billjings (u/billjings)

billjings commented on Oxide’s compensation model: how is it going? oxide.computer/blog/oxide... · Posted by u/steveklabnik

tgma · 8 months ago

I guess you've basically proven my point, although it appears I may have been poorly communicating it as if I meant you can afford a yacht or not, which I would certainly think would be deserved, but none of my business to comment on: you have a house/mortgage and your kids are now grown to college aged, but for someone who's not had as long of a career, the low-variance compensation means they have fewer opportunities to get ahead by trying harder and totally bound by equity performance [which actually does vary quite a lot, I'd suspect] so the risk-reward of a flat-comp startup generally favors the more established players in the labor market, unless the amount is somewhat above the range of the base salary they'd command elsewhere (which is the case with cash-rich players like OpenAI).

billjings · 8 months ago

Frankly, when you look around and everyone around you is focused first and foremost on getting rich, that's a good indication that the rich veins have already been mined.

Wealth is built on creating something of value. There is gamesmanship played to acquire that value once it is created, but without the thing itself they are all just picking each others' pockets.

billjings commented on Google to buy Wiz for $32B reuters.com/technology/cy... · Posted by u/uncertainrhymes

breppp · 9 months ago

So many sources yet no source of the actually outrageous claim that Google will use this to illegally siphon customer data

maybe this deal is about a company with a lot of revenue in an area google is heavily investing in: cloud security?

billjings · 9 months ago

Facebook did exactly this with a VPN acquisition. They didn't break into customer data; they just mined it for usage patterns.

So as a pure speculation on Goog's motives, it doesn't sound farfetched enough to call ridiculous. Competitive data is valuable, particularly if you want to strangle the youth in their cradles (or acquire them).

billjings commented on String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians' sfgate.com/bayarea/articl... · Posted by u/davikr

none_to_remain · a year ago

None of the murder victims I'm aware of were transgender?

billjings · a year ago

Target as in, target for recruitment into the group.

The targets for their victims seem chosen...as retaliation to defend their understanding of their own interests.

billjings commented on UnitedHealth overcharged cancer patients for drugs by over 1,000% fortune.com/2025/01/15/ft... · Posted by u/this_weekend

jrflowers · a year ago

UnitedHealth is not an insurance company. They own an insurance company as well as OptumRx, a pharmacy benefit manager, which is described at the very top of this article.

billjings · a year ago

They also are the largest employer of doctors in the United States.

They've essentially constructed their own single-payer health care provider, but instead of being paid for by tax dollars it's a publicly traded company whose primary goal is to increase shareholder value.

billjings commented on USFS decision to halt prescribed burns in California is history repeating cepr.net/us-forest-servic... · Posted by u/danboarder

darknavi · a year ago

> This week, the U.S. Forest Service directed its employees in California to stop prescribed burning “for the foreseeable future,” a directive that officials said is meant to preserve staff and equipment to fight wildfires if needed.

It sounds like it's a resourcing issue, not a change in philosophy. It doesn't change the fact that it won't be happening though.

billjings · a year ago

The real philosophy is in the budget.

billjings commented on Ask HN: Why is Pave legal? · Posted by u/nowyoudont

billjings · a year ago

As described, it is a fair ways away from what RealPage is doing. Specifically:

* RealPage sells raising rents, not just market info.

* RealPage pressures clients into taking their higher rents.

* RealPage also pressure clients to refuse to rent at lower rates for their own narrow economic interest - in other words, they actively seek to circumvent competitive pressure to keep rents high. (edit: to clarify, I mean they discourage lowering rent to attract a renter)

Pave does sound like it gives businesses a leg up over employees in wage negotiations, but until it e.g. starts promising clients that they will be able to pay lower salaries, the critical element of coordination won't be in the mix. Pave gives you the data, but you can still choose to pay above market to attract talent.

billjings commented on Three ways to think about Go channels dolthub.com/blog/2024-06-... · Posted by u/ingve

throwaway894345 · a year ago

I'm confused about why we're comparing GOTO control flow with channels, since they're completely unrelated. I guess you can make a mess with each when you use them inappropriately? With GOTO, you should avoid it because there are better options (notably, conditional statements).

