Hacker News Reader

Gen Alpha kid don't say 'look up', they say 'search up'

As the article says, the problem with destination dispatch is that it 'locks in' an elevator. The passenger gets told at call time what elevator to go to, and it can't change that mid flight. RSR has the advantage that the passenger has no idea which elevator will come, and so RSR can change the elevator they will get in real-time as conditions change. This was an insight I had not considered before reading the article.

brd529on AWS Fired the One Employee Who Gave a Damn

100% agree with this. The irony of this article critical of AI development culture is that the author used AI to write it.

The 'not a, not b, but c' writing style used to be _effective_. If someone wrote that way I paid attention because it was good writing. But because it is everywhere now, it has ceased to be effective, and it has the opposite effect. My mental heuristic sees this and zones out now.

brd529on It's official: Utah is the U.S. state closest to banning VPNs

We (in the tech industry) did this to ourselves. The internet my kids have is very different than the internet I had in the 90s. Algorithmically optimized short form video or other content in an infinite scroll is hurting children so much it borders on abuse. They have no brain capability to resist the micro-dopamine hits we are so scientifically delivering to them. The biggest tragedy is that it hits the lower income kids the worst - the ones whose parents are around less often to monitor their device usage.

Parents and policy makers have noticed that their kids attention spans are lower, their ability to read and reason is lower, and most alarming their ability to socialize suffers. Of course they are going to try and stop it. Requiring age verification, and putting the onus on the social media sites seems like a way to do this. We are able to verify ages for all sorts of things online, e.g. gambling sites, opening bank accounts, etc. It shouldn't be too hard for social media sites to figure out how to require age verification to create an account that can access their service.

brd529on The looming college-enrollment death spiral

Isn’t there a strong argument that we put too many students in debt with a partially completed or useless degree in a well meaning push for “college for all”? The triumph the author describes - an increase in colleges - came at the expense of a reduction in vocational schools and programs.

brd529on Payphone Go

This is amazing

brd529on xAI joins SpaceX

Overview energy has done interesting work in this area.

brd529on Hertz to sell 20k EVs in shift back to gas-powered cars

I recently rented a tesla from hertz - I had made sure my hotel had charging in it's parking lot. I arrive at the hotel to find that the tesla was missing it's j1772 adapter, which is what the hotel charger required. I had to hunt down a supercharger and hang out there for an hour. Pretty lame. When I returned the car I complained and was told that there is no guarantee from hertz that the adapter will be included. Without the guarantee renting an a tesla is a scary prospect - I probably won't do it again.

this from someone who has a model y at home as my daily driver and I love it.

brd529on "King of the Cannibals": How Sam Altman Took over Silicon Valley

the board was about to vaporize employee equity overnight - the secondary was days away and would have been life changing for many employees and significant for all of them. SA is probably a great a leader but the financial incentives for the employees to support him and ensure the secondary went through were huuuuuuge

brd529on Redfin Is Leaving the National Association of Realtors

That’s a great story! Do you know why your friend was willing to sell below market? Was it just 6% below market - what they would have spent on fees anyway?

brd529on Redfin Is Leaving the National Association of Realtors

How did you market it and do you think listing on mls, having an agent show the house, or paying a buyers broker fee would have gotten you more and higher offers?

brd529on Elixir saves Pinterest $2M a year in server costs

Reading higher in the thread, some Elixir folks are saying that the techempower benchmarks used the wrong settings (debug mode, etc) for their Elixir benchmark.

brd529on Mortality patterns for patients hospitalized during cardiology meetings (2016)

Remember this is from 2016

brd529on Ask HN: Visiting SF on a Budget?

https://www.bart.gov/tickets/calculator

$6.50 one way from downtown SF to somewhere like concord

brd529on Ask HN: How to deal with 0.1X programmer colleagues?

Talk to your manager or find a mentor within the company and ask for advice. Rather than framing it as “my colleges are all slackers” frame it as “what am I missing?” At big tech orgs success can mean a lot more than coding. It’s possible you are not doing things the others are doing… writing specs, documenting, interviewing, planning, etc. the bigger the engineering org the more time spent communicating. It may be they are doing more testing than you as well. It may be that this isn’t for you and you should return to the world of tiny teams where you really can code all day and “feel” much more productive because the communication overhead is so low.

brd529on Ask HN: (How much) do you get paid for being on call?

Google pays for on call but it is absolutely the exception in the US. Most Silicon Valley tech companies do not - it’s considered part of the job. Paying for a call is an elegant solution when you have a massively profitable business. Comp days like you are describing are more common, but often informal arrangements.

