HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

prions

912 karma · joined January 27, 2016

submissionscomments
prions··on Speed limiters now mandatory in all new EU cars
Mopeds can only operate on streets, they cant go in bikelanes or sidewalks. They are subject to the same restrictions as cars (licensure, registration) except that they uniquely have a speed limit

Not having a speed limit is unique only to private car ownership

prions··on Speed limiters now mandatory in all new EU cars
Class B and C mopeds in NYC are speed limited and require a license and registration
prions··on Speed limiters now mandatory in all new EU cars
Bit funny how the article states that the systems are unobtrusive as to be essentially useless, which ignores the fact that these systems are defanged to appease entitled speeders.

Governments around the world impose various requirements on vehicle speeds, most notably ebikes being capped at 20mph for "safety reasons". Meanwhile private cars can travel at over 100mph for no apparent reason other than to not upset drivers at the expense of everyone else on the road.

prions··on Show HN: AI climbing coach – visualize how to climb any route based on your body
It looks really interesting, but as an experienced climber I'm not sure if just watching a video of my avatar climbing would really help with skill acquisition.

Also, this claims that the wall type or video quality doesn't matter, but I have a hard time understanding how the model would be able to understand that a small crimp could possibly be dual textured and therefore has only a few specific ways of approaching it.

So it seems that this is more for visualizing a climb (which is a skill most climbers should develop) and not really for dialing in some sort of microbeta for a problem.

prions··on NYPD spent millions to contract with firm banned by Meta for fake profiles
Not new. Seeing as the NYPD also surveils people well outside of the city: https://www.nj.com/news/2012/02/nypd_muslims.html
prions··on A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place
Comparing YC to Bell Labs, which had deep ties to academia, misses the entire philosophy of YC and Paul Graham. He constantly talks about academia being a hive of orthodoxy, and positions "smart people" as those who can think around it.

By his logic, Bell Labs would be one of the largest hives of orthodox thinking to ever exist, and its the complete antithesis of vc heterodox thought

prions··on Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)
How many times does the hard libertarian view on forums have to be debunked until people stop trying to pitch it as a serious solution?

Even 4chan has stronger moderation than what you advocate

prions··on Language models cost much more in some languages than others
It's not a "Tangential remark" if your tangent is 10 times longer than your commentary on the article!

> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

prions··on StableLM: A new open-source language model
> Supportive. We build models to support our users, not replace them. We are focused on efficient, specialized, and practical AI performance – not a quest for god-like intelligence. We develop tools that help everyday people and everyday firms use AI to unlock creativity, boost their productivity, and open up new economic opportunities.

Refreshing take on the peak alarmism we see from tech "thought leaders"

prions··on Why are there so many tech layoffs, and why should we be worried?
The author also cites this paper as support:https://www.jstor.org/stable/2580324?origin=crossref#metadat...

Instead of bashing the author and his credentials, maybe you should engage with the argument hes making instead?

prions··on How to rebuild social media on top of RSS
I work in this space (podcast ads) and the podcast ads tech maturity is years behind other media, like video, due to RSS. This lag is also reflected in that advertisers generally spend less on podcasting.

RSS makes it very difficult to measure the performance of an ad. Most players in this space wrap a publishers hosted podcast link with their own tracking link, and the main metric of engagement is a download. Downloads themselves are a pretty crude measurement and don’t hold up to something like minutes watched/listened.

Placing ads into the audio directly also just isn’t as performant as streaming it into the media like in video. Publishers and advertisers want more fine grained control over where the ad is placed, when it’s placed, and how it’s consumed by the listener. Podcast ads currently don’t deliver on that.

prions··on How a dangerous stew of air pollution is choking the United States
> The US-wide heat map aligns pretty well with agricultural and industrial pollution, not necessarily wildfires. Let's not turn every last thing into a climate change debate.

Does agricultural and industrial pollution not contribute to climate change?

prions··on Tell HN: Siri provides Apple Music link when sharing current song on Spotify
Stream quality and catalog sizes are both legal issues with music rights holders and have nothing to do with streaming innovation. Unless you consider Apple having a boatload of money to make legal issues go away a kind of innovation.
prions··on Musk’s inner circle worked through weekend to cement Twitter layoff plans
Because the aggrieved aren’t satisfied only by Elon taking over twitter and taking it in a different direction, they also believe that those currently at twitter deserve harsh punishment for whatever role they had in twitter.
prions··on “There Seem to be 10 managers for every one dev at Twitter” – Elon
There have been a lot of people cheering twitters downfall because they feel personally or politically vindicated. But it’s especially bewildering to see how many people here on Hn completely cheer on the absolute disrespect and humiliation of twitter employees as a good thing.
prions··on The evolution of the data engineer role
Without getting into the weeds of it, I'd say smooth out the rough edges in your development experience and make it behave as similar to prod as possible. If there's less friction there's less incentive to cut corners and make hacks imo.

Some pain points:

- Does it take forever to spin up infra to run a single test?

- Is grabbing test data a manual process? This can be a huge pain especially if the test data is binary like avro or parquet. Test inputs and results should be human friendly

- Does setting up a testing environment require filling out tons of yaml files and manual steps?

- Things built at the wrong level of abstraction! This always irks me to experience. Keep your abstractions clean between which tools in your data stack do what. When people start inlining task-specific logic at the DAG level in airflow, or let their individual tasks figure out triggering or scheduling decisions is when things just become confusing.

