Former quant dev. K8s contributor. OMSCS alumni in computing systems. Distributed systems enthusiast. Anime enjoyer. Employed at big tech as a staff swe.
All comments are my own and represent my own opinions.
Submissions
UK House of Lords attempting to ban use of VPNs by anyone under 16
alecmuffett.com
394 points·by nvarsj··456 comments
Online Safety Act – Blackmailed after submitting identity docs to scam site
old.reddit.com
5 points·by nvarsj··1 comments
Ask HN: Can a fully remote manager be effective?
4 points·by nvarsj··2 comments
Large performance degradation in OpenSSL 3
github.com
4 points·by nvarsj··0 comments
Google Workspace is ending unlimited storage
old.reddit.com
30 points·by nvarsj··16 comments
Ask HN: Do you use an alias for OSS contributions?
2 points·by nvarsj··2 comments
Learning from Marble Arch Mound
mvrdv.nl
27 points·by nvarsj··12 comments
Max Headroom Signal Hijacking
en.wikipedia.org
39 points·by nvarsj··2 comments
Ask HN: Could what.cd have been considered an archive for copyright purposes?
4 points·by nvarsj··2 comments
Knative won't join the CNCF
groups.google.com
3 points·by nvarsj··0 comments
The Creeping Capitalist Takeover of Higher Education
huffpost.com
3 points·by nvarsj··0 comments
Post Mortem on the Demise of CloudFoundry
medium.com
2 points·by nvarsj··0 comments
How LinkedIn Manages 10k Code Repos
engineering.linkedin.com
3 points·by nvarsj··0 comments
An Analysis of the Impact of Arbitrary Blockchain Content on Bitcoin [pdf]
fc18.ifca.ai
141 points·by nvarsj··153 comments
Bitcoin tops $7000
arstechnica.com
2 points·by nvarsj··0 comments
Major outage for Monzo bank on Kubernetes/Linkerd
community.monzo.com
2 points·by nvarsj··0 comments
DreamHost fights DOJ request for 1.3M IP addresses of Trump protestors
bbc.co.uk
61 points·by nvarsj··8 comments
Ask HN: Is Riak a viable alternative to Cassandra?
6 points·by nvarsj··2 comments
The Terrorist Line
energizedwork.com
1 points·by nvarsj··0 comments
Steam vows to never publish Hatred, a mass-murder simulator
Not hard to understand. People will pay for a better UX. Which Plex has, once you disable all the streaming junk.
Also there’s simply more clients for it. The only way to play Bluray Dolby Vision layers correctly is with an AM6B+ which has an amazing Plex frontend.
Well I don't know the details from Apple's side, and this was 20 years ago. That was just the discussion on the ground. I personally experienced a senior Mot employee grilling me about some IP I had developed, then go to Apple the next week. Also saw many directors/VPs with extensive proprietary knowledge go to Apple. Apple opened up recruiting events 10 minutes down the street from Mot HQ in Schaumburg Hilton to poach the best people (which I went to, and flew to Cupertino to interview for the original iPhone ios team - wish I had passed that, I would be retired by now!). I know there was also a free flow of information as part of the ROKR collab while Apple was working secretly on the iPhone.
Psychotherapy. I've also done a lot of CBT in the past - but I found it didn't really solve my issues, just provides some temporary relief. I personally found going for a long walk to be better than CBT techniques.
Yep - meds. Tried a bunch and duloxetine is making a massive difference for me. On them for 4 months so far.
Also picked up therapy yet again but tbh I never found therapy to really solve things - it helps me understand myself better at a logical level but the underlying anxiety / depression (including suicidal ideation) has never really gone away until the meds.
I'd say right now I'm feeling quite content with life, and even find myself feeling genuinely happy throughout the day about things. Which is something I haven't really experienced before. I still have some of those feelings of anxiety crop up but they fade away pretty fast. Depression is completely gone for the most part. I'm still trying to understand this new reality as I'm not used to it at all. But I think (with some caution still!) it's pretty great.
