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buggy6257on Most promoted and blocked domains among Kagi Search users

Looks like the summary here is “f** Pinterest”. Soooo many stack overflow scraper sites too god I hate those.

buggy6257on A world where people pay for software

I'm not sure I get your argument. Basically everything you're talking about applies to physical manufacturing too. You have high fixed costs (equipment, location, assembly line workers, what have you), and you also have marginal cost (software basically has zero marginal cost). Good physical goods also take effort, and great people to design them.

> Physical manufacturing is hard, but it at least brings in dollars

You say this as if it's some indelible fact that if you make a physical product, it WILL be bought and you WILL make a profit no matter what, but I think it's safe to say this is objectively false, as many failed physical business would attest to.

> OSS, privacy and wankers reverse engineering your software shrinks your market substantially.

As opposed to in the physical world, where nobody ever cribs your ideas and sells them at a discount compared to you... AKA "Amazon's business model"? (not to mention overseas knockoffs of products

Given all these things being equal then, software has all the same benefits that your parent comment mentioned, while staying at best EQUAL with physical manufacturing, save for maybe higher salaries to the people making your product (arguable in some cases, but on average probably true) but this difference pales in comparison to not having to own a warehouse and manage last-mile shipping costs etc.

buggy6257on Mars helicopter Ingenuity phones home, breaking 63-day silence

After a daily life of losing faith in the possibility good software and long lasting consumer products, it’s the Mars Rovers that give me this amazing optimism that humanity is capable of truly awesome feats of engineering. The longevity, durability, and mind-boggling logistics of these rovers is just so fucking cool.

buggy6257on A relay that changed the power industry

I didn't actually work on the device itself; that was after my time. By the time I left, they basically just had the MVP of the SDN software itself done -- there wasn't even a device it was scheduled to be on. Sorry :/

buggy6257on A relay that changed the power industry

Wow this is a crazy coincidence. I was a brand new software engineer that actually worked on the original implementation of SEL’s SDN software. Was my first real job out of college! My name might actually be on a patent somewhere even though I was just a code monkey at the time…

I wonder how much it has changed since then. My former boss is still working on that project AFAIK, I should reach out to him…

buggy6257on 418 I'm a teapot

I came across this a while back that I enjoyed but is kinda just an “lol” but not super useful status code thing:

https://github.com/3digitdev/Haiku-TTP-Codes

Doesn’t have any for 418 yet though… a PR may be in order!

buggy6257on Mojo might be the biggest thing to happen in programming for decades

> Why would a startup that's racing against time and money decide to create a new language when something already exists that can meet their needs with just a little tweaking?

Have you MET programmers? The idea that we/they would do this is not anywhere close to surprising.

buggy6257on The crypto detectives are cleaning up

Sad that an article about crypto detectives makes zero mention of Coffeezilla. That dude is the best detective/investigative journalist in the crypto space right now IMO

buggy6257on Surviving Burnout (2015)

A harrowing tale and I'm thankful the author made it through alright, but I have to fundamentally disagree with one possible takeaway from this:

Her solution to burnout was to _start her own business_?? I'm glad this worked out for her in the end, but holy shit this would be the literal last possible thing I (or I hope many others) would consider as a solution to burnout. That's a _fast track_ to burnout.

buggy6257on Problems that attract smart people

Claims to know*

buggy6257on Ask HN: What's the best TTS engine you've heard?

I have to second this. I was experimenting with a voice assistant and the Azure Cognitive Speech Service is by and far the most human like speech I found. I recently started looking into this topic again and tried Amazon Polly and it’s pretty embarrassingly bad even for their “neural” one. Only thing Polly has going for it is the ability to modify the speech with tags (Azure may have this now! Haven’t checked in a while) but that live modification only fully works with their crappier voices.

*EDIT:*. They also have a python library that’s pretty easy to use. It finally has an ARM build too finally…

*EDIT 2:* Just started tinkering with Azure again, and yep they support SSML for live modification, and it works with their best neural voice. Diving back in again, here we go...

buggy6257on Speak English to me: The secret world of programmers

So it's doing a pretty good job of imitating those "experts" then too

buggy6257on We built an exceedingly polite AI dog that answers questions about your APIs

I agree a lot with this. I’ve probably spent more time crafting system prompts to find ways to avoid it doing this. As far as I can tell the best way so far has been to say something like “you are a terse helpful AI who responds in 100 words or less”. The lack of extra words to work with forces the bot to focus hard on exactly the answer I asked for because that’s the part that is useful to me and therefore rewarded.

buggy6257on Not by AI

People born in the 70s are 53 at most. They are almost certainly not "mostly dead" yet.

buggy6257on How to politely decline a take-home test task

> This whole take home test thing is a marketing campaign [...]

