seanhunter (u/seanhunter)

seanhunter commented on Google has eliminated 35% of managers overseeing small teams in past year cnbc.com/2025/08/27/googl... · Posted by u/frays

seanhunter · 21 hours ago

Honestly as an outsider this is the not the most important role for them to have eliminated. I have interacted with google a couple of times in the last few years and the company I work for are considered a priority account that they want to do more business with.

In every meeting, they put forward one engineer (who is usually quite capable) and 6 or 7 spreadsheet-trackers who all come from McKinsey or straight out of MBA school and seem to have no function other than to consume the oxygen in the room. Every meeting another one shows up and introduces themselves as being the person in charge of the relationship (this has become a running joke between me and the CTO).

At one stage I stopped going to one of the weekly meetings that these people put on my calendar so the guy called me up to ask why. I explained I got no value from the meeting as all the meeting was for was so he could read through a spreadsheet that everyone already had shared so if I was interested (which spoiler I wasn’t) I could just read it for myself and didn’t need a 45min meeting. He was most offended and disappeared soon after to be replaced by some other person who introduced themselves as the head of the relationship.

So in short if they get rid of everyone on the client-facing side who describes themselves as head of some relationship they would cut a lot more dead wood than TLMs.

seanhunter commented on 4chan launches legal action against Ofcom in US bbc.com/news/articles/cly... · Posted by u/01-_-

stubish · a day ago

A US company located in the US protected by the US government and complying with US and only laws. Which would mean, when viewed in another country, they are exporting? And need to be paying their tariffs on all the ads they are exporting and views and clicks they are importing (I think we can assume the content is of zero value)?

seanhunter · a day ago

Whatever the rights and wrongs of this case, the US has taken legal action against UK internet companies which were fully compliant with UK laws, specifically related to online gambling. So what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander also.[1]

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5333850.stm (link changed to something where the story isn’t behind a paywall)

seanhunter commented on Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me boston.conman.org/2025/08... · Posted by u/classichasclass

sugarpimpdorsey · 4 days ago

There's some weird ones you'd never think of that originate an inordinate amount of bad traffic. Like Seychelles. A tiny little island nation in the middle of the ocean inhabited by... bots apparently? Cyprus is another one.

Re: China, their cloud services seem to stretch to Singapore and beyond. I had to blacklist all of Alibaba Cloud and Tencent and the ASNs stretched well beyond PRC borders.

seanhunter · 4 days ago

The Seychelles has a sweetheart tax deal with India such that a lot of corporations who have an India part and a non-India part will set up a Seychelles corp to funnel cash between the two entities. Through the magic of "Transfer Pricing"[1] they use this to reduce the amount of tax they need to pay.

It wouldn't surprise me if this is related somehow. Like maybe these are Indian corporations using a Seychelles offshore entity to do their scanning because then they can offset the costs against their tax or something. It may be that Cyprus has similar reasons. Istr that Cyprus was revealed to be important in providing a storefront to Russia and Putin-related companies and oligarchs.[2]

So Seychelles may be India-related bots and Cyprus Russia-related bots.

[1] https://taxjustice.net/faq/what-is-transfer-pricing/#:~:text...

[2] Yup. My memory originated in the "Panama Papers" leaks https://www.icij.org/investigations/cyprus-confidential/cypr...

seanhunter commented on The contrarian physics podcast subculture timothynguyen.org/2025/08... · Posted by u/Emerson1

calf · 8 days ago

The author's accusations about Sabine are buried in the middle but I could not follow the main point. If anyone actually reads this carefully perhaps they could paraphrase a summary of their claims for the rest of us.

(Actually come to think of it, Sabine saying at one time that Weinstein's work is bad, at another time that professional physicists failed to engage with Weinstein properly--this is not a contradictory position, the former is a personal opinion and the latter is akin to an Enlightenment principle on how an institution ought to be behaving even towards dissenters and outsiders. Disappointing that the blogger doesn't seem to understand this and is using it simplistically as an example of Sabine being a dishonest science communicator)

seanhunter · 8 days ago

There is history here and Sabine is being particularly dishonest saying that professional physicists failed to engage with Weinstein. Tim Nguyen specifically along with a couple of others made a detailed analysis of the paper [1] and responded very thoughtfully. He got involved because his research area touches on gauge theory (which is the source for some of Weinstein’s Geometric Unity thing).

