HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

milch

287 karma · joined November 19, 2017

submissionscomments
milch··on Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
I just timed it, my personal Mac takes 10s to the login screen and then 4 seconds to the desktop after putting in my password. My work Mac takes 3+ min. All of the endpoint monitoring stuff they put on there really takes its toll.

My windows gaming PC starts up in about 30s from a cold boot (though it's not encrypted...), so I would at least put the personal Mac and the Windows machine in the same ballpark. I couldn't have told you which one is faster without timing it. The work machine laptop is clearly noticeably slower.

milch··on Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup
Adobe is the worst offender. I just checked and I have no less than 8 Adobe processes running on my macOS machine, without any Adobe apps running, and with all of the settings to run in the background or sync stuff turned off. I even have a script to nuke all of the services they install that I run every once in a while, but they just come back after a while. It's literally malware. If Photoshop and Lightroom weren't the best at what they do I'd be gone, but sadly they are.
milch··on Mozilla launching “Thundermail” email service to take on Gmail, Microsoft 365
I just checked mine and I have about 250k emails sitting in my personal laptop's mailbox, no issues there. It might be dependent on the provider - I know at work where we use Exchange I get occasional slowdowns but I'm not sure whether that's due to Mail.app, due to Exchange, due to our dear endpoint security software taking its sweet time checking whatever I'm doing, or any combination of these. I probably have a couple million emails in my work laptop's mailbox though. Often the "Rebuild Mailbox" function fixes any problems for me, at least for a while.

The iPhone one regularly just doesn't search properly for me though. I'll search for the exact subject or contents of a message and just won't be able to find it, then when I go to my laptop and type in the exact same terms it finds it instantly.

milch··on Public secrets exposure leads to supply chain attack on GitHub CodeQL
AWS throws errors that look like `arn:aws:iam:... is not authorized to call "$SERVICE_NAME:$API_NAME" on resource arn:aws:$SERVICE_NAME:...`. I think it's more complicated when you go cross account, and the receiving account doesn't have permissions set up (if the calling account doesn't have it set up you get the same error). In any case you would still find that information in the CloudTrail logs of the receiving account
milch··on The Cult of the American Lawn
Except that the article said that the HOA needed to change the rules before that forced the couple to change what they were doing. The only thing that was called out as being against the rules was them keeping chickens in their backyard
milch··on Imagine telling 2010 devs that in 2025, collapsing a div would require $8/ month
I think if you compared the median wage of people holding at least a bachelors degree with just software developers they'd be closer together as well
milch··on Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face
Maybe people need to add deliberate traps on their websites. You could imagine a provider like Cloudflare injecting a randomly generated code phrase into thousands of sites and making sure to attribute it under a strict license, that is invisible so that no human sees it, and changes every few days. Presumably LLMs would learn this phrase and later be able to repeat it - getting a sufficiently high hit rate should be proof that they used illegitimately obtained data. Kinda like back in the old days when map makers included fake towns, rivers and so on in their maps so that if others copied it they could tell
milch··on Net Zero by 2050 Is 'Impossible,' UK Tory Leader Badenoch Says
You responded to a comic where a guy has a slide saying those things I enumerated — so the response of "what if it is for nothing" is quite literally in opposition to clean water, livable cities, and so on. It seems your comment was more directed to the post's article and not to the thing you responded to
milch··on Net Zero by 2050 Is 'Impossible,' UK Tory Leader Badenoch Says
I'm not sure how you create a better world than one that has sustainable infrastructure, livable cities, healthy children, preserved nature and wildlife (or just rainforests as the cartoon puts it...), clean water and air, ...

Maybe net zero is a waste of time because in 20 years we will crack cold fusion and have infinite energy and then literally suck pollutants out of the air. Or maybe we don't and we wish we'd spent the last 20 years not razing forests, polluting air and water, and so on

milch··on Tesla is done in Germany: 94% say they won't buy a Tesla car
Interestingly the Tesla Model Y seems to have dropped very quickly, you can also find the year-end report for 2024 here where Model Y was number 1: https://www.adac.de/news/auto-bilanz-e-autos-2024/

