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Dan Luu
@danluu
Active on mastodon.social/@danluu; also trying out bsky.app/profile/da. No longer read replies or notifications here now that tweetdeck is gated.
danluu.com
Joined December 2008
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    Dan Luu
    @danluu
    Dec 24, 2017
    Computer latency: 1977-2017 danluu.com/input-lag/
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    Dan Luu
    @danluu
    Dec 25, 2023
    "Unfortunately, a recent software update was not successful. Your vehicle cannot be driven. Please call customer support:"
    "Unfortunately, a recent software update was not successful. Your vehicle cannot be driven. Please call customer support:"
    23M
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    Dan Luu
    @danluu
    Apr 15, 2024
    Every once in a while, I think about going to work in the game industry.
    @ZTGallagher • 1mo ago I know a guy who was a QA tester for Obsidian Entertainment working on Neverwinter Nights 2. At the end of development, they invited all the QA testers to the parking lot for a celebration party. There was no party, they disabled all their keys when they got out there, and told them they were all fired. And that was it...
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    Dan Luu
    @danluu
    Aug 13, 2024
    A former Apple engineer discusses Google product culture: > My director wore an Apple Watch and had an iPhone ... my VP too. Nobody was expected to eat the dog food and so few did. This was crazy to me coming from Apple ....
    mattnewton 1 hour ago | parent | next [–] When I worked at Google I got re-orged into the same division as pixel / android. My director wore an Apple Watch and had an iPhone for personal use, and I am pretty sure I saw an Apple Watch on my VP too. Nobody was expected to eat the dog food and so few did. This was crazy to me coming from Apple- I remember several internal sites would ask you to file a radar (bug report) on why you switched to chrome from safari if you opened them in chrome. So many crazy issues I saw and reported didn’t actually matter to many high ranking members of the pixel team because they didn’t use the devices after 5pm. There is a lot of incredible talent in that team but I think Google needs a minor culture shift to compete with Apple here.
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    Dan Luu
    @danluu
    May 2, 2017
    Google translate, are you ok?
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    Dan Luu
    @danluu
    Jan 18, 2024
    Current and former Google engineers discuss how Google has changed:
    That was an absolutely spot-on description of what it was like when I joined in 2007 or 2008. Within 2 year of joining, I had approval to use all the idle cycles in prod for protein design, folding, and drug discovery, and I had a front-row seat with some of the best programmers in the industry. By and large, employees were fun people to interact with, and the management was generally understanding of our hijinx. The main struggle I had was to convince the leadership to move faster into the cloud ("But we have appengine!" and "But profits aren't as good as ads", until MSFT ate their lunch). As soon as it was possible, I built and launched the cloud product I had wanted Google to make even before I joined! It really did just feel like grad school with better funding. For me it lasted until around 2014 (wow, 10 years ago) when a director stole my ideas and bad-mouthed me to a bunch of senior folks. I hung on a bit longer (working for a close friend of the author of this FAQ on 3d pri...
    Sundar is not a psychopath. You're making a common error, ascribing humanity to Sundar. Sundar is a growth robot with no moral system. See Bryan Cantrill's description of Larry Ellison: "You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle." The difference is that Sundar is a industrial scale trash compactor, not a lawnmower. throwaway5211 1 hour ago | root | parent | next [–] (throwaway for obvious reasons) The comparison to Oracle is pretty good. Working for Sundar's Google feels like working for a company whose only product is quarterly earnings reports. I have no idea what the company's mission is anymore besides Number Go Up. The ol...
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    Dan Luu
    @danluu
    Jan 22, 2024
    Long-time Microsoft employees explain changes in Windows: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=300193… Designers were handed full control over UX. Engineers who fought for usability over a slick-looking interface burned out and left after repeatedly being overruled.
    I worked on the Windows Desktop Experience Team from Win7-Win10. Starting around Win8, the designers had full control, and most crucially essentially none of the designers use Windows. I spent far too many years of my career sitting in conference rooms explaining to the newest designer (because they seem to rotate every 6-18 months) with a shiny Macbook why various ideas had been tried and failed in usability studies because our users want X, Y, and Z. Sometimes, the "well, if you really want this it will take N dev-years" approach got avoided things for a while, but just as often we were explicitly overruled. I fought passionately against things like the all-white title bars that made it impossible to tell active and inactive windows apart (was that Win10 or Win8? Either way user feedback was so strong that that got reverted in the very next update), the Edge title bar having no empty space on top so if your window hung off the right side and you opened too many tabs you could n...
