avilay (u/avilay) - Readit News

avilay commented on I beg you to follow Crocker's Rules, even if you will be rude to me lr0.org/blog/p/crocker/... · Posted by u/ghd_

pardon_me · 15 hours ago

> Being able to be brutally honest with each other about our misunderstandings

Being specific to misunderstandings is an element that's overlooked.

This advice tends to be taken onboard (often to extremes) by those who take it as a free pass to just say whatever comes to their mind, whenever they like, without explaining how they arrived there. Any excuse to avoid putting in effort to be understood or be conscious of the fact that human beings have emotions.

We are not robots.

I'm glad commenters here are aware of this, as HN sentiment is getting close to the point of treating each other as machines, whilst we train bots to have better communication skill such as empathetic reflection, and allow them more creativity and freedom.

Some people are more patient and sympathetic towards computers making mistakes and not following commands perfectly, or being too verbose, than we are with our fellow human beings.

avilay · 15 hours ago

Totally agree with this! Being "kindly honest" is way better than being "brutally honest". Being honest and direct is important of course. I have often found that delivering constructive criticism in the so-called sandwich manner often obfuscates the message, so delivering it directly is much better. However, being kind to the receiver of the feedback by having empathy for them and supporting them as they process that feedback will help land that message far more effectively than being "brutal" about it.

avilay commented on So you want to write an “app” (2025) arcanenibble.github.io/so... · Posted by u/jmusall

judah · 5 days ago

Increasingly, there just aren't enough incentives to write native apps.

This isn't a criticism of the article, but rather a tangential observation about why so many people turn to the web instead of using native toolkits to build apps, and why so many of native toolkits feel uninspired and lacking any real innovation.

If I choose to build an app using web tech, I get:

- Universal distribution

- No download and install process

- No "please wait while we update this"

- Users can easily share my app

- Users can link to individual pages within my app

- Users get autofill for forms and passwords and credit cards

- Users can block ads

- Users can scale and zoom my content

- Users can find text on any page in my app

- No "SmartScan couldn't verify if this app is safe" because it wasn't signed with a cert.

- A clearer security model: web apps prompt the user for access to e.g. microphone, camera, or secure disk locations. Native apps can kinda do whatever they want.

Why would I give up all those things to write a native app? A knee-jerk answer is often "performance", but honestly, most web apps load faster than their native counterparts these days.

Another common answer is app store distribution, but web apps can now be published to the major app stores without Electron or other frameworks. Google Play and Microsoft Store both support PWAs, and iOS App Store supports web apps via web view.

There are some scenarios where a native app is warranted. For example, hooking into some native component or OS API; e.g. HealthKit on iOS. But for many apps, the web is good enough.

avilay · 5 days ago

This hit a nerve as I am in the middle of developing a webapp for myself using NiceGUI. I find CSS, especially its layout framework, pretty confusing and sometimes downright intimidating to work with. `inline`, `block`, `flex`, `grid` seem reasonable when you read about them. But when using it, especially within frameworks when flexboxes are nested within grids which are nested within flexboxes and so on, it becomes hard to reason about. And then you throw in media-queries in the mix and it becomes even more dense.

avilay commented on Jim Whitehurst to step down as IBM President newsroom.ibm.com/IBM-Lead... · Posted by u/sweettea

BrandoElFollito · 5 years ago

One of my recent revelations was when I told my teen children "... a company like IBM".

To what they said "what is IBM??"

They know all the large tech companies but that one was a surprise to them, they had a look at Wikipedia and said "ah yes, it was a great company in your times".

Time to get some wine.

avilay · 5 years ago

Lots of nostalgia in this thread. However, I recently started playing around with IBM's quantum computer cloud service and it has been by far the best experience compared to other players. Who knows, that might be their come back story!

avilay commented on Building a personal website in 2021 origami.kosmulski.org/blo... · Posted by u/mkosmul

avilay · 5 years ago

Surprised not to see ghost in here. They have a paid managed version at https://ghost.org and it is fairly easy to set up with any of the public cloud providers. I have set mine up with Digital Ocean (https://ghost.org/docs/install/digitalocean/).

avilay commented on Ask HN: Which of the following ML topics do you wish had good tutorials? · Posted by u/avilay

p1esk · 5 years ago

I'd be interested in Distributed Deep Learning with PyTorch, but only if you really know what you're talking about. I wouldn't want you to repeat what is already on pytorch.org on this topic.

avilay · 5 years ago

Cool, thanks for the response. Yes, I do find that the PyTorch tutorials on distributed training are a work-in-progress.

I was thinking of starting with a basic implementation of the original paper by Jeff Dean, et. al. on synchronized data parallelism, implement basic model parallelism, explain why async parallelism works, do a simple implementation of HOGWILD!, and finally do "hello world" training using existing distributed training systems like Horovod, Distributed PyTorch, RayLib, Microsoft DeepSpeed, etc.

avilay commented on Buy on Google is now open and commission-free blog.google/products/shop... · Posted by u/hhua_

avilay · 6 years ago

Does anybody else think this is in response to Apple's privacy crackdown on third party tracking data? If you buy on Buy, then you are still first party for Google and they can still get your signals.

avilay commented on VCs Promised to Help Black Founders – My Experience Shows a Different Reality thebolditalic.com/vcs-hav... · Posted by u/gammarator

m0zg · 6 years ago

VCs invest into your track record and the ability to put together and retain a good team. "Ex-Google" is a good signal that the person can at the very least _technically_ do what they are promising to do, once they take the cash.

What's your track record?

Nobody has ever promised that money will be given for phenotype traits alone.

avilay · 6 years ago

And given that a majority of "Ex-Google" engineers are males, where does that leave a woman (or any under-represented group) founder?

She is not asking for money "just because" she is a woman. She is asking for a fair chance. And we need to give folks from under-represented communities a more than fair chance to combat inherent selection bias.

avilay commented on VCs Promised to Help Black Founders – My Experience Shows a Different Reality thebolditalic.com/vcs-hav... · Posted by u/gammarator

avilay · 6 years ago

Even if her business idea was bad, or her app didn't have traction, or her LI profile was not impressive enough, she deserved, at the very least, the following:

  * Access to VCs, she had to use her husband's email to get access.
  * Some constructive and personalized feedback. This does not have to be very detailed, a couple of no-BS sentences will do the trick.

I get that VCs are too busy to respond to each and every email they get, but they, and every one of us in the tech sector who is in a position to do so, needs to walk the extra mile to pull in people from under-represented communities who are trying to get in.