If you look at the data for 2023 you can also see that Tesla sold about the same number of any of their model as VW did for the ID series (both ~60k). That seems to have stayed flat for VW in 2024 according to the table from ADAC, but Tesla overall sales dropped significantly to ~30k. If you extrapolate the February numbers they are on track to halve sales again this year, while VW is on track to sell 30k more cars than they did last year (I know extrapolation is not going to be super accurate here)

milch··on I Used to Teach Students. Now I Catch ChatGPT Cheats
In the past 6 months about 50%. That's my n=1, I have another colleague who may just have been unlucky - their number is 100%. This is all on-sites, I barely get phone screens anymore.
milch··on I Used to Teach Students. Now I Catch ChatGPT Cheats
My company does, and I find it pretty easy to weed out the LLM candidates either way. "You used a heap here, can you explain why?", "why did you name your variable [something unrelated to the question but relevant to the underlying concept]?" will send them stumbling or "just a sec, I need to think about it". That's obviously not how it works, if you're actually writing the code you'll have thought about it before, you won't just throw in a heap "just because". It's also not super hard to figure out when someone is just reading something off of the screen, especially when they clearly have a second monitor, or a phone, or a tablet nearby, but even on the same screen you can see their eyes dart back and forth.

The bigger problem for us is the online assessments that they give out as a replacement for the phone screen nowadays. They clearly can't detect LLM use, even though to me as a human it seems quite blatant - things like extensive use of comments explaining the code, which should throw up a red flag on an assessment where the only thing that matters is passing the test cases. So we get a lot of candidates at on-sites that would have never made it past the traditional phone screen.

As an aside I initially only ask "LeetCode easy"-type questions. Stuff you would encounter in your day to day. You get to choose your favorite language. There's at least 3-5 solutions for each of the problems I give, they're really not meant to be trick questions. Any dev should be able to code these in 5 minutes without even googling, let alone need ChatGPT. I almost think some people use ChatGPT out of habit more than anything else and it trips them up more than if they had taken a minute to think about it and do it themselves.

milch··on Show HN: Bayleaf – Building a low-profile wireless split keyboard
I went from only using my MacBook's builtin keyboard to using a Lily58 split keyboard and it took probably about 2 weeks to fully adjust. I started out at around 100-110 wpm on the standard keyboard. On the first day of the split I was doing about 20-30 wpm, after a week I was up to 60 wpm, and then 80wpm after 2 weeks. Kept improving more slowly after that. I did switch cold turkey, i.e. using it 100% of the time including at work.

Now I'm about a year and a half later and am up to 140wpm. I think the biggest problem for me on the standard keyboard is the bottom row index fingers and pinkies, the "natural" motion of my fingers lands right in between the two keys on those fingers so I used to make a lot of mistakes there, especially when typing fast.

milch··on Show HN: Bayleaf – Building a low-profile wireless split keyboard
People make their own dongles using another nice!nano or something more compact like the Xiao BLE
milch··on Show HN: Bayleaf – Building a low-profile wireless split keyboard
Realistically you've got about 50 or so keys and you are using all of them all the time, so you're not really forgetting where anything is. Many also customize where symbols, media keys, etc., are - so they are positioned where it makes most sense to you. Outside of maybe a 2 week learning period I haven't needed to look up where a key is at all

The other thing is that many keys will have multiple functions - so what do you print on them? e.g. my j key also doubles as # and the down key. Some are maybe even more frequently used key combinations, e.g. I have a ``` and a => key

milch··on America faces a Trumpian economic slowdown
Isn't it kind of sad that 100M doesn't even count as super wealthy anymore? That's missing 3 zeros. Yes 100M is enough that you never have to work again and can basically go anywhere and do anything you want in boundless luxury, but it also doesn't even cover the cost of one (1) boat purchased by the actual super wealthy
milch··on Ask HN: Where are the good Markdown to PDF tools (that meet these requirements)?
I do this with Chrome for my resume. Write it in Markdown, convert to HTML using Pandoc and then print it to PDF using Chrome.

Google\ Chrome --no-sandbox --headless --print-to-pdf-no-header --no-pdf-header-footer --enable-logging=stderr --log-level=2 --in-process-gpu --disable-gpu --print-to-pdf=resume.pdf "file://path/to/resume.html"

milch··on Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code
Interestingly I did the same thing and got the wrong answer, with the right reasoning. A quick cross check showed that 4o also had the right reasoning but wrong answer, while 03-mini got it right
milch··on Thoughts on Daylight Computer
I feel the same about my Kindle... but also have yet to pull the trigger on anything else. I've eyed some Boox ones, they have a million options from Kindle to tablet formfactor, including color, and they run Android so easy to do newspapers, magazines, feeds, ..., but I also find it hard to justify when my Kindle still works kinda fine. Ugh
milch··on The Butter Thesis (2019)
We use it at work and honestly I'd rather have Google Docs. Very limited formatting (why are there only 3 levels of headings?), very slow interface (why does it take what feels like 30s to load a folder with 25 entries in it?) and the search feature might as well not exist. When I write a Quip doc I basically have to realize and rationalize to myself that I am not going to be able to find it again in the future. So much time lost to "anyone else have the link to...". It's a black hole that allows real time collaborative editing and comments. Sometimes they'll have spells of a few hours to weeks where comments or edits are randomly lost. Randomly the UI will also pop up a 500 or 503 error, which never inspires confidence that it is actually saving my edits. I basically do all my writing in markdown locally, then copy it into Quip — both so I have a local copy I can full text search on and so that if it has one of its random fits I don't lose a half day of work.

