khalilravanna (u/khalilravanna)

khalilravanna commented on The cultural decline of literary fiction oyyy.substack.com/p/the-c... · Posted by u/libraryofbabel

default-kramer · 2 months ago

Not so much with video games. The industry is so young that most of those "classics" are actually much less fun than I remember them. (Super Mario World does hold up very well though.) But since you mention Persona, consider how much better Persona 3 Portable is than Persona 3 FES. Game design has come a long way, and I believe it still has a long way to go. Not to mention the technical improvements that allow a game like Uncharted to exist, which cannot be compared to any 16-bit or earlier game.

khalilravanna · 2 months ago

I have to disagree. Evidence for this being wrong is right on many games websites a la Backloggd with plenty of people rating older games very highly, more than many new releases. More evidence: numerous games being re-released with mainly surface-level changes (older Final Fantasy’s, arguably Oblivion Remastered).

While I absolutely agree some games age like milk (IMO Persona 3 FES/Portable mechanically play like garbage and P4 ain’t much better) there are many games that were either the pinnacle of their of their craft in pretty fundamental ways or were just doing very odd, interesting things that no one tries to do anymore (outside indies). JRPGs are honestly the big genre I see for aging well, but there’s a bunch of PS1/PS2 era games having a big second life with the younger generation.

khalilravanna commented on The 20 year old PSP can now connect to WPA2 WiFi Networks wololo.net/2025/02/14/the... · Posted by u/zdw

UnlockedSecrets · 7 months ago

Damn it's been 20 years since the PSP.... loved that thing growing up.... So much Monster Hunter Freedom Unite... grabbed mine off the shelf after all this time just to feel it again and the battery is almost 1 inch thick.... Guess it's time to go through some of the old electronics and recycle the batteries before they either off gas, or catch something on fire...

khalilravanna · 7 months ago

Same. Mine had expanded so much it almost popped the battery panel off. Thankfully replacements are quite cheap! I went through and replaced old ones on my PSPs, DSs, etc and now keep em all charged (with a mess of cables) to hopefully keep em semi healthy and not cause a bonfire in my closet.

khalilravanna commented on "We ran out of columns" jimmyhmiller.github.io/ug... · Posted by u/poidos

compiler-guy · a year ago

It's hard for those who came into the discipline in the past twenty years to realize just how much things have changed around version control and building.

Joel Spolsky released the "Joel Test" for determining if the software team you were interviewing had good practices in 2000. One of the requirements was that they used version control. Not all that many teams actually did. Especially during the dotcom craze.

Today, passing the Joel Test is table stakes, and it's the rare shop that doesn't. But it took years for that sort of thing to become ubiquitous.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...

khalilravanna · a year ago

This reminds me of my first software job, an internship in college in 2012 building an application from scratch to facilitate evaluating teachers. It was basically an app to allow people to create a form for their school’s evaluation criteria and then submit those forms. Sounds super straightforward, right? It was. The catch was our team was 2 CS undergrad, a masters CS student, and a high school student. All with no professional experience. We knew nothing. Well kind of but more on that in a second. Our manager was absolutely non technical. In fact they were the second highest person in the company (fairly small company) and were managing our project and a bunch of other stuff at the company. And somehow with almost 0 oversight we built a functional Django application that the business was able to sell and make money from. My favorite highlights were 1) the codebase was initially shared over FTP (“Hey you’re not editing file X, right? Oh you are? Ah woops I just overwrote all your changes.”) till someone intelligently suggested “Uhhh Git?” 2) the actual best programmer amongst us was the high schooler. They suggested Django, picked the DB, they suggested using Celery to speed up async work, Redis for caching, and yes, “Uhh Git?” In retrospect the only reason we succeeded was because of them. They were like top 5 on the stack overflow Code Golf site IIRC. 3) My interview was basically showing my aforementioned manager who had never coded in his life a project I worked on at school and him being like “Yeah looks good. You’re hired.”

With 10 years of hindsight, I cringe thinking back to all the bad decisions I pushed for and the no-doubt terrible code I wrote. But I also marvel and look back fondly at being given a shot and being in an environment where I could just build something from the ground up and learn everything soup to nuts on the job. God bless whoever inherited that codebase.

khalilravanna commented on Ask HN: Is it possible to make FAANG salaries without working there? · Posted by u/zer0sand0nes

alephnerd · a year ago

> then $1mil in stock for 4 years

Most FAANG engineers are NOT getting $1M stock grants.

That is the stock grant for Google L6-7, Amazon Principal SDE, and Microsoft L67.

These are engineering levels comparable to Director of Engineering or Engineering Manager and extremely rare.

