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davidjfelix

638 karma · joined June 28, 2019

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davidjfelix··on Kolibri: A Sovereign Open-Weight Model
to be fair, this discussion has been had numerous times here and the industry has arrived on "open-weight" to describe the practice of releasing the post-training weights in an open manner but not releasing the data it was trained on.

That's what they call this and I think it's a pretty clear definition these days to people in the industry.

davidjfelix··on Show HN: Gage – Rust based tool to scan Claude sessions for bugs, other issues
What are the .rn files in your examples? They look like rust but perhaps I'm missing something?
davidjfelix··on Minikotlin
Visibly claude produced website. No link to code.

Is the expectation that people write kotlin in their browser? How do people work this into their development workflow? Is this just a neat demo?

davidjfelix··on Chasing Chicago's movable bridges (2014)
yes - the lake freezes.

I should also clarify. The sailboats in particular need the bridges raised which is why they have a scheduled time to exit. Ordinary boats can be removed closer to the water or navigate the river without the bridge being raised. Those boats are also removed for the winter.

davidjfelix··on Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
so you're saying its not the evil that's the problem its the hypocrisy?
davidjfelix··on ASML's Best Selling Product Isn't What You Think It Is
yeah but if all you're getting is the manual that's free https://rebrickable.com/mocs/MOC-215601/NightHawk11991/asml-...
davidjfelix··on Apple testing new App Store design that blurs the line between ads and results
It mostly seems like this was a response to the complex world of SEO. My perception is that SEO was seen as this pay-to-play 3rd party service that was offered by "experts" which allowed you to get the leg up on your competition. Search engines saw this as value being externally captured so they offered ads. Want to buy your way to the top? Quit paying 3rd parties to play the game and pay directly.
davidjfelix··on Tell HN: Help restore the tax deduction for software dev in the US (Section 174)
It may result in an outsized penalty to bootstrapped companies but being VC funded doesn't make you immune to this. VC funded companies with revenue will not be able to offset their revenue by reinvesting in R&D (software development) expenses, so in some cases they may be seen as having a profit when they previously wouldn't have. In those cases they'd have a tax burden.
davidjfelix··on Cloudlflare builds OAuth with Claude and publishes all the prompts
Or Cap'n'Proto, Protobuf, Cloudflare workers, Cloudflare Durable Objects. The LAN house is cool too.
davidjfelix··on ClickHouse raises $350M Series C
Is that the case? It's just a product you like?
davidjfelix··on ClickHouse raises $350M Series C
Yeah -- I see nobody but you mentioning HTAP and I see every comment on your account talking about the same product. That's astroturfing.
davidjfelix··on ClickHouse raises $350M Series C
So what's the goal here? Astroturf SingleStore ads in any post about databases?
davidjfelix··on Using unwrap() in Rust is Okay (2022)
Unwrap is fine if used sparingly and as mentioned, to indicate a bug, but in practice it requires discipline and some wisdom to use properly - and by that I mean not just "oh this function should be a `Result` but I'll add that later (never).

I think relying on discipline alone in a team is usually a recipe for disaster or at the very least resentment while the most disciplined must continually educate and correct the least disciplined or perhaps least skilled. We have a clippy `deny` rule preventing panics, excepts, and unwraps, even though it's something we know to sometimes be acceptable. We don't warn because warnings are ignored. We don't allow because that makes it too easy to use. We don't use `forbid`, a `deny` that can't be overridden, because there are still places it could be helpful. What this means is that the least disciplined are pushed to correct a mistake by using `Result` and create meaningful error handling. In cases where that does not work, extra effort can be used to add an inline clippy allow instruction. We strongly question all inline clippy overrides to try to avoid our discipline collapsing into accepting always using `unwrap` & `allow` at review time to ensure nothing slips by mistakenly. I will concede that reviews themselves are potentially a dangerous "discipline trap" as well, but it's the secondary line of defense for this specific mistake.

davidjfelix··on Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users?
Ideal customer profile
davidjfelix··on How three years at McKinsey shaped my second startup
My understanding was that the "enemy" was McKinsey, a firm that has a reputation to me as being an expensive consulting firm filled with MBA types who frequently are hired by companies.

