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prolly97

110 karma · joined December 4, 2023

Previously working with ML/data science/statistics. Now it's data engineering, in order to hopefully enable the former. https://askhviid.com/
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prolly97··on Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination
Not all science has this issue. But to reference Thiel, a lot of the sciences with "science" in the name, seem to.
prolly97··on Terence Tao explains 6 essential mathematical concepts [video]
I've experienced something similar, I still think the quote works - If you can explain difficult concepts well, it's a demonstration of true understanding. Not that poor communication demonstrates lack of it.
prolly97··on How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs
For every time the EU implements a new regulation... and sees it fail horribly... it seems as if their collective minds concludes that the reason is for not having even more central control.

Soon we will have our own, European, Gosplan. Comrades.

prolly97··on We never use AI. For anything
Thanks for writing this! Was about to say something adjacent but much less structured and precise.
prolly97··on CIA funding helped keep NeXT afloat in the 80s
Haha, "follow the money!"
prolly97··on AI usage patterns in software teams
Invoking the bullshit card on opposing views, in order not to have to elaborate your own pov, seems counterproductive, if the aim of your participation in a discussion is to test your own hypotheses about the world - or in any way gain or deliver insights.
prolly97··on AI usage patterns in software teams
Is this just an opinion? If so, fair.

If it's an attempt at rebutting their claims etc, it'd be easier to interact if you provided some data, or concrete observations :)

prolly97··on AI usage patterns in software teams
If you built a task management system, you'd have very different code bases depending on whether it's for internal use at a mid-size development org or as a SaaS.

So I wonder whether, in your experience, the results you've seen, could have improved by providing sufficient context? - or what context was given.

I.e. if you have the agent that same context, as one of your colleagues would have/require to solve a problem.

prolly97··on Buyer cancels showing after Deflock shows two cameras utilized by the HOA
Is this net bad behaviour that was added due to Flock, or was it a bad actor who happened to use Flock?

Agreed that it's bad behaviour, and that we don't want police overstepping. But I don't see how the use of Flock by police can't be monitored in a way, which catches or even eliminates this issue.

prolly97··on Lovable raises $400M Series C
People are throwing a lot of shade on Lovable - mostly while comparing the output of non-technical people, with the output of the HN audience.

"Excel is the second best tool for everything". While, from a technical POV, we can have a trillion billion objections to making anything in Excel. But it has brought down the cost/barrier of doing numbers based knowledge work - and have enabled more and broader experimentation. Sometimes an Excel sheet should have been a "real" app. No doubt about that.

When we observe someone use something, we have to assume that there's some "truth" in that demand. Lovable, and companies like it, have enabled someone to accomplish things that they couldn't before. That empowered group are now churning out half-baked stuff, that won't get used. And decent POCs that will become "real" apps.

... I challenge anyone who objects to Lovable, to give us the current status on their first web-app related project. My first 10 projects are either dead, or never got far enough to touch the internet. But some have stuck.

prolly97··on As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
You're comparing almost three millennia of text, to a couple of years worth of text. Let's see this play out. Plato also threw shade on writing. Which is an invention that turned out alright for humanity, imho. Maybe it'll turn out that we can push through to a yet-unknown-but-better state, as we've so far done, rather than relying on just going back to a previous state that we were content with.

Sorry for the somewhat sarcastic tone. But the hyperbolism deserved it.

prolly97··on Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again
I mean... yes discrimination doesn't feel nice... but it's not as if people who come to Germany where forced to do so by the germans. I'm not from Germany, but the vibes in some of the high-muslim density parts of Germany I've been to have likewise felt unwelcome, unsafe and hostile (towards me as a scandinavian).

So it feel a bit more complicated than "germans are racist, BAD". Anecdotally I've heard that it's hard for any other nationality to do business in germany, simply because they prefer to do business with other germans. It's their country, we just need to accept those cultural differences, and their right to do as they please in their own country.

There's plenty of countries whose laws or attitudes I don't agree with, and that I just don't visit or have any ambition of staying in. China, Burkina Faso, Somalia and Chad are a few examples.

prolly97··on Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again
Anecdotally I've noticed that among the coworkers I've had from other countries, the ones who manage to learn danish and stay, have generally been in areas with lower density of foreign workers.

My theory is that in areas with lower densities of foreign nationals, you'd benefit more socially form learning the local language.

prolly97··on Doing nothing at work
With the way you're framing your opposition, I agree with you. But I'd like to add some nuance. Parts of building a product or a set of features is about search, rather than great engineering. Sometimes it's better to build two good-enough features to figure out which one is valuable to the user, rather than building one solid* one. I've always been in the "let's fuck around and find out" camp. I appreciate that someone with a different attitude built git! Just saying that there's a balance here, which will depend on the degree to which you're in the middle of a search problem.

*solid in a pure engineering sense - availability, maintainability, chance of leaking the users' nudes etc.

prolly97··on The SpaceX IPO will be the theft of the century
I hear you. And I believe disagreement is good. The markets were right back in 2018 - Tesla did manage to overcome their manufacturing struggles, and they did become profitable (now having retained earnings equal to ~65% of their then market cap).

The markets may well be wrong now. But they weren't back then, and the arguments haven't changed drastically.

Currently I'm sitting in Palo Alto. So I get to see a lot of Waymos and Cybercabs. I struggle to see how Waymo can compete on price if Tesla can keep production prices in the same realm as M3. And making a car is a pretty steep barrier to entry. So that edge may take some time to compete away.

prolly97··on The SpaceX IPO will be the theft of the century
All that. But also he makes products so compelling that people who dislike him drives in them. "Fuck Elon" gotta be an all time top seller among bumper stickers.

