virgilp

13 ms·

121.
by virgilp 2y ago
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/927/
122.
by virgilp 2y ago
When a measure becomes the objective, it ceases to be a good measure. Even if you could perfectly measure customer happiness (very hard, as you note) - it's relatively easy to make customers happy by giving them more value than what th
123.
by virgilp 2y ago
> It is staggeringly hard to measure. It's straight up impossible. Best we can do is observe and attempt to measure proxies. Take hypothetical situation: VPs A & B debate a business decision. Let's say A wins the argument a
124.
by virgilp 2y ago
I asked over WhatsApp chat (I didn't try speech). Still works.
125.
by virgilp 2y ago
Interestingly enough, it answers the question "Who is Jonathan Zittrain?". An oversight?
126.
by virgilp 2y ago
I didn't even ask for it. I just asked what version it is. The cutoff date was completely volunteered.
127.
by virgilp 2y ago
It's funny, I asked it what model it is, and it replies: > am based on OpenAI's GPT-4 model. Specifically, you are interacting with an instance of GPT-4, which is designed to understand and generate human-like text based on th
128.
by virgilp 2y ago
Yes you're right, it's kinda' obvious if you say you forgot the name of a person and ask ChatGPT to help: https://imgur.com/a/hCl94B0
129.
by virgilp 2y ago
That's just in the public model/on chatgpt.com? Run it in Azure, and you get: Who is Jonathan Zittrain? < > Jonathan Zittrain is a prominent legal scholar, computer science professor, and technology policy expert.
130.
by virgilp 2y ago
> our grandiose art will be also a path to starvation. That's what I'm saying, that in general the "grandiose art" _is_ a path to starvation, in a lot of business software at least. Because the actual (eventual) requ
131.
by virgilp 2y ago
That's the thing, it might have been the right call. Take facebook: perhaps if you were on the original engineering team, you could've made the (correct) call that "developing this thing in php won't scale to billions of
132.
by virgilp 2y ago
> Just stating, 'don't look further than the problem you are required to solve' is not an excellent general rule. It's still pretty good though; I think the only better formulation is "only implement a general so
133.
by virgilp 2y ago
> Sometimes there is a right answer. Indeed. And when that "right answer" comes along, it tends to swipe away everything else. If it's universally better, why wouldn't it? Except that, Rust does not do that. Which is
134.
by virgilp 2y ago
I was not saying anywhere that people don't or shouldn't care about the quality of their code. I was just pointing out that, whether we like it or not, "quality" is just one of the factors that goes into the mix of &quot
135.
by virgilp 2y ago
Webkit TBH wasn't a great example, since it's arguably a piece of software that would benefit from being developed in Rust. That said, the point is that we don't need "one language to rule them all" - C++ has made s
136.
by virgilp 2y ago
It is kindof an interesting point you bring up here. However, it's also true that languages (and software in general) are what people make of it, not necessarily what their creators intended. I do believe that the stuff that happens to
137.
by virgilp 2y ago
Well, let's put it like this: - Webkit, GCC, and a few others are non-trivial C++ codebases that are (I argue) useful. - In your experience, since they are non-trivial, they have silent memory corruption bugs (i.e. they are not "p
138.
by virgilp 2y ago
At the same time, you should recognize that not all real code in the world is used to run planes & thermonuclear power plants. For a lot of the business software, it's actually fine if it's not perfectly safe. So if it's
139.
by virgilp 2y ago
Germany is one of the most conservative societies in EU, they still insist on cash. But even so, I'm surprised you can do large-value payments without PIN; even if you have a contactless card, those are limited to small-ish sums (less
140.
by virgilp 2y ago
Paypal - like Apple Pay & Google Pay - require you to authenticate into your account, which takes away the "wasn't me" deniability (if you pay _with paypal_ as opposed to "via paypal, with credit card"). It&#x27
141.
by virgilp 2y ago
The comment originally was in the context of "I'm not truly sure what the right fix is." ; technically, a pretty decent fix is implemented elsewhere so it's not that hard to find. 3DSecure is implemented widely in Europe
142.
by virgilp 2y ago
Indeed, I'm not in US - I was just pointing out that it's not __that__ hard to fairly solve, in fact it has been solved decently well in other places.
143.
by virgilp 2y ago
Is it? - 3d secure would have made it hard to claim "wasn't me" - banks here cancel cards involved in fraud, and request a police report (not really a very strong deterrent, but at least makes it risky/harder to repeated
144.
by virgilp 2y ago
missed the opportunity to create named constants for each of the password validation rules.
145.
by virgilp 2y ago
It says that the HN community is more rational than most? It's not about empathy, it's about common sense - you can't prevent someone from seeing your PUBLIC posts just by blocking their account... at most you can make it sli
146.
by virgilp 2y ago
It is true that for many (especially concurrency/distributed-systems-related) bugs, reproducing the issue might be the hardest part... but that's not always true. Long time ago, I was working on a C++ compiler for an embedded proc
147.
by virgilp 2y ago
This is a good observation but one can argue that those devoted to themselves are a subset of those devoted to the organization (to further their goals, they act as being part of the second category, since that's the most profitable)
148.
by virgilp 2y ago
The "problems of data" are not really problems with data, I feel that's what Rich Hickey was alluding to in that discussion (and no, I didn't feel that him & Alan Kay were talking past each other) > as a represent
149.
by virgilp 3y ago
Like, what? Honest question. I can think of a few things that Java does (bounds checking, for one), but very few things that C does. (also, not entirely sure what you meant. There isn't a canonical C compiler, or toolset, and the langu
150.
by virgilp 3y ago
That's only cheaper for payments in excess of 100EUR

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