HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

claudiulodro

2,674 karma · joined October 26, 2015

submissionscomments
claudiulodro··on S.F.'s top-paid employee made $900K. Here's what every city worker gets paid
Yeah they could do a whole slogan and everything about it, maybe something about funding the police less or doing more oversight over police departments! It'll be super popular and definitely won't be misrepresented.
claudiulodro··on U of Michigan drops first-semester grades to ‘curb mental health crisis’
Companies don't expect interns or new graduates to perform at the level of a senior engineer. They expect and plan that they have to ease them into the "professional workforce" somewhat.

Anyways, the biggest tech companies in Michigan are automakers, Dow chemicals, and Whirlpool. These are all respectable places and have different expectations than X or OpenAI or companies like that.

claudiulodro··on The human-in-the-loop is tired
In this metaphor, your dude in a digger could also be drunk or a thief or bad at his job, and that'd be a bigger problem vs. a few people from a 100 person hand crew.
claudiulodro··on Journalism is rearranging the deckchairs. It needs to reinvent itself
People are always talking past each other in the comments here because when some people hear "journalism" they think "national coverage reporting like what you see on TV, NYT, or Twitter maximized for eyeballs and engagement".

They should be thinking "coverage about local elections and politicians, and investigative work".

More Block Club Chicago or Oklahoma Watch.

Less Buzzfeed or CNN.

claudiulodro··on Ask HN: What game have you replayed more times than any other?
- I've been playing the original Doom on and off for more than 20 years now. The weapons and monsters are perfectly balanced and fair, and there's a ton of extra levels and mods, with new ones even still being released.

- It's not necessarily one game, but they're all so similar that I'll count it: whatever the current Need for Speed game is (Unbound, Payback, etc.). The arcade-style racing handling is more satisfying to me than "realistic" racing, and customizing the cars is a lot of fun.

claudiulodro··on Making the news available at no cost is a victory
Texas Tribune, CalMatters, Montana Free Press, Mission Local -- there are a lot of very successful nonprofit newsrooms throughout the country.

It's actually more stable than ad-supported business models because small donor subscription revenue is consistent (like a SaaS business), unlike ad revenue which is much more volatile.

claudiulodro··on What do you say when the AI asks "Let me know if you'd like me to proceed."
- continue - do it - go for it - sure - ship it

Something like the above unless I want it to add some nuance to whatever it was going to do e.g. "do it, but don't commit the change"

claudiulodro··on Ask HN: Who is your favourite Entrepreneur/Visionary?
It's not one particular entrepreneur, but my favorite are the long-term local small business owners, like the guy I met a few months ago that's had a tire shop in town since the 70s. They've found a sustainable way to make a living providing something useful for their local community. That should really be the goal.
claudiulodro··on Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly building an AI clone to replace him in meetings
The role of a CEO is basically to make tough decisions, not really to be some sort of friendly face in meetings.

If the AI clone is not empowered to make decisions on Zuck's behalf, what's the point? If it is empowered to make decisions on his behalf, who is accountable for bad decisions it makes?

claudiulodro··on Google to provide Pentagon with AI agents
Engineering Ethics is a standard required class in any engineering discipline and a whole field of discussion. The ethics of working on military stuff (or even just government stuff) is nowhere near as cut and dry as your question seems to imply.

For example:

- What if the country asked you to develop technology to track and hack journalists or political rivals the administration doesn't like?

- What if the country asked you to develop chemical weapons? Is it different if the weapons would be used on their own population or only on external "enemies"?

- What if the country asked you to personally assassinate a civilian of another country? What if they asked you to create a program that would do that? What if they asked you to simply create a list of targets, and you knew they'd be assassinated?

- What if the country asked you to build something in an unsafe way that you're pretty certain will cause harm to people?

- What if the country asked you to make a public statement lying about the purpose behind what you're building?

claudiulodro··on Larry Page has moved to Florida
More than .07% of my net worth, which is what his giving works out to.
claudiulodro··on AI makes you boring
> Based on a lot of real world experience, I'm convinced LLM-generated documentation is worse than nothing. It's a complete waste of everybody's time.

I had a similar realization. My team was discussing whether we should hook our open-source codebases into an AI to generate documentation for other developers, and someone said "why can't they just generate documentation for it themselves with AI"? It's a good point: what value would our AI-generated documentation provide that theirs wouldn't?

claudiulodro··on Google is stifling anti-ICE speech in the workplace
The largest cancelling brigade in the history of cancel culture was done by the right after the Charlie Kirk shooting, where more than 600 people were doxxed and lost their jobs for "social media posts that celebrated Kirk's assassination or were seen as disparaging of his legacy". [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reprisals_against_commentators...

claudiulodro··on MIT Living Wage Calculator
Looks like Forsyth County is the richest county in Georgia and has a median household income of apparently $140k/yr (and median home price of ~$500k), so ballpark something close to that hourly rate does seem necessary if you want to have a median life *within that county*.

But nobody is advocating for setting the minimum wage equal to what it would cost to comfortably live in the wealthiest part of a state.

claudiulodro··on MIT Living Wage Calculator
From when minimum wage was first established:

> “It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By "business" I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.”

> FDR

It was supposed to be a "living wage".

