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234 karma · joined November 25, 2022

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short_throw··on Challenging projects every programmer should try (2019)
If you want learn how things scale across a team and last years, read or contribute to open source code.

It takes years for a single person to get a project to the point where it's a good learning ground for scaling and maintenance.

Gluing a few libraries together is real software engineering but unless you're really invested in the outcome it's not that engaging and it's not that educational.

short_throw··on The end of retirement
For much of the developed world, the ratio of retirees to working age people is going to get a larger, causing economic difficulties across age groups.

Healthcare for the elderly will put huge strain on government budgets.

With the young struggling to afford housing with fulltime work, I find the authors disappointments about not getting those lavish vacations obnoxious.

short_throw··on The New Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen
Bunnie's "Hacking the Xbox" is still one of my favorite books ever. First read it as a teenager, it was my intro to bootloaders, encryption, copyright law, and so much more.
short_throw··on YouTube punishes ad-blocker users with slower videos on non-Chrome browsers
> YouTube has no financial incentive...

Nonsense. A Google controlled browser runs plugins Google allows with privacy settings Google creates. More data and no ad blockers is worth many billions of dollars to YouTube in the long run.

They directly benefit from people thinking Firefox is slow.

short_throw··on New images and video confirm Austin-made Tesla model Y has cracked front casting
It's still a serious structural defect.

The importance of the distinction here is that Tesla can't argue the customer caused this...a cold shut can only happen at casting time.

short_throw··on I only lost 10 minutes of data, thanks to ZFS
Identical twins may both die of a heart attack, but not usually at the same time.

Normally, failures come from some amount of non-repeatability or randomness that the systems weren't robust to.

The drive industry is special (in a bad way) in that they can exactly reproduce their flaws, and most people's intuition isn't prepared for that.

short_throw··on Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?
A healthy marriage of two people treating each other as equals takes a lot of communication, and that almost certainly can't be scaled 10x, nor do the same principles apply when someone is only getting 10%.

In traditional polygamy, the man with 10 wives would be the head of household for 10 wives with competing interests, so it does start to sound very managerial.

short_throw··on PSA: Intel Graphics Drivers Now Collect Telemetry by Default
"You could have learned that stuff in the last 6 months"

"You might have to hand in your power user card over that one"

And these attitudes are why most consumers almost exclusively use proprietary software. You have to let people be lazy to get mass adoption. Businesses know and exploit this, the foss world writes tools with steep learning curves and says "take it or leave it." And that's perfectly fine as long as we can be honest with ourselves: the vast majority of people will never invest the time to learn to use cmd line applications, or debug wifi drivers, or learn to use an environment that's more complicated than what they already have. Time is money so even a highly motivated person should question spending months to learn new tools.

I love Linux for being superior for servers and hackable and having so much powerful software available for free...but if I weren't a software developer and I didn't enjoy this stuff there'd be no justification for the time I spent learning it.

short_throw··on Uh, guys, we should think about spending more on defense in the US
If you aren't familiar with Ray Dalio's Principles for a Changing World Order, I can't recommend it enough (both the book and the YouTube video). You'll understand a lot better where the U.S. is in it's history and why so much is the way it is.

https://youtu.be/xguam0TKMw8

short_throw··on Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’
I'm a bit perplexed that you see trashing a man's character with certainty as right and pondering if his actions could reflect a struggle with mental illness as wrong.

I don't like Musk, nor do I trust the things he says, but I usually err on the side of granting people some humanity.

short_throw··on 6 days to change 1 line of code (2015)
I was just waiting to hear that the parameter loading wasn't available in some edge case scenario and code review changes took down the system.

But actually this is a story about the process working.

short_throw··on Stanford Graduate Students Won Their Union Vote
>Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
short_throw··on False 911 Calls Increase During Festival as iOS Mistakes Dancing for Car Crashes
If no one speaks than you can't differentiate a false alarm from someone who can't breathe, or is hiding from an attacker, or is too hurt to put the phone to their ear.

It's a massive nuisance unless someone gets on to say it was a mistake...and if someone didn't notice their phone buzzing before it made the call they aren't gonna pick up.

short_throw··on FedEx Accused of Largest Odometer Rollback Fraud in History with Used Vans
If you think the entirety of corruption in the US is recent and tied to a specific family you need to switch to a media source with more nuance.
short_throw··on When dying patients want unproven drugs
There are tradeoffs here, but the current approach seems to protect people's inheritances better than people's lives.

Selling straight up snake oil is still fraud, and letting money be thrown at overhyped but ineffective treatments is a smaller tragedy than forcing people to die when treatments exist.

short_throw··on Research on harvesting electricity from humidity in the air
You will find the second law of thermodynamics very disappointing.
short_throw··on SanDisk Extreme SSDs keep abruptly failing–firmware fix for only some promised
I'm 2 for 2 with SanDisk ssds suddenly dieing due to the controller going out way short of the drive's expected life.