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    Dan Luu
    @danluu
    Jul 1, 2023
    "Hardcore" engineering at Twitter 2.0: "To address extreme level of data scraping & system manipulation", Twitter added rate limiting on the backend which seems to have created a retry storm from the client that DDoS'd Twitter for at least eight hours.
    Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode 246 points by 3cats-in-a-coat 1 hour ago | hide | past | favorite | 351 comments Elon Musk: "To address extreme level of data scraping & system manipulation, we've applied the following temporary limits: - Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day - Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day - New unverified accounts to 300/day" Source: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fz94eReWYAEhkHS?format=png&name=900x900 Source (backup): https://i.imgur.com/WvwtHez.png user_named 40 minutes ago | prev | next [–] This is hilarious. It appears that Twitter is DDOSing itself. The Twitter home feed's been down for most of this morning. Even though nothing loads, the Twitter website never stops trying and trying. In the first video, notice the error message that I'm being rate limited. Then notice the jiggling scrollbar on the right. The second video shows why it's jiggling. Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to
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    Dan Luu
    @danluu
    Jun 11, 2024
    State of the art anti-cheat techniques: Roblox detects if you have the string "x86dbg" in a window title (or window?), so kids are changing their display names and discord server names to x86dbg to get people kicked from Roblox.
    The program I’ve opened before this issue started was discord, where my friend named himself “x64dbg”, triggering the kick every time someone had thier DMs open. Even thought it kept after that, the only program that could’ve left it’s drivers running would be Cheat Engine, which I haven’t launched that windows session.
    This was confirmed by Bitdancer to be by design I believe: https://devforum.roblox.com/t/serious-issue-discord-servers-are-able-to-prevent-you-from-playing-roblox/2971604/31?u=ashi_division
    196K
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    Dan Luu
    @danluu
    Jul 5, 2019
    When it's easier to put up physical a sign than it is to get Google to stop routing people down the wrong road.
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    Dan Luu
    @danluu
    Jul 30, 2022
    I've find U.S. immigration policy baffling. Back when I was in college, the majority of the top EE students at my university where from China, Korea, or India. Almost all of them wanted to stay in the U.S., but most couldn't, so they went home and worked as engineers at home.
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    Dan Luu
    @danluu
    Jan 29, 2022
    One thing it took me quite a while to understand is how few bits of information it's possible to reliably convey to a large number of people. When I was at MS, I remember initially being surprised at how unnuanced their communication was, but it really makes sense in hindsight.
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    Dan Luu
    @danluu
    Nov 16, 2022
    One of the things that I think is sad about the decimation of Twitter eng is that Twitter was doing a lot of interesting (and high ROI) engineering work that, at younger companies, is mostly outsourced to "the cloud" or open source projects A few examples off the top of my head:
    user avatar
    Dan Luu
    @danluu
    Sep 29, 2021
    The value of in-house expertise danluu.com/in-house/
    An alternate title for this post might be, "Twitter has a kernel team!?". At this point, I've heard that surprised exclamation enough that I've lost count of the number times that's been said to me (I'd guess that it's more than ten but less than a hundred). If we look at trendy companies that are within a couple factors of two in size of Twitter (in terms of either market cap or number of engineers), they mostly don't have similar expertise, often as a result of path dependence — because they "grew up" in the cloud, they didn't need kernel expertise to keep the lights on the way an on prem company does. While that makes it socially understandable that people who've spent their career at younger, trendier, companies, are surprised by Twitter having a kernel team, I don't think there's a technical reason for the surprise. Whether or not it has kernel expertise, a company Twitter's size is going to regularly run into kernel issues, from major production incidents to papercuts. Withou...
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    Dan Luu
    @danluu
    Oct 21, 2021
    Willingness to look stupid danluu.com/look-stupid/
    People frequently think that I'm very stupid. I don't find this surprising, since I don't mind if other people think I'm stupid, which means that I don't adjust my behavior to avoid seeming stupid, which results in people thinking that I'm stupid. Although there are some downsides to people thinking that I'm stupid, e.g., failing interviews where the interviewer very clearly thought I was stupid, I think that, overall, the upsides of being willing to look stupid have greatly outweighed the downsides.