0898

I'm an idiot, and a lot of Hacker News goes over my head, but I still read it. Would anyone mind answering this question?

Are databases not a solved problem? Why are there lots of different databases? Why is one faster than the other? What's different between them?

I did some ghost writing for EY. I wrote cheat sheets about international tax transfer pricing, mining and metals, and life sciences for its then CEO Mark Weinberger.

I had no experience and knew absolutely zero about any of those sectors.

One interesting restriction is that it won’t do anything with people’s faces.

I run conferences and I like to have photos of delegates on the page so you can see who else is attending.

I wanted to automate this by having Claude go to the person’s LinkedIn profile and save the image to the website.

But it seems it won’t do that because it’s been instructed not to.

Shaan Puri has also talked about how he's been coaching a youth basketball team on the My First Million podcast recently. He says it's one of the best things he's ever done.

I think you misread the word feather.

Unlikely as it sounds, being normal is a strategy that works on LinkedIn.

The quality bar is very low. People post so much fluff and AI thought leadership that the algorithm has recently started rejecting it, and LinkedIn essentially ran out of content.

For the past couple of months it's been showing people posts from two or three weeks ago due to the lack of suitable material.

What I've found is that it's surprisingly easy to stand out and build an audience if you just post honestly and thoughtfully about the interesting little puzzles or dilemmas you face during your workday.

Some posts of mine that have hit it off:

> Why is it hard to find clothes for men? > Why do people think it's weird when I drink milk on Zoom? > Should I post on X, or do people still frown on it?

Try posting about what you don't know, rather than what you do. People like that more.

So what you're saying is that honeybees just have good bee-R?

I thought this was a fascinating read. To cut a long story short, he thought these cheap bank note detectors would be easy to fool.

But they measure several things at once, which are extremely hard to mimic in aggregate.

Sorry, I realised this is a dupe but I can't delete.

Why is this article flagged?

Hacker News and Daring Fireball have so much in common:

1. Both long-running sites 2. Both serve a curious and tech savvy audience 3. Both run zero graphics 4. Both appreciate / provide long-form journalism

They should be fine bedfellows. What's going on?

Is this true? Shame if so – Daring Fireball and Hacker News are two of my favourite websites.

This is what’s happening to us.

The main use case in our house for Alexa is sending announcements between rooms. But for a few months now, it hasn’t worked properly.

I will say: “Alexa, send an announcement”. But 50% of the time, instead of prompting me for the announcement, it will play me saying “Send an announcement” around the house.

I wonder if anyone else has had this issue, or if it’s just me?

I must say, it's strange watching Traitors after watching Beast Games. It feels slow and lazy.

Traitors is one idea padded out with endless cringey "ceremony". (Claudia Winkleman walks down a corridor in a cape! Claudia Winkelman whispers "murder"! People gather and read out names slowly.)

In the Mr Beast version, the entire series would be boiled down to one 8 minute segment – and there would be 15 other original ideas besides it.

I read somewhere that the AirTag doesn’t actually know whether it’s low on battery or not. The alert is just triggered after a preprogrammed time.

It's amazing how many tech people, like this author in this piece, still believe that their phone is constantly listening to you to target ads.

This is an interesting mechanism, but is it really that difficult to boil rice for 20 minutes? I'm not exactly Gordon Ramsay, but I don't think I've ever failed to make decent rice.

One thing I often wonder about with RDS: How do they stop the traffic alert (“TA”) feature being abused by stations to grab listeners?

The guy got sick with a mystery illness didn't he? This was about 20 years ago. He blogged about the saga of having doctors try to figure out what was wrong with him, and I think was self-administering various treatments. Must look up how he's doing.

I’m noticing more and more it’s harder to use data on your phone in major cities.

I was in Bath this weekend and I could hardly access anything when I was out and about.

The best REM album was the one that came out when you were in college

It’s a retro nod to newsletters like NTK and Popbitch, I believe.

It’s interesting that Matt Levine capitalises “white”, as well as capitalising “black”.

I haven’t seen this style choice before.

The article is about stopping the fridge beeping when you leave the door open.

Your comment is about removing a fridge from the wall.

The article is saying that tech jobs are declining due to high interest rates. It's also saying that companies now expect you to perform tasks from multiple departments, leading to burnout and low job satisfaction when you do get a job.

I was active on a channel called #digi in the late 90s. A few years ago, I downloaded an IRC client on the remote chance it was still around.

Not only was it still active – many of the same people were still in the room.

Was TinyLetter the one that Pud from FuckedCompany made?

Such a weird article. It’s all throat clearing and rhetoric, and never quite gets to the meat.

Try posting on LinkedIn as though you are on Hacker News. That’s how I approach it. Authenticity is rare on the platform and there a shortage of relatable, likeable content.

I do fairly well just posting about the problems I’m working on and the puzzles I’m trying to solve.

I prefer to buy second hand iPhones for my family, and usually use Amazon. But the last couple of iPhones haven't been able to connect to the cellular network at all.

Digging into it, it seems they've been IMEI blocked – i.e. reported stolen. Sending them back to Amazon is always such a pain because it means a visit to the post office.