> few could have anticipated that Tesla and Musk would be unaffected by valid scrutiny and criticism.

This almost implies that the scrutiny itself, and not the economic reality, should be the reason of Teslas demise or otherwise lesser financial outcome. Which seems a little self referential. If Elon doesn't wash his hands after peeing, and we pointed it out, that would be valid criticism. Ewww pee-hands. But the economic reality and aggregate outcome wouldn't change.

Like not even if the frontpage of WSJ, The Times or FT said "eww Elon pee-hands".

And that the thing - with enterprises of this scale, you could always nitpick and find some things that are suboptimal. But we gotta see it in proportion. 100mm accounting error in Tesla is not the same as a 100mm accounting error in the local McDonalds franchise. For one the error is magnitudes larger than their real economic footprint. For the other it's a rounding error.

TL;DR: I hear you - yes there is valid criticism. We just gotta see it in proportion. I like Teslas cars. But I don't like pee-hands.

prolly97··on The SpaceX IPO will be the theft of the century
When I followed TeslaQ, the valuation was around 60b. Today Tesla has 39b in accumulated retained earning (pr latest 10k, not q).

If the thesis was that Tesla would be unable to create a system that would churn out cars that could be sold at scale with an economic surplus, then we have to reject it.

prolly97··on The SpaceX IPO will be the theft of the century
So this guy was pretty active in the TeslaQ community. They believed Tesla to be (extremely) overvalued in 2017-2019 on the grounds that they would never become profitable.. or something. They lost a lot of money shorting Tesla. https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/91aha1/montana...

Anyways, seems like he's keeping the grudge alive.

They were right about a couple of things back then. But majorly wrong in aggregate and with respect to the outcome.

prolly97··on Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?
At least half of the people in this thread survived growing up with access to social without age verification.

And I'm pretty sure we've all had an encounter with some creep in some random chat room too.

We talked about these things at school and at home. Don't share things with people you don't know etc. Idk if it's illegal to tell kids what to do these days. But when I grew up, we were occasionally also told to get off the computers and touch grass.

I hope I'll get to raise my future kids myself. I think I can do a better job than the government :)

prolly97··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2026)
Are you getting any sales on Lobsterpack? Just curious :)
prolly97··on Beating the House for the Love of Math
Also added HACKERNEWS95 as a coupon code in Stripe :)
prolly97··on Beating the House for the Love of Math
ofc, if you don't want the Excel sheet, you can find my contact details in my profile. Otherwise you get free access to the web version (which is far better), just by signing in with Google (you don't actually have to sign up to anything through the affiliate link, you can just wait out the timer).
prolly97··on Beating the House for the Love of Math
I made an app to calculate exact EV and optimal strategy for Black Jack.

Originally I made it in a Google Sheet/Excel. The calculations are much clearer in Excel, so DM me if you want a copy :)

prolly97··on Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws
I don't want an internet designed by lawyers and politicians. And I'm afraid that's what this level of regulation and enforcement would create.
prolly97··on Claude Code weekly rate limits
> Loosing it for a couple of days is more palatable

Sorry, I'll just be "that guy" for a moment. Assuming that access is cut at a random time during the week, the average number of days without Claude would be 3.5. That's not reasonable as it's dependant on usage. So assume that you've always been just shy of hitting the limit, and you increase usage by 50%, then you'd hit the limit 4.67 days in. Just 2-3 hours shy of the weekend - a sort of reward for the week's increased effort.

Have a blessed Thuesday.

prolly97··on Temu pulls its U.S. Google Shopping ads
This might more be a European thing, but over here some of the sellers on marketplaces like Amazon, are linked with organised VAT/Tax fraud. While I can't say it's all, it'll all things being equal, be baked in to the competitive dynamics. Thus undercutting legal operators, or destroying their profit (incentive) to provide good or domestically produced wares. There's a podcast episode from some ML (money laundering) specialists, that make mention of it. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/trigger-warning/id1448...
prolly97··on 23andMe files for bankruptcy to sell itself
Luckily most of us live in democracies, where we can just decide whether we want the rules to allow this kind of differentiation.
prolly97··on Where are Mr. Beast's early sponsors now?
Was about to comment something to the same effect. He's got 341 million subscribers on youtube (on his english channel). If we imagine that there's 1,35 billion english speakers worldwide (the figure that came up on Google when I searched), that means that 25% of english speakes actively follow him on Youtube.

While I agree that a 13 y.o. is probably more likely to follow him than a 30 y.o., his reach is anything but limited to the teens & children segment.

Chamath Palihapitiya have have worn Mr. Beast merch on multiple occasions on the All In pod as well - which I find kinda funny :D

prolly97··on Scientists Say Our Water Cycle Has Started Breaking Down
Uhu.. And how do we decide which people we don't want to exist? Is it last in first out? - "we were here first"?

As one of the 8 billion on this earth, I'm rather happy being alive. And would love to give that gift to someone else. As many as possible, in fact. You're proposing a world where I should be happy not to have my siblings in my life. Which is absolutely insane. Your view only makes sense from the POV of those surviving or being the lucky chosen ones. I'd rather have my siblings + have to figure out how to fix issues with water supply etc. along the way, than not have my siblings and not have meaningful 'problems' to work on.

We've solved harder problems. Throwing 7 billion people under the bus, because a problem seems a little hard, seems idiotic.

prolly97··on Filling Nuclear Power's $5T Hole Is Beyond the Banks
Thanks... it's as if we've completely forgotten to think about 2nd order effects, let alone 3rd or nth order. Whether it's suffocating GDPR, AML/KYC or other regulation, we're really making an effort to suffocate any future development and initiative.
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