Paul Butler @paulgb Twitter profile

Last Seen Profiles

@TrialNz

@PmPbPC2e4h86628

@minafts

@StarrCompanies

@Chris_Ramos11

@jbckuni

@alwazeer_ali3

@Ib0ter0

@GrappleClips

@ryika140983

@aa_raku

@Timba1x

@auguiee

@koooo_i_k

@American_Ind

@asami_npm

@a_alfadda

@badlar00

@kaceymontoya

@Avelhide

@KingEgo

@andrewdbreck

@0xdejavuzc

@jandakembangstw

@____Pingu____

@HarryValeStyles

@morita_ka

@SpBaystars

@mqdmly341630

@SunnahGh

@abnalymaan

@ManoelMelg20434

@GrantHo16890702

@Tengu4649

@Ueie84931040

@Troymarq4

Paul Butler

@paulgb

3 months

@NYPD114Pct “obeying VTL laws isn't just for cars” (shows picture of 11 cars disobeying VTL laws and one cyclist getting a ticket) lmao this one is a bit too on-the-nose

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

4 months

Sailors against Kubernetes

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@paulgb

4 months

It’s so nuts to me that people used to get in giant wood boats and shoot metal bowling balls at other giant wood boats to sink them for a job. Really puts writing yaml files in perspective.

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

4 years

@JRehling @realDonaldTrump People will just buy tires from other American companies, oh wait

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

7 months

Compared to the US system, going to Waterloo feels like a cheat code. No SATs, no acceptance coaches, no grinding out extracurriculars to stand out. You can just get decent grades at a public school, apply, and end up with a degree that Silicon Valley and Wall Street respect.

Aqeel Ali

@AqeelMeetsWorld

7 months

highest signal for ability to generate shareholder value

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

4 years

@ZoeSchiffer @aravreby Calling people waving nazi flags “nazis” just divides us, says someone who definitely isn’t arguing in bad faith.

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

2 years

It sucks for me that stackoverflow is down, but it *really* sucks for the brave soul who has to fix stackoverflow without using stackoverflow.

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@paulgb

2 months

@SneederOfFeed @Chicken_Face1 I’m a native English speaker and I would have done the same thing this guy did. Found the closest substitute, then when asked for more options, taken a picture of some other less-direct substitutes. What exactly do people expect him to do here?

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

3 years

@BenBonnema @TraderJoesUnion Infuriating. As a customer, mandating masks and enforcing it is NOT a policy “against customers”! Most of us don’t want to be in the store with someone without a mask either, that’s why the vast majority of us wear masks without huffing about it.

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

2 months

How can S3 claim eleven nines of durability, I don't even have 99.999999999% confidence that Earth will exist in a year.

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@paulgb

4 years

@roseforbeto @meenaharris I love the little glance towards the camera at the end, as if to say “see what I'm dealing with?”

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@paulgb

11 months

@Powergannon @Liv_Agar I’m 90% sure this is either a modern “no soap radio” joke, or a way to game the TikTok algorithm by confusing people into increasing their dwell time.

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

7 months

@_sn_n Which one of “chivalry and heroism” is rowing away from the disaster in a partially-filled lifeboat?

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

3 years

Untitled work, 2021 Text on meme template (donation from the artist)

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

2 years

@melissamcewen This is perfect as a troll gift. The bug, the color scheme, the mixed alignment, the emoji variable name. Definitely ordering a few of these to give out when a programmer wrongs me.

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

4 years

One thing nobody tells you about programming in Rust is how much you'll accidentally learn about car maintenance as you google for things.

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

2 months

@dsmith1462 @cyclesixmile Peak entitlement attitude. Inconvenience walkers (not to mention people with strollers, wheelchairs, walkers, etc.) for what, to avoid pulling a few feet forward?

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

9 months

@kentlind @AshokaTheBear @KCGrock The funny thing is, this novelty limited-edition collectable bike is still significantly cheaper than the oversized F-150s that people have no problem considering “working class”.

