malux85

I would say thats a different thing entirely, an amateur in the original sense of the word

Latin amator, French amateur, means lover.

In this sense, it means somebody who is doing something because he/she loves it, not as his/her profession. It is not a large semantic shift to infer that he/she is not as skilled.

I haven't once come across one of these mythical perfectionists that everyone is constantly retelling cautionary tales of, who endlessly rewrites perfectly serviceable software and never releases

Oh, I have. A LOT! In my friend group theres at least 5 of these right now. They work day jobs (that they dislike), they try to build a side hustle but never get it off the ground because they endlessly rewrite perfectly serviceable software and never release, the reason is:

- they believe that running a startup only requires writing a good product

- they avoid releasing because thats "judgement day" and might flop

- they think if they code it "just right" a money Waterfall will open up magically like a lottery ticket win and be instant success

- they believe that because theres the occasional exception to these rules above, it will happen to them too (everyone thinks they are the special exception,) because thats easier than accepting building a successful business takes discipline, hard work, and doing the tasks you dont want to do.

You havent come across them because by definition they never release and they dont share (they are embarrassed it might fail) so theres thousands and thousands of them, grinding away under false assumptions. They enjoy the act of building (which is totally cool!) but think thats all there is to it. Convinced that just one more rewrite is the thing holding them back from success - because they'd rather rewrite than talk to users. Millions of people doing this, millions of dreams that will die, because /just one more rewrite/

Just because you havent seen them, doesnt mean they aren't there

Android was acquired, and it was java from the start in the source company.

Hacker news is a community of curious, technical people, the technical parts alone of getting this all working in the browser and maintaining compatibility with the binary formats, is pretty interesting and cool!

Typing speed only really matters for juniors and going into intermediate developers, after that point thinking methodology - abstraction design, data structures, system design, complexity isolation, matter way, WAY more.

50% because by the time you get to this your typing speed has crossed a threshold of no longer being the bottleneck and 50% because you are experienced enough not to make all the silly little mistakes and your unit of work is larger and more complex

After getting a tiny amount of traffic from HN, its now crashed. Beautifully poetic.

I think theres still a lot of room for traditional engineering - methods that have been robust enough to stand the test of time are enduring because they work! Hype will always hype, but when its delivery time and the system is stress tested, we will see what happens...

I find it baffling when people complain about this like AI use is mandatory.

You explored agentic coding, didn't like losing control to vibes, so stop doing it.

The beauty of pet projects is that they are yours to define, you set the terms, if you dont like how agentic coding played out then just dont do it?

You're not under pressure to ship, youre not being forced by a manager, this is yours : so own it. The only "pressure" you are under is the pressure in your mind that youre getting from sitting on social media drinking hype juice all day, the lesson here is the motto of the royal society - Nullis in verba- THINK FOR YOURSELF

Strong (but polite) disagree. Domain knowledge is now commoditised more than ever, the only valuable employees are intellectually flexible ones with a can-do mindset, ideally more senior ones who will also take responsibility for the final output. Thats all we hire right now.

With the exception of companies so huge that economies of scale make hyperspecialisation the sensible choice, however I ignored these because this is a startup and small-medium business community

I've also been in situations where the person claiming it simply refused to become competent in the language, framework, or persistence technology that the system was built on.

To all managers out there, this is a strong negative signal in the employees mindset, and a strong positive signal that there was a mistake in hiring. Eliminate this type of behavior immediately and if the person wont change then fire them (inability to change is also another red flag).

There is a small chance that there's strong logical reasons for a desire to fundamentally change an underlying technology, but the comment above says they "simply refused to become competent in ....... that the system is built on" and as a ex-google senior engineer of 20 years, I can 100% confidently say that the first step to large scale refactor is to understand and be competent in the existing system!

Pay for enterprise or use one of the guaranteed no data retention models (e.g. Bedrock)

Streets of Rage 2

Ghouls and Ghosts

Radical Rex

Jurassic Park

These megadrive games had great art and music and are still really enjoyable today

When I was a teenager, I lived on a farm and our neighbour's were another adult couple. He was late 40s and she was late 50s, her name was Jane.

Jane had an infectious laugh. She was always baking. She died her hair bright red. She drank too much wine. She didnt know much about the details of technology but she was intrigued by it, she read books and she volunteered to help as a teachers aide at the local primary school.

And Jane had a secret, she was one of the best Red Alert 2 players I had ever seen. We'd have matches over dialup and she would totally wreck me in such a short amount of time. I couldn't figure out a strategy to beat her, it was different every time.

I still have very vivid memories of Jane sitting in the corner of her farm house, big thick glasses on, glass of red wine, leading the comrades into war, and laughing as she bombed the allies into submission.

If you met Jane on the street you would never ever guess that under that farmer's wife persona, lurked a dangerous and cunning war strategist. Totally unexpected and utterly fabulous.

Love you Jane

I completely disagree with you and it seems like your assumption is that the transition times are years.

I've seen a B player on my team turn into an A player in just the last couple of months

But I do agree with you about the C thing, if youre a C you need to move immediately to at least a B, otherwise leave

"Most of us think of espresso as a hot, high-pressure ritual." - No, most of us dont care how the sausage is made, and just want the end product. Sure theres lots of individual coffee enthusiasts who cares, but in % terms thats not "most of us", most of us do not care, and nobody in my 40 years of life has ever complained about coffee energy usage.

