godot

I realize I must be in the minority of software engineers/tech circles, I do not keep a "personal knowledge management" base.

I do have a personal Notion, but the things I keep in it are like list of restaurants we want to try and haven't yet, list of travel destinations we want to go at some point, the trash collection schedule, things like that. Basically references/bookmarks.

I don't keep reading lists, knowledge I learned, or anything like that in an archive. I rely completely on my own memory in my brain for those. (I also don't open up tabs with intentions of "I'll read this later". Either I read it and close it, or don't. If it feels semi-interesting but long, I just skim it, then close it.)

If anything interesting comes up, I talk about it, typically in a group chat (I have about half a dozen group chats with various friend groups or ex-coworkers groups that are active). If a discussion took place about something, I will likely remember it. If I remember some key points, if something comes up in the future about it, I will remember enough to look it up, whether by Google or by LLM. *

I've lived this way for decades professionally and never found myself missing a piece of knowledge in any context that I wish I had. In other words I don't find a use to keep a personal knowledge base.

For those reading this, maybe it helps you think about whether you need one like this as well. Perhaps like the article author here, you might feel more relieved not having one.

* I also want to note that I operate this way at work / in meetings as well. I find that if I try to take notes during meetings, I can't pay attention fully, and can't digest the information being discussed. It works much better if I don't take any notes at all, pay attention in the meeting, and if there's anything important from the meeting, I try to write it down afterwards (typically in a Slack message) from memory. 99% of the time it works fine and once in a long while I might miss something (but someone else who reads my Slack message would fill out what I missed).

If you're already doing local ffmpeg stuff (i.e. pretty involved with code and scripting already) you're only a couple of steps more away from just downloading the openai-whisper models (or even the faster-whisper models which runs about two times faster). Since this looks like personal usage and not building production quality code, you can use AI (e.g. Cursor) to write a script to run the whisper model inference in seconds.

Then there is no cost at all to run any length of audio. (since cost seems to be the primary factor of this article)

On my m1 mac laptop it takes me about 30 seconds to run it on a 3-minute audio file. I'm guessing for a 40 minute talk it takes about 5-10 minutes to run.

> Right now, preparing for these interviews is really gatekept – either you need friends in big tech willing to help you practice, or you have to pay hundreds of dollars for one-on-one sessions.

So I'm probably not your target audience (I haven't had to interview for a software eng job for at least 7-8 years), but from my past experiences in these interviews from that time, system design is typically the most sensible part of the interview process and it really does just test if you have experience solving those problems, or if you're less senior, if you can think at least through the problems logically. There are even pretty good system design interview books written out there. What do you think is gatekept about this?

Leetcode took off as a trend because it wasn't easy for company interviewers to come up with good coding questions, partly because the daily work of most software engineers in most companies simply don't involve much tricky programming. System design is the opposite, most software engineers have to work on system design in their daily work and most companies can simply ask system questions very related to their companies' problems.

Looking at it from this lens, I'm not sure what a leetcode for system design adds in value, that a system design interview book doesn't already give.

I realized that the smallest background remover ML models (u2netp.onnx) is only 4.5mb and inference can be run in browser JS pretty quickly (a couple seconds), so I built a client-only web app for people to do this quickly without using one of the upload-then-process tools out there (which is most of them from what I can tell). It works decently well for pictures where the object and background are relatively distinct. It's a small model so it definitely struggles with the more complicated cases. It's just intended to be for the easy use cases.

I googled for "image resizer" and every single one of the top results (imageresizer, Adobe, simpleimageresizer, promo.com, etc.) have to upload the image(s) to their server and it does server processing. The upload itself takes a minute and the export/download process often takes longer. On top of that sometimes there are too many knobs and ads. Most of the time when I need to resize one or a bunch of images I already have a target dimension in mind and want to just do it all quickly.

I wrote scripts to do this before but I figured why not build a web tool that's super fast. With HTML5 canvas there's no real reason to do server upload to do resizing other than to get people to sign up or something. This client-only tool should be way faster than the common alternatives.

One of my favorite series from when I was younger. I only ever played the DS ones, not the 3DS ones. That was the 2008-2011 timeframe -- 14-17 years ago!

I think in their case, offline is as in you don't need to set up a pubsub server and the client doesn't have to talk to a server for the specific pubsub functionality, not as in "use this for offline web pages/html files locally" (it may or may not work for that, I have no idea, didn't look).

I like it a lot, and I see from the source you're coding in vanilla js, which is awesome. It's underrated how much of an interactive web app you can build without using any libraries or frameworks nowadays.