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

1 year

TIL JSON supports multi-line comments if you hate yourself enough

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

1 year

Blogs that regularly do well on Hacker News -- , Supabase, Tailscale, etc. -- usually don’t have cookie consent banner. I don’t think this is a coincidence. It’s not that they flout GDPR, either. Fly and Supabase don’t set a single cookie on blog landings.

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

1 year

This @spolsky paragraph always comes back to me, about how Google built an eng org that operated with higher-level abstractions as if they were primitives. There are non-AI companies now quietly using LLMs the way their competitors use the if statement.

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

3 months

One thing nobody told me about getting older is how much time you spend thinking about databases.

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@paulgb

3 years

@0xdjma @TheStalwart Buy 50 tomatoes. Plant the tomatoes. Send the broker 50 tomatoes every month.

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

2 years

Mathematically, (y / x) - ((y / c) / (x / c)) = 0 But if you calculate it on a computer, you get tiny differences due to numerical imprecision. If you magnify the differences, cool patterns emerge.

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

4 years

@kyle_teamjoe @carriesheffield It jumped the shark at the Total Landscaping fiasco. Wake me up if they top that one.

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

5 months

@paul_winginit @JakeAnbinder That is a falsifiable date, unlike domain registrations, which shows that most of those sites are under 10 years old. The oldest, bucketlist dot net, was registered about three months before the release date of the movie.

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@paulgb

1 year

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

11 months

When I get frustrated with Rust and work through it, I come out feeling like I learned a new fundamental truth about the universe. When I get frustrated with JS and work through it, I feel like I spent so long at a carnival game that the operator gave me a toy to get rid of me.

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

8 months

Wasm actually delivered a cross-platform and cross-architecture bytecode, a legitimate technical feat, and the best thing we can find to do with it is deploy code on x86-64 Linux instances in us-east-1. Like using a particle accelerator to make toast.

Phillip Carter

@_cartermp

8 months

It will never stop being funny to me that WASM, a technology ostensibly to let you use different languages to write browser apps, is primarily used for backend systems running in the cloud

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

5 years

@Dr_Memory @2AvSagas The "flat fare" also doesn't include tolls and random fees that the TLC adds (rush hour, etc.) Last time I was tricked into a $52 flat fare it ended up being something like $80-90 with fees and tip. The price transparency of Uber/Lyft is worth something to me.

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

10 months

Rust’s selling point for me is not memory safety, or speed, or traits, or cross-compilation, it’s this. Everything else is icing on the cake.

Enrique Mejías

@kiyov09

10 months

This slide is gold ⁦ @chrisbiscardi ⁩

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

4 years

@ElizabAdams @NYCferry @NYCEDC Wait, the ferry service depends on private property owners allowing use of piers on an at-will basis? They set up ferry routes without contracts in place for continued use of those piers? What are lawyers even for if the city can't get this right?

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@paulgb

3 months

VC-backed OSS is unsustainable because they need to return for VCs. Hobbiest-backed OSS is unsustainable because nobody wants to do the gruntwork for free. Foundation-backed OSS is unsustainable because members have their own agendas. BigCo-backed OSS is unsustainable beca...

Artem Zakharchenko

@kettanaito

3 months

I want to like Bun but I keep reminding myself that it's a VC-baked company. They have a goal. If that goal was to make JavaScript better, it wouldn't be Bun. It'd be a bunch of pull requests to Node.js to improve performance and stability. That's not the case. Custom

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

4 years

@TheAquaFresca @madrid_mike @ProjectLincoln Nothing says "fuck the coastal elite" quite like getting arrested on a $28M 150 foot yacht owned by a Chinese billionaire off the coast of Connecticut.

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@paulgb

1 year

It’s crazy how kids these days don’t realize that an “encyclopedia” used to be a physical thing.

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@paulgb

3 months

@PeterKneale @QuinnyPig If they don’t at least make a show of telling you not to, they could lose the trademark. Which is probably why the attempts to get you not to use it are generally pretty half-hearted.

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

3 years

@NikMilanovic

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

8 months

I went down a rabbit hole to learn that: The G in GStreamer stands for GLib. The G in GLib stands for GTK. The G in GTK stands for GIMP. The G in GIMP stands for GNU. The G in GNU stands for GNU.

