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blevinstein

34 karma · joined September 2, 2012

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blevinstein··on There's No Limit to How Bad Code Can Get
> Technical debt has no bankruptcy, no clean reset

There definitely is a technical debt bankruptcy option.

You can stop using a particular piece of code or technology, e.g. by replacing it (with new code, or a third-party/vendor solution), or re-architecting a system or business process so that the code's function is no longer needed.

This is exactly what the technical debt metaphor means. Short-lived systems can accumulate a lot of technical debt without as much concern, because you're planning to declare bankruptcy (deprecate and decommission) the code soon anyways; long-lived systems must plan to pay off their technical debt on the usual installment plan.

blevinstein··on Reflections on Americans' Net Worth
25th percentile never goes above 125k at any age, and 50th percentile doesn't go much about 400k at any age.

Sounds like a lot compared to annual income, but that's trivial if you're trying to retire and live off these assets until you die. Especially since public support, pensions, etc have been eviscerated.

Assuming you can get income of 5%/year from your assets (obviously depends on interest rates, investment mix, etc), 50 percent of people would need to survive on 20k/year or less to retire.

That's not being wealthy. That's choosing between abject piece, and working until you die. Dystopian.

blevinstein··on Feature Request: Support AGENTS.md
Workaround: local symlink from CLAUDE.md to AGENTS.md, inside each repo.

It's not pretty, but it works, and it has become my standard practice, so that I get consistent behavior between claude cursor codex etc.

blevinstein··on Let's say you're hungry for a sandwich
Just move your funds from mutual funds tracking NASDAQ (if you own any) to a different fund tracking S&P. Inconvenient but not the end of the world. You still have about two weeks to do so; I did this last week. Then in 6+ months when lockups expire and insiders have dumped, you can move money back if you'd like.

Also, SpaceX only sold a tiny portion, and Elon is only a trillionaire based on unrealized value of unsold stock. If it crashes before he sells any, he might go back to being a "normal" centi-billionaire.

blevinstein··on Dangerous Technology for Americans Only
IMO the US administration actions are less about actually caring whether foreigners have access to these tools, and more about legal/political precedence. In the US there's a long history of executive or legislative branches crying "national security" to shut down things they don't like, and courts will rarely stop them (or do so extremely slowly after months of deliberation.

(The other common cry is "child sex abuse" but for obvious reasons this administration is less interested in talking about that particular topic.)

https://xcancel.com/i/status/2010634987872387438

blevinstein··on Adaptive PDFs
Idk what they're using for serving, but it's truncated in the raw HTML, not just the presentation layer. So probably a bug on the backend somewhere? The linked github repo doesn't seem to have the contents of the post.
blevinstein··on Codex is now in the ChatGPT mobile app
Nice to see some catch-up with Anthropic and others, but this doesn't actually offer cloud coding agents (my favorite Claude and Cursor capability).

I want to code from my mobile device when my laptop is off or unavailable, pushing PRs directly to GitHub. Codex mobile only works with a desktop machine, at which point, I'll just use that machine, what's the point.

blevinstein··on Iran mulls taking control of all 7 cables passing through Strait of Hormuz
"What do you mean by seizing the whole earth; because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you who does it with a great fleet are styled emperor."

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

blevinstein··on Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?
I experimented with setting up a dedicated openclaw instance for coding via chats on mobile, but now that cursor and Claude both offer easy coding from the Web/app, I have had it turned off for weeks.
blevinstein··on Show HN: An interactive map of Tolkien's Middle-earth
Arda was supposed to be drastically changed after the First Age. This map is from the Second/Third Ages. Do the events from the First Age map currently into what is shown? Do some have to be excluded?
blevinstein··on Scammed out of $130K via fake Google call, spoofed Google email and auth sync
I avoided this exact scam. The most important thing is to never trust an incoming phone number. If they can't give you a publicly posted phone number that you can call inbound, they are a scammer.

Google has dozens of properties and it is easy to generate an email from one of them that seems to confirm the attacker's identity. Never trust any of these to identify a legitimate representative.

blevinstein··on I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs
This user just doesn't understand how to use an LLM properly.

The best solution to hallucination and inaccuracy is to give the LLM mechanisms for looking up the information it lacks. Tools, MCP, RAG, etc are crucial for use cases where you are looking for factual responses.

blevinstein··on A phishing attack involving g.co, Google's URL shortener
Sounds really similar to my experience a few months ago. I commented here about it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/googleworkspace/s/NtJpputXtg

There was something in Google workspace that allowed the scanners to have an email sent to them, AND an additional and of their choice. But when I asked about calling them back, I was told that wasn't possible, which made me suspicious.

blevinstein··on Why is my LG Washing Machine using 3.6GB of data/day?
I think that was a joke. DLC normally means downloadable content.
blevinstein··on Send Me to Heaven
Can anybody understand how it detects cheating (throwing your phone off a tall building)?

