HN user

eitland

12,040 karma

I work for a large consulting in Drammen, Norway. We provides specialists in cloud, machine teaching (i.e. programming), machine learning, project management, digital transformation and more.

We are a nice bunch. If you are stuck in Norway in a less than ideal job and you are a friendly person who knows any of the above as well as enough Norwegian to communicate effectively with Norwegians at work, shoot me a mail.

Writing I think is funny:

- http://erik.itland.no/courses-id-like-to-teach

- http://erik.itland.no/simplified-and-more-precise-privacy-policies-for-big-companies

- https://erik.itland.no/tag:aifails (Less funny. I wish stuff just worked.)

Stuff others upvote on various sites:

- http://erik.itland.no/what-did-google-get-right (About Google+)

- http://erik.itland.no/are-you-making-a-chrome-application-or-a-web-application

Tell HN: I think (2017-02-22) that user data should be treated in much the same way as nuclear raw materials. I would suggest considering a User Data Non-Proliferation Treaty along the lines of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferation_of_Nuclear_Weapons

I am a:

Sysadmin that prefer nix but have worked for years with a big, widely distributed, safety critical Windows system as well.

Programmer

  * Java, Java EE, Quarkus, Spring Boot
  * C#, Asp.Net MVC
  * Client side Javascript (TypeScript now)

I don't do graphic design.

I'm happily working for a Norwegian company.

You can reach me at erik.itland_at_gmail.com

Posts131
Comments4,066
View on HN
news.ycombinator.com 9mo ago

Tell HN: Copilot.microsoft.com redirect to m365.cloud.microsoft, chats gone

eitland
7pts1
habr.com 1y ago

How to Fail Those Students Who Rely on ChatGPT

eitland
3pts1
xxtomcooperxx.substack.com 2y ago

Saints, Thunders and Lightenings, Part 1

eitland
1pts0
www.cnil.fr 3y ago

The CNIL fines Google a total of 150M euros and Facebook 60M [2022]

eitland
1pts0
omniscientdebugger.github.io 3y ago

Omniscient Debugging (2007)

eitland
41pts20
www.thedrive.com 3y ago

Russia has already lost (written 24. March 2022)

eitland
2pts0
twitter.com 3y ago

A critical piece of evidence comes from the cell phones of Ukrainian victims

eitland
4pts0
www.washingtonpost.com 3y ago

The war in Ukraine has decimated a once feared Russian brigade

eitland
6pts3
www.oryxspioenkop.com 3y ago

Lost in Lies: Keeping Track of Russian Propaganda Claims – Oryx

eitland
2pts0
twitter.com 3y ago

9 years ago today, I was in a pub with my uni pals

eitland
7pts0
twitter.com 3y ago

Putin's fascist regime may be finally blocking access to Telegram inside Russia

eitland
2pts0
www.bbc.com 3y ago

Damaged cable leaves Shetland cut off from mainland

eitland
7pts0
www.stefanjudis.com 3y ago

A Firefox-Only Minimap

eitland
1pts1
www.vg.no 3y ago

“Little Scandinavia”: A small piece of Norway in an American prison

eitland
4pts0
twitter.com 3y ago

Was the 2014 Euromaidan revolution a “coup” by the U.S. and Ukrainian Nazis: No

eitland
10pts0
threadreaderapp.com 4y ago

Elementary Putinology for Western Appeasers

eitland
2pts0
threadreaderapp.com 4y ago

Do you run a discord server? Your private channels are probably not as private

eitland
2pts0
unherd.com 4y ago

The Battle on the Eastern Front

eitland
3pts0
www.thedrive.com 4y ago

Russia Has Already Lost

eitland
13pts18
imgur.com 4y ago

The Fog of War (Ukraine Conflict Day One)

eitland
8pts2
techinorg.blogspot.com 4y ago

What is going on with the search results?(2013)

eitland
1pts0
m.signalvnoise.com 4y ago

Why we choose profit

eitland
2pts0
erik.itland.no 4y ago

Chrome is the new Internet Explorer – 4 stages

eitland
2pts0
duckduckgo.com 4y ago

DuckDuckGo Traffic

eitland
310pts224
bugzilla.mozilla.org 4y ago

1332447 – API to Hide the Tabstrip

eitland
1pts0
m.signalvnoise.com 4y ago

We Choose Profit

eitland
7pts2
mcfunley.com 4y ago

Choose Boring Technology

eitland
3pts0
news.ycombinator.com 4y ago

Ask HN: How to prevent “boil in bag”-laptop

eitland
2pts4
threadreaderapp.com 4y ago

We took a tour of the port. Here's a thread about what I learned

eitland
4pts1
fediverse.party 5y ago

Fediverse.Party – Explore Federated Networks

eitland
181pts55
Mythical Man Month 2 months ago

I agree with you.

