neilv

10 ms·

121.
by neilv 5mo ago
Great photo up top, of author's family members entering the "America[n]" airliner.
122.
by neilv 5mo ago
Yeah, and even in good faith, the questions can be problematic. Example: At the very start of the interview, candidate suddenly feels like they have to hide something about their religion, sexual orientation, or whatever, in how they answer
123.
by neilv 5mo ago
Some good points. Just a heads-up about something interesting I heard/read in training... "Innocuous" icebreaker questions about hobbies, the weekend, or whatever, can be surprisingly problematic. The questions and answers o
124.
by neilv 5mo ago
> Or the “this person knows how to interview” part (which generally, but not always, correlates with experience and emotional maturity). I think that "generally..." is a little harsh. The person might just not have worked in
125.
by neilv 5mo ago
Positive credit is not the only purpose of attribution. There's also the named authors not taking credit for something they didn't fully do, regardless of whether the credit goes to someone else. There's also traceability, if
126.
by neilv 5mo ago
I disagree. Imagine a human co-author on a work. "Written with a co-author" would not be sufficient attribution.
127.
by neilv 5mo ago
Who is actually writing this very concerning California Internet legislation, which will ultimately affect the entire nation and world? Did someone write California Internet legislation without consulting any California Internet companies?
128.
by neilv 5mo ago
I knew an adolescent kid (not me) who built the robot from that exact robots book. A historical thing to appreciate is that, even though this book was unusually prescriptive and nuts&bolts detailed, for the time, building the robot was
129.
by neilv 5mo ago
Congrats on graduating. Like everyone else at the moment, you're living in interesting times. AFAIK, there are not enough respectable companies for even the senior engineers. (And you may have already noticed that a lot of companies ar
130.
by neilv 5mo ago
> Obviously an LLM generated the code, but I felt comfortable following along and understood what it was doing, reading and Trusting the Tests. [...] My difficulty is with thinking the way that lets me write Scheme. There's yo
131.
by neilv 5mo ago
Like you, I've found that working with people of integrity (or some qualities closely related to that) is very important to me. Not in a "new-grad or corporate PR appropriating meaningless platitudes" kind of way. But in a &
132.
by neilv 5mo ago
OTOH, this phase will tell you who cares about doing great work, and who is inclined to just fling around slop.
133.
by neilv 5mo ago
> Highlighted Answers: When people are researching, they want helpful suggestions. Now, when AI Mode provides a list of recommendations — like the best language apps for an upcoming trip — highly relevant, high-quality ads are eligible
134.
by neilv 5mo ago
Great question, in light of vibe coding. Yes, and no. I absolutely still believe in small teams of highly-effective and aligned people. And they should be working smarter, and thinking forward and more holistically, than anything LLM-ish b
135.
by neilv 5mo ago
I contributed to a contemporaneous large and complex system in Lisp (Scheme) that used most of those. It was one of those things where 1-3 programmers, working with the right tools and thinking, could out-perform all competitors, no matter
136.
by neilv 5mo ago
I remember your great work on pie menus, from when I got into HCI. And that's quite a cast of stars on that paper! Before I went to MIT as a student (almost the same time as Ted Selker arrived as a new professor/researcher), Mark
137.
by neilv 5mo ago
I wonder whether this could still pop up at estate sales, or when a retiree is cleaning out their garage. Not all gear got junked. When I was a teen intern, I got some obsolete Apollos (and 2 logic analyzers and a terminal) from my employe
138.
by neilv 5mo ago
Often, if you visit a few of the top PageRank-ish search hits for a query, you can find where the "AI" answer was mostly plagiarized from... (For example, a random Redditor once said something, and the AI repeats it confidently an
139.
by neilv 5mo ago
Impressive curation effort. One comment: at least a few of the examples in the gallery seem to be of the "last, greatest" version, which actually isn't necessarily the greatest, and definitely not the most interesting. For e
140.
by neilv 5mo ago
Anyone want to comment on what it's like to work for Anthropic (as an ordinary software/AI engineer, not as Karpathy)? Compare and contrast with working at OpenAI, Google, etc.?
141.
by neilv 5mo ago
Another thing to appreciate while reading is that Risks started pre-Web, when the Internet was a much smaller place, so PGN's work on Risks was well-known, and presumably influenced the thinking of a lot of people. As one example, I bu
142.
by neilv 5mo ago
If you buy replacement laptop keyboards, be sure to test them promptly, not just stockpile them as spares. I started to see some poor-quality 'genuine' replacement ThinkPad keyboards. Bad action, bad fit of assembly with keycap c
143.
by neilv 5mo ago
I just had my 25th ThinkPad anniversary, which started with a ThinkPad that was 5(?) years old at the time, and which I carried all around town (parks, cafes, student centers, libraries), every day, wrapped in a towel in my bag: https:&#x2
144.
by neilv 5mo ago
1. Plea to anyone doing TrackPoint projects: consider using a 6mm TrackPoint assembly that can accommodate an off-the-shelf 6mm Soft Rim cap. See this comparison of the shortening and changing of the TrackPoint cap over time, and you can im
145.
by neilv 5mo ago
> Goodacre told The Register he tested awareness of the Management Engine with various attendees at the CyberUK conference in April 2026. "Almost no one" knew about it, he reports. That's surprising. I would've exp
146.
by neilv 5mo ago
> It has already submitted forum posts and social media evidence showing some users employing the system to disable emissions controls. Is right-to-repair going to get scrod by illegal activity, like everyone got scrod by media piracy?
147.
by neilv 5mo ago
BTW, I appreciate people's candor, and don't want to spoil it, but I feel obligated to point out, to people criticizing big-tech employers, that HN pseudonymous/anonymous identities aren't very secure... You might have a
148.
by neilv 5mo ago
I wouldn't blame company culture on neurodivergents. It's explained by a stereotypical ruthless flavor of business, which reinforced itself with the culture they hired and nurtured. The company has been known as kinda sketchy alm
149.
by neilv 5mo ago
> if you view higher education as gatekeeping for further life options (i.e. a career) then proctored exams make sense. But if higher education is just for learning, it's stupid to put all this gatekeeping around it [...] Let the c
150.
by neilv 5mo ago
I'm very interested in how this cheating is perceived by other students. There is no peer pressure not to cheat? Students aren't considered sketchy or jerky for cheating? Being seen cheating has no adverse affect on their ability

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