redshirtrob (u/redshirtrob)

redshirtrob commented on What is going on right now? catskull.net/what-the-hel... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

HankStallone · 4 months ago

It's annoying when it apologizes for a "misunderstanding" when it was just plain wrong about something. What would be wrong with it just saying, "I was wrong because LLMs are what they are, and sometimes we get things very wrong"?

Kinda funny example: The other day I asked Grok what a "grandparent" comment is on HN. It said it's the "initial comment" in a thread. Not coincidentally, that was the same answer I found in a reddit post that was the first result when I searched for the same thing on DuckDuckGo, but I was pretty sure that was wrong.

So I gave Grok an example: "If A is the initial comment, and B is a reply to A, and C a reply to B, and D a reply to C, and E a reply to D, which is the grandparent of C?" Then it got it right without any trouble. So then I asked: But you just said it's the initial comment, which is A. What's the deal? And then it went into the usual song and dance about how it misunderstood and was super-sorry, and then ran through the whole explanation again of how it's really C and I was very smart for catching that.

I'd rather it just said, "Oops, I got it wrong the first time because I crapped out the first thing that matched in my training data, and that happened to be bad data. That's just how I work; don't take anything for granted."

redshirtrob · 4 months ago

Ummm, are you saying that C is the grandparent of C, or do you have a typo in your example? Sure, the initial comment is not necessarily the grandparent, but in your ABCDE example, A is the grandparent of C, and C is the grandparent of E.

Maybe I'm just misreading your comment, but it has me confused enough to reset my password, login, and make this child comment.

redshirtrob commented on Al Jaffee, king of the Mad Magazine fold-in, has died nytimes.com/2023/04/10/ar... · Posted by u/coloneltcb

bombcar · 3 years ago

Donald Knuth’s first published work was published in Mad Magazine - https://silezukuk.tumblr.com/post/616657913

He lists it as his first published paper: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/vita.pdf

So the arguably most reknown computer scientist of all time got his start in Mad Magazine.

redshirtrob · 3 years ago

Here's a fun fact: There's a typo in his article [0].

I only learned about the typo when I asked him to sign my copy at a Christmas Tree lecture years ago. Instead of signing it, he corrected the typo. He had a mnemonic he used to remember the digits in a Potrzebie. He had the mnemonic stored on a file on his home machine. I watched him ssh to the machine, then fire up Emacs to look up the mnemonic.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potrzebie

redshirtrob commented on Why rails buckle in Britain networkrail.co.uk/stories... · Posted by u/scrlk

jpollock · 3 years ago

This drove me down a rabbit hole, so I thought I would share.

Track used to be separate pieces (seemingly before 1950), but they are now continuous welded rail [1][3]. This was done to allow trains to go faster, and lowers maintenance on the trains. This confused me because trains go "clack clack clack" - I guess that's foley now.

However, it means track is more prone to buckling, since there aren't any expansion joints, like we have on bridges.

Slack is added/removed from the rails by stressing the track during installation [2].

They heat (or mechanically stretch) the track to the length at a chosen "neutral" temperature. Then they install the track. This allows them to calculate the max expansion and contraction the track will see and offset those forces with the sleepers (horizontal forces?) and the ballast (vertical forces?).

The rail can still buckle - this is engineering. If the ballast fails, or the temperatures exceed the maximum allowed for, then it will buckle. It also looks like it must be continually destressed by going along the rail, cutting it and re-welding it? [4]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_track#Continuous_welde...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_stressing

[3] Thermite track welding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uxsFglz2ig

[4] https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/peter-calder-old-methods-keep-...

redshirtrob · 3 years ago

You're correct that the rail needs to continually have its stress managed. This could be cutting the rail and adding a new piece, or removing a bit. This is a fairly labor intensive and costly process so the railroads were very interested in coming up with a way to determine when a buckle or break was most likely.

Buckles and breaks were most common just after a train had left a section of track. The normal approach was to issue slow orders when the temperature got too high (buckle) or too low (break). So there was a lot of interest in finding more accurate ways to determine when slow orders were necessary and to optimize when to add/remove rail.

