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671 karma · joined December 14, 2020

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suction··on Apache Burr: Build reliable AI agents and applications
I agree. As with Bootstrap, it was fine in the beginning but at some point turned sour - strictly speaking about Look & Feel.
suction··on More product, fewer product managers
By knowing the customers business and needs better than the customer, and be able to convince them that the best product possibly conceivable is not a Frankenstein’s monster put together from “100 ideas gathered from the costumers, prioritised by a PM”, but an opinionated tool created by opinionated people.

Of course you need the right developers for this, not code monkeys or offshore outsourced companies with a time zone and cultural barrier to overcome…

suction··on Coffee in a Can
Because the taste is not good for European palates.
suction··on Netscape and Sun announce JavaScript (1995)
I admire your ability to maintain a rational view on this.
suction··on At Japan’s first winery, the country’s oldest grape lives on
I think US culture, which I suppose you're from, is on a very lonely path food-wise - people from all over the world enjoy trying and making other culture's dishes, not everything is for everyone, but this American-style "I can't get into anything, ever, which I am not used to" is so unique.
suction··on On the slow productivity of John Wick
I have the theory that this is due to digitalisation. We are now at the stage where "everybody" needs to know Tech, and everybody now wants to work in the hip Tech companoes, regardless of own technical skills or mindset: Project managers, legal, accounting, etc. nowadays all want to have a say in Tech aspects, and this creates pressure on the actual tech departments of a corporation to create reports and documentation and explain themselves much more than it used to be.

It's a bad situation for tech people to have to deal with the FUD of all other departments because those departments want to present themselves as knowledgeable and contributing to the technical aspects, when they are not able to at all.

suction··on A peek inside Japan's largest “Dagashi” store
Usually these people are financially secured enough to run their stores or bars or cafés as a hobby, to have something to do and meet some people instead of just sitting at home.

I know a guy in Tokyo whose family owns a small plot of land in the 23-ku area and he leased it to some company who built an office tower on it. They get an upper-5-figure USD amount every month for rent.

The guy runs an import streetwear store just for fun, he's in the red all the time but doesn't care.

suction··on The EU AI act is coming, this time for real probably
As a EU citizen, I can't even begin to explain to you how willing I am to trade in possibly not having cutting edge software for the higher living standards and cultural superiority of the EU.
suction··on Starship Flight Test [video]
Does anyone else feel that calling this thing a "Starship" is too hyperbolic?
suction··on Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior
The key is to abandon social media and shame those who keep using it.
suction··on ‘Scanners are complicated’: why Gen Z faces workplace ‘tech shame’
It's just a function of Japanese-designed UX. "Easy" symbolises "cheap" in Japanese culture, the more buttons and steps and menus the better.
suction··on How Spotify's podcast bet went wrong
Used it for years but Pocket Casts beats it in all aspects.
suction··on Twitter kicking off a developer API campaign on January 16, 2023
So if I create a free Twitter client that has 10000 users, I will have to pay Elon 80000 Dollars every month? Seems a worthwhile effort ;-)
suction··on A mistake that killed Japan’s software industry?
Could you elaborate a little on why she can’t handle living in the US?
suction··on “Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting
I've witnessed some hard negotiating in the car industry about the price of a cable lug for a 6-figure luxury car. The car maker wanted to bring down the price for one lug from 0.05 Euro to 0.03 Euro at a order volume of about 100.000 pieces.

This kept about 50 people (on both sides of the deal) busy for 3 months: Engineers, CAD-Ops, Buyers, Sales, Project Managers...

It was obvious that the amount of extra-work to see if the price could be lowered was a multiple of the savings of the car maker. Yet nobody complained.

suction··on Dark Sky iOS app will no longer work from Dec 31
Apple Weather's forecast is unusable in the whole of Europe because of the data providers they use. Pretty disappointing to have such a US-centric view on an app that's so integral to a smartphone. They either should work with European data providers or make the app unavailable outside of those markets similar to how they do it with the "news" app.
suction··on What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)
Isn't it the most rational thing to assume that a company that is extremely experienced and successful at analyzing business processes and digitalising them will know better than any newcomer with less resources and less experience who operates mainly on "we're disrupting for the sake of it" swagger?