Right now my workflow allows me to run a prod job (google cloud dataflow) from my local machine. It consumes prod data and writes to a test-prefixed path. With unit tests on the scala code + successful run of the dataflow job + validation and metrics thrown on the prod job I can feel pretty comfortable with the correctness of the pipeline.

prions··on The evolution of the data engineer role
IMO Data engineering is already a specialized form of software engineering. However what people interpret as DE's being slow to adopt best practices from traditional software engineering is more about the unique difficulties of working with data (especially at scale) and less about the awareness or desire to use best practices.

Speaking from my DE experience at Spotify and previously in startup land, the biggest challenge is the slow and distant feedback loop. The vast majority of data pipelines don't run on your machine and don't behave like they do on a local machine. They run as massively distributed processes and their state is opaque to the developer.

Validating the correctness of a large scale data pipeline can be incredibly difficult as the successful operation of a pipeline doesn't conclusively determine whether the data is actually correct for the end user. People working seriously in this space understand that traditional practices here like unit testing only go so far. And integration testing really needs to work at scale with easily recyclable infrastructure (and data) to not be a massive drag on developer productivity. Even getting the correct kind of data to be fed into a test can be very difficult if the ops/infra of the org isn't designed for it.

The best data tooling isn't going to look exactly like traditional swe tooling. Tools that vastly reduce the feedback loop of developing (and debugging) distributed pipelines running in the cloud and also provide means of validating the output on meaningful data is where tooling should be going. Trying to shoehorn traditional SWE best practices will really only take off once that kind of developer experience is realized.

prions··on Ask HN: What's Happening at Cloudflare?
Same with Fly.io, SQLite, Hetzner, etc. Hackernews is a pretty effective way to advertise to developers.
prions··on The tyranny of the supertweeter
So Twitter isn't important except for:

* influential politicians

* journalists

* Jerome powell "... though there's some evidence that Jay Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, may consult it for ideas on monetary policy"

* College educated people (94 million americans)

I don't think this is the own-the-libs that the author intended

prions··on Tech layoffs keep stacking up
The trueup data casts a pretty wide net. Seeing Microsoft on that list and makes the impression that layoffs are hitting FAANGs in a similar way to high growth startups, but those layoffs were due to Microsoft pulling out of Russia.

https://www.trueup.io/co/microsoft#layoffs

prions··on Success in Canada means moving to America
I don’t understand how comparing Trudeau to Hitler is a reasonable position.
prions··on Ask HN: Have you invested in self-development and done inner work?
IFS patient here as well. Totally agree on how powerful it can be, and how deep of a connection you can get with some far off parts of yourself. I find the whole concept a great mental model of how my mind works.

Also as a software engineer whose always been on the analytical/intellectual side of reasoning, I prefer the psychodynamic nature IFS as opposed to modalities like CBT. Really helped open me up to being more emotionally intelligent and aware.

prions··on In Defense of Bitcoin Maximalism
So all of the data for https://triple-a.io/crypto-ownership/ is fake?
prions··on In Defense of Bitcoin Maximalism
So the author points to a link claiming 12% of Ukrainians own crypto, yet triple-a creates a circular reference in trying to substantiate this claim:

- The author refers to: https://triple-a.io/crypto-ownership-ukraine/

- This link calls it an estimate: "It is estimated that over 5.5 million people, 12.7% of Ukraine’s total population, currently own cryptocurrency.(1)"

- Link (1) points to https://triple-a.io/crypto-ownership/

- The link under "Ukraine" in that list points back to the first claim: https://triple-a.io/crypto-ownership-ukraine/

At the bottom of their data page: "The data contained or reflected herein are proprietary of TripleA."

prions··on Artists Who Code, a group helping artists switch careers to tech
First off, I'd recommend you explore art on a personal level before you start looking to apply it outwardly. What mediums do you like? What's your style? Where does your inner drive to make art come from?

Art can be incredibly rewarding just doing it for yourself, and from my perspective I'd find it hard to have an artist career without first knowing my own artistic expression.

I'd also be interested in figuring out how I can utilize my tech experience towards a more artistic kind of career. I paint outside of my day job and I wish I could bring the things I love about it, open-ended creativity, curiosity, etc, to my career.

prions··on Apple Is Working on a Hardware Subscription Service for iPhones
Because that group values personal ownership of technology, and their aversion to the "you will own nothing and be happy" philosophy as antithetical to their own.
prions··on Apple Is Working on a Hardware Subscription Service for iPhones
People who criticize Apple for forcing their users to spend tons of money on new phones every year (via forced obsolescence) should be cheering this decision.

The techno-libertarian wing of HN will be incensed about this decision, but this move by Apple is clearly within their thoughts about reducing their environmental impact through reusing more of their iphones. When a user wants to upgrade, they can just return their phone to apple without the friction of having to resell it.

prions··on The Red State Murder Problem
Mask off time. I wonder how @dang will handle egregious racism disguised as "data".
prions··on User reports indicate problems at Discord
Discord's status page now reports a 99.83% uptime for the last 90 days. Crazy how it seems that they have a major outage this frequently.
prions··on Russian news channel RT to broadcast on Rumble after Big Tech curbs
HN in general has taken a hard lurch to the libertarian right as of late. In this highly upvoted value system, there is no higher principle than free speech and no greater sin than censorship. Except censoring the censors, which is viewed more harshly than censorship itself.

People will respond and say that HN isn't a monolith, and thats true. At the same time, these extreme takes are dominating the top posts of every thread thats even slightly tangential. One of the top posts on the thread about wifi ovens was about how the government was installing killswitches into smart devices.

The view from nowhere [1] is especially relevant nowadays.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalistic_objectivity#View_...

Page 1 of 5Next →