The danger is not however that only that people write their own tools for calculations and capacity planning etc.

The danger is people make useful stuff that is very fine as long it is just an internal tool, but then someone add credentials to other systems so it can access and maybe even update stuff and it gets exposed to third parties etc and all of a sudden we have a major data breach going on.

Mythical Man Month 2 months ago

Obviously it was not the same s since models that could write programs were not available 10 years ago.

And if you just mean your friend taught himself programming on his own, well that is actually very cool, I did too back in the 90ies and so did many others here.

My point is that it is now possible to vibe code a full application from frontend to backend today and still not be able to understand a line of TypeScript or anything else.

Mythical Man Month 2 months ago

My friend who has never taken a programming class (or even touched an IDE before AFAIK) has now put a small app into production.

Complete frontend + backend + database.

Yes, it is an internal app, but it works and everyone loves it.

Does that count as an example?

(Also I absolutely expect him to need help at some point, but so far it has taken his project from absolutely impossible to 3 weeks of work in between work, renovating his house and being a dad for the first time so I was very impressed.)

Back in the days we had this in programming as well with palettes of drag & drop components.

It is kind of broken now, much thanks to using web applications (and applications that are basically just wrappers for web applications), but I don't know I if want to go back.

On one side it was much easier when I could hack together a program that was good enough (since everything was the same bland grey).

On the other hand some programs certainly looks nicer today.

And it has become easier to compose logic with solutions like Maven, Nuget and the various frontend package managers.

But yes, we lost drag and drop UI development, we lost consistency and we lost a lot of UX (at least temporarily).

That's a big flaw of LLMs, not limited to RAGs: it lacks the fundamental understanding of "good and bad", like Richard Sutton said in that Dwarkesh podcast.

After paticipating in social media since the beginning I think this problem is not limited to LLMs.

There are certain things we can debunk all day every day and the only outcome isit happens again next day and this has been a problem since long before AI - and I personally think it started before social media as well.

There is always the option to use battery (some modern mines use this),for example RAAMS.

The problem is of the enemy know you use only mines that work for max n hours or m days they just wait for n + 1 hours or m + 1 days.

There is a lot more to say about this, but there are probably people way more qualified than be here to explain it.

My take is that Bluesky got the network effects right, with hyping and gradual release and careful curation of who seeded the network and that is - IMO - the important thing they got right.

Let me present my take on why the federated alternatives struggle to replace X:

Twitter didn't succeed because it was a particularly good solution - it really isn't. It succeeded purely on the back of the network effect.

When every open-source alternative simply copies the existing restrictions without adding any unique value, why would users switch to an equally flawed version where none of the accounts they actually want to follow are?

It is really interesting for me to hear your experience.

I have lived in Norway all of my >45 years on this earth and I can say that in the first half of my life were I lived on the west coast, power outages was totally expected.

We had a generator, and we had a gas stove ("everyone" in Norway use electricity for cooking) for those days, a kerose lamp and a wood stove.

The longest power outage I experienced was 3 days, somewhere around 1986 I think, but a few hours could happen multiple times and overnight outages were not unusual.

Personally I ignore most ads but I have also bought some really good products based on ads and there are companies I wish would advertise more, for example relvant conferences that I only find out about because someone posted about their experiences being there.

In my case I was kinda OK with Google ads until around 2010 and IIRC only began blocking them actively after they had been feeding me trash ads for years.

Maybe you are right in most cases and I was the victim of a fluke.

But from what I have seen from Google after that I don't think so.

Facebook however, a company I disliked then and dislike now are scary good with their ads and have often been even even when I actively tried to avoid them.

All this to say that your theory sounds interesting but I am convinced it is far from the whole story.

My experience as well:

Stack Overflow used to (in practice) be a place to ask questions and get help and also help others.

At some point it became all about some mission and not only was it not as useful anymore but it also became a whole lot less fun.

Late, but thank you!

Both for explaining the simpler way to do it and also for the contect.

(Why? Because it feels good to know that I am not the only one who cannot find documentation for this and other things.)

>> Just grab any man you see on the street, throw him in the van and ship him to the conscription office for processing.

