hinkley

6 ms·

31.
by hinkley 1mo ago
Might I suggest you instead call this Executive Summary? It's not just neurodiverse people who would like to get to the fucking point sooner and the explanations afterward. All of us have other shit we need to be doing.
32.
by hinkley 1mo ago
I think the idea was that the IDE trusted itself, the same way we trust the CI server. Ken Thompson's Trusting Trust holds pretty equally for both.
33.
by hinkley 1mo ago
Some compression libraries have an 'rsync compatibility mode', that plays some games with the block sizes to make it easier to rsync to not have to completely re-transmit a large compressed file because not the whole file changes
34.
by hinkley 1mo ago
I was informed many eons ago that one of the hot features of Rational was that when one user made a change that required recompiling the headers, those headers were uploaded to the server so that other users didn't have to recompile th
35.
by hinkley 1mo ago
Yeah the number of times displeasure with our lack of progress turned out to be some customer yelling at a manager who forgot to prioritize work for that customer and I later discovered was just letting the shit roll downhill was too damned
36.
by hinkley 1mo ago
I have a rule of thumb that goes something like, if you want to get people to use something 2x as much you need to make it 4x more reliable. The reliability becomes a enticement, and you will often underestimate how much more popular it wil
37.
by hinkley 1mo ago
They also remove the secret menu item of rewrites which is to have some peace from management because you’re not delivering anything for a long time while you do the rewrite. I predict AI will cause the number of rewrites people ask for to
38.
by hinkley 1mo ago
Wonder if this effect happens at all with stone.
39.
by hinkley 1mo ago
I was taught this in school thirty years ago. Is this not a known thing?
40.
by hinkley 2mo ago
Yes, the curse of knowledge. The new person only has industry jargon that everyone else will have and so they will describe any new concepts that way instead of with the circular logic the team has established. And that is often something I
41.
by hinkley 2mo ago
I also repeat the process with people that I'm responsible for onboarding. But it becomes my responsibility to compliment their contributions to the project in those early days so that it quells their nervousness about me tapping the b
42.
by hinkley 2mo ago
You could still do map-reduce operations, but for it to really fly, what you'd want is a side channel between the memory chips that allows the reduce to happen out of band from the front-side bus and the reduction to be sent to the CPU
43.
by hinkley 2mo ago
Maybe PIM will push this forward, but I still think we're doing something fundamentally wrong by not just embracing NUMA and trying to do something Sun tried decades ago, which is have number of cores share 4GB of semiprivate working
44.
by hinkley 2mo ago
Yes, and no. Two decades ago it was a challenge to get people to see that what they were doing was preventing horizontal scaling. Today horizontal scaling is table stakes and people don't even always register that they are doing it. It
45.
by hinkley 2mo ago
Nobody talks about SEI anymore but their Capability Maturity Model informed and/or aligned with how I approach new-to-me projects whether that 'new role' is internal or a new employer. CMM says that an engineering team whose
46.
by hinkley 2mo ago
Chesterton was talking about politics (public policy). And 'responsible for security or accuracy' well, have you heard of politics? If you haven't, don't look it up, it will just depress you.
47.
by hinkley 2mo ago
How you ask the question matters just as much as whether you should ask it. Impressionable ears are everywhere and asking 'is there icecream in the house?' means that everyone is about to get a bowl or be upset.
48.
by hinkley 2mo ago
I've seen a lot of people relearn the same couple of lessons over an over again. One, most of the things you believe scale linearly scale at nlogn because of physics. Storage is much worse, scaling at n^1.5. What fit in a single 4U cas
49.
by hinkley 2mo ago
I have a mountain of bad things to say about Microsoft, but they definitely had loss leader products that never made a dime but pulled you into their ecosystem. So they funneled money from a couple of cash cows back into the other projects
50.
by hinkley 2mo ago
This is perhaps the hardest nut to crack. We give perverse incentives to the marketing department to bring us the most customers they can, instead of the most appropriate customers. Someone told me at my second lead position that they had l
51.
by hinkley 2mo ago
> In fact optimization is by far the easiest part of the process because there are many system programming experts on this HN thread who consider these optimizations to be trivial. <strange high pitched equivocal sounds> I do a lot
52.
by hinkley 2mo ago
Those laws generally aren't high crimes. You know when you're committing crimes against humanity. Some people pretend they don't. And pretend they don't feel the judgement of those around them.
53.
by hinkley 2mo ago
Speed is frequency times instructions per clock, modulated by pipeline stalls.
54.
by hinkley 2mo ago
Ignorance is not a defense against getting arrested. Everyone with a drivers license is expected to know all traffic laws, even brand new ones. You’re expected to know all forms of theft and violence. And then you and I are absolutely expec
55.
by hinkley 2mo ago
Information theory is its own sort of physics but that’s not the part that needs to be regulated. Psychologists are also licensed. That we still aren’t is a mystery to me at this point. Our stuff is now critical infrastructure. Not everyone
56.
by hinkley 2mo ago
All engineers know to be on the lookout for executives who are indirectly asking them to break the law to raise the quarterly profits. The end goal is to take the engineers out of the loop, or leave them in a position where they are unable
57.
by hinkley 2mo ago
So how long before they escalate from copyright infringement and go straight for exfiltrating trade secrets?
58.
by hinkley 2mo ago
> lessons learned. I think some of the other responders here are upset that lessons were not learned in any meaningful way.
59.
by hinkley 2mo ago
So we are already getting into paperclip factory territory.
60.
by hinkley 2mo ago
The rewrite is better! For the engineers who are planning to have a new job in a year. They get a whole year of being able to deflect all questions about how far behind schedule we are and how many of the customers want to burn the buildi

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