Viewing profile — nthj

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 …

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 ill…

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…

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 accou…

Rails can easily serve up pages in Usually what happens at scale is that the SQL database starts slowing down as more data is loaded in. Partitioning, indexes and painful refactori…

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.

> 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 car…

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 complet…

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…

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 …

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 wha…

“I have an idea for an app”

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…

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 effect…

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 instin…

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 em…

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.

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 upf…

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 f…

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, Spotif…

> 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 variou…

A lot of companies. https://www.levels.fyi/charts.html#

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.…

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.

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 bo…