BirdieNZ

This was a thoroughly enjoyable read, both the writing and presentation. I really liked the level of writing as it's basically introducing a whole lot of advanced topics but at just the right level for a non-AI researcher type of engineer like myself to be able to understand what's going on, and I felt it made some elements of LLMs actually something I could understand rather than wizardry done by maths PhDs. Probably because it's more like applied engineering rather than hard mathematics here. Thank you for a delightful post.

I don't think that's the conclusion of the paper you linked, although there are papers suggesting that ADHD and autism are essentially subtypes of a single overarching disorder.

The more common view is that because prevalence of attentional deficit in autism is so high, it's rare to find someone with autism who isn't also able to fit an ADHD diagnosis. This might mean a shared common ancestor as it were, or perhaps autism has attentional deficit as an intrinsic part of the disorder rather than people with autism also often having ADHD.

The other direction is the amount of people who have ADHD who also have autism. In this case, while the overlap is higher than the general population, it is easy to find people with ADHD who do not meet the diagnostic criteria for autism.

Put more simply, people with ADHD aren't necessarily autistic, but people with autism are usually ADHD.

It does depreciate, usually. It's the land underneath that appreciates in value.

Occasionally if you get unusual spikes in building materials and labour costs then the house itself can appreciate in value because it costs more to replace it, but that's rare enough.

It's basically one way to implement Georgism, and is a standout real world example of why land ownership policies are very important.

> Cloudflare is an outlier because the company doesn't actually make money at present; their past three annual statements show net losses in the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars.

Their free cashflow is high; they're choosing not to report a profit. I don't think it's useful/accurate to say they don't make money.

Don't get me wrong, they may be doing a layoff to boost margins or enter GAAP profitability but the company revenue exceeds its operating cost by quite a bit.

See in their latest quarterly report: https://cloudflare.net/news/news-details/2026/Cloudflare-Ann...

> First quarter revenue totaled $639.8 million, representing an increase of 34% year-over-year

So they're growing 34% annually.

> Free cash flow was $84.1 million, or 13% of revenue, compared to $52.9 million, or 11% of revenue, in the first quarter of 2025. Cash, cash equivalents, and available-for-sale securities were $4,163.9 million as of March 31, 2026.

...and they have $84 million free cash flow in one quarter, and it's consistently pretty good cashflow.

And they have $4b of cash or cash equivalents stockpiled. It seems pretty healthy to me.

It's significantly more efficient to provide services to compact towns than sprawled towns, so I'm not sure this registers to me as a downside.

It's pretty common for small sprawled towns to struggle to keep up with maintenance of roads/water/power, which is less of an issue with compact towns.

The same applies at the city level, of course.

I don't want to just copy and paste my previous comment, but this isn't how companies at this size think about declaring profits. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47347993

Hence the comment you replied to saying "they print cash". You'll find a lot of big companies work this way: high free cashflow, because they earn a lot more than they spend, but then the spare cash is either reinvested or paid out via share buybacks. Declaring a profit isn't advantageous compared to the other options available.

This is a pretty surface level analysis; Atlassian also has stock buybacks of billions of dollars each year. It's an intentional choice to not declare a profit and pay a dividend, and instead to reinvest in acquisitions and pay shareholders via stock buybacks.

You'll find it much more interesting to look at metrics like free cashflow, which is a better indicator as to whether the company is generating more cash during operations than it spends. This is a lot closer to the layman's idea of profit, and in a small business like a restaurant or single store it's often analogous to profit. In publicly traded companies, net profit and loss are borderline meaningless.

Jevon's Paradox: more software will be produced, rather than fewer software engineers being employed.

It's not uncommon in NZ/Aus to be paid weekly and pay rent weekly. I find monthly rent to be just as strange!

I found it a helpful analogy. Cooking almost any Japanese food will quickly introduce you to dashi and kombu, and I didn't know what carrageenan was.

Cron job with a bash script syncing media and the database to S3 Deep Archive once a day. Cheap as chips until you need to restore.

> Obviously, every single existing property owner wants it to stop right now. Because more housing means more supply, means less money for them.

Upzoning actually increases land values, because it gives you the option to develop your land into a higher-productivity use (and hence higher potential rents).

NIMBYs in my observation tend to be anti-change; they bought with the neighbourhood a particular way and want it to stay that way. Upzoning brings in a change in the vibe and demographic that they don't want.