I actually also really like the idea of building simple/local web apps in a single HTML page. A while ago my child and I visited a science museum and played with a simple stop motion animator. I decided to make a web app just like it and built it as a single HTML page, copied it to her laptop and she can use it without internet. I built it using React and a bundler though, because I'm too lazy to write vanilla js. It just bundles into a single HTML file. Maybe I'll post a Show HN some time.

I do agree with this article; I just think there is a time and place for each type of engineer.

There are companies where 10x engineers make sense, and there are companies where normal engineers are better to have.

One good example is the Commandos, Infantry and Police article from 2004 Coding Horror. (you can look it up, not going to link) Typically the commandos are the 10x engineers. Having them on early in a startup is tremendously helpful. As a company grows to stages where you want infantry and police, having commandos / 10x engineers might hurt more than they help. Of course this isn't always true but this is more likely true than not, in most cases.

We as humans, and particularly in America, like to quantize people and use a single variable to rate how good people are. In reality different people are good at different situations. It's not always the best option to hire for the 10x engineers.

I feel languages and cultures also gradually change over time and over a couple of decades it can be fairly different when you've been disconnected from it.

I was born in Hong Kong and lived there for 13 years, moved to the US and I'm now 40+. I was back in HK last year and although didn't have problems understanding people in Cantonese for the most part, there were situations like calling a restaurant (to make a reservation) where I absolutely could not understand the waitstaff's Cantonese. After 30 years I still consider myself more fluent in Cantonese than English but language and culture had evolved in HK so much that the way younger people talk, especially on the phone where it's harder to hear, is almost completely foreign to me at this point.

The scenario is a task needs to be done. Whether it's for business, personal, whatever. It's a task. It needs to be done somehow. It can be done by a human, or by AI.

We are calculating the cost of doing this task. I don't know how else we can be more clear.

Honestly I'm very unconvinced by this article author's sense of need to calculate the energy cost of the LLM as an argument against it. But if we're using it as an argument, it's only fair to compare how else the task can be completed (i.e. by the human) and what it would cost. What is there to not understand about this comparison?

If it takes you 5 minutes to verify the output of the LLM vs 3 hours to do the research work to come to an answer, you saved 2h55m of human time.

You would use the 2h55m to do another task.

I feel like it is indeed a valid comparison of energy usage.

That is exactly what I am trying to point out; that considering the energy usage of LLM is a level of psychopathy, because that LLM is doing productive work that a human otherwise would.

You would use those couple of hours to work on something else that isn't answering that specific questions, so IMO it is a valid comparison.

The energy usage concern is also funny in that it doesn't try to compare the energy usage of a human doing the same task (if one were to not use LLM to do the task). If we assume it's true that asking ChatGPT a question costs 3 bottles of water, you should take into account how long that question takes to answer by a human doing the research. If it takes you a couple of hours, you need to include the food and drink intake it takes to power yourself for a couple of hours. If it's anything like beef or almonds it takes way more than 3 bottles of water.

Not OP but many many reasons. If you have the money and you prefer comfort (and/or have kids along) taking a taxi/uber/etc. is much more preferable than dragging several (probably heavy) luggages up and down platforms (elevators may or may not work), walking long paths, etc. especially when you consider the alternative is simply putting luggages in a trunk, sit down and relax, and most likely get there faster. And all of this is before we even talk about any safety issues with BART.

I was going to write a counter argument that codebases using earlier versions of React did not look nice, and that they only started to look nice when React moved to Hooks and functional components.

But I realized that actually supports your argument. React with Hooks and functional components unseated old school React.

This is probably most 50-200 people startups.

There was a restaurant called Flavor in Half Moon Bay that had probably my favorite burger ever, of all time/places. They shut down a few years ago. I didn't find that one in your SF/SJ listings, probably just out of range!

For companies I think you're right; but a price tag of a few thousand dollars was a strong deterrent for students or hobbyists/learners to get into doing those development. I think the web was great for learners in the 90s/00s because no special tools were necessary. All you needed was Notepad and a browser. If you did some CGI/Perl or PHP you may also need a $5-$20/mo web host account, that's about it.

It pains me that even on hacker news (a more sophisticated discussion destination than most) most people who are replying didn't read the body of the message and just saw "are there banks/crypto cos immune to bank run" and just blurted out their usual response "no central bank to bail anyone out" or "banks earn money by investing / crypto has no FDIC".