AFAIK this problem is still outstanding. The product I worked on years ago never quite succeeded. Railroads are a harsh environment.

redshirtrob commented on What should you do with stock options during a recession? every.to/p/what-should-yo... · Posted by u/jrdngonen

redshirtrob · 4 years ago

This is a fine article. It covers a lot of the decisions one must consider when considering stock options. I just think it's a little abstract for folks who haven't lived the experience.

I actually tried to enumerate the scenarios. When I hit five variables I realized the advice would be mostly worthless. That's 32 separate outcomes, some of which are pretty subjective, e.g. do I think this is a viable company?

Nevertheless, I've been down this road a few times. I have some wins and losses. I think this article misses an important point: Exercising is not an all or nothing proposition.

For example: If I join a startup and leave after a year, the difference between my strike price and the 409a price might be non-zero. I can still exercise a percentage of my options to avoid AMT. Maybe I can't exercise all of them without triggering AMT, but chances are I can exercise a fair amount.

If I'm offered an early exercise, I don't have to do 100%. I can do a number that fits my budget. I just have to make sure I file my 83b election form.

redshirtrob commented on Bitcoin losses are piling up for companies that added crypto to balance sheet markets.businessinsider.c... · Posted by u/cheinyeanlim

kobalsky · 4 years ago

>that people like to vilify

Specially here.

Given HN's demographic there's a ton of people that had the opportunity to get into bitcoin in its early stages and make some unthinkable amount of money, private island amount of money, myself included.

Some people cannot come into terms with that and let cognitive dissonance do its work.

Ahh if only I had... better just go back to work.

redshirtrob · 4 years ago

If I'd bought Bitcoin at $1 and it went to $5, I would have sold. If I'd bought at $10 and it went to $20, I would have sold. If I'd bought at $100 and it went to $150, I would have sold. The amount of discipline it would have taken to hold through all the rises and make an obscene amount of money is well beyond my risk profile.

But I get what you're saying.

redshirtrob commented on How James Patterson became the world’s best-selling author newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/samclemens

irrational · 4 years ago

I’ve never read any Patterson books. Anyone have a recommendation of a single one to read to get a feel for what makes him a best seller?

redshirtrob · 4 years ago

Read the first "Alex Cross" book.

It's...not very good, but it's a pretty good example of Patterson's work. I read the first 3-4 books in the Alex Cross series, but gave up after finding no growth or improvement on the character or the author.

I think you'll find his popularity similar to what makes lots of other things popular. His books are rather bland, but not quite boring. He doesn't pack a lot of exposition between the action so the plot moves forward. Unfortunately this often makes the characters seem quite stupid as they rush to action rather than ponder the situation. I find this unrealistic and annoying, especially given Alex Cross's profession.

Obviously, I'm not a fan.

redshirtrob commented on Windows OS, Services and Apps: Network Connection Target Hosts (2021) helgeklein.com/blog/windo... · Posted by u/pmoriarty

GiorgioG · 4 years ago

I tried running Pop OS for the last 3 weeks on my desktop machine. It's got 90% of the polish I expect from a UI/IX - which I can live with. I sadly switched back to Windows yesterday because I couldn't solve the following problem: I use Remote Desktop to get into my work machine - I have a 4K monitor and I couldn't get the scaling to work the way I expected with Remmina or freerdp clients. I had hidpi scaling enabled (150%) in Pop OS, but whenever I would connect to a remote session it would connect at 2560x1440 which made text ever so slightly fuzzy. The only way I could get the behavior I expected was to disable hidpi in PopOS, but then everything is too small.

redshirtrob · 4 years ago

Disclaimer: I know nothing about Windows or RDP.

I was just on a developer group call the other day where another developer from another organization was having weird scaling issues RDPing into the vendor's sandbox. The solution was to adjust some buried registry setting on the remote machine, not fiddle with the local machine. Unfortunately I paid little attention to the details as I rarely RDP and when I do I can tolerate display issues.

I realize this is super vague, but it was so fresh in my brain I had to respond. Maybe someone who actually knows something can provide actual details.

redshirtrob commented on I was forced to be a child star. It was never my dream or my idea wilwheaton.net/2022/05/ye... · Posted by u/Tomte

girvo · 4 years ago

My parents were similar (I played trombone, though I was terrible at it. Or I felt I was anyway).

