Hacker News Reader

ernon CEOs are running companies from afar even as workers return to office

I think the introduction of WFH during the pandemic hurt a lot of IT workers in the long-run.

In the interests of “fairness” they are being ordered back to the office post-Covid even when their work processes mean they can be done perfectly well remotely, and even if they have widely geographically-distributed teams.

Anecdotal, but we had a team that was split with 50% working remotely before Covid, and we saw an improvement when everyone was forced to work remotely: conversations that were being held in person were shared openly.

ernon Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

I would consider using Alexa to buy things if it understood what I wanted. It rarely does. Asking it to list subscriptions, for example doesn’t work. Trying to get it to set up anything beyond a simple timer is a hit-and-miss affair.

The fact that they could be finally fixing this, and then are putting it behind a paywall is ironic, because if it finally works properly, people could actually start using it for buying stuff.

ernon Alexa is in millions of households and Amazon is losing billions

ernon Microsoft points finger at the EU for not being able to lock down Windows

Would a bad driver update potentially have had similar consequences? (real question)

If so, this feels like a red herring.

ernon Sparrows may be 'canary in the coal mine' for lead poisoning in children: study

As I understand it, much mining is done in Australia through FIFO (fly-in-fly-out) nowadays. It greatly reduces the need for infrastructure, boom-bust towns and issues like these.

ernon My daughter (7 years old) used HTML to make a website

I decided to throw in the towel on frontend dev when I was forced to translate wireframes from a UX designer into pixel-perfect CSS (on a safety and time-critical project where the site was going to be used by back-office staff only, you've got to love how consultancies find ways to make $$$).

We had used Bootstrap and similar frameworks for years prior, but all the battling with different CSS layout techniques to render the UI on this project made me realize I was wasting my time, and the fact that the designer couldn't give developers working CSS made me wonder if the entire promise of separating design from functionality was a mirage.

ernon AI's $600B Question

Corporate values. Drew the short straw, but had to present something.

ernon AI's $600B Question

I consider myself to be fairly senior, and use it all the time for learning new things. I work with some brilliant senior developers who lean on it heavily, but I do think it doesn't mesh with the cognitive styles of many.

ernon AI's $600B Question

The difference is that with a chat interface you can ask it questions, you can brainstorm with it, you can drill down into specific concepts and you can do it any language/framework, without waiting for a tutorial to be written for it. And it would help you do the "homework" at the end.

For the tutorial you linked to, there's a lot of prior knowledge assumed, which the author alludes to in the summary, which a chat interface would help with:

This time I decided to focus on the essence of the topic rather than building basic React and CSS, so I skipped those basic parts. I believe it makes this article easier to digest.

ernon AI's $600B Question

I think that one of the reasons there's a surprising amount of pushback because a lot of developers don't like the sort of collaborative, unstructured workflow that chat-oriented tools push onto you.

I once worked with someone who was brilliant, but fell apart when we tried to do pair-programming (acturial major who had moved into coding). The verbal communication overhead was too much for him.

ernon AI's $600B Question

Can it do meaningful PowerPoint work

Yes, it absolutely can. I threw together a PowerPoint presentation with a script for a low-value, high visibility meeting a couple of weeks ago with ChatGPT 4.0 and a PowerPoint plugin. Everyone loved it.

ernon AI's $600B Question

I recently needed to help a downstream team with a problem with an Android app. I never did mobile app dev before, but I was able to spin up a POC (having not coded in Java for 22 years) and solve the problem with the help of ChatGPT 4.0.

Sure I probably would have been able to do it without ChatGPT, but it was so much easier to have something to bounce ideas off-of. A safety net, if you will.

The hallucination risk was irrelevant: it did hallucinate a little early on. I told it it was a hallucinating, and we moved onto a different way of solving the problem. It was easy enough to verify it was working as expected.

ernon What if they gave an Industrial Revolution and nobody came? (2023)

The "tiny island" schtick is part of the British mythos, I believe.

ernon Instead of “auth”, we should say “permissions” and “login”

It's one of the many reasons we have the saying, "Don't roll your own crypto.

I remember when this saying referred to people rolling their own cryptography algorithms. When did it become about not doing your own auth? (I agree it's generally a bad idea, but curious about the scope expansion of the statement)

ernon Microsoft, Khan Academy Partner to Make Khanmigo Teaching Tool Free

I’ve generally gotten that vibe from most of these threads. No I haven’t used it, but I can say that ChatGPT 4.0 has been a huge helping me tutoring one of my children in math. We previously had college students tutoring him, and it turned out they were not very good. I have a fairly solid, although dated background, so it helps me refresh concepts and to find mistakes. I don’t let him use the AI directly though.

ernon Clever code is probably the worst code you could write (2023)

This is mostly because mid-level dev needs to justify their existence in order to not get laid off or PIP and is worried about losing their H1B and having to uproot their entire family in 60 days notice. Hyper-optimized, hard-to-read code that only they understand is one way to increase reliance on them while giving a reason that can be put into a promotion doc. Mid-level jobs are worried about maintaining their job.

