News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

marshmallowmad

Re:When did people stop being drunk all the time? on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @01:52AM (#36873593)
I’m pretty sure the average daily gluten intake of this person is much higher than that from 3 beers..
Re:From Deep to Long Learning on Sunday April 09, 2023 @12:53PM (#35504400)
I don’t quite understand why context length needs to keep growing. It seems to me like many tasks (e.g. customizing your LLM on your own data) would benefit from the model doing some sort of sped up fine-tuning on any prompt that gets added. That way we don’t have to find all these hacks to find the most relevant context and repeat the same info in prompts. Curious if anyone has insight here as this has caused me some confusion lately!
Re:Chess Is Booming and Our Servers Are Struggling on Monday January 23, 2023 @04:51PM (#34495596)
I prefer their analysis over lichess’s and I think they are a lot more feature rich. Also, I think the company in general is pretty good at chess? I’m an 1800 elo player for reference.
Re:Turn Your Best Programmers into Managers on Saturday December 24, 2022 @11:45AM (#34118506)
How does a non technical manager know who is doing bad or good work? I wouldn’t want to work on a team where the person in charge of my compensation can’t understand if I’m doing decent vs. great work. Leads to the best folks getting frustrated and leaving over time. Mediocrity is all that will remain if manager’s can’t understand the work their team is doing and the obstacles they face.
Re:Laws of Software Estimation for Complex Work on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @02:24AM (#34062715)
I don’t agree that trying to estimate things is bad as the author suggests. If you are perceptive and want to get better at it, then there’s a decent chance you will. Estimates also help us timebox work. They can help us give an objective view of when we should start exploring functionality tradeoffs. This article sounds like a lot of whining about not wanting to do something because it’s difficult.

I will say I think that holding people to estimates is not fair because it doesn’t necessarily correlate with productivity/value added. When asked for estimates my general rule is: take a conservative estimate and double it.

Re:Show HN: This Hacker News Does Not Exist on Saturday December 03, 2022 @04:16PM (#33847439)
Yeah this one is right - the only issue is it’s an understatement
Re:Advent of Code 2022 on Thursday December 01, 2022 @01:50AM (#33813151)
First day was a pretty fun start. Just heard about this for the first time this year and going to give it a go.

Tangential question - why does the HN crowd hate these types of questions in interviews but apparently likes to do them on their own time? Different folks answering to different posts? Honestly curious.

Re:The fall of Sam Bankman-Fried is crypto’s Enron moment on Tuesday November 15, 2022 @11:37PM (#33618912)
I would pay to hear some of these conversations of him asking for more money right now. I wonder if people just start laughing or try to tell him the truth.
Re:The fall of Sam Bankman-Fried is crypto’s Enron moment on Tuesday November 15, 2022 @11:33PM (#33618882)
It appears that he may have upped his dosage. And him acting like he can recover is from the drugs. To act like this after clearly committing crimes visible by tens of millions of people, and just getting torn apart for it online. I wish I was this confident!
Re:The fall of Sam Bankman-Fried is crypto’s Enron moment on Tuesday November 15, 2022 @11:22PM (#33618806)
He seems to be deep into denial. I can’t imagine what’s going on in his mind right now.
Ok. I saw this interview months ago and thought something looked off. Now I swear he is playing LoL in this interview: https://youtu.be/xVaSSTEHB0Y
SBF has turned out to be a complete psychopath. It’s scary. Someone who was quite trusted in a number of circles turns out to be a liar, fraud, and just knowingly stealing from retail.

He should be behind bars.

I’m not convinced they’re going under. Is Alameda in trouble? Maybe, but FTX is basically having a bank run. Just because things are slow processing doesn’t mean they’re going under. SBF came out and claimed to have all customer deposits.
Re:Body Doubling on Sunday November 06, 2022 @03:03PM (#33496463)
And I respect your view that generally workers are more productive at home. We can agree to disagree there. Also, work commutes in traffic are indeed silly.

This post is about body doubling, which happens far more in offices. That is a fact. Your reply makes it seem like that’s not the case. But, I agree with your gripes about in office work, which is why I work from home :)

Edit: my point is that what’s best for you, me, and other individuals may not be best for organizations. Do I care about organizations more than myself? No, but it’s at least something to recognize because I still care for some of them.

Re:Body Doubling on Sunday November 06, 2022 @01:39PM (#33495689)
I agree with you that productivity for managers versus programmers is different, but my view is that the majority of workers do more work in person and people actually really enjoy being productive! The “body doubling” that goes on in offices is IMHO an underestimated phenomenon, especially for new employees coming into the workforce. For remote work to be a permanent choice, I think we need to be a bit more honest about the benefits of being in-office. Giving employees the choice is very important to me, just trying to give my perspective.
Re:Body Doubling on Sunday November 06, 2022 @12:59PM (#33495310)
I think this is the reason why in-person work environments will be more productive over the longer term for any larger organization. Not saying I’m against remote work, as I actually prefer it myself.
Do you trust a single Rasperry Pi over a secured blockchain? If so, I think we can agree to disagree.