OP is explicitly asking what if banks (tradfi) or crypto cos held assets 1:1 and charged fees as operations rather than invest funds. The question isn't so much around tradfi vs crypto but inclusive of both, that can a bank business sustain this way or not.

I don't have answers but I have a feeling a bank/crypto bank like this would attract far fewer regular customers to be able to sustain running it, like a couple of replies said.

I agree with everything you said in theory. In practice, I don't really know that I agree with the grandkids/grandparents point.

The implication here is that if housing were abundant and more affordable in the bay area, then both grandparents and grandkids can live in the same city and visit each other often, rather than one side living far away in some suburbs. (In some cases, it's the grandparents living in suburbs and parents/kids living in the city for jobs; in other cases, it's grandparents living in the city because they've lived there forever and don't want to move, while parents/kids move to a suburb further away for better life/more space).

The thing is, growth of a city/a region brings along many other issues (in addition to lack of housing driving prices up), including safety, traffic, crowds, decrease in quality of life. Just because housing is affordable doesn't mean that both grandparents and grandkids would still want to live in the city.

Instead of building out even more housing in an already dense area (because jobs are concentrated in that area), I would've liked it if we have a far more diverse set of growing cities across the country where the job markets thrive in all of them, rather than deeply concentrated in a couple of places (SF Bay, NY, etc.).

[Edit] To clarify, I am in the group where the grandparents want to live in SFBA because they've been there forever and don't want to move away. I'm saying, the job market made SFBA grow too much, and building more housing in SFBA to make them cheaper won't necessarily make me want to keep living there because there are other problems that come with more people. Hence, if job markets weren't so deeply concentrated in one area, the country could see more evenly distributed growth across many cities/metropolitan areas, and SFBA/NY wouldn't be so lopsided and ridiculously unaffordable.

But at some point, philosophically, are humans not the same way? We learn all about how the world works, based on inputs (visual/audial/etc.), over time learn to give outputs a certain way, based on certain inputs at the time.

How far are we from building something that feeds inputs into a model the same way inputs go into a human, and then it gives outputs (that is, its behaviors)?

It really would benefit most people to learn to use (Windows) Snipping Tool or (Mac) cmd-shift-4 to crop an image that is currently displayed on their screen; that would create a new image altogether (cropped screenshot). It's truly even easier to use than whatever Gsuite or Office alternatives they would otherwise use, once you know of their existence.

My significant other is outside of tech and wasn't aware of either of these. Once shown, there was no reason to go back to using anything else to crop images.

No image editors involved!

Does that napkin math subtract the cost of the same delivery flight but without the stunt?

I didn't read about the flight but I assume that delivery was happening anyway, with or without the stunt. I am guessing it took an hour or two extra, so the fuel and pilot salary cost should only be what was extra in addition to the regular flight amount?

So, I work in tech and I may pattern-fit too much, but I feel some of it is due to PM culture in modern business and product development. In short, product teams in companies look for the best performing variant of products and once it determines it, it doubles down there. It only makes sense in terms of ROI for a business. In the grand scheme of things when whole industries do it, we as a society converge toward something, whatever category of product we're talking about (TV, suburbs, content algorithms, etc.).

Isn't the context thing true for anyone learning a second language?

I was an immigrant in the US as a teenager and it felt like that in English for me my first few years here. Eventually I got to a point where I can understand stuff without actively paying attention, and it got a lot easier to understand anything with or without context.

As an interesting aside, I speak Cantonese natively, and I barely speak Mandarin. Mandarin to me is like that as well. I have to pay 100% attention to keep up, and as soon as I lose context, all hope is lost in understanding anything in the conversation forward.

This feels like such a hard problem to solve; as a company (Airbnb) grows larger and larger this feels inevitable.

I was a very early user of Airbnb and started using it back in 2012, when the platform was still mostly folks renting out extra bedrooms in their homes, and occasionally full house rentals (less commercially-run than nowadays). For a good few years it was always a positive experience, and most of them had a human touch to them (good interactions with hosts, etc.).

A few years later it has gotten commercialized enough that I basically just consider it a commercial short term house rental platform. In the past few years, stories like this post is so common that I'm hesitant to book one unless absolutely needed (can't stay at a hotel at my destination for various reasons, e.g. large group wanting a house, etc.).

What's the future path for this? There's obviously a market need for something like this. Is it a move toward more decentralized small boutique short term rental management companies (maybe geographically dispersed too)? And for platforms like Airbnb to move back to strictly renting out extra rooms in a house you live in?

Javascript?

Hi potential alternate universe self!

I'm #20 on your list and you are #1 on my list. :)