It would be informative if someone made a list like the extended exercise window list [1] for on call practices and comp if it exists

However one piece of conventional wisdom - on call rotations should be no less than eight people, and not much more. Going on call any more than one week in two months leads to burn out. Any less frequently than that you risk losing familiarity with on call procedures, the observability systems, etc.

[1] https://github.com/holman/extended-exercise-windows

brd529on A mansion hidden directly under the Bay Bridge

This has been our experience

brd529on Millions snap up new Germany-wide public transit ticket

Monthly train pass on New Jersey Transit, LIRR and Metro North can get to above $300 once you are 20 miles from NYC.

brd529on Taking the initial phone screen with candidates

I think it’s great. SingleStore and any database company that ships binaries and supports customers managing their own clusters running those binaries requires a very different programming environment and culture from your typical saas or consumer app. Just picking any two of those articles at random will help candidates understand that. I think “cringy” is a very unkind description of a genuine attempt to answer the most common candidate question - “what is it like here.”

brd529on When McKinsey comes to town

A lot of the comments make this mistake, but the article clearly talks about both. It snarkily says the Ivy League graduates end up doing strategy and everyone else ends up doing software implementations.

brd529on Star Trek (1964) [pdf]

Super 8 has a coherent reveal of the mystery box. Lost did not and disappointed at the end.

The kelvin timeline from when he rebooted Star Trek is sort of mystery box but then we learn who Nero is in a coherent way early on as well. I did not like that JJ destroyed Vulcan and frankly made a confusing alternate, darker timeline at all. The reboots are good movies but they were not good Star Trek movies. Missed opportunities to explore the Roddenberry style themes of humanity and deep moral questions under a backdrop of optimism.

brd529on Office Vacancy Rate in San Francisco Just Hit a New High

Right now developers say it’s too expensive. Some data and a potential path forward: https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/empty-offices-housing...

brd529on Liz Truss resigns as UK prime minister

In England “public schools” are what they call elite privately run schools.

Edit: interesting history on why: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_school_(United_Kingdo... the schools “were "public" in the sense of being open to pupils irrespective of locality, denomination or paternal trade or profession.”

brd529on Citrix acquired and merged with Tibco for $16.5B

That’s right it was a Vista LBO

brd529on SingleStore’s Skiplist Indexes (2014)

For those of you that think you've seen this before, MemSQL was rebranded to SingleStore, and this was the first blog post MemSQL made - skip list indexes were always a fundamental performance innovation of MemSQL. I am not sure if MemSQL/Singlestore is still the only commercially available db using skiplist indexes but I do think it was the first when they debuted in 2014.

brd529on Poll: Contractors, what is your hourly rate

These are the rates that the agencies certified by salesforce as “platinum” “gold” etc charge their customers. One idea is to start by working for one of those agencies, figure out how the system works, how salesforce refers them to their customers, etc and then when you feel like you have enough connections start your own agency to charge those rates.

brd529on Poll: Contractors, what is your hourly rate

Salesforce is an interesting one - many eng leaders don’t consider it “engineering” because they aren’t that familiar with the platform (often the salesforce devs are grouped in the the salesforce admins in their minds, and organizationally the salesforce devs often sit under IT), so it’s a problem they don’t think about much.

Then they are surprised when they find themselves desperately needing the skill set once the business has decided to do a big salesforce thing and not having anyone on hand who a) can do apex / knows salesforce or b) is willing to do it.

So they often turn to salesforce speciality agencies and pay through the nose.

To answer your question - I’ve seen salesforce agencies bill their developers and designers at a blended rate of $170-$200 for $1M+ projects for onshore (US) talent. I suspect if you are a decent software engineer who knows salesforce well you can probably find clients willing to pay higher rates.

brd529on Ask HN: DALL-E was trained on watermarked stock images?

Great points but scary. If training ML models on copyrighted data becomes illegal in the US but remains legal in say China or Russia then the US will quickly fall Behind on ML capabilities - major national security implications at the very least. I suspect if the decision went the way you suggest congress would have to change the law to allow training.

brd529on Oven: The Company Behind Bun

I’m not sure where this movement went but efforts like SSPL [1] and similar aim to make it hard for cloud providers to resell an open source product as a service.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/29/the-crusade-against-open-s...

brd529on Ask HN: Working in tech for climate?

You were downvoted but this is a legit point - people like the ones in this article on “effective altruism” made this decision: https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2020/09/23/effective...

If you can find an org that can convert dollars to lives saved (by climate advocacy eg climate central or direct action eg terraformation) and commit to donating a certain percentage of your paycheck to them it may make your job feel more meaningful. Doesn’t work for me but works for sum.