HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

egd

274 karma · joined May 22, 2012

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/egd; my proof: https://keybase.io/egd/sigs/rW_TiOK5ARLMrH1bDmfelM59j-LECprcwpofBFk18EY ]
submissionscomments
egd··on The Megadonors Who Have Poured $1.2B into the Midterms
I mean, the story here is that the overwhelming amount of money going into our election is being spent by and for the Republican party. This isn't a "both sides" thing, it's that there's a party of and for rich people pushing policies to support rich people supported by rich people and funded by rich people. That's the story of American politics in 2026: the wealthy are trying to buy the government by spending ludicrous amounts of money to influence elections. That's the entire story. That should be the front page news, that should be the only thing we're talking about, but it's taken as something everyone "already knows," so we don't talk about it, and the NYT article is about crypto or some shit and not "THE GOP IS A CAPTURED INSTRUMENT OF WEALTH BEING LEVERAGED AGAINST THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, AND WE HAVE THE RECEIPTS."
egd··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2021)
Location: US, Currently West Coast, likely East Coast

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Remote Only

Technologies: Python, Rust, Swift, JS, Docker, Bash, Linux Systems

Résumé/CV: https://egd.im/resume.pdf

Email: hn@egd.im

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielsoneg/

---------

I've been a developer for 12 years, most recently at Twitter, including a stint managing. I'm a strong generalist - I've done everything from run servers to write iOS apps, and generally wear many hats.

I'm looking for remote-friendly programming roles at companies in the biotech & synthetic biology space.

egd··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (January 2021)
A few reasons! First, the field is absolutely fascinating - the complexity is incredible, and I'm really enjoying learning about it. It's also clearly "What's Next" - the synbio space in particular has a real "early computers/early internet" feel, in that the capabilities are becoming apparent, but the tooling & infrastructure's not quite there - it feels like it's about to take off in a big way, and that's exciting. On a broader level, I think climate change is an existential risk, and the biotech/synbio toolkit is the best bet I can see for how we both mitigate and repair the damage and shift our energy consumption patterns, so I want to be part of building it.

Go Slugs! The UCSC campus is still the most beautiful place I've ever lived. I'm sad I wasn't more of an outdoorsy person while I was there - it was just an incredible place.

egd··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (January 2021)
Location: US, Currently West Coast, likely East Coast

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Remote Only

Technologies: Python, Rust, Swift, JS, Docker, Bash, Linux Systems

Résumé/CV: https://egd.im/resume.pdf

Email: hn@egd.im

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielsoneg/

---------

I've been a developer for 12 years, most recently at Twitter, including a stint managing. I'm a strong generalist - I've done everything from run servers to write iOS apps, and generally wear many hats. I'm looking for remote-friendly programming roles at companies in the biotech & synthetic biology space.

egd··on Show HN: USA.css – units set in inches, 1776 bytes
It's understandable. Bald Eagles sound genuinely hilarious for a bird that big.
egd··on Inefficient, but Smart
This is similar to the Hygiene Hypothesis for allergies and autoimmune disorders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis

Nassim Taleb's Antifragility concept is relevant here as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragility

egd··on Mozilla VPN
I'm a fan of James Mickens' "Mossad or Not-Mossad" internet threat models ~essay: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf
egd··on Drive through cities in the browser while listening to local radio stations
This is great - wonderful sense of presence, especially with the road noise mixed in. It would be really fantastic in VR.

(Also, 50 different cities and a couple stations for each? That's no small amount of work!)

egd··on Amazon’s New Competitive Advantage: Putting Its Own Products First
> but it is hard to say that in the end, consumers are on the loosing end.

Consumers are actual humans with complex lives that often also include producing things. Every seller that Amazon drives out of business is a consumer (or consumers) that no longer has an income. That's how this harms consumers.

egd··on Intel's flagship 10th-gen desktop CPU has 10 cores, reaches 5.3GHz
This is the cycle with Intel, though. They innovate, blow out the market, and then stagnate until AMD or someone else comes out with an architecture that's a category improvement on whatever Intel's offering.

