HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

wippler

367 karma · joined December 2, 2010

submissionscomments
wippler··on Anthropic S-1
Close enough - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/spacex-spcx-stock-ipo-welder-em...
wippler··on Why DuckDB 2.0 is faster
Hilarious that even DuckDB's article has many of LLM tells as well
wippler··on Stonebraker on CAP theorem and Databases (2010)
FYI. This was written in 2010 although it feels relevant even now. Didn't catch it until the mention of Amazon SimpleDB.
wippler··on H-1B program grew 81 percent from 2011 to 2022
This chart is entirely misleading. In any given year, there are only 85k new H1B visas. That's it, it has not grown nor shrunk.

Reason for increase in population shown here is H1B renewals. Normally the way this works is H1Bs convert to permanent residents, but due to the country caps, Indian/Chinese H1B holders keep renewing their visas contributing to this increase. Again these are people who are already here and got their approval sometime in the past, so its not like in 2022, companies collectively hired 685,117 (which is also why you see the decrease in 2023 since due to covid, a very little bit of backlog for residency cleared).

(Not to mention the sentiment of comments here is entirely disappointing, but I guess that's the vibe these days)

wippler··on Claude Code now supports Hooks
Not to take away anything here, but hooks are present in other similar products. Atleast one example here - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazonq/latest/qdeveloper-ug/com...
wippler··on Justice Dept files suit against Facebook for discriminating against U.S. workers
I think the argument was that it has nothing to do with it, companies don't sit and follow a rule that prioritizes hiring H1Bs (talking about companies like Facebook here). In fact there are quite possibly a ridiculous number of steps in hiring an employee on visa.

What is alleged in the lawsuit seems purely self preservation, if FB doesn't jump through the hoops of getting PERM certified for the employee, they are going to leave and go to another company which does that. (Saying this without making a larger comment on immigration policies of USA)

wippler··on Kotlin vs. Java
I don’t know why but your assumption that others are skating by with what they know rubbed me the wrong way (maybe because I have been on other side of this). There are likely many other valid reasons here - project deadlines (sometimes it is not the right time to pick a new language), consistency of code (having a mix of languages is going to raise hell in code reviews with opinions on some code that could be done better in one language vs other), hiring (does your hiring/onboarding get more complex?), writing idiomatic code (learning a new programming language is easy but writing good code is hard), extreme swing in brevity (people abusing new languages to write concise code using obscure language features, which makes it hard for someone new to jump in).

I am sorry I don’t have any suggestions to fix your problem but I just wanted to provide a bit of perspective. Maybe try thinking from your peers perspective to see what benefits adopting this new language would give and be prepared to answer why Kotlin among a whole class of JVM languages - Scala, Kotlin, Groovy, Clojure.

wippler··on Show HN: IAvisa – Explore visa requirements worldwide
I wouldn't recommend this website for visa information. For example, I put in "United States" -> "Peru" - it says visa is required and when clicked on more information it takes me to a page where it lists which countries require visa for traveling to Peru. In that list among the visa required countries, it shows "united states" and in no visa required section it has "united statesa"
wippler··on Learning to Build Distributed Systems
I found "Designing Data-Intensive Application" book to be really helpful introduction to learning more interesting details about distributed systems. The book provides a gentle introduction to build intuition around these systems and contains a plethora of links to go further down the rabbit hole.

