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john_max_1on Show HN: Octofriend, a cute coding agent that can swap between GPT-5 and Claude

https://deps.dev/npm/octofriend/0.0.18/dependencies - huge list of dependencies

john_max_1on Diffsitter – A Tree-sitter based AST difftool to get meaningful semantic diffs

How does it compare to diffmerge?

john_max_1on Could an industrial civilization have predated humans on Earth?

One thing I always wonder is bury vs cremation.

Hindus, 1/6th of the world population usually cremate their dead.

The bodies are gone.

And the bones are washed away into ganges.

I would guess Hindus in USA or Europe would do the same.

An archeological study of skeletons in 4000 AD would drastically undercount groups that cremate their dead. Or won't it?

john_max_1on Binance lays off over 1k Employees

Companies don't hire people.

Managers do.

If I am a Director of Engineering with 5 reports and you are a Director of Engineering with 10 reports then you are going for the VP of Eng role on next promotion.

Like it or hate it that's why every company bloats up over time.

Company pays salaries.

And you enlarge your status.

john_max_1on Uber Eats Canada Ran Production in a MacBook Air

"core bussiness" is finding and dispatcching drivers including payments. Everything in-app.

> I can't imagine trying to deal with 1m+ concurrent tcp connections. 2 million connections on a BSD mchine is doable though not trivial and that too even in 2012. https://blog.whatsapp.com/1-million-is-so-2011

john_max_1on Uber Eats Canada Ran Production in a MacBook Air

I did. I rejected them as I didn't believe in the future of taxi-app industry.

john_max_1on Uber Eats Canada Ran Production in a MacBook Air

I was once interviewed by Lyft and I told them that a 64 GB Mac Book Pro is sufficient to run the core business.

The interviewer didn't believe me.

I did the calculations in front of him.

This was the time, I just learned Rust.

I did the full analysis and showed him that QPS is great.

Of course, my design didn't include 500 microservices, 50 deployments of Hadoop, Kafka, Elastic, Mongo DB, and 500 slightly different dashboards that different teams in Lyft probably use. Most modern tooling in ZIRP phenomenen.

Someone's Hadoop experience - https://adamdrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-...

john_max_1on InfluxDB Cloud shuts down in Belgium; some weren't notified before data deletion

5% interest rate is breaking the tech companies. If you are dependent on a SAAS service for your infra, ensure that it is either

  - self-hosted
  - provided by a big deep-pocketed cloud infra

Otherwise, the service might shut down with a 30-day or so notice.

john_max_1on Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

> If world poulation halved we'd still be at 1975 population levels .. a time when the world functioned.

The prosperity was much lower than. The scientific advancement even lower.

john_max_1on Ask HN: Problems for the next decade?

The world population is collapsing at a rapid pace.

Our economic growth is based on a growing productive population.

Our economic prosperity is based on a growing productive population.

Different parts of the world are dealing with population collapse.

Look at Japan, a xenophobic country facing population collapse. The total GDP has remain stagnant over the past 20 years.

Look at UAE, a country facing population collapse and acknowledging reality by handing our long-term residency permits to affulent immigrants, mostly Indian Hindus. They are even building the first Hindu temple in Islamic middle-east in Dubai!

Look at Africa, where the population growth combined with sectarian warfare is making for a troublesome living - https://pudding.cool/2018/07/airports/ South Africa is even regresssing. Rich businessman of Asian Indian origin who have lived for generations are already heading for UK/Canada. And with them tax base would collapse like Uganda (90% tax revenue came from Asian Indians in Uganda in 1972 - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-36132151).

Look at USA/Canada/Australia, all of them have low birth rate but compensate by being genuinely immigration friendly. They will grow while sucking even more productive population out of rest of the world.

The Europe would keep importing cheap labour (by choice) and welfare-loving immigrants from middle-east & Africa (by virtue of proximity). And they would transform Europe, how they tranformed Lebanon - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WubIe3c5NGc, further imagine how the voting blocks would look like when whites are rich & old while non-whites are poor & young. Why would they not demand higher taxation and lower welfare policies?

China would have same fate as Japan. Xenophobia with a collapsing population. China would appear a lot of more timid.

12,000 years ago, when sea levels rose, Tasmania lost connection to mainland Australia, and this lead to decline of knowledge and tools over time.

We might see the same in our world.

So, I believe population collapse is a huge problem.