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

4 years

@ProjectLincoln “vans were not big enough” this lady has not seen me pack a U-Haul

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

3 years

I wrote a blog post on parallels between play-to-earn web3 games like Axie Infinity, and the book Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber.

“Play-to-earn” and Bullshit Jobs

paulbutler.org

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

3 years

Based on sampling my feed, you're all insanely good at Wordle.

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

3 years

@Gothamist My favorite is where they pat themselves on the back for finding a “safe resolution”. The dude has a can of spray paint and they’re taking as if it’s Ruby Ridge.

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

2 years

@BradDFelix @coryzapatka That's where my head went too -- is this a sales tactic so he can do a mea culpa and offer a “really good deal to apologize”? Probably not, but bold move if so.

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

2 months

If you are giving me eleven nines, I need to see the line in your spreadsheet that accounts for the odds of an invasion by hostile aliens.

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

6 months

@JuliaCarmel__ On days like today it’s hard enough to make eye contact with a driver from outside the vehicle. Distracted driving is rampant. Please don’t make it harder for pedestrians to protect themselves out of a misguided confusion between UV light and the visible spectrum.

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@paulgb

1 year

@MidwitMilhouse @krrishd Ah, so the bots are run by the original account and are meant to draw the bank into the conversation so that to the algorithm it looks like a non-bot engaging with the original post? So far that’s better than any explanation I can think of.

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@paulgb

10 months

@djco @mycoliza @withoutboats Ahh I had to look for myself and his attitude is worse than I thought — not only obtusely ignoring the concern, but saying “Rust isn’t for you” if you disagree. He didn’t even write the original code, he came into an existing library and borked it.

Restore base64::{encode, decode} functions · Issue #213 · marshallpierce/rust-base64

This is a request to restore the base64::encode and base64::decode convenience functions deprecated in the 0.21.0 release. Normally I agree with explicit being better than implicit, but I don't...

github.com

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

2 years

@SammyKoppelman @tylercowen Sorry, I can't help it.

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

5 years

@AllManicHamlet @Lis_Smith @splinter_news "the candidate's stance on gay marriage is that it's going well so far thanks for asking"

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

1 year

People underestimate how many New Yorkers moved here in their 20s and are now stuck here because they forgot how to drive.

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

7 months

One thing I learned today is that it’s apparently gotten harder to get into. Now I feel like one of those people who bought a house for $40k in the 70s and wonders why young people don’t just do that.

Paul Butler

@paulgb

7 months

Compared to the US system, going to Waterloo feels like a cheat code. No SATs, no acceptance coaches, no grinding out extracurriculars to stand out. You can just get decent grades at a public school, apply, and end up with a degree that Silicon Valley and Wall Street respect.

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@paulgb

1 year

Visualizing 1.4GB of data in the browser without breaking a sweat, by migrating to cloud rendering at the flick of a switch. I’m super excited about this tech.

Jamsocket

@JamsocketHQ

1 year

When visualizing massive datasets, you hit the limits of WebGL. We built a way to seamlessly migrate a local visualization to a more powerful remote GPU, without leaving the browser. Preview the docs at , and reach out if you have a use case.

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

4 months

@bryanfcasey @Boenau I live in NYC and this street was on my (walk/transit) commute for years. What I notice about this video is all the people you *don’t* see crossing. Strollers, wheelchairs, people over ~35, dog walkers, people with heftier builds who can’t squeeze through those tiny gaps, etc.

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@paulgb

5 months

@Jack_Forge13 @t_NYC @TractorLaw @JulieMFaenza Probably also results in people staying further back, so I imagine it actually does “work” on some level!

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

1 month

@Jordy_vD_ @levelsio @jessebeach GitHub should have a public audit log for permissions on open-source repos, seems crazy that they don’t given how much rides on it!

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

1 year

Oh, made it to #1 again! I’m spoiled this week.

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

3 months

I could keep going, but the point is, you keep narrowing down the list and all that's left is sqlite.