(You can also very easily get the UI in an inconsistent state. I forget what the exact sequence is for the one I found most recently but it is something like: if you position your cursor after an image, and there is an empty line and then a line with a header, and you press forward delete, it'll get rid of both line and the header. Clicking undo won't get the header back, it'll only reappear when you refresh the page)

milch··on NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker
Most transit agencies have this problem of the "vicious transit cycle" - people don't take the bus because it's too infrequent/unreliable => more cars make the buses more unreliable => less money because so few people take it => back to start. It's amazing when you're sitting in a bus behind 20 cars backed up over 4 blocks, and you look back and there's 50 people on the bus. Really makes you think why the 50-person bus doesn't get priority over all of the single occupancy vehicles
milch··on NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker
Because police can't physically be in every intersection at once, and there's research that shows that removing parking around intersections reduces pedestrian fatalities. They could add cameras, but I bet you that people would fight tooth and nail against that as well... not being able to park within 20ft of an intersection doesn't cause any privacy issues, or funnel money into the city councilman's cousin's company that just so happens to be in the business of installing red light and stop sign photo enforcement cameras, or need ongoing maintenance to keep working
milch··on New Grad to Staff at Meta in 3 years
5 years from new grad to L6 is way more realistic and normal than 4 years from new grad to staff, which is L7 at Amazon. If you're good a year to L5 is pretty normal and if you're exceptional 2 years from L5 to L6 is normal as well. The quickest L6 to L7 promo I've seen is 3 years, though that one started at L5 and has 7+ years tenure, so probably between 8-10 YOE total
milch··on New Grad to Staff at Meta in 3 years
I'm at Amazon and the promo feedback I see time and time again is that they want to see consistency of next level behavior. I guarantee if you filed for your second promo in 6-12 months, that's exactly what would come back. Unless Meta has much lower standards for promotions I feel like even saying "hit the jackpot" must be a severe understatement
milch··on JSON5 – JSON for Humans
Using a YAML parser to parse JSON+comments is like bringing a tank to a knife fight... If you only parse "trusted" input, i.e. you can guarantee that no one is ever going to pass anything but JSON+comments, and you don't do it in any high-TPS scenarios it's probably fine to use a YAML parser
milch··on JSON5 – JSON for Humans
I've also seen parser directives inserted into the keys like `{ "fooBar__datetime": 123456780.0 }`, and many other creative workarounds
milch··on Ask HN: Is there a [blazing fast] alternative to homebrew for macOS yet?
+1, installation time of all kinds of software is much faster on nix for me. Over the years I've also been quite annoyed with homebrew for breaking all kinds of things, like the CLI interface or features like being able to easily install a pinned version of a brew

(used to be that you could just `brew install https://link/to/git/commit` which they disabled for "security reasons", the replacement is that you need to make your own tap which is quite a bit more effort)

milch··on YouTube Premium Showing Ads
Because eBay doesn't sell an ad-free premium version that removes ads but then still shows me sponsored ads as soon as I click on a listing or a seller's page. Neither does eBay intercept packages after you've made a purchase to drop their own ad flyers inside, or offer a premium tier that does prevent them from inserting an "eBay recommends square space for all your website building needs" flyer, but you end up with a "monkeybusiness78 recommends square space..." flyer in your package anyway
milch··on YouTube Premium Showing Ads
Not really? As the watcher I don't really care whether 2 minutes into the video it gets interrupted for 30s to tell me about square space or the video keeps playing and the host is telling me about square space for 30s. The only difference is who is doing the taking. If I'm paying for the ad-free experience I want an ad-free experience
milch··on Ambulance hits cyclist, rushes him to hospital, then sticks him with $1,800 bill
> no driver I know wants to hit someone and injure them

You must not be riding your bike a lot then. Most recently I had a guy follow me around and threaten to get his gun if I didn't get off the road

← PreviousPage 4 of 6Next →