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erickj

448 karma · joined May 16, 2013

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erickj··on Ask HN: Selling software to company I work for as an employee
The legality of who owns that work will depend on your work contract and your local employment law.

You very well might create something, turn around to sell it to them, and find out that your employer legally owns the copyright to the work even if you did it on your own time with your own resources.

Employment law is nuanced.

Tldr; bring your work contract and your idea to a meeting with an employment attorney and ask them who would own this work.

erickj··on National Weather Service no longer translating products for non-English speakers
That's ok, just go 1 train stop. The grammar will change
erickj··on National Weather Service no longer translating products for non-English speakers
s/France/Switzerland/
erickj··on Show HN: Stop sending files to sketchy servers and convert any file offline
> ChatGPT

Please give me the Image Magick command to convert a PNG to ICO

>

``` convert input.png -define icon:auto-resize=256,128,64,48,32,16 output.ico ```

...

erickj··on Colossal Biosciences raises $200M at $10.2B valu. to bring back woolly mammoths
Resurrecting woolly mammoths just in time for their natural habits to become decimated by climate change feels like a cosmic satire on the duality of human technological progress
erickj··on Microsoft and OpenAI's close partnership shows signs of fraying
Its pretty hard to ignore Google in any discussion on big scale
erickj··on Show HN: X11 tool to share a screen area in any video meeting
> Not that this matters for this particular tool.

Then the code is perfectly appropriate.

erickj··on Sears Homes 1915-1920
These houses still had to be built, hooked up to plumbing, wired for electricity, have a lot cleared and excavated, concrete poored... Also you still need to decorate and provide appliances.

Add all that in and you'll see theres a few 100k worth of additional work not in the kit

So that $52k price is really just for building materials and plans, but doesn't include land, permits, building costs.

erickj··on ESPN AI recap of Alex Morgan’s final professional match fails to mention her
If I was going to build this prototype I'd start with just a semistructured textual play by play recap as the input. Also including roster, injury, amd schedule information with a fairly basic prompt would probably go a long way.

This data exists for most live games at this point via various web services. I'm sure espn has significant resources internally to source that info

erickj··on Iron as an inexpensive storage medium for hydrogen
I believe most Swiss scientific investigations are legally required to involve Cervelat
erickj··on CPI for all items rises 2.9%; shelter up
Welcome to fiat currency backed capitalism
erickj··on Gear Acquisition Syndrome
MTB is pretty fun to get the shiny gear too... But yes, particularly cycling, $3500 for just a groupset. Gross

https://www.bike-components.de/de/Shimano/Dura-Ace-Di2-R9250...

erickj··on Ask HN: How did you learn Regex?
By continously ignoring that what I really needed was a pushdown automaton.
erickj··on YouTube's war on ad blockers continues, now making ads unskippable
Yet, you believe that you have the right to other people's created works while circumventing their means for recompense. Hmmm

... Let's just put aside the messy distinction between "what you tell your browser to do" and the code written by the website that you visit.

erickj··on Critical Bug in Docker Engine Allowed Attackers to Bypass Authorization Plugins
Hmmm... It's as though running root privelege daemons with open sockets could go wrong. Who could have known.

https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2020/09/25/rootless-conta...

erickj··on Open source AI is the path forward
That's the kind of work that can come out of academia and open source communities when societies provide the resources required.
erickj··on An abundance of Katherines: The game theory of baby naming
Did you name her Adenine?
erickj··on Mineral winds down: 'We will no longer be an Alphabet company'
> The archived technology was never touched. Years later there were multiple teams doing stuff redundant to what we did. They didn't know we ever existed and their projects will probably never be released.

I've worked there for 12 years and this is 100% accurate. It's all one big director and vp level circle jerk.

erickj··on Five common English words we don't know the origins of–including 'boy' and 'dog'
With absolutely no certainty or linguistic rigor behind this observation...

I've always thought that 'boy' sounded suspiciously close to the Swiss German translation "bueb" (or sometimes "buebe"), almost pronounced "b-way-b"

https://glosbe.com/en/gsw/boy

erickj··on California House Prices Plunge Up to $400k as Insurance Crisis Deepens
"Now the property is going for $2,695,000—the lowest asking price it has had on Zillow in the past three years. The public record of the property shows it was sold for only $40,000 in 1994, but between 2021 and late 2023, the asking price remained steadily above the $3 million mark."

That's almost disgusting.

erickj··on Show HN: SmokeScanner – Using cigarette price arbitrage to find free flights