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

1 year

Wow you can’t even like a tweet that says “su*stack”. How quickly things departed from the “free speech” facade.

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

1 year

Prompt engineering? Yeah, I’ve been training for that my whole life.

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@paulgb

4 years

@irish_jezebel @LinderSheldon @oneunderscore__ He used to tell the story of the Scorpion and the Frog on the campaign trail. He Scorpioned them and they didn’t even see it coming. It’s almost poetic.

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@paulgb

1 month

@stylewarning Early Julia was not very notebook-friendly. It compiled after each code change and iirc didn’t allow struct redefinitions. Also, Python’s mid CPU perf became a smaller issue because high-compute workloads got offloaded to a cluster (pyspark) or the GPU (tensorflow, pytorch).

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@paulgb

5 months

@JeniferRajkumar @nysdmv This will create hoops for law-abiding riders while the reckless riders just ignore it. We know this because it’s already the case with mopeds, which already require licenses but 90% don’t have them. The people cheering on this policy just have a grudge against all bikes.

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@paulgb

4 years

@dbi60 @ProjectLincoln He knows everything about everything until it's convenient not to, then he knows nothing about it.

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@paulgb

5 years

A garden-path sentence is a grammatically correct sentence that starts in such a way that a reader's most likely interpretation will be incorrect; the reader is lured into a parse that turns out to be a dead end or yields a clearly unintended meaning.

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@paulgb

2 months

@JLivshultz @PhilWalkable We all know why it’s jammed: because there are too many cars trying to use a limited amount of space. That doesn’t make the situation better for a stroller, wheelchair, etc. trying to cross through narrow gaps between cars.

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

3 years

@veltman I know how this ends.

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@paulgb

4 years

@cliffordlevy I am sure tenants will still pay for some of this in the form of rent, but I'm very curious to see how much. I don't usually doubt markets, but 1+ month tent always seemed out of whack in a world where tenants are doing their own searches on Street East.

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

5 years

@ne0liberal How much are you being paid by Big X?

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

4 years

Happy 10th anniversary of the time TechCrunch called me “Smarter than You”

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@paulgb

3 years

@Kate_Bunni @Delafina777 It’s a fake screenshot that’s been circulating.

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@paulgb

3 years

@arb @ADR62288 @LeahPilcer Yep. Not to mention how all the arbitrary and unwritten rules of interviewing for a job/writing a resume are primarily proxies for social class.

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

4 years

Ever wanted to make a crossword puzzle? Made with #rust #webassembly #svelte

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@paulgb

5 years

@NJ4Pete @MaxLewisWSBT @wpmagazine @NickMerrill Lots of people who already favor another candidate were looking for a reason not to like Pete. I don't think anyone in good faith believes that he flubbed here.

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@paulgb

1 year

@tylercowen Sounds good in theory but I invite you to come for a walk with me and see the situation on the ground. At rush hour on Canal or Broome, pedestrians need to weave through traffic on their own light. Enforcing “don’t block the box” laws would be a stochastic congestion tax.

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@paulgb

1 year

@pushtheneedle Yes, living in a pod that you never leave sounds just awful. Amazing how this comes within an inch of self-awareness.

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@paulgb

2 months

I like to use ephemeral “scratch” Jupyter notebooks for ad-hoc calculations or JSON munging, so I built with @JamsocketHQ . It starts an ephemeral Jupyter notebook, keeps it up while the tab is open, and then shuts it down.

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@paulgb

4 months

I’m used to being roasted on HN, but I’m being roasted on the Kubernetes subreddit right now and it stings way deeper because they actually read my post first.

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

7 months

Why am I excited about QUIC? Just look at the handshake protocol.

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@paulgb

5 years

@chimeracoder It's basically a modern-day 3/5ths compromise.

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@paulgb

27 days

@florianederer As long as you assign them an ordering, and they know the ordering and that you intend to break ties with it, it does not matter if they escape sequentially. They will never form a pact to escape together, because the one with the lowest ordering will have 100% of being shot.

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@paulgb

4 years

Life update! We have amazing neighbors who helped us put together a rooftop wedding when our original plans were postponed.