> 1. This is a wild exaggeration:[1] There are lots of men walking in Ukrainian streets.

With the right papers clearing them of draft obligations, sure.

So basically you agree with me that it was a wild exaggeration?

[1] Also your computer seem to have a bug where its clipboard selectively remove words (see the part in italics) from the text you quote without inserting ellipsis or any kind of marker to indicate it. The alternative would be that you very deliberately misrepresent what I wrote and that wouldn't be a nice thing to accuse you of.

My understanding is they are just stubborn. They once did it this way and now it is "the Apple way".

Recent example: Apple used to hide "search in page" in the share menu in mobile safari. Far from obvious, but at some point one discovers it because there is no other place to look for it.

Now they have finally decided to make a standard fly dropping overflow menu and hide the share button there. But interestingly you still need to open the share menu from there to find the search button.

Meanwhile other buttons that weren't as obviously misplaced in "share" like "Add to Bookmarks" are now on the top level together with the share button.

Same goes for the arguments against things like cut and paste in finder: they didn't create it back in the day and now there is a complete mythology about why cut and paste in Finder would actually be stupid and almost evil.

Especially when it happens at night.

But I'll not preted Google is any better. Last I used it would have call "CTO of the company I worked for" or "Send message to random friend-of-a-friend that I once helped" as suggested actions in the middle of the night. (Maybe it has improved now? I used to be comically bad, as was other large tech companies: https://erik.itland.no/tag:aifails)

This is a problem all over our industry:

- almost every search field (when an end user modifies the search instead of clicking one of the results for the second time that should be a clear signal that something is off.)

- almost every chat bot (Don't even get me started about the Fisher Price toy level of interactions provided by most of them. And worse: I know they can be great, one company I interact with now has a great one and a previous company I worked for had another great one. It just seems people throw chatbots at the page like it is a checkbox that needs to be checked.)

- almost all server logs (what pages are people linking to that now return 404?)

- referer headers (you product is being discussed in an open forum and no one cares to even read it?)

We collect so much data and then we don't use it for anything that could actually delight our users. Either it is thrown away or worse it is fed back into "targeted" advertising that besides being an ugly idea also seems to be a stupid idea in many cases: years go by betweeen each time I see a "targeted" ad that actually makes me want to buy something, much less actually buy something.

Could borrow the concept of FRAND (Fair, Reasonable And Non Discrimatory IIRC) from tech companies licensing patents?

I don't know much about it and I do not think it is perfect, but from what I remember from discussions here it prevents certain forms of abuse.

TypeScript isn't primarily meant to be enjoyed.

It is meant to be a much better alternative to Javascript while dealing with the fact that the underlying engines use and existing programmers were used to Javascript.

That said I absolutely enjoy TypeScript, but that might be because I suffered from having to deal with Javascript from 2006 until TypeScript became available.

Are you serious?

It is rather obvious why a software designer want to know how a piece of software is used and also to know it over time. If number of cancelled screenshots increases (or decreases) compared to general usage of the screenshot feature it might give an early indication that a recent change was bad (or good).

As long as it only logs counters like this and not who I am or any of my data or who I am I actually want them to log it and if it was disabled and there was an easy way to enable it I would do it.

The problem is that they have:

- a history of not being completely honest (unlike certain other actors who have a history of being actively dishonest)

- no easy way for people to choose what they send

- and a number of other problems, for example what I suspect is that they ignore actual users seemingly in favour of what their ux designers and developers think a user should want. (And that seems to always be dumbing down, "simplifying" and making it more like Chrome.)

Someday they'll stop changing the context menu if I accidentaly select something.

(Some UX designer or developer thought it was a great idea to remove the back and forward buttons from the context menu if text is selected so now I have two different context menus and one of them lack the thing I am looking for most of the time which is the back button.

Or fixing the tabstrip API (someone has decided we users are now too stupid to use only tree style tabs and for our own good we must be prevented from hiding the original tab bar).

In my case it is rarely that I use LLM to write comments but rather I frequently use an LLM on my finished comment to fix things I miss as a non native speaker.

The content of the comment is my unique opinion and my unique writing and I mostly also make sure to remove stupid things like directional quotation marks.

But yes, it is possible to be very much human but also trigger certain peoples AI detectors.

Thoughts on Evals 8 months ago

This scared me until I realized it is about raindrop.ai, not raindrop.io.

(Raindrop.io is a bookmark service that AFAIK has "take money from people and stores their bookmarks" as its complete business model.)