If the mini PC is second hand then using it until it dies is already a much better recycling culture than it going straight to the landfill. I much prefer that than buying these high spec brand new Beelink/Minisforum/Aoostar mini PCs.

Dell/HP/Lenovo all have huge amounts of ex-corporate mini PCs constantly coming onto the second hand market as they reach the end of Windows 10 licensing, or are depreciated out, or mass upgraded. Some popular models to get due to having a full size PCIe slot are the Lenovo M920q, M720q, or P330. They idle at maybe 10-15W with no optimisation attempts, and you can put a 10G network card in for example, or a bunch of M2/nvme SSDs. RAM can be upgraded to at least 64Gb. CPUs can be swapped out, there are 3D printable rack mounts, backplates and so on in abundance.

I'm trialing a NAS with Immich, and then backing up the media and Immich DB dump daily to AWS S3 Deep Archive. It has Android and iOS apps, and enough of the feature set of Google Photos to keep me happy.

You can also store photos/scans on desktops in the same NAS and make sure Immich is picking them up (and then the backup script will catch them if they get imported to Immich). For an HN user it's pretty straight-forward to set up.

Being East Asian doesn't make you blend in (visually). Japanese people look different to Korean and Chinese people.

Maybe formal spoken Cantonese/Mandarin, but colloquial spoken Cantonese for example is very different from formal written Cantonese. It would sound odd to speak the way things are formally written, if that makes sense.

Perhaps you could say there's a subset of the languages which can be mostly written in a mutually intelligible way. That sounds more like the similarities between, say, Portuguese and Spanish, though, where you can probably write a subset of the languages that is pretty comprehensible by both language speakers, yet the languages are distinct.

Batteries aren't unrepairable; you wouldn't open one up in the middle of the road to try fix it but at the bus depot with enough volume of battery electric vehicles, they'll have reason to hire repair technicians that can refurbish and repair batteries.

The sale value won't stay flat unless you tax land (or use leasehold like Singapore), because typically incomes rise, and in most places the rate of building new housing has an equilibrium lower than the rate of demand, because profit is needed for private developments to go ahead.

This results in a) higher incomes, and b) higher rents, because landlords can extract some of the increase in income, because tenants don't have enough alternatives to keep the rents low.

Capital value of property is a function of rents, so increases in rents result in increases in sale value of the property.

It's good practice to separate out your control plane and data plane, so in this kind of scenario you can use the control plane freely to manage and scale up the data plane without worrying about the data plane underresourcing affecting your control plane operations.

The reverse also applies; by separating them you can have issues with your control plane but not have the database go down.

As a non-American, Hispanic, white, and black American people in the USA are all "American, American, American", and not really a melting pot if that's the only ethnic groups you're counting.

It's for workers' rights. Even ole' John Calvin (who probably started it in Switzerland) wanted Sunday as a day off because it protected workers rights against overwork, not because he saw it as mandated by the Bible.

I don't know about clean, I saw hardly any (men) wash their hands after using the bathroom. Sometimes they'd wave their hands under the tap. Without turning it on.

Seemed more like obsession with being tidy than hygeinic.

> Cultures that value kids will have more. My parents did the same for us

Last I checked, cultures that have access to contraception and female education have fewer kids, independent of religion or tradition or practice of valuing kids.

Indian culture is no exception; total fertility rate has declined in the last ~50 years from ~6 children per woman to ~2, and continues to decline.

Wikipedia says in 2022 there were 4.4 million software developers in the USA. H1bs are ~85,000 added per year. Say over the last 20 years, every h1b slot was filled (by software developers), they never left the USA, and remained on h1b without becoming permanent residents or citizens. That would be 1.7 million H1b software developers currently working.

In reality a large amount become permanent residents or leave. However, FAANG and FAANG-adjacent are probably only around 1 million employees (not including Amazon's non-AWS workforce, but including non-USA employees). Still, FAANG+ are unlikely to be typically anywhere near 80%+ active H1b visa employees. Maybe AWS is a standout exception.

Now, how many software developers in FAANG+ are not born in the USA might be a very different story.

Shadow interviewers are common; why would it be inane to expect an interviewee to ignore the shadow?

Coffee isn't inherently bitter, but overextracted coffee is bitter. If you ever have the chance to try a well-extracted specialty drip coffee I encourage you to try it, it's quite an eye-opening experience as to what black coffee can taste like!

The Chinese version is way better than the Netflix version, I couldn't finish the Netflix one.

It might depend on your government; Singapore is at least one example of a country which does state housing very well.