an_opabinia

> Adobe is one of those companies that [isn’t] nice… See for example, [it charges money for software]

The absolute state of HN.

If the son of a Tencent executive had a video game idea, it has a ton of value.

I don’t know, there are a lot of games out there that are “well executed” that no one plays. Lots of indie developers who repeatedly make hits, and yet still no one finds (or finds) their next game.

These takes are kind of obnoxious.

You could say all the same things about video games. Serious mental health costs. Reinforce bad behaviors (like procrastination and inability to delay gratification). There are even almost nude characters in video games, mainstream ones like League of Legends. So very much reinforces objectification of women. And that’s okay, but if a bonafide woman wants to dress up as that character, suddenly Twitch’s audience complains.

> stigmatizing… rebranding…

People are just seeking equal treatment of what they do as men treat things like video games. While I would never wish upon anyone to be abused, and while I develop video games, I am not a blowhard, there are in absolute terms more people sick people aggregating in League of Legends than in Only Fans.

That is to say that some underlying trauma, like major depression or poverty, is concentrating people in endless video games playing and sex work, and that is the underlying problem.

There are lots of human endeavors that have zero shareholders, involve computers, and the people doing them think about security exactly 0 minutes out of the day and everyone thrives. This is to say that the opinion about how it’s the bottom line blah blah blah is probably totally wrong, and maybe the security blowhards are just talking about shit that is irrelevant like 99% of the time.

Is it? Benchmarks routinely show the async native database drivers outperforming JDBC ones in Java, and evented (async) IO is king in the only other contenders, C++ and Rust runtimes for RESTful and other server apps.

Most people are best served by the big vendor OCRs. In my experience Amazon’s works the best, followed closely by Microsoft and Google at a distant third.

It’s one of the few interesting games out there whose rules can be neatly represented as algebra on binary matrices and still make sense.

Nobody will be playing a competitive FPS with joysticks when the user also owns a PC.

The Steam Deck is as much Linux as Android is. The reason it will be a better gaming platform is because the users that will buy it will be rich, whereas that is not true generally of Android. This is just my perspective, but it should also inform you why it has no impact on software vendors to make professional software for Android, which makes hundreds of millions of Linux gamers, because an iPad too is a much more expensive device despite lower market share and hence worthwhile to target.

You’re not “framing the risk in terms of profit.” You’re talking about a set of equations in your head, that only you know, that come up with weird results like “it takes way more revenue to ‘offset’ an expense” because you’re holding “net” or “gross” or whatever margin constant. Which is really confusing and surprising and not how anyone I’ve ever met talks about this stuff, and they’d be equally puzzled and I don’t think would experience an illuminating or aha moment or whatever.

Personally I found it a little interesting, I get what you are going for, but it’s so strange and not really useful or true.

> Most companies have really rosy gross margins, but really tight net margins, so a $100K expense will take $2.8 Million in revenue to offset it.

I don’t think you are interpreting things correctly here. This is both counterintuitive and wrong.

> An interesting thing we saw was that investing in D-list creators could have a way higher ROI than A-list creators.

Nobody cares about an “ROI” metric, “marginal minutes of viewing content gained per marginal dollar given to personality.” If you meant real ROI (“dollars of revenue minus ad expense per attributed channel”) there’s no way this is true. This is how people observe that only the top 10 or so web destinations make any sense to advertise on but Google sends you traffic from 99,990 more trash websites that never convert, because in aggregate you might barely break even but the extra non converting traffic enabled Google to spend all your budget faster. D-Listers are definitely not ROI positive and anyone who measures that to be so is almost certainly making an attribution error or has a product that is already good enough to sell without targeted ads.

I'm not saying D-Listers are worthless. They aren't! They are ROI negative today. D-Listers are exclusively valuable for the potential of becoming A-Listers.

Anyway this parasocial relationship stuff is a huge red herring because people who aren't sick in the head and need followers for weird reasons are only doing this to become Hollywood stars.

What conversation could this person possibly have on a take like this? So what if the answer was simply “Yes.”

It’s pretty incomplete to figure that the coast or the weather are the reasons land is expensive in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

> alpha go is special

The VC community is in denial about how much Go resembled a problem purpose built to be solved by deep neural networks.