This looks like they're turning every nob to 11 on the current architecture to try to get something that they can sell until they can come up with whatever will succeed the Core line.

egd··on New Air Force One instruction manuals cost $84M
You may never actually need all 100,000 pages, but you don't know in advance which pages you will need, and you'll definitely need that page when you need it.
egd··on Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans
Have any of them stood out to you? Is there anything you'd consider a reasonable consumer device right now?
egd··on Magic Leap reportedly slashes jobs and steps away from consumer plans
The basic problem is that without high fidelity & a wide FOV, there's nothing that sets MagicLeap apart from any of the other companies that have been able to create AR headsets for the last ~decade.

AR right now is stuck because the display technologies aren't up to the task. The "Waveguide" approach has always fallen short - nobody's ever been able to make the viewing angle wide enough to be worthwhile, and the "passthrough" approach isn't really viable for walking down the street.

This is why I'm skeptical about Apple's AR moves - unless they've either got a totally new display technology or they've managed to do something incredibly clever with the waveguide approach, I just don't see consumer goggles working.

The only people I've seen doing something unique in this space is Tilt Five: https://www.tiltfive.com/ - they've basically done what you're suggesting: constrain the use case until you can actually build something for it.

egd··on Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?
At a previous gig, we had a lot of systems named after animals, and I'd joked about wiring our alerting system up to emit the animal sound for the system that was paging, but I think I'm actually going to do that at my next gig. Outside the land of software, engineers debug systems using sound all the time - I think we're underutilizing our senses and our pattern recognition.
egd··on Some shirts hide you from cameras, but will anyone wear them?
>Clothes change much slower than software updates,

I change my clothes at least once a day and add to my wardrobe on a ~weekly to ~monthly basis. Having been party to large system upgrades at even a reasonably competent company, I'd be shocked to find out that any surveillance system anywhere is matching that velocity.

egd··on 4.2″ and 7.5″ NFC-powered e-Paper Displays Work without Battery
I'd want to check this before committing, but my understanding is that e-ink is cheap power-wise because it doesn't require power to maintain the image - actually changing the image, though, is more expensive than LCDs or OLEDs, so if you try to, say, watch a video on an e-ink screen, you're going to get worse energy draw than an LCD display.
egd··on Shazam-like technology used to identify bars illegally streaming soccer games
Someone I met tried to figure out how to actually legally stream the NBA playoffs recently - apparently there's basically no way to do so without an existing cable subscription or without paying for the entire season. I'm guessing the licensing structure around all of that would make the US tax code look readable, but the result is that it's effectively impossible to decide you want to watch a specific game on a computer and give someone money to do so on a one-off basis.
egd··on Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban
> Even if it weren't his property, if you were in the public aren't people legally allowed to take photos of you and upload it wherever they want? If it weren't legal there wouldn't be paparazzi I would think.

This is probably one of the areas where the law's not quite caught up to reality.

50 years ago, the probable life story of a picture of you taken by someone in public was that it would be developed, maybe reproduced once or twice, possibly sold to a magazine or displayed somewhere, and then it would spend the next half century in a drawer somewhere.

In 2019, the life story of a picture of you taken by someone with an Android phone is that it is uploaded to Google's servers, where it's analyzed, tagged via facial recognition, combined with location data, associated with your profile, and used to build a better understanding of who you are, who you know, and who you associate with, so Google can package that data and use it to target better ads at you (and Google's one of the "better" players in this space, in that the worst they're likely to do is advertise to you).

I don't think it's quite caught up to people that the average amount of processing being applied to any given picture of them in 2019 is about on par with what the CIA would've dedicated to a picture of the Russian ambassador back in 1969.

egd··on Tell HN: Amazon now owns 3.0.0.0/8
I'm not a network engineer, so take this with as much credibility as you'd give an explanation after a few beers:

Most network providers have peering agreements to handle reciprocal traffic flows. In other words, if you're Comcast, you send a shit-ton of traffic to, say, Verizon. But Verizon also sends a shit-ton of traffic to you, as well. Generally, companies will have peering agreements that express the price for which they will route traffic for other network providers, and generally if there's a lot of reciprocal traffic, the peering will be "settlement free" - in other words, neither party charges the other to route traffic. So, in the example above, you as Comcast would agree to route Verizon's traffic across your network for free as long as Verizon did the same.

Cloudflare is a CDN, which means they push a LOT of traffic out across a lot of networks, and it's likely they're not getting as much inbound traffic as they're pushing out. That makes it harder for them to negotiate settlement-free peering, since they're not providing as much reciprocal value to their partners. By owning 1.1.1.1, they can now claim any trafic sent to that IP as "inbound" to Cloudflare's networks for the sake of peering agreements. Since 1.1.1.1 gets a bunch of traffic from either misconfigured equipment or people doing silly tests, routing that traffic helps improve Cloudflare's ability to negotiate better peering agreements.