Letting companies pay less than a living wage and providing a robust government safety net just subsidizes businesses using government tax money. The biggest beneficiaries of this are companies like Wal Mart, who gets effectively subsidized to the tune of $6B+ a year because so many of its employees are on SNAP and similar low income programs[1].

[1] https://www.ufcw.org/press-releases/wal-mart-has-highest-num...

claudiulodro··on In 6 violent encounters, evidence contradicts immigration officials' narratives
Before now, ICE was primarily paperwork police. Border patrol and occasional visits to round up undocumented immigrants at factories still existed, but the vast majority of their job was related to like customs and visa forms. It's like hiring 10x the postal workers and giving them guns and "qualified immunity" -- you're going to get some new problems.
claudiulodro··on The tech monoculture is finally breaking
AGPTEK makes decent and affordable MP3 players that still have buttons, and the battery life is really solid (~40 hrs!). I think they also use a dedicated MP3 player OS rather than an Android reskin. That's my recommendation if you want a 2007-style MP3 player with more modern hardware.
claudiulodro··on Why medieval city-builder video games are historically inaccurate (2020)
Hey! Just wanted to say it's really cool to run across someone that worked on those games. NFS is one of my favorite franchises, and Payback was my favorite in the series. Good work!
claudiulodro··on Postal Arbitrage
Because they don't have a car full of 100 people's meals like Amazon drivers do with deliveries? You're ordering a personal taxi for your burrito.
claudiulodro··on During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website
Interesting.

For Hurricane Helene specifically, my team at Newspack actually worked with Blue Ridge Public Radio and a number of other news organizations in the affected area to set up text versions of their websites for low bandwidth readers[1] and get info to 10s of thousands of people[2].

In fact, it was so successful (maybe not at reaching you specifically though), that we got a grant to roll out a general purpose plain text web solution for breaking news situations to news organizations across the country![3] So I think there may have been a mismatch in that you didn't know about all of the plain text versions of news sites available in your area during the disaster -- that's something we'll have to keep in mind.

[1] https://text.bpr.org/

[2] https://awards.journalists.org/entries/hell-or-high-water-bp...

[3] https://opennews.org/blog/press-forward-release/

claudiulodro··on Ask HN: How are most people converting HEIC to jpg?
I simply live with this, but if I need to download it in a compatible format from Google Drive, I just screenshot the photo from Google Drive instead of downloading it. That solves the problem for me but from a different direction.
claudiulodro··on Just 0.001% hold 3 times the wealth of poorest half of humanity, report finds
Real estate, automobiles, credentials/degrees, and businesses are all assets that would counterbalance their debt. (Credentials and degrees are not liquid, but you'd be hard pressed to argue that a doctor's license isn't worth many dollars).

The much more likely situation is a person with no assets or money and some credit card debt. Indeed, a person with simply no money is better off than such a person.

claudiulodro··on $27,000 a Year for Health Insurance. How Can We Afford That?
You're comparing what appears to be the MAXIMUM cost of German health insurance with the AVERAGE cost of US health insurance.
claudiulodro··on High-income job losses are cooling housing demand
I did it the other direction -- I bought a relatively cheap house, and if the winds of change come, I would rather get a different career than location! Two different equally valid perspectives IMO, as long as you're not dependent on having a particular career in order to make your house payments.
claudiulodro··on Entrepreneurs don't have a special gene for risk, they come from families with m (2015)
> I'd say about 25% of them came from a "moneyed" background. The rest were just regular people with regular backgrounds who were obsessive about starting businesses.

This is a very similar point to the article though -- the moneyed class is much smaller than 25% of the population, so they are disproportionately represented in even your anecdotal sample. To be clear, that doesn't mean that regular people can't make it though!

claudiulodro··on Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?
Super late to the party, but Dale Harris Cash Register is a free Point of Sales TUI program that has been maintained by Dale since the 90s[1]. The website is pretty great too. He originally made it for his locksmith/key business. He has a gallery of people using it in the wild [2]. I've always wanted to have some sort of business where it makes sense to use it!

[1] https://keyhut.com/pos.htm [2] https://keyhut.com/posphoto.htm

claudiulodro··on OpenAI, Jony Ive struggle with technical details on secretive new AI gadget
A fob on a lanyard would work well I think. It would be nerdy as hell, but in a practical sense, it's better than carrying around another phone-like thing or wearing something on your face.
claudiulodro··on How the AI bubble ate Y Combinator
> "How paid subscriptions ate the spread of information"

The "irony" here is that news organizations are moving to gate their content precisely because that's the only effective technique for preventing AI crawlers from ingesting it all ...

claudiulodro··on Ask HN: How to be ambitious/hungry again?
I'd also add that the industry is not the same as when the iphone came out. When I was younger I wanted to do shareware games like iD and Apogee, and I'd still be down to do that if it was a thing any more. But you have to meet the market where it's at if you want an actual viable business. I don't have a ton of hunger for starting an b2b SaaS, and I'd bet the OP doesn't either.
claudiulodro··on MAGA declares war on the property tax
While not a whole state, there are municipalities with no property tax e.g. Thorne Bay in Alaska:

> Thorne Bay is a Second-Class City within an unorganized borough on Prince of Wales Island.

> Thorne Bay does NOT LEVY PROPERTY TAXES.

> https://thornebay-ak.gov/land/

You get what you pay for as far as services are concerned though.

Page 1 of 21Next →