Cigarette smuggling has a few aspects and each state while give it different priority based on its own economic incentives. But for a glimpse at the federal level, the ATF says [1] their justification is interested in enforcement (among other things) of:

"Illegal possession and/or transportation and distribution of more than 10,000 unstamped (non-state tax-paid) cigarettes."

This is mostly a tax revenue issue. Some other interesting info at the state level can be found at https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/cigarette-taxes-cig...

tldr; it will almost certainly take more than transporting "a few packs" for personal consumption to get in trouble in the "land of the free" at the federal level, however each state will he more or less aggressive depending on its own priorities

1. https://www.atf.gov/resource-center/fact-sheet/fact-sheet-to...

erickj··on Asus agrees to a whole raft of US warranty service improvements after complaints
My $1300 Lenovo X1 carbon gen 3 from 2014 is still running as well as the day I got it (less one m.2 drive and CMOS battery) ...

Granted the first thing I did to it 10 years ago was install Fedora.

Try putting Pop OS or some Ubuntu flavor on it, maybe it'll find a 2nd life. If it's already bricked and there's no warranty, then what's the harm. (games support via Steam nowadays is almost seamless)

erickj··on Nvidia announces financial results for first quarter fiscal 2025
Think of their revenue in an ecosystem.

Google announced 2 weeks ago that its Q1 capex for datacenters and servers was $12B. This was up 100% y/y. Goog also expects for this capex spend to be ongoing... A healthy chunk of that is all going to Nvda

erickj··on AI hype is over. AI exhaustion is setting in
Other than an incredible amount of cynicism, does this author offer a single objective fact or 3rd party source to support his argument?

The argument that he's trying to make is that AI is overhyped, but his conclusion is that it's nearly worthless. This is a non sequitur.

He's cynical last years announcements of new discoveries AI models aren't immediately useful. But he's completely ignoring the acceleration and advances of these announcements. He's relying on the matter that hallucinations exist, but he's ignoring the dramatic reductions in error rates across models every 6 months.

He's ignoring that his very industry of writing has been completely changed, and the irony is editing will almost never be done without an AI model again. How many other industries are seeing the same impact (design, project management, software engineering, digital creatives,...).

Medicine and law are actively updating their methodologies and practices in order to better incorporate these new tools 1. https://mcpress.mayoclinic.org/healthy-aging/ai-in-healthcar... 2. https://hls.harvard.edu/today/harvard-law-expert-explains-ho...

This is obviously a piece that was written with a conclusion regardless of the facts

erickj··on I gave my time and expertise to StackOverflow because it was licensed CC-BY-SA
I don't know when it was most recently changed, but...

"and you grant Stack Overflow the perpetual and irrevocable right and license to access, use, process, copy, distribute, export, display and to commercially exploit such Subscriber Content, even if such Subscriber Content has been contributed and subsequently removed by you"

https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service/public

This content isn't licensed under CC-BY-SA to stackoverflow, it carries additional riders which grant SO the legal right to sell it however they please.

erickj··on GQL: A New ISO Standard in Graph Query Language
The tinkerpop writings of Marco Rodriguez are seriously underrated pieces of computer science literature

https://www.datastax.com/blog/tales-tinkerpop

erickj··on Alphabet shares jump 12% on earnings beat, first-ever dividend
This is a flat rate dividend, which at the current price equates to a 0.1% dividend. It seems more likely that it's just designed to satisfy a checkmark on the portfolio investor prospectus. This equates to ~$2B payout, while they simultaneously announced another $70B stock buy back.

Overall Google announced they spent $12B on server and datacenters capex in Q1. This is up 100% y/y. Also this spending level will continue for at least the rest of the year, that's $50B in capex spending in a single year... But people are going to focus on a $0.20 dividend I suppose.

It's difficult to say that they're not continuing to invest in future tech. Focusing on the dividend announcement is a nothing burger (for now)

erickj··on Court approves 3M multi-billion dollar settlement over PFAS in drinking water
The economy is not a zero sum game

(Not defending the Sacklers, fuck that family)

erickj··on Court approves 3M multi-billion dollar settlement over PFAS in drinking water
Yes, but a once society crossed that boundary then it will be on you and your lawyer to prove that it wasn't criminal negligence, just the regular old kind
erickj··on Why isn't anyone signing up?
I saw the pricing page hit HN about a year ago. I sent it to non tech friends in a group chat as a laugh.

But... I'd never even consider handing over my credit card or other PII to such an obviously blasé admin.

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