Patients will eventually die or like go blind on “regular” insulin.

> And that's ignoring the who-knows-how-many secret un-released projects that might relate.

Most software businesses exist on a tenuous information asymmetry turbocharged by capital (dumping, to reduce prices). The noncompete is about protecting well-capitalized customers from doing the stuff they're buying from Amazon themselves - not because they poach an employee who knows how, but because they find out that a piece of free, open source software is the secret to it all.

> If I work as a studio musician can I also be working on my own album after hours?

Yes.

> Why is that obvious?

Just because there's a law somewhere that covers both a part of making music and part of making software, and just because some programmers make music and some musicians write software, and both are sometimes creative, doesn't mean they have much in common.

> It forces you to actively work against git's design goals and implementation.

It works against GitHub's design goals. You could work on multiple, logically distinct projects in the same git repository easily, if you so choose. git was designed for Linux's workflow.

> Most recruiters and hiring managers will never even open your GitHub profile.

This is the first thing I do, because seeing the code you write is the very best story of them all. Maybe every person I've worked with who came in with weak skills demonstrated in GitHub was terminated between 2 weeks and 5 months later.

> Instead of relying on the system to provide security, we're relying on Apple, Google and Microsoft to decide what we can run, or can't run, even though Apple is responsible for distributing 500 million copies of Xcodeghost[3], and Google's Play Store is the #1 vector for malware on Android[4].

The security stuff is a huge red herring.

The security model is all about limiting self publishing and directly reaching consumers by the biggest players in IP, Disney, Netflix, Nintendo and Tencent. 90% of App Store revenue is games. Most remaining revenue is to subscription entertainment services. Security as engineers talk about it basically never affects the bottom line.

> I get people sending me things that I might like as a screenshot. Great, nice jacket, if only I could click that "buy" button.

People like the psychic pleasure of browsing and collecting and making recommendations and having taste. They like buying too, but that takes place on Amazon, where that daily gratification is only $10. It’s not important that you buy the jacket.

It’s an interesting idea, but I don’t know. Lawyers and doctors also say the workload burns them out. Some doctors have to do 24 hour shifts which are more than 3x physically demanding than working 1 8 hour day.

I understand what you mean by hobby though. It’s toxic to discount people feeling shitty. But the biggest complainers I know - maybe the shittiest people - get into programming or the guilded professions to make money.

> Getting an education (even an advanced one) is a completely separate thing than entering academia and I suspect you know this.

This is the same energy as saying that being the son of an incredibly rich person is a completely separate thing than being rich.

Anyone who has shown a kid an iPhone would know that touch screens are immensely more intuitive for kids. They can write words in days compared to months of rote handwriting practice. Of course the press around this study will be flawed. And of course this study didn’t have a control, like learning to play the violin or a similar motor skill.

On the contrary the biggest critics of the car’s QA problems are the people driving them. It’s the people who don’t own them who say dumb shit.

But weren’t all those Google employees trained in the academy? Wasn’t this competition organized and designed by people in the academy? Who defined the goal, who laid not just the foundation but built the whole town? It’s clearly a positive collaboration.

In any case, left to their own devices, corporate R&D teams wouldn’t be able to define goals that work for their business. Like without the competition and goals being defined for them, DeepMind would be having meetings with brand managers about the avant- grade of ad tracking.

> There is not much your local councilman / state rep / US Rep / US Senator / etc can do about a problem with Comcast

Because of its presence on public utility poles, there is a lot that they can do about Comcast. Many people prevail getting Comcast to do stuff by writing cities. The problem is the cushy job Comcast gives people after a long stint in government service in favor of Comcast. That shit isn’t a conspiracy.

> replace Bash with PowerShell

On the contrary I wish Windows shipped with busybox, so that it would be easier to run scripts with some bashisms portably.

> look at everything in your trash can this week.

You’re just saying, “if it’s small it’s okay” again. It’s not that reductive. I agree that plastic is bad. I also think throwing away AirPods is bad, for a different reason than plastic is bad, but really, are they the same reason? It’s so much more interesting when it’s not as reductive as “small things are okay to throw away” or whatever like, really simplistic thought is going on here.