crimsonpowder's comments

crimsonpowder | 8 months ago | on: Tell HN: Help restore the tax deduction for software dev in the US (Section 174)

I don't understand the reasoning behind this, however. Why depreciate anything over multiple years vs just deducting it in the current year? Does it not all come out to the same amount to the IRS in the end?

crimsonpowder | 11 months ago | on: You might want to stop running atop

If it was 1 or 2, there would be a long Rachel-style post ranting about it and explaining exactly why.

It has to be 3.

And she knows her stuff, so I'm listening. Luckily we don't use atop.

crimsonpowder | 2 years ago | on: XML is better than YAML – Hear me out

XML's biggest problem is perfectly demonstrated in Apple's plist files. There's no real way to do lists so 15 ways have been invented ad-hoc.

crimsonpowder | 2 years ago | on: Why is division so much more complex than other arithmetic operations?

Probably because add, sub, and mul are int -> int and div is int -> real. The fundamental operation maps from ℵ0 to ℵ1, which the other operations don't do. Intuitively, the complexity comes from this fact.

crimsonpowder | 2 years ago | on: Kafka is dead, long live Kafka

Of course, as soon as an AZ goes down that had all of your Kafka nodes in it, you get eviscerated on HN for running such a setup.

crimsonpowder | 2 years ago | on: Meta Tells Managers Promotions Will Be Few and Far Between

It works well while there's good growth and cheap debt. But when the revenue to support this type of headcount inflation isn't there, suddenly the entire promotion treadmill seizes up.

crimsonpowder | 2 years ago | on: Fastmail Is Down

On the contrary, fastmail is usually the fastest for me in terms of delivering mail and has never failed. I get all PINs and verify emails.

crimsonpowder | 2 years ago | on: AI Will Create More Developers, Not Less

LLMs can't replace most developers, not yet. If they get much better, maybe. But they have limited context. They make up APIs that don't exist.

For me, it's a great starting point that reduces carpal tunnel, but not much more.

crimsonpowder | 9 years ago | on: Male birth control study cut short as some participants experience side effects

There are divisions that are tested--monthly polygraphs and urine/blood. You've never heard of them. When people think about bodybuilding, they imagine freaks, which is not a natural state.

In software, we say: good, fast, cheap; pick two. In bodybuilding: big, lean, natural; pick two.

You can have a lot of mass and if you carry extra fat, or you can be shredded to the bone and carry a lot less lean mass. Naturally, the lower fat reserves run, the higher the chance that catabolic hormones break down lean mass. If you want to be big, lean, and win shows, you need to take the growth and steroid hormones to flip some bits on the config files in your muscular/adipose tissue to allow it.

Your DNA is the software for your body. Hormones bind to receptors on cells, get transported into the cell, bind to internal receptors, and then this complete structure moves into the nucleus where it transcribes certain DNA sequences into RNA chains that will be fed through ribosomes to produce proteins (your hardware).

Steroids/hormones (everything from vitamin D to testosterone) is the body's mechanism of editing /etc/* and calling kill -HUP on select daemons. Steroids evolved as the process for doing this because it's biologically impractical to grow a nerve ending to every single cell in the body.

crimsonpowder | 9 years ago | on: Male birth control study cut short as some participants experience side effects

I'm trying to get my IFBB pro card. Natural drug-free bodybuilding as a hobby is healthy. What I'm doing is not. I have no delusions about this.

crimsonpowder | 9 years ago | on: Male birth control study cut short as some participants experience side effects

Since steroids are demonized, I had to make a throwaway account. Testosterone does not increase aggression, even when given in doses far above natural limits. [1] [2]

When I'm not programming, my hobby is bodybuilding. To make it as a bodybuilder, you have to use steroids. With a sample size of ~30 (fellow lifters and me), I can tell you that more testosterone makes you calmer, leaner, and bigger. My stress and anxiety on steroid cycles vanishes and all that's left is confidence, even with powerful steroids like trenbolone.

This study was designed by some of the most incompetent people around. Athletes inject long esters every 3-5 days and these guys were doing a shot every 8 weeks. Athletes take additional drugs to control the conversion of testosterone into estrogen (the hormone behind acne and mood swings). If I had designed this protocol, it would've looked like standard Testosterone Replacement Therapy (TRT) plus an injection of nandrolone decanoate every week (which is great because it heals your joints). Of course, good luck selling bi-weekly injections.

For decades we shouted about reefer madness from the rooftops, arrested millions of people and threw them in jail, and expanded corrupt government agencies because marijuana was "dangerous". It seems like we're learning our lesson on that front and I hope we get our act together when it comes to hormones.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8855834

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12062320