nthj

6 ms·

1.
by nthj 7mo ago
We didn’t fire all our developers when we invented compilers either, and for much the same reason we didn’t stop hiring laborers when we first built ships and established overseas trade routes: business will always expand to meet its reach
2.
by nthj 7mo ago
We’ve had the sycophant problem for as long as people have held power over other people, and the answer has always been “put 3-5 workers in a room and make them compete for the illusion of favor.” I have been doing this with coding agents a
3.
by nthj 8mo ago
A big difference between crypto and AI is around how crypto could paint a better future once we rebuilt most of our transactional infrastructure and persuaded a quorum to move onto it, and how I personally am benefiting from AI day by day t
4.
by nthj 4y ago
SVB has a ton of bonds that mature (will be cashable) after ten years, but nobody wants to pay for them today because they can make more money placing their cash in a savings account. For a silly analogy, imagine if you had a bunch of cash
5.
by nthj 4y ago
Rails can easily serve up pages in <100ms. If you do have an endpoint that is CPU-bound to where you can’t meet your SLA goals, you can serve up just that endpoint in Rust or Golang. But that’s rare. Usually what happens at scale is that
6.
by nthj 4y ago
Git and/or feature flags exist for this reason. Adding a network layer isn't the fundamental insight here, but it can cause additional consequences.
7.
by nthj 4y ago
> we need to store enough energy to power the whole country for at least 2 weeks before we can get rid of fossil fuels. Maybe this is self-obvious, but "get rid of" seems to be carrying a lot of weight in that statement. I pers
8.
by nthj 4y ago
I don't know your culture or your boss, but I have worked with people who could not code their way out of a paper bag, and round-robbined there way through DMs to "pair" to complete their assigned work. These people were high
9.
by nthj 4y ago
I have at least a thousand hours into Factorio. Factorio has provided a sandbox for me to visualize and acquire skills on managing bottlenecks in data flows; skills that I have and am applying as the point software engineer to resolve criti
10.
by nthj 4y ago
There's an episode near the end of The West Wing where it's C. J. Cregg's first day as Chief of Staff. Of course, this same day, a national security emergency has arisen involving weapons-grade plutonium. The whole day goes b
11.
by nthj 4y ago
Part of the problem is we use unintentionally vague terms like "performance." What does that mean? Bandwidth? Reliability? Scalability? Something we can fix later right? That's what all executives and—frankly—most engineers h
12.
by nthj 4y ago
“I have an idea for an app”
13.
by nthj 4y ago
That’s a great scene. For anyone who hasn’t seen the movie, I might recommend skipping the clip and watching the full film! If you’re on HN, odds are you would enjoy it, and it has an impressive cast.
14.
by nthj 4y ago
The 100x impact isn’t usually with proofs of concept, it’s with surgery. 1,000 lawyers would likely never identify and execute the life-saving graft, all while avoiding side effects that eventually kill the patient. A surgical ten lines of
15.
by nthj 4y ago
I think in many contexts, “I think” means “this is complex, but I am prepared to articulate my position using logic,” and “This feels” means “my subconscious, experience, or instincts are telling me this is wrong, but I can’t yet articulate
16.
by nthj 4y ago
Different blockchains could still agree how to exchange messages and transactions relevant to that exchange. I must have consensus with my employer on how I will be paid, but my employer has no business in my agreement with my landlord. Yet
17.
by nthj 5y ago
Slack has saved messages. I use this as an inbox/todo list. Any message that takes longer than two minutes to reply to, I move to my actual todo list and un-save the message.
18.
by nthj 5y ago
I’ve found people often overlook that while code can be very quickly deleted, gigabytes or terabytes of production data is a huge pain to ETL later. Investing in the data model upfront has huge payoffs for your code and avoiding ETLs later
19.
by nthj 5y ago
AWS lets me provision servers all over the world at any point, which is required by customers both for compliance and for latency SLAs. Even billion dollar companies are going to find that a huge lift to build out themselves, and they have
20.
by nthj 5y ago
I have a 2021 Honda. Yes, CarPlay is basically the iOS philosophy of “full screen touch interface with Siri that becomes wholly focused on whichever app you’re using.” Maps, Spotify, and Messages are the 3 I mainly use, but I could download
21.
by nthj 5y ago
> Companies like to control those things I mean, this is probably true, but in enterprise software, companies are paid by their customers to control those things and enforce various compliance standards like SOC-II. The difference betwee
22.
by nthj 5y ago
A lot of companies. https://www.levels.fyi/charts.html#
23.
by nthj 5y ago
I’ve seen a few researchers raise the idea that moving this scanning to the client is effectively a political prerequisite for enabling iCloud E2E, so I suspect that may be coming.
24.
by nthj 5y ago
Just to add, I have a 2021 Honda, and disabling this functionality is a 1-button-press toggle on the dash to the left of the steering wheel. Not mandatory.
25.
by nthj 5y ago
Anyone inclined to argue against this could maybe sink 1,000 hours into Factorio. The game is simple enough to require 1-person-engineer, but complex enough that the player must both solve low-level problems AND be The Eye of Mordor. If you
26.
by nthj 5y ago
I think observed only along the axis of the increase in remote work as a percentage of available software jobs this may true, but may not properly account for the continual geometric increase in demand for highly skilled software developers
27.
by nthj 5y ago
Also I see trains as network design. You have to commit to the train size upfront (network block size) and you can hit throughput limits
28.
by nthj 5y ago
My day job is getting alignment and approvals on fixing things. Factorio is deciding to fix something and then doing it.
29.
by nthj 5y ago
Yeah, the 10x debate always seems to be just a disagreement of terms. Are we talking about junior engineers shoving lines of code through the JIRA backlog with no negotiation over what the most effective things to be working on are? Probabl
30.
by nthj 5y ago
I believe the confusion is over the term "buy." In San Francisco/US terminology, a 25 y/o is likely to rent or lease an apartment. Buying would more likely be of a condo (or a house, as you mentioned.)

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