cobbzilla

wow the haters are out today! Happy Holidays All! Congratulations to Bob & Arun on the launch!

a money-saver! uh uh seven belongs on a vintage Ford Pinto!

Thank you for brightening my day with your website. That is one adorable (and adorably annoyed-looking) cat.

I did for years too, but newer MacBooks no longer allow running with lid-closed unless connected to a monitor, I was disappointed to recently learn this.

If I’m wrong, someone tell me how to do it! On an M4 MacBook Air running latest OSX release.

You had me until you said electricity. That implies metal, and we certainly have the tools to find metal that old, but have found nothing crafted by homo anything, afaik. Would it all be too buried? One would imagine that somewhere some evidence would have surfaced. But iirc oldest metalworking is from ~11kya

Absolutely. I love playing Atari 2600 games, and it seems sacrilegious to play on anything but an old-school CRT TV.

Also, I’ve heard a CRT is required for NES light-gun games like Duck Hunt. Anyone know if this is true? I don’t have an NES, and if I did, I’d hook it up to my CRT, so I still wouldn’t know the answer :)

Scary stuff. But if we only use mass facial-recognition to catch “the bad guys” then that’s OK, right? It’s not totalitarian or authoritarian at all, right? When a majority of voters want it, that’s democracy, right?

My head hurts.

[1] https://news.met.police.uk/news/arrest-landmark-for-met-offi...

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c62lq580696o

[3] https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/met-police-facial-reco...

it would also be really cool to use excess power generation to drive atmospheric petroleum synthesis (pull carbon from air to make hydrocarbons); then sell it or store it for later use.

I know the tech is not quite there yet, but it’s getting closer every year.

I agree with everything you've written.

Clarifying my "YOLO" usage: I was being a little flippant, in the sense that when ending an interview early with direct critical feedback, the most likely outcome is a "burned bridge" with that company (you're never coming back).

Which reminds me one of my favorite twisted idioms: We'll burn that bridge when we get to it!

I guess I've finally found an acceptable real-world use case for this phrase :)

In a few cases, I really liked the company and what they were doing, got along wonderfully with the hiring manager. Then bombed their leetcode BS.

So when I say I’d politely tell them why they’re fucked, it’s actually out of a genuine desire to help the company.

But you’re right, I’m also thankful that they showed their red flag so visibly, early enough, and I’m happy to not move forward!

Here’s my empirical evidence based on several recent “coding session” interviews with a variety of software companies. Background: I have been developing software for over 30 years, I hold a few patents, I’ve had a handful of modestly successful exits. I kind of know a little bit about what I am doing. At this stage in my career, I am no longer interested in the super early stage startup lifestyle, I’m looking at IC/staff engineer type roles.

The mature, state-of-the-art software companies do not give me leetcode problems to solve. They give me interesting & challenging problems that force me to both a) apply best practices of varying kinds and yet b) be creative in some aspects of the solution. And these problems are very amenable to “talking through” what I’m doing, how I’m approaching the solution, etc. Overall, I feel like they are effective and give the company a good sense of how I develop software as an engineer. I have yet to “fail” one of these.

It is the smaller, less mature companies that give me stupid leetcode problems. These companies usually bluntly tell me their monolithic codebase (always in a not-statically-typed language), is a total mess and they are “working on domain boundaries”.

I fail about 50% of these leetcode things because I don’t know the one “trick” to yield the right answer. As a seasoned developer, I often push back on the framing and tell them how I would do a better solution by changing one of the constraints, where the change would actually better match the real world problem they’re modeling.

And they don’t seem to care at all. I wonder if they realize that their bullshit interviewing process has both a false positive and a false negative problem.

The false negatives exclude folks like myself who could actually help to improve their codebase with proper, incremental refactorings.

The false positives are the people who have memorized all the leetcode problems. They are hired and write more shitty monolithic hairball code.

Their interviewing process reinforces the shittiness of their codebase. It’s a spiral they might never get out of.

The next time I get one of these, I think I’m going to YOLO it, pull the ripcord early and politely tell them why they’re fucked.

I am curious what would happen if one of those people tried to pray while having a sign above their head that said “I’m praying for <favorite sports team> to win their next game”

Could they still arrest you?

Honestly wondering if this is a legit use of DMCA. Like, what exact provision of the DMCA is being implicated here?

One should have some reasonable means for challenging this kind of thing. But what do I know.

