel.
bfung··on PostgreSQL and UUID as Primary Key
> secondary indices on the external_id columns in both tables

pick your poison, slower lookup or more disk usage

bfung··on The super effectiveness of Pokémon embeddings using only raw JSON and images
> minimaxir uses Embeddings!

> It’s super effective!

> minimaxir obtains HN13

bfung··on OpenEMR: Open-source medical record software
Yep - and the hardest part about getting the input signs and symptoms data is that patients often don’t know the words to describe what they’re feeling.

LLMs are not going to help if the input data is also garbage, let alone hallucinations.

“Are you dizzy?” - sometimes, I’m not sure… etc

bfung··on U.S. home prices have far outpaced paychecks. See what it looks like
Arable land is only to grow food.

> Most of China lives in one third of the country

Right, so U.S. has PLENTY of space ;)

I’ve been to rural China (village where my family and ancestors are), there’s tons of space to modernize and build still, China def not out of livable space.

bfung··on U.S. home prices have far outpaced paychecks. See what it looks like
If you take a step back and look at the earth via satellite layer via Google maps, it’s not as full as it feels on the ground. Quite the opposite.

A sibling comment about people cramming into the same area seems way more accurate.

Also, look up the population density of different countries:

* China has ~4x the people of the U.S. with similar land area

* India also ~4x US population and has 1/3 of landmass

* Russia has ~2x landmass of US, but only ~1/2 population.

There’s plenty of space for more people. Just gotta be less lazy and destructive and build, build, build. Finding how incentives align & not as game-able would also help.

bfung··on Apple's On-Device and Server Foundation Models
Waiting for aiPhone in a few iterations </troll>
bfung··on Some Americans have stopped tipping. Should you do the same?
It’s not that no-tipping policy won’t stick; it’s that it’s allowed by the tax code. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/minimum-wage/tipped

The code allows for a lower minimum wage when tips are involved.

Getting rid of this complication in the tax code would make owning restaurants harder, but fix other societal issues.

Can’t say it’s be an easy decision or trade off to make - a lot of restaurants wouldn’t be able to stay in business and those who like eating out would have a lot less and more expensive choices.

bfung··on Making a tic-tac-toe game with ‘randomness’ using pure HTML and CSS
It’s a toy tic-tac-toe game with no monetary or life threatening implications, no need to bring the security mindset into this discussion.

If someone copies this code and uses it in a non-toy application, well, that’s on them.

bfung··on Google Says Its Med-Gemini AI Healthcare Models Beat GPT-4
For doctors, as a sibling comment mentions, there’s way more medical demand than doctor-time available.

This isn’t even considering quality of care, only quantity.

For other professions, if there’s already a glut of supply,… well, we don’t really need more ads or reality tv shows or sensational/viral clickbait.

bfung··on An electric new era for Atlas
If we’re using NN’s to get fine motor skills right, like final steps in an assembly line, the simplest and most abundant source of training data are humans. :shrug:
bfung··on Meta Loves Python
Some perl 5 syntax ain’t backwards compatible from perl 4, and there’s also perl 6.
bfung··on Meta Loves Python
> “dependency manager”-manager

Language toolchain.

You have to do this for all the languages, not just Python. Hence nix and other tools were made.

bfung··on US permanently deploys training mission in Taiwan
To the person who got flagged to death, apologies I wasn’t ultra precise in grammar, and yes, my experiences does bias me a bit.

Though, in my experience, asking that question to people in China (or from there) is generally met with:

  * I don’t know, not interested in politics
  * Chinese people live there so they’re a part of China (not separating gov from race/ethnicity as a naive answer)
  * (no comment)
bfung··on US permanently deploys training mission in Taiwan
If you ask people in Taiwan, they will say they’re independent. If you ask China, they’ll say Taiwan belongs to China.

The short history version is basically like this: after the overthrowing of the last emperor and WW2, the Chinese civil war continued between the KMT political party and the Communist party. KMT basically lost and moved to which is Taiwan today and even the KMT now is no longer the controlling majority now (they have elections whereas mainland China does not).

bfung··on Apache Superset
grafana is built more for operational and timeseries data, but not so optimal for complex analytical queries. Ex: up-to-second data on cpu load on a host.

superset is the flip side of grafana; not good for up-to-second updates, but good for complex queries. Also, non-time series stuff. Ex: Which customer groups bought which products for all time? <— that type of BI stuff.

bfung··on The Namingless Programming Language
> Every node is either a leaf containing a char, or a branch containing a dynamic array of the data structures.

So it’s basically lisp, with either lists or atoms, at the char level

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