Unlike GOTO, there isn't really a better alternative for synchronizing parallel programs. Parallel programming (or even concurrent programming, for that matter) is just harder than sequential programming, and if you don't know what you're doing (regardless of whether you use channels or not) you're going to end up with a mess. Channels help to tame parallel programs, but they can't compensate for programmers who don't know how to write correct parallel programs.

And while Rust can prevent against data races, data races are a tiny sliver of parallel programming bugs. Far more common are race conditions and deadlocks, against which Rust is powerless.

> I greatly prefer programs that “color” functions sync/async, and that use small state machines to coordinate shared state only when necessary.

Async/await similarly doesn't solve the problem of undisciplined programmers making a mess. If you give undisciplined programmers async/await and shared state, they'll make a mess as easily as they will with goroutines and channels. If you're hiring people who can't be trusted with shared memory parallelism, then you have to take away parallelism or mutability or you have to train them to write correct parallel programs.

billjings · a year ago

> I'm confused about why we're comparing GOTO control flow with channels, since they're completely unrelated. I guess you can make a mess with each when you use them inappropriately? With GOTO, you should avoid it because there are better options (notably, conditional statements).

Notes On Structured Concurrency goes into some depth on this comparison:

https://vorpus.org/blog/notes-on-structured-concurrency-or-g...

If channel sends are being used as invocations, then this description can apply just as well to channels as it does to the go statement.

billjings commented on Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F sfchronicle.com/bayarea/a... · Posted by u/rntn

dventimi · 2 years ago

I do. It'll be easier to keep the fleet on a cleaning schedule, and won't be left to the whims of individuals.

billjings · 2 years ago

I have a good friend who's a Lyft driver. According to him, all drivers are rated on cleanliness by passengers; if you're dinged for a weird smell, there are lasting financial consequences (even if it was for reasons outside of your control, e.g. using a Lyft provided rental while repairing from a traffic accident).

We'll see how Waymo handles it! It will definitely be Waymo's problem to solve, though.

billjings commented on Show HN: Pls Fix – Hire big tech employees to appeal account suspensions plsfix.co/... · Posted by u/jpdpeters

maxrmk · 2 years ago

On one hand: an action virtually guaranteed to get you fired.

On the other: $150

I used to work at FB and they have a team that tries to catch employees selling access like this. I can’t imagine risking that for what is essentially an hours pay for most tech roles there.

billjings · 2 years ago

> I used to work at FB and they have a team that tries to catch employees selling access like this.

For folks who aren't familiar with FB, maxrmk is absolutely right. But some more color would probably help:

When one of the privacy teams discovers a violation of this kind, the employee is generally called into a meeting with HR and fired the very next day.

A friend of mine did this inadvertently - just trying to help a real personal friend with an account issue, and inadvertently accessed a system in a way he didn't realized was a privacy violation. Months later, he was investigating data for a project, which triggered an audit. They walked him out the door the next day after finding it.

So: yeah. This is not a very good business idea.

billjings commented on So We've Got a Memory Leak stevenharman.net/so-we-ha... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

hedora · 2 years ago

By far, the worst memory leak I’ve ever had to debug involved a cycle like you are describing, but it was in a Java program (swing encourages/encouraged such leaks, and “memory leaks in java are impossible”, so there weren’t decent heap profilers at the time).

For the last few decades, I’ve been writing c/c++/rust code, and the tooling there makes it trivial to find such things.

One good approach is to use a C++ custom allocator (that wraps a standard allocator) that gets a reference to a call site specific counter (or type specific counter) at compile time. When an object is allocated it increments the counter. When deleted, it decrements.

Every few minutes, it logs the top 100 allocation sites, sorted by object count or memory usage. At process exit, return an error code if any counters are non-zero.

With that, people can’t check in memory leaks that are encountered by tests.

In practice, the overhead of such a thing is too low to be measured, so it can be on all the time. That lets it find leaks that only occur in customer environments.

billjings · 2 years ago

But circular references don't leak in Java. You have to have a GC root (e.g. a static, or something in your runtime) somewhere pointing at the thing to actually leak it.

There is one case where a "circular" reference can appear to cause a leak that I know of: WeakHashMap. But that's because the keys, which are indeed cleaned up at some point once the associated value is GC'd, are themselves strongly retained references.