That seems to be a matter of survival overriding ethics and professional pride. I know I came up with some really cringeworthy and complex solutions as a mid-level dev, but I would never have done it deliberately.

If people are put into a situation where they need to purposefully write substandard code to not get deported, it's something that needs to be fixed.

ernon Did GitHub Copilot increase my productivity?

You make an interesting point. I once worked with someone who was brilliant, but had gotten into the field via a math degree, and we were building an enterprise-software product.

We tried pair-programming, and he cracked within a few minutes. He couldn't articulate his thought processes verbally. Sounds similar to the scenario you're describing.

ernon Tesla retreat from EV charging leaves growth of U.S. network in doubt

What we do know is that ev sales have taken a dive

"A record 1.2 million U.S. vehicle buyers chose to go electric last year, according to estimates from Kelley Blue Book, a Cox Automotive company. More specifically, 1,189,051 new electric vehicles (EVs) were put into service as the slow shift to an electrified future continued unabated. In 2023, the EV share of the total U.S. vehicle market was 7.6%, according to Kelley Blue Book estimates. That is up from 5.9% in 2022.

EV sales in the fourth quarter set a record for both volume and share: 317,168 and 8.1%, respectively. And while records were set, the oft-reported slowdown is real. Q4 EV sales increased year over year by 40% – a strong result by any measure, except when compared to the growth the industry saw in previous quarters. The market posted a 49% gain in Q3, and EV sales were up 52% year over year in Q4 2022. By volume, EV sales in Q4 were higher than in Q3 by roughly 5,000 units. The EV market in the U.S. is still growing, but not growing as fast."

https://www.coxautoinc.com/market-insights/q4-2023-ev-sales/

ernon Visiting the most expensive nuclear station

Article reads as overly dismissive of safety measures as well. Seems to be implying that measures to prevent construction workplace accidents are driving the cost up, for example.

ernon A mile-long lava tube where humans sheltered for thousands of years

Spoiler alert: it was a shelter for people moving herds between oases, and doesn’t seem to have had a permanent population.

ernon Is .NET just miles ahead or am I delusional?

Microsoft decided to release .NET 8 without support for InProcess Function Apps. After a few months of radio silence, they have finally acknowledged that they were working towards support at some point before .NET 6 hits end of life later this year.

I have a fairly large portfolio of legacy in-life systems that are stuck in limbo now, and a limited group of developers to move them to .NET 8.

We wont have to move them into isolated mode on short notice, to get them to .NET 8 but this isn’t the Microsoft of old, where backwards-compatibility is a paramount consideration.

ernon Tired of late messages from your boss? A new bill aims to make it illegal

When did HN turn nasty?

ernon Tired of late messages from your boss? A new bill aims to make it illegal

This is the law in many parts of the world, and their economies seem to have not collapsed.

Haney thinks the bill is already being misconstrued and said that it would only require that companies be transparent about their expectations for working hours. Employers would still have the freedom to dictate their policy, which could include that employees be available around-the-clock, he said.

ernon Tired of late messages from your boss? A new bill aims to make it illegal

FTA: Haney thinks the bill is already being misconstrued and said that it would only require that companies be transparent about their expectations for working hours. Employers would still have the freedom to dictate their policy, which could include that employees be available around-the-clock, he said.

ernon What happens to Google Maps when tectonic plates move? (2020)

(2020)

ernon Airlines Colluded to Ensure Onboard Food Would Be Awful

Maybe that was the case pre-pandemic, but I shelled out for Business Class on a long-haul international flight, and it was worth it, and I'm not the only one: https://www.afr.com/life-and-luxury/travel/pointy-end-shake-...

Maybe we'll return to looking for lower costs, but an aging and wealthier world might prize comfort more than it did in the past.

ernon Rogue editors started a competing Wikipedia that's only about roads

Wikipedia seems to have a growing contingent of editors from countries like India, the Phillipines and Sri Lanka who edit topics that seemingly have little to do with those countries.

To establish their credentials, they get involved in arcane areas like Articles for Deletion or other areas that you’d expect would be of more interest to experienced editors.

Now everyone has the right to edit anything on Wikipedia, but it’s starting to feel like paid editors have gained a foothold.

ernon What a major solar storm could do

For practical purposes in this case it’s immediate right?

ernon Companies embracing SMS for account logins should be blamed for SIM-swap attacks

There is a shocking percent of internet users -- I'd estimate 20% -- that cannot reliably tell you their email address (5% that literally can't, and another 15 that can't reliably).

My email address is firstname.midddlename@<wellknownemailprovder>.com

I get a dozen emails a week from companies and government agencies trying to reach people with the same first + middle name combination from around the world. People seem to think they automatically get an email address with their name provisioned or something and they just sign up for accounts and services using that combo.