https://dataintensive.net/

wippler··on I got asked LeetCode questions for a dev-ops systems engineering job today
Just to provide an alternate perspective here, this seems to tilt the incentives towards people that are not working already. I wonder how many folks have time to take a week or more off from their current job to participate in this exercise. I understand this is paid but its still a huge risk that candidates would be taking.
wippler··on List of April Fools' Day Announcements
Retro amazon, http://www.amazon.com/
wippler··on From India, Proof That a Trip to Mars Doesn’t Have to Break the Bank
Its Mars orbiter, not lander.
wippler··on India to launch its first mission to Mars [video]
You keep moving the goal post. ISRO delivered some fantastic stuff on a very low budget, this is not about whether ISRO will be able to compete in future or not. Infact going by the current prices posted on SpaceX website and the amount it took for this orbiter mission, it is indeed very competitive
wippler··on Sorry, NSA, Terrorists Don't Use Verizon. Or Skype. Or Gmail
It's not about the number of lives but it is about the state of fear that grips the state afterwards. That anything can happen and government has no power to stop that.
wippler··on What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project
"Most of being nice, in a software context, is about being considerate. Not unnecessarily trash talking other people's stuff. Not going out of your way to be a jerk. Try to be helpful. Treat others how you want to be treated" - http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2011-08-19-matz-is-nice-s...

What can I say?

wippler··on "I've got nothing to hide" and other misunderstandings of privacy
Are you sure about this? Reading wikipedia suggests only 90mg or higher unit dosage falls under Schedule II narcotic. You may not be guilty after all :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codeine#North_America

wippler··on The Design of a Signage Typeface
great blog.. i love how each article has a different layout emphasizing the content.
wippler··on The Wiki Game for iOS
thanks.. used the third one!
wippler··on Node-fib: Fast non-blocking fibonacci server
wow.. this is incredibly juvenile. you should need to appreciate other people's opinions too apart from yours
wippler··on Show HN: My weekend project for those who obsessively follow AAPL, GOOG & MSFT
Cool project. Identifying common news and showing them as one that spans across will look awesome
wippler··on Show HN: Readable-HN Chrome extension
could you put a small settings screen to adjust font size for lazy users like me. love the clean look :)
wippler··on Why GitHub Hacks on Side Projects
This is really cool, last week when I got bored of having lunch at the same place, I decided to write an app that picks a place for me but then it kinda got sidetracked. This gave me enough push to do it as my weekend project.
wippler··on New MacBook Pro series
may be they should've relabeled the 13" MBP as Macbook and retired the white Macbook, frankly the specs are quite low except for the CPU.. display at 1280x800 :(

But the 15" and 17" inchers look awesome with quads

wippler··on Microsoft just bought Nokia for $0
I think the post is unnecessarily harsh on both Nokia and Microsoft. Windows Phone is now a lot better and is comparable with iOS/Android, only thing it is lacking is apps.

Nokia making this decision much late in the game clearly knows that Microsoft also came late to the game. It needs MS as much as MS needs Nokia. Together with huge marketing muscle of MS, they can surely make something out of the partnership.

wippler··on EFF Warns That FCC Net Neutrality Rules Are a Bad, Bad Idea
I am pretty sure that Netflix pays to ISP's properly for all the outbound traffic from their data centers, problem mainly originates when a bunch of users from same area hog up the network with streaming services - then they might want to charge those users.

And I don't understand why they want to do that also. They are enjoying near monopoly and are getting paid by the mild users also. ISPs should monitor spikes in usage and adjust the infrastructure accordingly.

wippler··on CSS Code Snippets To Make You A Better Coder
Can anyone point to a good CSS resource with more detailed explanations?
wippler··on Joyent responds to Yahoo's issues with V8 being used under Node.js
"We’ll fork it. And fork it hard. Fork it like it’s never been forked before"
wippler··on The New Rules of the App Store
I agree. Everything should've auto-update. Infact this makes more sense in iOS than Android as Apple reviews the updates also - that way users can be sure that the new update wont do anything fishy.
wippler··on A surprising opinion on the ‘Bing is copying Google’ controversy
"If Bing is using the techniques descriped in this Microsoft technical paper then they should stop. Full stop." http://aclweb.org/anthology/P/P10/P10-1028.pdf

I didn't read the paper (just read the abstract, I know..), could anyone explain what are they doing so bad in that? Thanks.

wippler··on Capturing a Full Day in a Single Photograph
Some discussion about this 3 days ago on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2160446
Page 1 of 2Next →