HN user

ZainRiz

2,038 karma

Software Engineer at Stripe. Previously: Microsoft, Google

All view points (and mistakes) I post are my own and not from my employer

Blog: www.zainrizvi.io

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bford.info 3y ago

Cache Directory Tagging Specification (2004)

ZainRiz
1pts1
www.youtube.com 3y ago

Stable Diffusion: Like DALL-E but Free [Two Minute Papers]

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1pts0
pytorch.org 3y ago

PyTorch Moves to the Linux Foundation

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3pts0
pytorch.org 3y ago

PyTorch Design Philosophy: Make It Flexible

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pytorch.org 3y ago

PyTorch Design Philosophy

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www.youtube.com 4y ago

Google’s Imagen AI: Outrageously Good! [Two Minute Papers]

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2pts1
www.zainrizvi.io 4y ago

The Software Engineer's Career Ladder

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www.zainrizvi.io 4y ago

Why software engineers like woodworking

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334pts247
www.zainrizvi.io 4y ago

Hacking the bureaucracy to get stuff done (2020)

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114pts65
paulgraham.com 4y ago

Is it worth being wise? (2007)

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3pts1
www.zainrizvi.io 4y ago

P.A.R.A: Two Years of Practice

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1pts0
www.forrestthewoods.com 4y ago

Memory Bandwidth Napkin Math (2020)

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45pts6
www.zainrizvi.io 4y ago

P.A.R.A. vs. Zettelkasten: The False Binary

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3pts0
knowstuffs.wordpress.com 4y ago

The Parable of Two Programmers (2012)

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2pts1
dynomight.net 4y ago

Experiments on a $50 DIY air purifier (2020)

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409pts267
www.infoq.com 5y ago

Bumper-Sticker API Design (2008)

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1pts0
www.zainrizvi.io 5y ago

6 ways woodworking is like software engineering

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www.zainrizvi.io 5y ago

Interview advice that got me offers

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642pts359
arstechnica.com 5y ago

SolarWinds hacked recursively breached other companies, including Microsoft

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5pts0
www.youtube.com 5y ago

Using a Genetic algorithm to train a Neural Network – Car learns navigation

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www.zainrizvi.io 5y ago

Banks help scammers with their bad UI

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96pts76
www.zainrizvi.io 5y ago

Reuse Your Side Projects

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davidvargas.me 5y ago

When your bank helps your scammers – How I lost $5k

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3pts0
www.zainrizvi.io 5y ago

Effective Altruism Is Suboptimal

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3pts1
www.zainrizvi.io 5y ago

Hacking the Bureaucracy to Get Stuff Done

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4pts0
zainrizvi.io 6y ago

The Interview Advice No One Tells You About

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3pts0
zainrizvi.io 6y ago

Unconventional tips for Mastering Software Interviews

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twitter.com 6y ago

I tried Information Fasting for a week. It was harder than I thought

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2pts0
groups.csail.mit.edu 6y ago

Man-Computer Symbiosis – JCR Licklider (1960)

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2pts0
zainrizvi.io 6y ago

Comparing Zettelkasten to Para

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If you're in finance, you earn enough to live in NYC

imagine what happens to NYC when all the people doing the menial work keeping the city alive (have to) move away? Whoops, now everyone is going to drown in trash and feces!

That's not a "the poor middle class folks in NYC need help" story, that's a "the rich folks of NYC need folks to serve them" story. They're welcome to strategize however they like to incentivize people working there. Manipulative heartstring tug are not welcome however.

With Microsoft they tell you years in advance when the product will reach EOL, so you have plenty of time to prepare

On top of that, most of their products are software running on your desktop and will still keep working after EOL

And if you're a government or enterprise with spectacularly big wallets, you can choose to pay Microsoft big $$ to keep shipping you additional security patches

Even though I've drawn pictures, built toys and contraptions contraptions out of wood, made a rube golderg machine

Still...

The thing I'm the proudest about...

Is that time I opened a jammed coaxial cable with nothing but two butter knives.

The challenge with books like The God Delusion is that it's barely one step above strawman arguments.

It attacks claims made by some simple lay people, based on their half-baked understanding of their own faiths (which they never really dug into). However, people well versed in the religion don't actually make any such claims.

