HN user

SuperQue

281 karma
Posts0
Comments76
View on HN
No posts found.

Many phone cameras are already quite good.

Of course, you and I know that. But most people just listen to the marketing material.

My mother's most used feature on her phone is the camera.

She asked me about getting a new phone when she has a perfectly working Samsung flagship phone from 3 years ago. The marketing says "The S26 camera is _SOOOO_ much better". But, really, it's exactly the same sensors as the S23.

"none, loyalty goes only one way and trust me when I tell you that no-one is safe"

Yup, I know someone who had been there since 2006 that was laid off. Not even high scores on Perf will save you.

I have no idea what methodology went into it. That's a whole postmortem on its own.

In Finland, time of day electric use meters have existed for something like 20 years. Someone I know who lived north of the arctic circle had a home heating system that would heat up an energy storage box (I forget if it was an oil tank or simply stone) at night and then cycle the heat out to the house during the daytime.

The big thing I see with a ton of arguments about changing the way we produce and consume energy assume that things will change overnight and the whole system will come crashing down because it's not ready.

Perfect is the enemy of good. Things aren't going to happen overnight, there will be a transition period.

Electric vehicle transition is a good example of this. * OMG, the grid will crash with all the charging. * OMG, You won't be able to charge it <because reasons>. * OMG, it doesn't solve <random gas car use case here>.

The transition to electric vehicles is coming, but slowly. It basically started at 0 in 2010 and a decade later it's still only at 2-5% in the US and something like 5-10% in the EU, China, etc. The ball is just getting rolling.

The grid hasn't crashed, charging is getting deployed where there's demand, and not every <random gas car use case here> needs to be solved now, or even in the mid term future.

Yea, it was great. But it was more lack of maintenance than anything. The original chat devs were passionate about open federation. The new devs were not.

Add to that it was a big source of spam that nobody wanted to deal with.

Apparently the team tried really hard to get more companies on board with opening up federation. But I think the only "major" service that did was what was left of AOL.

Google ended up with a bunch of chat apps because the culture promotes building new over keeping things running.

The first chat was basically an XMPP service. It was decent, it federated outside of Google, it was fully functional. It even supported group channels (XMPP conferences) internally. But I don't think that was ever exposed to the public.

Then Hangouts was created. It was, per usual at Gooogle, a ground-up rewrite. IIRC not the same team. So they spent at least a couple years playing catch up to get feature parity with the XMPP chat. Worse, Hangouts was one of the first services to suffer from strict team-created "Personas" design philosophy. Any time anyone would complain about a feature, or miss-feature, it was flatly ignored because "You're not one of our Personas". It took years of complaints to get them to change their minds.

By the time Hangouts was good enough to fully replace the previous service it was now boring and people left the team for other new projects. Because maintenance won't get you promoted.

The other random chat services were basically experiential toys.

Now we have Meet, which is is likely another case of "Hangouts is unmaintainable tech, we need to re-write it". Years of getting up to feature parity. And miss-features that won't get fixed.

This is spot on. The issue was a culture of new over improve.

It had the upside of making some things more integrated. MR and issues and CI work much better together than GitHub or atlassian.

But it had the down side of expanding into feature categories half baked.

I only managed to stay for 4 years before I couldn't stand it. But I'm more an SRE than a feature developers.

I left for a job that has "burn tech debt" as a key goal.

garden leave

It's called the same thing in Germany. The term also applies to when you quit, but the employer wants to cut your access to the company ahead of your contract termination date. It's typical to have 1-3 months of "notice period" in Germany.

Not 100% silent, but lots of new projectors are based on LED/laser lamps, which produce a lot less waste heat.

Plus there's now ultra-short-throw projectors that sit in the front of the room, rather than above / behind you.

Ultra-short-throw also has the advantage that you can use from-below lenticular screens. This means that ambient room light affects them a lot less, since they refelect light mostly coming from only where the projector is.

Sadly, "smart TV" has infected projectors as well. But maybe not as bad as normal TVs. Most projectors still have dumb inputs that work fine.

Atomic clocks are not required. That's a misunderstanding of what they're used for.

The atomic clock thing helps improve performance of Spanner, by tightening the SLO of node-to-node and continent-to-continent clock drift.

And that's part of what others are saying. Some class of developers want POSIX, but POSIX is _terrible_ to horizontally scale.

I've tried a couple times at different companies to get developers to stop assuming POSIX and switch to object storage as their persistent byte abstraction layer.

Trying to scale POSIX is a dead-end. Every time I try and see people build it, it's a big pile of suck. For example, CephFS. Yea, it works, but it still sucks compared to object storage. There's just no magic in the universe that will get you around the CAP issues with trying to make POSIX work over a network.

Except, modern AC is pretty efficient. I have a decent monoblock cooler in our apartment in Berlin. I also have a 1-second sampling power meter. The AC unit uses about 700 watts when active cooling, but of course it cycles so that's not all the time. We also only run it when it's 30+ during the daytime.

Overall, it's only added about 15-20kWh to our monthly usage. (2-person household, about 200kWh/month average)

No, it really is pretty easy. I learned on a '85 VW Jetta manual. Took a couple tries to figure out, then it wasn't an issue.

There are some cars that have very touchy clutches, but most are just fine.