kweingar

16 ms·

151.
by kweingar 3y ago
At one point in history, it was a law of nature that a substantial portion of children will die at very early ages. Up to that point, it was basically universally true across space and time. We changed that law of nature. There are lots of
152.
by kweingar 3y ago
> the vast majority of people that dislike the direction Google is taking Chrome and the web at large [citation needed] The vast majority of people don’t care, even if you restrict the population to developers
153.
by kweingar 3y ago
It’s true that sometimes people repeat mistakes of the past by iterating on a fundamentally bad idea. But sometimes the idea wasn’t bad. The mistake of the past could have been in execution of the idea or tech limitations. When any new VR p
154.
by kweingar 3y ago
Yes
155.
by kweingar 3y ago
Ultimately the existence of elite universities is the root of the problem. Most colleges take a huge majority of the students who apply, so neither legacy students nor affirmative action make too much a difference for them. Universities sho
156.
by kweingar 3y ago
> The thing is that programmers aren't writing code for the audience of academics and I think that's very reasonable. Why are academics not writing for the audience of programmers? That feels far less reasonable. I think this i
157.
by kweingar 3y ago
You weren’t asking for a glossary. You were asking that people stop using Greek letters. Aside from that, there are references that will tell you what these symbols mean. You just have to look them up. “What does capital omega mean in algor
158.
by kweingar 3y ago
I've seen this sentiment about math notation among programmers, and I don't understand it. Lots of programmers would like mathematicians to define everything in their papers so that programmers don't have to learn math notati
159.
by kweingar 3y ago
> A small group of people, people who are often not the ones building the libraries from this research, know what these symbols are likely to mean. If you're writing libraries to implement novel data structures fresh from academia,
160.
by kweingar 3y ago
My favorite were comments on a post about Google Zanzibar, which is an internal Google infrastructure thing that they published a research paper about. Other companies started adopting that method, and there were HN comments warning about G
161.
by kweingar 3y ago
I am trying to understand this. People can be different from each other but still share relevant attributes. For example, two women can have different ideas and opinions, but they are both women. I don’t see the problem here
162.
by kweingar 3y ago
Of course I do. What’s the purpose of this question?
163.
by kweingar 3y ago
I don’t see how you can come to that conclusion. “Male and female impersonators” as written in the law was meant to refer to drag shows, which are definitely not just trans people.
164.
by kweingar 3y ago
Just one example: Tennessee has recently passed a law banning “male or female impersonators” from performing in public places. Tennessee also does not alter sex on birth certificates for trans people. Arguably this means that Tennessee bann
165.
by kweingar 3y ago
I'm confused as to why anyone outside Google would care about the possibility of Google deprecating Zanzibar. It's an internal-only project that handles authorization across Google services. It's totally invisible to all user
166.
by kweingar 3y ago
As a non-major, I did not have access to an advisor in the department. My general advisor was for the liberal arts college (which I belonged to), and he did not have any sway in the engineering college. I ended up getting to know one facult
167.
by kweingar 3y ago
My last comment was a little ambiguous, sorry. I meant that you’ll often enter the pre-req well ahead of the others. In many of my early college classes, there were people who already knew most or all of the material and were just there b
168.
by kweingar 3y ago
But if you make a capable student take the pre-req as a box-ticking exercise, then they often enter that class (edit: the pre-req class) way ahead of everyone else.
169.
by kweingar 3y ago
This is why I’m glad I did not major in CS. I would have had to take all of these prerequisite classes to graduate at all, not just to get into more interesting classes. I guess the rules make sense, but it does seem silly that I ended up b
170.
by kweingar 3y ago
This is a bit of a tangent, but I read the prerequisites for this course and felt the same annoyance that I did when I was in college. I didn’t major in CS, but I wanted to take some CS classes. Several times I had to go back and forth with
171.
by kweingar 3y ago
When I am doing desk work, I want to avoid turning. It’s bad for the neck and back. I could have several monitors at my desk if I asked for them, but me (and my coworkers) usually stick to one or two because the ergonomics are better.
172.
by kweingar 3y ago
What is the CTO (head of product, software, and sysops) doing announcing moderation policy for Twitter? Isn’t that a different department’s responsibility? What does the CEO have to say about this?
173.
by kweingar 3y ago
Ironically this means that discussion of trans people is allowed on Twitter, but there is no easy way to talk about cis people as a category (oops, I mean people who are not trans). The only alternative I can think of is “non-trans” but the
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by kweingar 3y ago
A product can be light years ahead of its competition and still not be worth buying. The best we can do with current technology might not be enough to make a good product. Not saying this is the case with the Apple Vision Pro.
175.
by kweingar 3y ago
Big tech companies don’t make money directly from their open source languages and tools. But neither do solo maintainers or volunteers (most of the time). As with every open source project, you have to consider who is driving development, g
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by kweingar 3y ago
> It only encourages other developers to build a following that they attempt to leverage against Reddit. Isn't that what the app developers and their users want?
177.
by kweingar 3y ago
I think you proved their point. A very small minority of enthusiasts and professionals wear $3500 watches and >$100,000 cars.
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by kweingar 3y ago
A phone number is a number in a colloquial sense (a string of digits) but I would hate to use any computer system where phone numbers are stored or reasoned about as actual mathematical numbers.
179.
by kweingar 3y ago
Here's my rule of thumb: if my search doesn't depend on recent information, and it is likely to return blog spam as the top result, then I will use ChatGPT instead. I still use web search frequently to find project homepages, offi
180.
by kweingar 3y ago
I had this attitude in college. I wasn’t a CS major, but I really enjoyed programming. I was floored by how many CS majors seemed to not enjoy the discipline. My interest in computers and programming hasn’t waned. But with every passing yea

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