Here’s a page giving some of his side of the picture and he includes the original Weinstein paper etc if you want to read it https://timothynguyen.org/geometric-unity/

[1] https://files.timothynguyen.org/geometric_unity.pdf

seanhunter commented on The value of hitting the HN front page mooreds.com/wordpress/arc... · Posted by u/mooreds

seanhunter · 9 days ago

They weren’t trying to get on the front page of hn age 1 so it’s not 36 years in a row. Why do you need to be unpleasant to someone you don’t even know?

seanhunter commented on Monoid-Augmented FIFOs, Deamortised pvk.ca/Blog/2025/08/19/mo... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

bern4444 · 9 days ago

> The identity element is zero

I think the identity element would be 1 for integers and multiplication, right?

0 would be the identity element for integers and addition.

seanhunter · 9 days ago

Yes. Sorry I edited my original to change the operation.

seanhunter commented on Monoid-Augmented FIFOs, Deamortised pvk.ca/Blog/2025/08/19/mo... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

seanhunter · 9 days ago

For people who haven’t done abstract algebra, don’t be put off by the word “monoid”. A monoid in algebra is just a set with some associative binary operation and an identity element. Mathematicians in the 19th and 20th centuries realised you can study these types of structures and prove things which are true for all of them rather than having to do each one separately, and that led to “abstract algebra”.

So for example, if I have the integers and multiplication, this is a monoid[1]. The identity element is zero, which is an integer, and multiplication is an associative binary operation. It takes two integers and returns an integer.

Once you realise you have a monoid, if you do maths that only relies on the monoid properties then it applies to all monoids, so you could drop a different monoid in there and everything would still work. This ends up being very much like how typeclasses work in Haskell or traits in Rust.

[1] For the curious, it’s not a “group” because the integers don’t have multiplicative inverses. If I have x=2, there is no integer that I can multiply that by to get 1. Integers with addition on the other hand is a group, which is a monoid with the additional property that inverses are present.

seanhunter commented on Secure Boot, TPM and Anti-Cheat Engines andrewmoore.ca/blog/post/... · Posted by u/gm678

gausswho · 12 days ago

Can't help but feel like this is Microsoft leaning on devs to make the general PC multiplayer gaming experience so onerous that they'll choose to get an XBox instead.

seanhunter · 12 days ago

Microsoft’s corporate strategy is almost the exact opposite of this though. It’s that “everything is an Xbox” ie they are massively shifting away from the special-purpose hardware to anything being an xbox if it runs windows. I would be somewhat surprised if microsoft-made consoles even exist in a generation or two’s time.

seanhunter commented on Compiler Bug Causes Compiler Bug: How a 12-Year-Old G++ Bug Took Down Solidity osec.io/blog/2025-08-11-c... · Posted by u/luu

wavemode · 14 days ago

Scala has the advantage (and disadvantage) of not caring one lick about backwards compatibility. They were perfectly happy to burn it all to the ground and redo the language's syntax in v3. And even point releases of Scala frequently have breaking changes.

seanhunter · 13 days ago

I respect that, but kind of lost patience with it when a new version of the compiler decided that my types were no longer decidable in code that hadn’t been touched for years. I tried for about 5 mins to fix it and then just thought “It’s not me, it’s you” and put scala down never to pick it up again.

seanhunter commented on Kodak says it might have to cease operations [updated] cnn.com/2025/08/12/busine... · Posted by u/mastry

vkou · 15 days ago

> give the world the first digital camera... mismanagement on a gargantuan scale

Which why we're all flying on Wright airplanes, using Kenbak Personal Computers, and are all calling eachother with Bell telephones.

Being first to a market and not winning, or not even surviving isn't 'mismanagement on a gargantuan scale'. Especially when it comes to consumer devices, which have no moat or potential for monopoly consolidation.

-Sent from my BlackBerry(tm)

seanhunter · 15 days ago

Obviously not, but Wright and Kenbak weren't dominant in their markets and Bell was broken up by the courts, so those are pretty poor examples you've chosen there.