One interesting thing, is the thing I am best at, I had to sneak and scrape and fight tooth and nail to do, which was learn to program on our PC: the thing that is my life and career now two decades on.

I've been programming my whole life, but all throughout my childhood my parents hated the idea of me spending my time on the computer tapping away at GameMaker v4 and work through QBasic and the C++ book a family friend gave me (I think I was using the Digital Mars compiler at the time?).

redshirtrob · 4 years ago

Hello there. That's eerily familiar. For me it was sports (although I was quite good at baseball and soccer) and Turbo Pascal. My parents, especially my Mom, put up a huge resistance to me programming. I had to promise to try out for the HS basketball team (easily my worst sport) to get a computer. I'd been cut the previous two years so of course I barely made the team that time.

My Mom was convinced I was sitting in the computer room playing games. When I told her: "No, I was programming", she asked what I was programming. Of course I told her I was writing a game, as all kids learning to program were. She responded: "See! Games!" as though she'd somehow proven her point.

But, like you, I've made my career from programming and it's treated me quite well for the most part.

redshirtrob commented on I was forced to be a child star. It was never my dream or my idea wilwheaton.net/2022/05/ye... · Posted by u/Tomte

adriand · 4 years ago

My daughter is 12, she has been taking piano lessons for several years now. About a year-and-a-half ago she started saying that she didn’t want to continue. Hated her lessons, didn’t like her teacher any more, etc. We of course weren’t happy about this because she was playing very well. We do believe in honouring our kids’ wishes, coupled however with the requirement that they meet their commitments: in this case, that my daughter finish that year of instruction. In the meantime we coached her on pressuring herself less and tried to support her.

Over that period, something changed. She started watching YouTube videos of pianists. She heard about the Canadian pianist, Bruce Liu, who won the Chopin piano competition last year, and started saying she wanted to be the first female Canadian to win the same competition. She started practicing all the time, and we got her a new piano, an upright instead of an electronic one. She is still working hard like this.

I don’t know why or how this happened, but I am glad it turned out this way. On the flip side, she also used to take ballet, and was very good at it, but didn’t want to continue that either. Once again we insisted she finish the year, and after that she didn’t want to enrol so we let that lapse.

Parenting is a tricky balancing act!

redshirtrob · 4 years ago

> Parenting is a tricky balancing act!

Indeed it is. Our rule of thumb is that you have to finish what you start, and generally give it two chances. This worked well for me as a child. I wanted to quit everything after the first go, but there were many activities that I loved after the second go, and a few I was happy to be done with (looking at you trombone).

1. Finishing what you start means honoring the promise you made--be it to the teacher/coach, the team, or someone else. Oftentimes other people are depending on you.

2. Giving the activity a second try accounts for the possibility that the problem wasn't with the activity so much as the environment.

To be clear, I only apply these rules for the kids wanting to quit, not the parents. If, as a parent, I observe unacceptable behavior by the coach/teacher, dangerous conditions, etc I will pull the plug. Thankfully that hasn't happened yet.

redshirtrob commented on Stripe App Marketplace marketplace.stripe.com/... · Posted by u/vladikoff

possiblelion · 4 years ago

Somewhat unrelated, but I've found it really difficult to stop a recurring payment with Stripe. A company which has shut (website down and email unresponsive) keeps trying to charge 299 bucks on my card via stripe. No way to stop it either, if the client website is down.

Ripe for failed founders to exploit

redshirtrob · 4 years ago

I had this happen with a fraudulent charge once. To be clear, I don't know that it was a recurring payment with Stripe, but the behavior was similar. It took me about three years and a half dozen new cards to finally kill it.

At one point I asked the customer rep if there was any way to rid myself of this nuisance other than completely closing my account. She responded with the normal "that's your decision, blah, blah, blah...", but I was legitimately asking, not threatening.

I think I said something like: "No, let me be clear: I don't want to close the account. I just don't want to deal with this every six months either. I'm seriously asking if this is the only other recourse because it seems we've tried everything else."

It did get resolved eventually. It was also for a trivial amount so nothing like what you're looking at. It was still very annoying though.