Telling SAP that you want them to change their ways to accommodate your brilliant idea is akin to a layman telling a brain surgeon how he wants his surgery done.

suction··on Ask HN: Seriously, how do you TDD?
A very good explanation. Yet what I think is confusing a lot of (very?) good programmers (not me) is that they already do that intuitively by not letting methods become longer than 3 or 4 lines, and whenever implementing a new method, by writing the return statement first (i.e. returning a mock object or similar) and working backwards, i.e. only writing enough code to be able to return the desired value.

If one then goes and tries to write tests for these kind of methods, it feels like superfluous busywork.

suction··on The forty-year programmer
A disappointing aspect of being a Programmer at 40, 50, or even 60, is that you’ll meet a lot of people, often your managers, who will think of you as an non ambitious loser. “I used to be a coder but now I’m 32 and the ‘Director of User Experience’ - did you never feel the need to do a little more than coding?”
suction··on Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)
The difference is that no "developers are just tools that should be outsourced whenever cheaper" company has a chance against a true software company (which I count Apple towards even though they're more known for the hardware) deciding to enter the competition.

Nokia was not a software company at all. They treated their OS and UX as an afterthought and put hardware features first.

The same is currently happening in the automotive world with their in-car software. Auto makers aren't thinking of their OSs and UX and the people who develop them as the absolute center point of their industry, when they are.

suction··on Germany pushes for ‘pay as you fly’ model
> I worry that this would essentially make it easier for airlines to drop passengers in the long run.

That should be easy to prevent. It has to be designed so the airline (i.e. the party that holds all the power in this contractual agreement) cannot cancel the contract, but the customer's money can only be collected the moment the flight touches ground on the destination. Like a reserved amount on a credit card that car rentals use.

Flights are already "connected", it should be easy to auto-bill once the destination has been successfully reached.

suction··on Mercedes and Ferrari’s edge in the electric car age: high-end axial motors
In that dreaded plant in Germany it’s a cool 60% currently:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/efahrer.chip.de/news/ueber-60-p...

suction··on An odd discovery on Spotify
Doesn’t it come down to „be a critical thinker instead of a mindless consumer“? From that follows that you don’t just scroll through the homepage but should use the search function, in an informed way.

Which in turn already fails at the majority of people being too lazy to type, and not knowing how to search for things they want. They quickly give up, and just take the easy route of consuming what’s served to them.

It’s the modern equivalent of falling on the sofa, switching on the TV, and just watching whatever’s on until they fall asleep.

Getting a majority of people to care about their media consumption is probably a hopeless cause.

suction··on Mercedes and Ferrari’s edge in the electric car age: high-end axial motors
They are the only ones trying to make hydrogen a thing, not „all others than Tesla“. And Toyota has lost the plot a long time ago like all other Japanese makers. The Koreans are eating their lunch.

But Toyota recently put an EV to market, it’s called BZ4X or something like that. It’s not good.

suction··on Mercedes and Ferrari’s edge in the electric car age: high-end axial motors
Tesla quality is still lightyears behind old premium brands. Panel gaps so wide you could use them as kiddie pools. Their scrap rates are testament of how crappy their production process is.
suction··on Mercedes and Ferrari’s edge in the electric car age: high-end axial motors
He meant the latter
suction··on Mercedes and Ferrari’s edge in the electric car age: high-end axial motors
Hydrogen was mainly Toyota, no German maker for instance made any serious commitments into that technology.

I suppose you mean that Tesla was the dragging force in the EV sector and all others were reluctant until they saw Tesla become successful?

If you look at the timeline of global auto makers putting EVs on the market, that claim is unsubstantiated, they would have been years later if that was true.

I get it though, Tesla is the first product of the American auto sector that is somewhat innovative, after decades of being behind all others. So it’s natural that many Americans are proud of Tesla’s success and will basically defend that pride with their lives. It’s a cult because they and facts the contrary will be seen as an attack.

suction··on I love my GPD Micro PC
Lol, why so defensive?
suction··on Ask HN: Why are bookmarks second class citizens in browsers?
pinboard.in is a good alternative
suction··on Edible insects role in transmission of parasitic diseases to humans (2019)
??
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