brian-armstrong (u/brian-armstrong)

brian-armstrong commented on Compaq’s Rod Canion broke IBM's hold on the PC market every.to/feeds/b0e329f304... · Posted by u/vinnyglennon

brian-armstrong · 20 days ago

> By March 1989, however, Hugh Barnes—now Compaq’s vice president of engineering—started to notice that Intel’s best chip people were being reassigned to other teams. Some quiet investigation revealed the cause. Sun Microsystems, one of Intel’s rivals, had announced chips based on a new design approach called reduced-instruction-set computing (RISC). For Intel, this presented a threat to its higher-end, large computer and mainframe markets. It was now shifting to focus on that threat instead.

> At a hotel room in Silicon Valley, in April 1989, Canion and Gates met with Andy Grove and Intel chair Gordon Moore to try to persuade them to stick with 486 development. After considerable back and forth, Intel reversed course. The new chip launched in late 1989.

Could this be the moment that forever saddled us (and Intel) with the cumbersome legacy of x86? It seems like a great cultural win for PCs in the moment, but in hindsight this decision almost feels backwards somehow.

brian-armstrong commented on MacBook Pro Insomnia manuel.bernhardt.io/posts... · Posted by u/speckx

teejmya · a month ago

I've worked around this problem on each mac laptop I've owned over the years by configuring "hibernate on lid close."

When I open the lid of the mac it takes maybe 20-30 seconds to resume. I consider this a small price to pay in exchange for reliable sleep and less battery drain with the lid closed.

If you want to try this, run in the terminal:

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 25

If you don't like it, you can restore defaults with:

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 3

brian-armstrong · a month ago

Does hibernate play nice with FDE? I know in Linux there are varying caveats around committing memory to disk wrt disk encryption

brian-armstrong commented on In a major reversal, the world bank is backing mega dams (2024) e360.yale.edu/features/wo... · Posted by u/prmph

brian-armstrong · a month ago

Dammed if you do, damned if you don't

brian-armstrong commented on NIH is cheaper than the wrong dependency lewiscampbell.tech/blog/2... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

fireattack · a month ago

What's NIH

brian-armstrong · a month ago

National Institute of Health

brian-armstrong commented on ICE test train reaches speeds of up to 405.0 km/h deutschebahn.com/de/press... · Posted by u/doener

brian-armstrong · 2 months ago

Hehe, Testfahrten

brian-armstrong commented on JavaScript Trademark Update deno.com/blog/deno-v-orac... · Posted by u/thebeardisred

nailer · 2 months ago

If Oracle win we rename the language JS. JS stands for nothing.

brian-armstrong · 2 months ago

We can just start calling it by its full Christian name, Eczemascript

brian-armstrong commented on P-Hacking in Startups briefer.cloud/blog/posts/... · Posted by u/thaisstein

Jemaclus · 2 months ago

> This isn't academic nit-picking. It's how medical research works when lives are on the line. Your startup's growth deserves the same rigor.

But does it, really? A lot of companies sell... well, let's say "not important" stuff. Most companies don't cost peoples' lives when you get it wrong. If you A/B test user signups for a startup that sells widgets, people aren't living or dying based on the results. The consequences of getting it wrong are... you sell fewer widgets?

While I understand the overall point of the post -- and agree with it! -- I do take issue with this particular point. A lot of companies are, arguably, _too rigorous_ when it comes to testing.

At my last company, we spent 6 weeks waiting for stat sig. But within 48 hours, we had a positive signal. Conversion was up! Not statistically significant, but trending in the direction we wanted. But to "maintain rigor," we waited 6 weeks before turning it... and the final numbers were virtually the same as the 48 hour numbers.

Note: I'm not advocating stopping tests as soon as something shows trending in the right direction. The third scenario on the post points this out as a flaw! I do like their proposal for "peeking" and subsequent testing.