Which, honestly, is pretty clever, since most of that traffic is garbage.

egd··on Carbon Removal Technologies
Sources?
egd··on iOS 12, reviewed
If the outcome of widespread machine translation is a whole new generation of poets, I'm all for it.
egd··on Apple self-driving car in accident: California DMV filing
They're not an ad company though - what are people going to do in their cars? Probably use their phones and tablets, and if Apple's got a lock on that, then who gives a damn about the car?

It's the same reason there's not an Apple Television, there's an AppleTV - the display doesn't matter, the source does.

egd··on Apple self-driving car in accident: California DMV filing
Honestly, I agree with @saagarjha further down thread - I think things like AR and personal assistants are much closer to their core model.

Grant the MP3 comparison, though - and that's why I'm trying to understand this. They've got smarter people than me pushing for this.

That said, I do agree the idea that they're fundamentally a company good at making high-tech, well manufactured items cheaper and at a larger scale than anyone else can and extrapolating that to luxury cars as a market is a reasonable and possibly sufficient view of this.

egd··on Apple self-driving car in accident: California DMV filing
I genuinely do not understand Apple's move into this space.

They've made a trillion dollar business out of small, high-margin electronics that consumers replace every couple year. Most of their products serve to enhance this business model or have high complementarity from a technology standpoint. The self-driving car project feels like an incredibly expensive diversion from this core business with limited technological overlap to their existing product lines. I'm trying not to see this as "Post-Jobs Apple finally jumps the shark," but I'm just not getting what the vision here is.

This isn't snark, by the way - I'd really love to hear a good model for what they're doing.

egd··on Bringing Back Skeuomorphic Design
> Fashion really has no place in computing. These are tools and we should treat them as such

This is a remarkably limited perspective on a set of devices that people spend almost every waking hour using.

egd··on China's Xinjiang surveillance is the dystopian future nobody wants
Typically pieces written directly by experts - instead of by journalists interviewing experts - are placed in the opinion section. The author of that piece is a historian from Georgetown who wrote a book about the region.
egd··on Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads
In a way, this is similar to the argument the FBI made to assert that GPS trackers didn't constitute a search because they could just follow someone around and get the same data. The argument against that, and this, was that the technology is sufficiently more powerful and sufficiently out of step with people's expectations that it's a difference in category, not degree. (IANAL, if that's not obvious)

The difference with the new systems is that, while I might happen to come across an ad in traditional media because I woke up early or I might happen to be reading a paper I normally don't, there's practically no chance whatsoever for me to accidentally see an ad in Facebook's systems that's not targeted at me. That's a categorically different situation because I'm being explicitly excluded from that content based on factors specified by the employer, not just by luck or personal preference.

Also, the "implicit filtering" of traditional media only passes the bar because it can't actually be proven that the employer is filtering based on age, gender, etc., which isn't the case with an explicit filtering system. Yes, employers can still skirt the system with the traditional media targeting, but they're still illegally discriminating based on age or other factors.

egd··on Neom – an entire new land, purpose-built for a new way of living
So where the folks who haul the garbage get to live?
egd··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2016)
Twitter | SF, SEA, NY, BOS, Boulder | Sr. Software Engineer | Full-time | REMOTE OK

My team at Twitter is hiring software engineers to help us build the stack that manages Twitter's server fleet.

Our systems manage over 100k physical servers in multiple locations, providing simple, reliable REST APIs to automate maintenance, tracking, and provisioning of the servers that underpin Twitter’s services. You'll be helping build some of the foundational services that run Twitter's infrastructure.

(And if that doesn't sell it: we've tested new features by rebooting enough computing power to land on the Top500. VMs are fun, but there's nothing like pressing "enter" and knowing several thousand actual boxes just power cycled.)

We've got offices in SF, Seattle, Boulder, New York, Boston, and a few other places, and we support remote work as well.

More details and application here: https://careers.twitter.com/en/work-for-twitter/software-eng...

Or you can email me at edanielson at, well, you know the domain.

egd··on The Psychology of Human Misjudgment (2005) [pdf]
Oh that's much better.

How'd you do the conversion?

Page 1 of 2Next →