I mean, not in this case -- in this case they got 3 features implemented for them for free. That's why they did it.

buggy6257on ‘Old-School’ Signature Bank Collapsed After Its Big Crypto Leap

We'll make sure to have the FDIC CC you on the emails next time, must have been an oversight.

buggy6257on Influencer parents and the kids who had their childhood made into content

> Whether it was right to make a public spectacle of the child's situation, even assuming the best intentions, is a different question.

Um....disagree. That's literally THE question being discussed.

buggy6257on It Turns Out Money Does Buy Happiness

How Money Works YT channel has a great video about this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ra34dUWcmw

More glibly:

"'Money doesn't buy happiness!' Do you live in America...? Because it buys a waverunner. You ever seen a sad person on a waverunner?"

- Daniel Tosh

buggy6257on The perks workers want also make them more productive

The number of clicks from a Zoom email to a zoom call:

- Click the Link

- Click the "Start the meeting button", nothing happens

- Click "join meeting from browser" after waitint for it to eventually show me that option

- I'm in the meeting! 3 clicks

Number of clicks from a Google Meets email to a Zoom call:

- Click the Link

- I'm in the meeting! 1 click.

buggy6257on Haraldur Thorleifsson's Personal Site

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1633011448459964417

He also had a (now deleted) comment where he called the guy "just the worst":

https://twitter.com/JamesClayton5/status/1633155915892527104

buggy6257on Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

Also very interested in this!

buggy6257on Twitter refused to pay AWS bill, so Amazon refused to pay for ads

When was the last time you negotiated a contract after it was already signed by all parties?

buggy6257on Live on a cruise ship for $30k per year

Calm down your biases. Take a trip to Australia and tell me that Japanese and Chinese tourists don’t do the exact same thing. Turns out tourist traps exist for a reason. People seem to enjoy them.

buggy6257on Why American workers aren’t returning to the office like their intl counterparts

I live in a lower CoL “city” with a 440k home and 2.875 interest rate and I pay 24k/year for my mortgage. I gotta imagine that most major cities are significantly more than what I pay so yeah that seems pretty accurate even for houses.

buggy6257on Why American workers aren’t returning to the office like their intl counterparts

Before throwing stones, you may want to introspect on the fact that the parent never said “homeless” but rather “mentally ill” and you just assumed that’s what he meant

buggy6257on Ask HN: Has anyone started over outside of tech?

I bought a saw stop literally last week -- depending on your needs, they have a "compact" table saw which is basically equivalent to the craftsman jobsite $250 one, but it's $900. That said, it's head and shoulders above the basic ones in build quality, QoL features, and many other things too, PLUS it has the sawstop system.

As a hobbyist in a small shop, I bought it as my "best saw i'll need for a very long time".

The $200 saws are pieces of garbage that anyone who pursues the hobby for more than like a few months will rapidly discover the flaws of. Best bet is middle-road to get like a dewalt for $400 or so but even that has flaws compared to the sawstop.

buggy6257on Twitter has reportedly laid off product manager Esther Crawford

That doesn't necessarily mean she learned her lesson. She may go so deep into denying the mistake that she ends up doing it again just to prove that she was right.

Based on how fervently she's defending herself, that seems likely to me.

But yes you're absolutely right that there was no chance she was going to actually admit it was a bad idea for her to commit like this. People don't like admitting that stuff and will do whatever they can to avoid it.

buggy6257on Twitter has reportedly laid off product manager Esther Crawford

She got exactly what she deserved. The only sad parts of this:

- She VERY obviously didn't learn her lesson. See her tweets after the layoff.

- The insane number of people responding with positive encouragement for "how hard [she] worked" and how it sets a good example. What a fucking travesty of a work culture some people have.

VALUE YOUR OWN TIME PEOPLE. All she did was help Elon attempt to recover a stupid business decision, and her reward was being sent back into the job market to do the same thing for some other billionaire in the future. This is the TEXTBOOK definition of being taken advantage of, combined with some astonishing stockholm syndrome.

buggy6257on Twitter has reportedly laid off product manager Esther Crawford

I don't necessarily disagree with you, but remember that this person was in a position of power in the company as the product manager leading a major effort. She sets the bar for work, and was glorifying sleeping at her desk and working insane hours to push Elon's "vision" out the door. You gotta imagine her underlings were required or pressured to do the same, and got fucked for it.

buggy6257on Implant lets those with severe paralysis send texts with just their minds

Would you mind giving me an idea of how I might go about procuring some sensors like this for myself? I’m at a loss for how to even search for one especially that gives signals I can parse myself rather than through some special software or proprietary machine. I’d love to be able to feed this stuff into code and mess around with it!