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@paulgb

1 year

Later-stage companies often get bogged down by the weight of legacy code, which is why we’ve instituted a policy against writing legacy code.

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Paul Butler

@paulgb

8 months

@dobroslav_dev @TheUnicornist @peer_rich Sneaky. When you access the fake URL with the Twitterbot user agent, it sends a redirect header to , tricking the twitter bot into thinking that that’s where the link goes.

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@paulgb

1 year

@uhshanti @JeffMerkley I’ve rented from a large corporate landlord (title aside, the text of @JeffMerkley ’s bill covers many large SFH landlords, not HFs specifically). After renting from individual owners and deadbeat local building collectors, the big corporate landlord is my preference.

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@paulgb

4 years

@Lesleyab @davidmackau The motivation is really weird to me. Even if you’re the most anti-vax person about yourself and your family, surely you’d want other people to get vaccinated so you don’t have to. Even if you think it’s just a flu, I don’t understand the downside.

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@paulgb

1 year

@nwilliams030 IIRC the most economical speed to fly a commercial passenger jet at is below the maximum speed, so I’ve always assumed that they actually do fly faster if they are behind (because the cascading logistical costs of being late are more expensive than the extra fuel burn).

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@paulgb

4 years

@GrugWife @wupton theDECLINE of TYPOGRAPHY STANDARDS

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@paulgb

2 years

@ncweaver @ahcastor @smdiehl @dgolumbia I've been surprised how often I hear from engineers at blockchain companies some variation of “I don't believe in the tech I'm building, it's depressing, but there is a ton of money in the space and it pays the bills”.

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@paulgb

4 years

@bee_thorp @JamesFallows Geez, I didn't realize wearing my “you are secretly a Marxist, get a Twitter” pin in public would have such an effect.

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@paulgb

8 months

Someone hacked @mwseibel ’s account to promote a crypto scam. Twitter shows the official YC domain as the link even though their site wasn’t hacked. The trick here is to spoof a location redirect when someone accesses the fake page with the Twitterbot user agent.

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@paulgb

1 year

A frontend stack we’ll see more of: React for “chrome” components, rendered on top of a WebGL / WebGPU canvas owned by a WebAssembly module for performance graphics. @figma , @Modyfi_ , and @Rayonapp come to mind as examples. Who else?

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@paulgb

1 year

Imagine going back to 2004, when Microsoft had 95% of the browser market share, and trying to convince people that 15 years later Microsoft would ditch their rendering engine for a fork of a fork of a fork of KDE’s file manager’s built-in browser.

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@paulgb

4 years

@markjeffrey @AndrewYang Life: does the government act to protect life, or merely not take it? When does life begin? Liberty: does my liberty entitle me to dump sewage in a lake override your liberty to swim in a clean lake? Pursuit of happiness: not clear to me what this conveys that liberty does not

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@paulgb

3 years

@BadEconTakes If I was an economist I would simply not inflation

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@paulgb

4 years

@BadLegalTakes Loss of smell is a symptom, so if you can still smell malpractice suits you probably don't need to be tested.

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@paulgb

1 year

@evgeniyzhe @alex_peys Yeah. Seems like the mistake of the interviewer was to just say “no numpy” instead of asking about performance as the graph scales, and then asking follow ups. So much signal is lost when you just throw out arbitrary constraints to get the candidate on a predefined path.

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@paulgb

3 years

“what would stop someone from rendering a spreadsheet with WebGL backed by an Arrow dataframe compiled to WebAssembly” turns out, nothing.

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@paulgb

2 years

is on the HN front page! Makes my day to read comments like this.

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@paulgb

10 months

@iamdarcinc @ArmandDoma Some of them didn’t even make a mistake, from what I understand. They just scooped up any names they could find associated with the clubs that signed the letter, even if they had already graduated or had no say in the signing.

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@paulgb

2 years

@smdiehl I’m sure someone can do better, but I’ve always liked the “the asset I own happens to solve all the world’s problems” genre

jack

@jack

3 years

#Bitcoin will unite a deeply divided country. (and eventually: world)

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