Assuming it's just using the accelerometer to detect freefall, is there any way to distinguish ascent and descent? GPS is probably too inaccurate and too high-latency to assist here.

Perhaps it can tell the difference between reaching terminal velocity and crashing into the ground, and it penalizes the former?

blevinstein··on Software engineering topics I changed my mind on
Product manager and project manager are different roles. I think the author was specifically designating the latter.
blevinstein··on Don’t do the long take home assignments like coinbase
I also recently went through the Coinbase interview process, and was pleasantly surprised that they offered this compensation for the take-home interview part.

Overall, a 4-6 hour task, to be completed on your own over a 1-week period, seems reasonable to me.

blevinstein··on (2013) George W. Bush is smarter than you
Estimates online suggest that GWB has an IQ of 120-125, making him smarter than the average college grad, perhaps slightly less intelligent than the average person with an advanced degree.

It's also worth noting that IQ is not a particularly good predictor of presidential success, and only a partial measure of intelligence.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Presidential_IQ_hoax#ci...

http://www.assessmentpsychology.com/

blevinstein··on A One-Line Proof of the Infinitude of Primes
This proof is nearly equivalent to that proof, but uses the sine function to generate a contradiction. The crucial step involves the fact that:

1 + 2 * product(p', p')

must be divisible by some prime number, where

product(p', p')

is the product of all primes you were talking about.

blevinstein··on India's demonetisation of Rs. 500 and Rs. 1000 notes
500 rupees = $7.52, 1000 rupees = $15.05

These are not large denomination bills.

blevinstein··on Show HN: Puput, listen to your email for free when traveling, using missed calls
I would be surprised if this doesn't constitute a violation of Terms of Service somewhere along the line? Something that could provide grounds for one of the telecom companies involved to have it taken down, if it were to be successful.

Basically, it means that you can send information (in one direction only), without paying for use of the telecom network. Taken to an extreme, it should be possible to create a "free walkie talkie" app that worked all over the world, for free, by repeatedly calling back and forth but never connecting the call.

blevinstein··on Carl Sagan's idea for Contact video game (1983) [video]
I recently spent some time working on exactly this, in 2D:

https://github.com/blevinstein/SRAsteroids

To see what it looks like, you can check out this youtube video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hSCz7tRl1s

I wrote an engine that modeled object positions as "timelines", where position varies with time, and demonstrated the basic relativistic effects (length contraction, time dilation, and frequency shifting). Unfortunately, I never really figured out how to turn these into actual game mechanics.

blevinstein··on Carl Sagan wrote a design doc for a video game based on his work
I recently spent some time trying to turn a 2D simulation of Special Relativity into a game:

https://github.com/blevinstein/SRAsteroids

To see what it looks like, you can check out this youtube video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hSCz7tRl1s

I wrote an engine that modeled object positions as "timelines", where position varies with time, and demonstrated the basic relativistic effects (length contraction, time dilation, and frequency shifting).

Unfortunately, I never really figured out how to turn these into actual game mechanics.

blevinstein··on Visualize move, protection and threat status in chess
This is neat!

I was working on something similar recently: https://github.com/blevinstein/chess_assistant/blob/master/s...

I had been thinking about ways to analyze the graph of "threats", so I focused on which pieces were threatening which. I wanted to eventually extend this to also include which pieces were threatening which squares, but never got that far.

blevinstein··on Why are free proxies free? (2013)
A friend of mine setup a simple PHP-based proxy while he was in high school, to get around the firewall.

Then, he modified it slightly to scrape facebook username/passwords, and gave the URL to all his friends. :)

I wonder whether modern security practices (e.g. https everywhere) will make proxies less lucrative (and therefore less common).

blevinstein··on Show HN: Screeps is live at Indiegogo – the world's first MMO for programmers
The Indiegogo perks really need to be rethought. I want to contribute, but I can't imagine I'll need more than the lowest ("30 CPU") level, at least to start, so I've only pledged $1. I'd much rather pay for 6 months or a year, and contribute $10 or $20.
blevinstein··on How to be a great software developer
I did as well. To save everybody else from having to search, Ronseal is a maker of wood stains, and their slogan is "Does exactly what it says on the tin."