But, really, let's just be realistic about what level of "rigor" is required to make decisions. We aren't shooting rockets into space. We're shipping software. We can change things if we get them wrong. It's okay. The world won't end.

IMO, the right framing here is: your startup deserves to be as rigorous as is necessary to achieve its goals. If its goals are "stat sig on every test," then sure, treat it like someone might die if you're wrong. (I would argue that you have the wrong goals, in this case, but I digress...)

But if your goals are "do no harm, see if we're heading in the right vector, and trust that you can pivot if it turns out you got a false positive," then you kind of explicitly don't need to treat it with the same rigor as a medical test.

brian-armstrong · 2 months ago

The thing is though, you're just as likely to be not improving things.

I think we can realize another reason to just ship it. Startups need to be always moving. You need to keep turning the wheel to help keep everyone busy and keep them from fretting about your slow growth or high churn metrics. Startups need lots of fighting spirit. So it's still probably better to ship it rather than admit defeat and suffer bad vibes.

brian-armstrong commented on How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not charity.wtf/2025/06/08/on... · Posted by u/zdw

BobbyTables2 · 3 months ago

Worse than Python (without Typing)?

brian-armstrong · 3 months ago

100% yes. Python mostly encourages simple, stupid code. Code that you can still read while 2 beers in. Rails, on the other hand, encourages being as clever as possible at all times. Forget about local side effects when any part of the codebase can just reach in and patch another part of the codebase.

brian-armstrong commented on Low-background Steel: content without AI contamination blog.jgc.org/2025/06/low-... · Posted by u/jgrahamc

gojomo · 3 months ago

Look, we just need to add some new 'planes' to Unicode - that mirror all communicatively-useful characters, but with extra state bits for...

guaranteed human output - anyone who emits text in these ranges that was AI generated, rather than artisanally human-composed, goes straight to jail.

for human eyes only - anyone who lets any AI train on, or even consider, any text in these ranges goes straight to jail. Fnord, "that doesn't look like anything to me".

admittedly AI generated - all AI output must use these ranges as disclosure, or – you guessed it - those pretending otherwise go straight to jail.

Of course, all the ranges generate visually-indistinguishable homoglyphs, so it's a strictly-software-mediated quasi-covert channel for fair disclosure.

When you cut & paste text from various sources, the provenance comes with it via the subtle character encoding differences.

I am only (1 - epsilon) joking.

brian-armstrong · 3 months ago

Seems kind of excessive to send them to jail when the prisons are already pretty full. Might be more productive to do summary executions?

brian-armstrong commented on GitHub MCP exploited: Accessing private repositories via MCP invariantlabs.ai/blog/mcp... · Posted by u/andy99

Aurornis · 3 months ago

Anonymous Internet comment section stories are confused and/or lie a lot, too. I’m not sure why you have so much faith in them.

Also, this conspiracy requires coordination across two separate companies (GitHub for the repos and the LLM providers requesting private repos to integrate into training data). It would involve thousands or tens of thousands of engineers to execute. All of them would have to keep the conspiracy quiet.

It would also permanently taint their frontier models, opening them up to millions of lawsuits (across all GitHub users) and making them untouchable in the future, guaranteeing their demise as soon a single person involved decided to leak the fact that it was happening.

I know some people will never trust any corporation for anything and assume the worst, but this is the type of conspiracy that requires a lot of people from multiple companies to implement and keep quiet. It also has very low payoff for company-destroying levels of risk.

So if you don’t trust any companies (or you make decisions based on vague HN anecdotes claiming conspiracy theories) then I guess the only acceptable provider is to self-host on your own hardware.

brian-armstrong · 3 months ago

With the current admin I don't think they really have any legal exposure here. If they ever do get caught, it's easy enough to just issue some flimsy excuse about ACLs being "accidentally" omitted and then maybe they stop doing it for a little while.

This is going to be the same disruption as Airbnb or Uber. Move fast and break things. Why would you expect otherwise?