benstein

I rebuilt isitchristmas.com using 484 subagents and 16 million tokens to learn how Claude's dynamic workflows work. Oh, and today is not Christmas.

I really appreciate how much thought you gave this. Interesting to me that biggest tells came out of the attempts at humor and metaphor.

The title was intentionally ironic :-)

LOL fork

+1000. "Human coders are still better than LLMs" is a hot take. "Antirez is still better than LLMs" is axiomatic ;-)

I made my own webmail client in 2001. The killer feature was a Heart button that one-click opened a new mail addressed to my then-girlfriend-now-wife. I've never seen that feature replicated then or now. And since it was hard-coded to my girlfriend, it was clearly (hopefully!) not broadly applicable.

"Special Olympics T-Ball Stand Pitches Perfect Game" is the greatest headline ever written

The different prompting strategies needed to improve results for different models is fascinating. I usually tell ChatGPT the role it should play to get better results e.g. "You are an expert in distributed systems". The same approach with Gemini returned "as a large language model constantly learning, I wouldn't call myself an expert."

I wrote the article and I think it's funny

Why hate on that game? It had both great puzzles (challenging yet approachable) AND was pushing the envelope of CD-ROM as a new technology, specifically the use of video + celebrities.

It's a good point, but the challenge is we sometimes just get street1 from a utility without city/state/postal. We tried USPS and geocoding libraries, but they fail because they often pick a random-ish city which likely will not match.

Using an LLM to solve day-to-day programming problems, replacing more traditional algorithms, data structures, and heuristics

Cliche, but I've found this to be an amazing interview question for nontechnical positions. You learn quickly how much someone can hand wave and bullshit. If they are too cocky and can't say "I don't know", that's great to suss out up front. If it's for a sales role, maybe that's a good thing.

TL;DR buy all your vanity domains early. Just a prank. Move along.

Bank of America has had 2-part login screens forever. IIRC they are going in the opposite direction and will be putting them together in a single page very shortly.

in a bar

My favorite BBG anecdote was when I was on the hiring side. I rated a candidate "hire at top priority" but he was rejected by another manager.

When I asked why, the manager told me it was because the candidate wrote "xml" on his resume and not "XML" and that any knowledgable programmer would know to capitalize it correctly so he clearly didn't know his stuff.

</seriously>

My interview at BB actually was 90% about pointers and character arrays, 10% about the keyword static in C. I got the job worked a great 3-4 years there. Also, that was 13 (!) years ago.

How is this whistleblowing? What benefit do we as the public gain from this knowledge?

I like to think of her kid. What will the other children say on the playground? "Your momma wears army bootstrap" and "Your momma so FAT32..."

It's actually a fun and interesting real-world distributed computing problem. You need computers w/ TV tuners in every major market across the country in order to get the _local_ broadcast news. The computers then FTP the data back to the central servers.

But you can't easily/cheaply get server racks in 100 cities that have cable TV lines going into the cages.

So you have to find reliable places to put all your distributed computers that have good TV signals, good upstream bandwidth, a person who can help reboot it when it crashes, and reasonable cost.

True in this case, but I don't see this being a trend and definitely not the "standard model for building startups". What are some other examples of companies that have done this?

Presumably Audible as well

Would love to see more details as to WHY I got the suggested responses. As a prescribed grammarian, born and raised in the northeast US, I was definitely surprised to see Canadian and ebonics. Assuming not enough training data yet...?

I went through this a few months ago and discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7166955

Here's my update: It's been about 4 months or so since I switched.

Nothing I was able to do or Apple was able to do fixed the problem. I was able to put Messages into debug mode and I sent Apple a full debug log (Apple bug report #15966535). They marked the ticket as "Duplicate" and I was no longer able to view any updates.

After about 3 months, most of the issue has resolved.

The majority of group-texts work now; iPhones now send the whole thread is MMS not iMessage. It's still not 100% but pretty good.

Most of my friends can send SMS without failures, but quite a few still get "iMessage failed" and have to "resend as SMS".

I've completely given up trying to fix the problem. Just hoping the remaining iOS devices resolve themselves at some point, or Apple fixes in next update.

<rant>Everyone thinks this is an Android problem that they can't message me anymore. Really tough to explain to the world that it's _their_ phone that's buggy.</rant>

Hey, I was the guy that submitted the trick to Nintendo Power! A friend of a friend showed it to me after school and I immediately mailed it in to the magazine. Nintendo Power Agent #826.

LastPass. Strikes me as just insane to use anything else.

Mobile Commons, onsite in Brooklyn, NY Full time web developers, Ruby/Rails

Our technology powers today’s most effective mobile campaigns. We work with some of the biggest brands, government agencies, healthcare groups, and nonprofit organizations in the country. Our customers demand high availability, strict security (think HIPAA compliance), and an easy-to-use interface. Our distributed, message-driven architecture requires rock solid engineering, operations, and monitoring.

http://www.mobilecommons.com http://www.jobscore.com/jobs2/mobilecommons?sid=68

Show me a "Save" icon that doesn't _still_ look like a floppy disk. Until then I'll take my text labels.

I wonder if they fixed the iMessage caching-phone-numbers-after-you-switch-to-Android bug that's been so terrible? Really wish they had a FULL changelog, not just marketing spin.