The arguments being debunked are ones that religious scholars themselves would have disagreed with. Such misrepresentations don't guide anyone

There's two aspects to value creation:

1. How much more value you can now create. E.g Moving from assembly to managed code was also a 1000x shift

2. How much of that value you actually capture, as opposed to it going to your CEO, customers, etc

The people in developing countries have the misfortune of being able to capture only a minuscule fraction of the value they create

Good point. It doesn't necessarily have to be a paid membership, but it would need some type of reputation formation. Ability to pay money is one way to grant you a "prob not a bot" reputation.

There's many other ways to set reputation thought:

- I've seen private online communities where you need one or two members to "vouch" for you

- StackOverflow has it's own reputation model based on how helpful you've been in the past

- Bitcoin et-all use proof-of-work as a reputation model.

I'm sure there are many more just waiting to be discovered

The tools for a community to self-moderate is the key here, along with communities being able to define their own boundaries.

Reddit communities with active moderators are often great places to have respectful conversations. Twitter, on the other extreme, has virtually zero moderation tools for any group. You get to live with whatever rules Twitter sets for the entire platform (and die by the group that's able to hack them)

Trust-less information was the norm for most of history.

The past century has really been an anomaly when it came to trusting news, with photos and videos seeming to be reliable proof. Before that, societies had to be structured very differently to account for the lack of proof. You'd hear people from out of town talking about what they saw in a neighboring city.

You'd need to judge how trustworthy the person was.

People would expect a chain of narration, to understand how _that_ person came to learn a bit of information (or if they claimed to witness it first hand).

As AI generated content becomes more popular, I predict we as a society are going to go back to relying more and more on the reputation of the speakers in question.

Who might you consider reputable? People you've met personally, people who your community respects, and of course, influencers who you follow who's persuasive words match your pre-existing world views. Perhaps something else will emerge

The past century has really been an anomaly when it came to trusting news, with photos and videos seeming to be reliable proof. Before that, societies had to be structured very differently to account for the lack of proof.

You'd hear people from out of town talking about what they saw in a neighboring city. You'd need to judge how trustworthy the person was. People would expect a chain of narration, to understand how _that_ person came to learn a bit of information (or if they claimed to witness it first hand).

As AI generated content becomes more popular, I predict we as a society are going to go back to relying more and more on the reputation of the speakers in question.

Who might you consider reputable? People you've met personally, people who your community respects, and of course, influencers who you follow who's persuasive words match your pre-existing world views

I'm surprised by the combination of "Writing a book + public speaking opportunities + (apparently public) twitter account" with not wanting to dox yourself in the blog post.

Do you have two+ very different online personas? I can't imagine you doing public speaking without your book readers/twitter followers knowing exactly who you are. And if they know, then why keep your blog covert?

I'm really curious about what content you post publicly vs anonymously.

First I'm hearing about nerfed iphones, but if true this sounds like a reasonable decision from a business perspective.

They wouldn't want customers worrying about whether they got the better qualcomm iPhone X or the slower intel iPhone X.

Apple could have chosen to make everything with the faster qualcomm chips, but they prob wanted to derisk their supply chain by diversifying onto two chip manufacturers (and perhaps play them against each other for negotiating power)

Either ways, once you arrive a the result that you need to chip manufacturers making chips for the same phones, you need to make sure your customers have practically the same experience regardless of the underlying hardware they end up with

Consistency is key

Over 50 percent of Black children in the U.S. will experience a child welfare investigation before their eighteenth birthday (nearly double the rate of white children). Nearly 10 percent of Black children will be removed from their parents and placed into foster care (double the rate of white children)

While the numbers above sound horrendous (and they really are!) I wish they normalized the data to only consider poor households. That would give a much better picture of how much of the existing system is biased against a given race vs being biased against poor people in general.

"problem" is a bit of a strong word, but when someone says "Cancer Death Rate Dropped" dropping people assume "Cancer Rate Dropped", which is not at all the same thing

The article provides no numbers about cancer rate dropping. Yet the false association between the two ideas is so strong that even the authors themselves seem to theorize that the cancer rate itself is dropping because people don't smoke as often now.

Conflating those two concepts seems like a Very Bad Idea

Housing can be very cheap if you're willing to live in a small town. It feels expensive only when people want to cluster around the same, limited number of areas.

If you're not tied by an employer, then you can be way more flexible about how you spend your housing budget