I know anti depressants have a lot of bad press and I’ve even had therapists tell me it’s a crutch. So I’ve generally been hesitant to start them. But they work, not sure why they work, but they do for me at least and I’m glad I stuck with it to find the right one.
This... I finally changed my life by talking to a psychiatrist after 40+ years of suffering and trying a myriad of things. Mental illnesses are real and need real treatment.
The irony to me is Apple did the exact same thing to Motorola back in the day, which I saw firsthand as a Mot eng. Poached employees and IP. I doubt the iPhone would have happened otherwise.
Jobs was absolutely ruthless and would do anything for his goals.
As an old timer, I saw this firsthand happen with Motorola. Apple did the same shenanigans, stealing IP and engineers. I doubt the iPhone would have happened otherwise.
Jobs was absolutely ruthless and would do anything for his goals.
The harness is so much better than cc which is a buggy mess. Gpt is also way faster than Claude. I’ve been using gpt for a while now and I know a lot of people that swapped away from Anthropic for multiple reasons. However - fable still seems to be the best coding agent, it’s just slow and the harness sucks. So I still use it in some rare cases like to review codex. I’m hoping 5.6 lets me drop it entirely.
This is the one great feature about Gmail I think.
But I haven’t touched Gmail in years, been on fastmail for about 6 years now.
I’ve solved this by using the fastmail-mcp plugin and have a skill that organises all my mails for me and highlights high priority ones. Works great - I run it every few days, takes about 5-10 minutes.
I honestly think the rise of LLMs will be the death of open source in the long run. Already, apparently, quality of OSS has dropped significantly since 2025 (so most models stop training on github after this).
I don't think a lot of OSS authors quite understand the extent to which models like claude/codex rely on their work. I'd bet money there are extensive curated tasks using your tooling for post-training. With 0 attribution or anything, these models are using your work wholesale to build sophisticated agents that can do your job.
Yeah it's depressing as hell. I guess it's the same thing for artists and musicians and writers.
P.S. I can symphathise with the old house issues! I bought a 1901 terraced property, it's an absolute money pit.
Yeah it was a bit reductionist. I guess it was my reaction to the negativity.
I think his experience is
quite common in big tech, and even swapping teams doesn’t seem to help in my own experience. It’s the rare teams that have any agency, or even clear ownership over the code. It seems by design but as a craftsman it is very frustrating.
I haven’t read anyone put it in words quite as well as Sean’s posts. This really is the nihilistic side of big tech that is rarely written about.
So I think it’s a unique insight - hence why I’m kind of baffled at the reaction. I think if you can relate to what he’s saying (it hits really close to home for me), it’s easy to sympathise with.
Imagine an entire world of interactive, colourful ascii art.
I mostly started on my local BBS on Long Island playing tradewars in my teens, around 14 (where I memorably won as top player for a few months and got tons of credits).
I actually have no memory of how I discovered BBSs, I think I found some directory at the library then found my local one.
I expanded from there to some bigger ones (requiring a special telephone plan so it didn’t cost a fortune!). I played some rpg (maybe lotrd?) with like a hundred players and it was an absolute blast.
Other highlights:
I found a credit card generator and used it try getting free credits which got denied. The owner called my parents house and they had no clue what they were talking about.
Another time I was trying some exploits to get ops access and the admin caught me (BBS servers would echo the remote session). Admin interrupted my session and we started chatting. He recognised I was a naive script kiddie and we chatted about love of BBSs and computers. Pretty cool.
Everyone's circumstances are different right? It's not always so simple.
Big tech was a bit of an experiment for me in my 40s, I always worked at small/med size companies before. I think it was worth it (for the learnings and comp). I get a lot more choices in the future when I'm financially secure.
Former quant dev. K8s contributor. OMSCS alumni in computing systems. Distributed systems enthusiast. Anime enjoyer. Employed at big tech as a staff swe.
All comments are my own and represent my own opinions.