> a Staff Engineer at an avg startup might get $250k base salary, in a HCOL area and maybe a 10-20% bonus

This is the norm at FAANG as well. Just add a $60-150k/yr stock grant, which is normal at other public companies in the Bay Area and Seattle tech scenes as well.

khalilravanna · a year ago

This is incorrect information. Check out levels.fyi. The average stock grant for Meta E6 is well over $1M/4years. Just one example. Plenty of data on other companies offers there.

khalilravanna commented on Rabbit failed to properly reset keys: emails can be sent from rabbit.tech domain rabbitu.de/articles/secur... · Posted by u/davidbarker

khalilravanna · a year ago

Never heard of this. So I went to the website to find out what it is. "Your pocket companion" the top of the website reads. Ok, don't know what that means. Scroll down "push to talk button", "conversational interface", and some other hardware features. Still no idea what it's for. They have a keynote video. I press play. It starts with them showing a bunch of press coverage and social media. Still no description of what it is. Not even a demo of what it does. I got several minutes into the video and it's all acting like I already know what it is. I've completely lost interest. Mystifyingly bad marketing.

khalilravanna commented on AMD CEO Lisa Su reminisces about designing the PS3's infamous Cell processor tomshardware.com/tech-ind... · Posted by u/rbanffy

khalilravanna · a year ago

My biggest lament with the PS3 is the forward incompatibility making many great games locked to the platform (MGS4, Demon’s Souls, etc.). Meanwhile in Xbox land there are *633* 360 games you can play on any new Xbox by just slipping the disc in. Now some of this is no doubt due to differing approaches to business by the corporate masters but from what I’ve read a lot of it is the unique and befuddling architecture of the PS3.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_backward-compatible_...

khalilravanna commented on Cybertruck Owner Breaks His Finger Trying to Show Vehicle Is Safe gizmodo.com/cybertruck-vi... · Posted by u/nickthegreek

khalilravanna · a year ago

I wonder if the engineer working on this thought “I wonder if someone on YouTube will use this to try and become famous by breaking their finger? Surely not…”

An algorithm that closes the door harder if it meets resistance seems a bit insane, right? What if there’s something fragile? Is this how these auto closing doors normally work? God I’m happy I drive a dumb manual car with no real electronics other than a radio.

khalilravanna commented on How Hertz’s bet on Teslas went sideways bloomberg.com/news/featur... · Posted by u/helsinkiandrew

jordank · a year ago

Having rented a Tesla via Hertz last year, here are some quick remembrances:

-The car was not charged fully when I rented it.

-I had to park in a pay parking lot at a shopping mall to charge the car. Charging to 100% cost me $7 but took 30 minutes of my time.

-The UX of most of the basic car functions was much harder to learn than a typical rental car. I'm sure that Tesla's UX quirks start to feel normal after a while, but I had trouble locating basic car functions and had to text with Tesla-owning friends for advice.

None of these things made me want to rent a Tesla again.

khalilravanna · a year ago

Similar experience.

- Rented Model Y. Show up and no Model Y. “We got a 3”. I’m driving to Vermont with snow but no choice now. “Ok sounds great.”

- Have to stop every couple hours to charge.

- Multiple times the GPS plotted us a route which would have battery hit 0% before arriving to charger. Nerve wracking.

- Most of the full speed charging stations had lines and if we did the slow speed ones our entire weekend trip would be spent charging.

- Regenerative braking is cool till you’re going down hill in snow with all season tires. Then it’s a great way to lock up and slide. Thankfully I’m not a noob. (Also not that I expected winter tires from a rental, even in Boston, but cmon Hertz.)

My biggest takeaway is that if where we stayed had a charger for overnight charging it would have been fine. Without that it was undeniably worse than renting a gas car. We basically had to plan our days around the rental which is a bit insane. I don’t doubt that having one to whip around local with a charger at home would rule but for anything more than short drives I don’t think a rental electric makes sense.

khalilravanna commented on I worry our Copilot is leaving some passengers behind joshcollinsworth.com/blog... · Posted by u/headalgorithm

htfu · 2 years ago

It's a very powerful autocomplete. "It doesn't generate all the code I need in full and if it does I have to poke at it" is just poor criticism. You don't have to press tab and insert everything it suggests. It will usually generate me half a line after typing the first half - that's pretty awesome in my opinion.

If you stick to using it to merely speed-spell out what you were in fact already in the process of writing, and ignore 90% of the terrible crap it proposes, it's a nice productivity boost and has no way to make code worse by itself.

Basically, instead of writing a big comment and then a function signature and expect it to do the rest, just start writing out the function, tab when it gets it, don't when it doesn't, or (most of the time) tab then delete half of it and keep the lines you intended, likely with some small tweak.

Surely LLMs will be able to go so much more and without constant supervision in the future, but we're not there. That doesn't mean they're bad. Especially copilot since it's just there with its suggestions and doesn't require breaking flow to start spelling out in regular text what you're doing.

khalilravanna · 2 years ago

This sounds like it mirrors my usage. Basically treat it like pairing with a really junior dev: assume everything it writes will be wrong and then go from there. If you do that then best case it speeds you up and worst case you waste a little time reading what it wrote that was wrong and ignoring the suggestion and moving on.

khalilravanna commented on Figure out who's leaving the company: dump, diff, repeat rachelbythebay.com/w/2024... · Posted by u/l0b0

khalilravanna · 2 years ago

There was an automated tool like this someone built at Twitter. At first it was cool just to see who the most tenured people were. Then the layoffs happened and it became essential due to the absolute 0 communication happening thanks to the Cool New Management. I remember we used the count of people in one of the default Slack channels to keep track of how many people got the axe. Woof.