That was years before this issue but my rule of never buying a SanDisk product again is serving me well.

short_throw··on What happened with ASUS routers this morning?
I'm like you, Asus router on stock firmware and happy. In my case I set that up after a bad experience with openwrt.

Years ago I bought a $100 gigabit Linksys router, immediately flashed it with openwrt, and set it up. I assumed my isp was the reason my download speeds were struggling to hit 100mbps (new house and network all at once), and later when I bought my first NAS I assumed hdds are just inherently slow.

I had abysmal network performance for over a year before I figured out my gigabit router was the performance bottleneck, my isp was giving me 3x what the router could handle. The reason for the terrible performance was that openwrt doesn't have the closed source binary blobs to run hardware accelerated routing, instead everything gets squeezed through the cpu, and my router couldn't do it.

So basically, many routers lose performance, in my case I got a 10x performance drop, and openwrts website is all but useless for telling you which routers to buy.

All I can say is be careful blindly installing openwrt unless your router has a CPU that's complete overkill for what you want to do...and none of the mid range consumer combined routers/access points meet that criteria.

short_throw··on Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?
Gotta switch to some a4988s so the machine can moan back.
short_throw··on Tech bosses are letting dictators censor what Americans see
The founders of the United States thought it was too dangerous to let a democratic government influence the media, which is why we have the first amendment.

Rival nations with totalitarian governments are now exercising control over US media to cover up terrible human rights abuses and influence US politics...and your only feeling on the subject is "meh not illegal"?

Foreign propaganda is an existential threat to a democracy, we can't look the other way as us media giants cede control to other nations.

short_throw··on Frank founder Charlie Javice arrested, charged with defrauding JPMorgan Chase
There are a lot of surprises here. I'm surprised this wasn't settled confidentially out of court, since Javice presumably doesn't want to go to prison and JPM doesn't want all this publicity as the bank that paid 9 figures for a fake excel sheet they were gonna use to spam people.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's a good thing that this fraud will be punished... I'm just surprised, either Javice is incredibly stupid/arrogant or someone in JPM was really mad and wanted to press the nuclear button, because a "renegotiation" after a "record keeping error" would have left both parties a lot better off.

short_throw··on California bill would ban sales of Skittles, other ‘toxic’ snacks
"I gave my kids junk food and they got excited."

Do you think there could be any potential confounders here?

short_throw··on Systems design explains the world (2020)
Well I think if Intel had decided to start from scratch to make "x86 only more power efficient, it'll only take one product cycle" they would have failed miserably, but if they said "let's make a phone cpu, that's our new top priority" that program could have grown into making great laptop cpus a decade later.

Making a new product that fills a new niche in a short timespan is viable. Making a product to directly replace what the old system does after decades of iteration is usually a delusion.

short_throw··on Control Mario Kart 64 with your car over CAN bus (2016)
For steering you're exactly wrong. Drive an old car without power steering, on the highway you'll barely notice, but you'll be using all your might to park. It's much easier to steer a rolling tire.

Power steering systems create heat and rely on airflow for cooling...so prolonged steering back and forth in a parking space is a worst case scenario for the system.

short_throw··on Five years of indie hacking
If the article were more prescriptive (i.e. it were giving people life advice or suggesting policy) I'd agree.

But it's primarily descriptive ("this is what I lived" and the prescriptive parts are limited to "if you find yourself in this situation, here's how to do it better than what I did").

Seems a bit silly to require a meaningless disclaimer on someone's memoir.

short_throw··on Seattle becomes first U.S. city to ban caste discrimination
He left a factual statement of his own experience. It's not poorly worded.

It's entirely fair to point out that different castes would see and experience casteism very differently...but sheesh, it's tiresome to see a bunch of (probably white) keyboard warriors show up and argue with in Indian American about what it's like to be Indian in America.

short_throw··on Fireship – Learn to Code Faster
HN predictably tearing him apart for his pricing and marketing.

If you haven't heard of fireship, do this instead of complaining about his prices:

1. Watch a few videos on his YouTube for free (https://m.youtube.com/c/fireship)

2. If you enjoy it, subscribe/watch more.

3. If you really like it and want to take his courses then pay for a membership.

This guy can get information on a new topic into my brain faster than anyone on YouTube, while keeping me entertained and enjoying every minute of it. His code report videos are so entertaining (but less technical) that my non programmer wife likes to watch them.

I'm glad he can make a living at this. He's put thousands of hours of labor into producing fantastic content for free. I was happy to pay a fraction of a days pay to buy a lifetime membership to support his years of work, but if you don't like it don't buy it.

High quality technical content is important to me, and I'm thankful whenever those creators find a way to eat without being totally subservient to google's algorithms.

short_throw··on Why it’s hard to buy deodorant in Manhattan
It seems you're a big fan of judging people on superficial details of their internet comments.

The point was pretty clear to me...that there's a person and a family on the losing end of all this. Giving the owners of a store a backstory is humanizing, OP gave as much detail as he knew which wasn't much and that's fine. It's a shame we're all so tense about cultural details that people get attacked for trying to say something nice.