It’s a scary world when you know a C&D or other legal nastygram is 100% bullshit and want to ignore it, but you’re chained to a vendor that can’t respond with any level of subtlety, just the ban-hammer for everyone

So the C&Ds and nastygrams become increasingly ridiculous, but whatevs, they’re all rubber-stamped so hey corporate just push that red “lawyer” button and make my embarrassment go away real fast, before any Streisand effect can kick in!

My understanding is that it’s basically the same as ripping a CD - I have a perpetual license for personal use.

Of course if I broadcast it publicly or share it on bittorrent I am in violation. But if all I do is keep it in my music library for myself to listen to, it’s OK.

So, while the MP3 is covered by an Amazon license and the ripped CD has an implied fair-use license, those license terms are more-or-less the same.

Regarding: “Find the emails of everyone who reacted to my latest LinkedIn post and send personalized outreach”

A forewarning and maybe advice to apply some heuristics — on another HN thread I received the brilliant advice to prefix my first name on LinkedIn with an emoji.

Now, whenever I get a message on LinkedIn that starts with “Hello [emoji] [first name]” I know it was automated spam, and I reflexively block the sender.

Or discovering that the song you loved has been edited by the artist, and your favorite line is now garbled because it’s not PC anymore? So glad I had the original CD, so I can listen to it how I remember it!

Is it possible to backup via Synology HyperBackup connected to a Backblaze B2 bucket? The monthly costs might be much cheaper.

I thought you could buy songs as downloadable mp3 files on Amazon? Did they stop allowing that?

I was responding to “The only companies this affected are those right at the margins of becoming profitable.”

It also affects wildly unprofitable companies that have burned lots of cash and never made any money.

And you do “lose” the tax credits upon acquisition - they’re not only time-shifted, they are company-shifted.

Not entirely accurate. An unprofitable company that is acquired for its tech or team might have a huge amount of tax credits that they can’t use, but the acquiring company can. This can make an acquisition more attractive, even if the target company never made any money.

I didn't think the series was trying at all to determine facts or who is right or who is wrong about anything.

It's about treating each other as fellow human beings, even those we fundamentally disagree with.

You’re surprised by NIMBYism?? It’s everywhere. Find a county where both developers and the populace are welcoming a new factory or other industrial facility — hard to find! Look at housing policy in certain big cities and where rents are skyrocketing while housing unit creation stagnates.

The upside down glasses is a good example. As I understand it, after you get used to wearing them and then take them off, you see everything upside down with your regular eyes, and it takes a while to get back to normal. Doesn’t sound fun.

But in my case I don’t think even that would work. Elaborating further on the ophthalmologist’s words (and as another poster here noted), the neuroplasticity required to develop stereoscopic vision is just not there past some age. No amount of lens trickery will join the left-right circuits in the cortex.

If the energy source to make the fuel is renewable (hydro, solar, wind), then it is effectively carbon neutral, and that’s the best you can do. Someday I think we’ll get there, but I don’t know enough to guess how far off that is.

Why does the build system need to be public? Does everyone who uses the open source software have to run jenkins builds on that server? If it’s for the artifacts, those should be published elsewhere, right?

To link back to TFA, if the explanation was that he didn’t know because the government made all the movies and never showed anything about the indigenous peoples, that ignorance is somewhat understandable.

Interesting perspective! Is this a component of what’s been called “manufacturing consent”?

I hope you are right!

In theory yes, but in reality the "Dormant Commerce Clause" is weak protection.

We've let states set their own "internet services" taxes, making selling anything online in the US a regulatory nightmare. A third-party vendor to manage (and keep up with) the tax laws to stay compliant is basically required for anyone selling online, or risk the wrath of various state tax bodies.

> With the current supreme court, who knows?

In his concurring opinion, Justice Kavanaugh said it was likely unconstitutional (but apparently not obviously enough to enjoin it) [1]. So it's going into effect, then the lawsuit follows.

Similar laws in California, Arkansas and Ohio were all found unconstitutional, so I am hopeful. That said, these were all district court decisions, and all of them are being appealed. When they lose on appeal, they go to the Supreme Court for (hopefully) the final smack-down.

Interestingly, reading the summary MS HB1126 [2], this law is doing two things. It regulates companies and defines crimes.

States are allowed to set their own criminal codes. If Mississippi drops the mandate part and passes a new law that simply defines certain things as crimes with corresponding penalties, that law would probably be constitutional.

[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/25a97_5h25.pdf

[2] https://legiscan.com/MS/bill/HB1126/2024