Extract with sound waves is an interesting idea, but dont romanticize demand that doesnt exist, it wrecks credibility, literally in the first sentence of the article

I would probably still pay if the cost doubled, but I would also look at competitors, offline solutions, etc

We have benchmarks on our domain and it does there are models that are 2x to 10x cheaper for a small drop in percentage points in accuracy

Dependents of an AI-megacorp for our "facts"? Our software? Our work?

It's worse than this, it's more like our thinking. There's already plummetting math grades [1], handing over our thinking to AI megacorps where there's likely to be a monopoly or duopoly is an incredibly dangerous thing for humanity as a whole.

[1] https://www.dailycal.org/news/campus/academics/failing-grade...

Accountability has to come internally, which will come through discipline. An external accountability force will only be short lived because once the novelty wears off, then you'll start making excuses and it will fail at that point.

I would suggest you do some internal reflection and very honest introspection to find the root cause of your dissatisfaction - are you not doing your projects because some other vice is getting in the way? Or maybe the answer is you just need rest and theres only so many hours in the day.

Compred to what? Datasets at this scale are rare. You're not comparing against another ideal dataset, you're comparing against having nothing.

They removed an important word in the quote from the original - the phrase isnt "do the hardest thing", the original quote was "do the hardest thing possible"

The addition of that last word is the difference between the chance at eventual success and the human burning out on world peace, time machines, free energy devices.

Im on the hiring side, and I can tell you that these questions are there to serve one purpose only - to give the candidate a chance to stand out.

We were getting some 30-40 applications a day when we were at peak search, and when you get so many, after a few weeks, you start looking for anomalies, show me some glint of greatness, a spark of wit, evidence of original thought, something to show youre not just pasting slop or ticking boxes.

The candidate on the other side of this might say "but theres so many applications to do, I cant do that for every one" and maybe thats the crux, the candidate who puts in the extra effort to stand out will win, and thats the purpose of these questions.

If you're serious about building a business for this technology you need to realize that people who are interested in trust, data provenance, digital signatures and verification systems are looking for signals of credibility, trust and reliability - as such hosting this on a domain "lyfe.ninja" and having "by lyfe.ninja" written everywhere sounds like a 14 year old script kiddie created this and regardless of whether that is true or not, destroys any credibility and trust straight away

Its scary because its so amateurish, unprofessional, out of tone with the rest of the site, but still has an underlying ominous tone.

During the normal course of Whitehouse communication I would expect that a review of the visual style, the messaging tone, and the overall professional style of communication would set the bar for the standard that institution represents.

This feels like a dorky intern, prompted an LLM and kept saying "make it scarier" until this garbage showed up, and then it was fast tracked to an 80 year old president who is stretched so thin physically and cognitively that his judgemrnt is impaired to the point where this campy, whacky, garbage seems like a good idea

Its classified, but the second hardest was simulating Dynamic nuclear polarization, ab initio.

I used the word "likely" meaning there is a chance, your re-phrasing of what I said into a certainty ... and then refuting that certainty, is another textbook strawman argument, you made the same logical fallacy again.

Also I said "intermediate and junior" engineers - meaning INexperienced engineers, not experienced ones, so you quoted me wrong in that part too.

I was saying that an AI would more likely hallucinate an incorrect answer than correctly diagnose the root cause failure. At no time was I comparing an AI to a human, thats the bit you made up.

That is an incorrect but plausible hypothesis. Do you really think that people can't make such mistakes?

Where did I say that? You just pulled that out of nowhere and then refuted it - strawman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

Much more likely is that it would hallucinate a plausible sounding but incorrect answer and send intermediate and junior engineers on a wild goose chase

Rsync for my mum, rsync for my sister, rsync for my lawyer, my teacher, my plumber, rsync for people who just want a folder with an icon that says it's working.

Rsync for people who just want a folder and it automatically shows up on all of their computers and phones at once. Rsync for people who are never going to use rsync because an ancient command line application with a zillion flags on it is just about as user hostile as you can get.

Is there a bunch of tech geeks who can rsync themselves? Of course there are, and this product absolutely, categorically and unambiguously isnt for them. But guess what? There's 100,000,000 people who both want their folders synced and have no idea how to use rsync (and dont want to). Thats what they are building, and that's who its for, and thats why the have 2.5 billion in annual revenue. Because they famously ignored the "iTs jUsT rSYnC" crowd, and built a product that actually works for 100 million people

Is that actually true in the real world? Or is that some comp sci algorithm dream? I suspect it might be an engineers fallacy where the romantic desire to reduce everything to an algorithm or scalar value that can then be maximized or minimized blinds the engineer to the reality of the situation - the businesses doing route planning already have something thats close enough to optimal so that if the travelling salesman problem was solved, it wouldn't make a material difference to the business.

The algorithm engineer is so in love with the idea that an algorithm is the solution to everyone's problem (its a natural human bias to think the world desires what we have) that they way overweigh the importance of route planning improvements which are incremental or worse - would be thrown away because the practicalities of implementation doesn't warrant the marginal improvements.

AI is a golem