Hacker News Reader

freddrefon LinkedIn CringeBot 3000

You have to ruthlessly prune the feed to get something worth reading.

freddrefon Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence

What are these bottlenecks specifically that you feel are essential?

Am trying to compare this to reports that people are not reviewing code any more.

freddrefon Ask HN: Share your personal website

https://batsign.me

The world's simplest personal Email notification API.

freddrefon Travel agents took 10 years to collapse, developers are three years in

Definitely feels like a good amount of dev work is writing the same things over and over, in a different language, codebase or context. And it seems like llms are particularly good at translating, specializing and contextualizing across existing knowledge.

freddrefon Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

It might be financial beneficial once as an up-front payment, but long term, as others have mentioned, really not good for the project to remove the only feature that gives firefox a defensible way to fill it's niche in the market.

freddrefon Thoughts on a Month with Devin

How is Devin different from cursor?

I recently used cursor and it has felt very capable in implementing tasks across files. I get that cursor is an IDE but it's ai functionality feels very agentic.. where do you draw the line?

freddrefon World conker champion found with steel chestnut, cleared of cheating

Two lads set themselves up in the business of selling conkers one year.

Any accidentally dropped conkers were stamped on by any and all in the vicinity.

A conker that survived to the next year was considered "seasoned", although many's the wizened tippex-covered lump of questionable provenance appeared under this explanation.

freddrefon Show HN: Detect if an audio file was generated by NotebookLM

Any stats available on accuracy?

freddrefon Show HN: If YouTube had actual channels

I'm curious here too, I only flipped through your channels for a minute, but found something interesting immediately.

I go to youtube and seem to run out of quality quickly. I even went as far as crawling the HN frontpage for videos - see hacker news TV - https://xiliary.com/bck/hn-tv.html

freddrefon Vista Equity writes off PluralSight value, after $3.5B buyout

Can you say more about flow?

I'm curious about practical use cases, could you share some examples?

freddrefon Ask HN: Who buys the long tail of cryptocurrencies?

I would guess there's a sizable chunk of people who but these coins are not investors as such.

The long tail of people buy the long tail of coins.

I bought coins when I first discovered them, driven by curiosity mostly.

freddrefon What We Learned from a Year of Building with LLMs

Humans probably have about the same error rate. It's easy to miss a comma or quote.

These systems compete with humans, not with formatters.

freddrefon How many EV charging stations does the US need to replace gas stations?

Agree on walkable, although I really like the idea of personal public transport that would be door-to-door and on-demand. I expect it would distribute cities more, and alleviate the hub-and-spoke model that public transport is sometimes built to, e.g. Dublin, Ireland.

freddrefon How many EV charging stations does the US need to replace gas stations?

My car is empty 99% of the time, it could be very highly utilised by the general public.

freddrefon How many EV charging stations does the US need to replace gas stations?

How about self driving cars as public transport?

freddrefon Dave Cutler on Windows [video]

youtube as curated by HN https://xiliary.com/bck/hn-tv.html

freddrefon We migrated to SQL. Our biggest learning? Don't use Prisma

This scenario emerges as often when starting from the toy as it does starting from the "correct" full implementation.

freddrefon We migrated to SQL. Our biggest learning? Don't use Prisma

yes hopefully, that's the best scenario.

freddrefon We migrated to SQL. Our biggest learning? Don't use Prisma

I am amazed at the number of engineers I've worked with who jump straight into the full implementation. I've done it myself on a few occasions thinking "how hard can this be".

Building the "toy" first is great.

In my experience, about one third of the time the toy is all you need, you can stop there, and what you were going to build fully would be over-engineering. About one third of the time, building the toy tells you you're taking the unworkable approach as you mentioned. And the other third of the time you can extend the toy.

freddrefon Microsoft has made Azure Linux generally available

"We're scratching an itch we had and offering it back to the community."

Is there a git repo one can peruse?

freddrefon Devex: What actually drives productivity

How do you maintain that as things grow?

freddrefon Dreams are the default for intelligence

Light switches and steering wheels never work properly in my dreams. I have to concentrate really hard to get things to follow the rules. Then I wake up.

freddrefon Homelessness is primarily a housing problem

What percentage of homeless have mental illness or drug abuse issues?

freddrefon Nokia launches DIY repairable budget Android phone

That's quite a line-up they have! I have a Elephone S3 pro, two day battery is really great when traveling, no worries. I'll strongly consider an Ulephone next..

freddrefon “Open source” seeds loosen Big Ag’s grip on farmers

Can you give us an example where a smaller company was successful in court against a much larger corp?

freddrefon Code Lifespan

Is your code easily deleted? That would be better than - is your code easily modified?

Change is hard, starting again is more fun.

freddrefon Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

Https://Batsign.me

Quick and easy personal email notifications.

I got tired of configuring email for simple things.

I have one very intensive user.

It's a side-side-project.

freddrefon The Unexpected Heaviosity of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (2006)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoi_polloi

Lot of great reading to do :)

freddrefon Using ChatGPT to make Bash palatable

I've always been sheepish about this, but bash is my favorite programming environment! Not really because of any language features as such, more it's terseness and simplicity. Another big draw for me is bash's ubiquity. All of this makes bash the ultimate glue layer. That said, if a bash script goes longer than ten lines long I'll usually rewrite in python.

freddrefon John Carmack Leaves Meta

I so wish I could "kill stupid things before they cause damage", "set direction" and have people follow, but it seems especially difficult for technical people.

We spend all-day every-day talking to our subservient (a compiler) but a human is fuzzy and unreliable which is compounded by team size. Carmack can realize something in an instant but it is amazing how long it can take an entire team.

One thing I've noticed that really does not work is "complaining", if Carmack thinks he is complaining, then magnify that by 10 for others on the team.

Rather than attacking an idea directly, I'm wondering if ignoring the idea may be more effective. This way there's no one to fight and the idea can slip away without any ego or drama, there's no face to lose.

If you really can't help the situation, then leaving is the last resort. Oh well, on to the next thing, very curious to see what Carmack gets into next.