My understanding of this reputation is: This often happens at the detriment of either product quality or employee satisfaction. It's debatable if they actually have a reputation of providing value. I think short term? Maybe, albeit expensive. Long term? I'd say no.

davidjfelix··on TikTok goes dark in the US
I’m glad you’ve limited your number of concerns to allow yourself to focus on what matters. Just curious where did replying on hacker news rank?
davidjfelix··on Distributed Transactions at Scale in Amazon DynamoDB (2023)
Agreed. It's wild to me how many people think they need arbitrary queries on their transactional database and then go write a CRUD app with no transactional consistency between resources and everything is a projection from a user or org resource -- you can easily model that with Dynamo. You can offload arbitrary analytical queries or searches to a different database and stop conflating that need with your app's core data source.
davidjfelix··on ByteDance's Recommendation System
My take: it's a mix of brand bundling and lack of data. They're roughly equivalent but shorts is bundled with youtube which has its own brand perception and reels are bundled with IG/FB and have their own brand perception. Additionally fewer users means less algorithmic data to keep viewers.

Tiktok was allowed to establish its own brand and develop a community while shorts and reels are intrinsically tied to their past. They may be able to escape that history but I don't think it's helping them be fast movers or win "cool" points.

davidjfelix··on ByteDance's Recommendation System
> They have people putting their fingers on the scales to decide what content gets promoted.

Is this just your belief or is there evidence you can point to.

How would you differentiate manual intervention from algorithmic intervention?

davidjfelix··on ByteDance's Recommendation System
Context: ByteDance is the parent company of TikTok. Frequently people talk about "the tiktok algorithm". This is that.
davidjfelix··on Starlark Programming Language
Allegedly it has an LSP and vscode support but I also have never used either.

https://github.com/facebook/buck2/tree/main/starlark-rust/vs...

davidjfelix··on Oncall shift should be Tuesday to Tuesday
At a previous employer we had a pair on call for each of: front end, back end, and infra. We had on-call lasting from Monday midday - Friday midday. Handing off to a "weekend on-call" from the same pool of people from Friday midday to Monday midday. Weekend on-call paid 100 per day, weekday on-call paid 50 per day. You were generally expected to take normal time "off" (but still on call) if paged off hours. Many people would still work if it was just a blip (rare).

I thought this was a pretty good system and despite the cycles being shorter, we had enough engineers to fill a rotation pretty well so that at most you were on call once a month, alternating months between weekend and weekday on-call cycles.

I still do not enjoy being forced into on call and wish I could opt-in. We traded weeks a lot but with smaller rotations or really finicky paging its awful. I still have a sinking feeling in my gut when I hear the work phone ringtone from somebody else's phone in public, and murphy's law definitely applies to being on call -- you always get paged the minute after your beer gets delivered at a restaurant.

davidjfelix··on Show HN: Rebels in the sky – Terminal game about space pirates
This link also did not work for me.
davidjfelix··on The MANY Alternatives to Scrum
I thought they debunked the "Spotify model" as something being promoted by a few consultants but also being phased out at the same time as being exposed to the public (nearly 10 years ago in 2014).

There are dozens of articles about the problems with matrix management that it introduced.

davidjfelix··on A supermarket trip may soon look different, thanks to electronic shelf labels
Membership loyalty cards typically gate "yellow tag" pricing. Some yellow tags are for bulk purchase discounts but some are just "discounted prices". The FTC says that it's deceptive pricing to advertise a sale while raising prices, but since yellow tags are membership pricing, not a discount, it's defensible to raise prices with the original price as a yellow tag rate, available only to members. Yellow tags are not always promotional prices.
davidjfelix··on The Rise of the Forever Renter Class
I think the problem is seeing it as an investment. Most people won't say a car is an investment but rather a cost - the investment is transportation and its value is gained external to the sell price of the car. The home itself really ought to be considered a cost, while the land and property as a whole may (but not necessarily) be an investment.

It produces a dividend of shelter for the owner. Assuming labor and material prices are fixed, the asset should be depreciating in value from wear and use which would all point to flat or lowering value.

Assuming that it must make returns, one or more of the following must be true:

* Labor price increases

* Material price increases

* Land value increases

davidjfelix··on Dear Europe, please wake up
(I don't agree with this viewpoint) maybe the author views fungibility of employees as a feature because it lessens the risk of a founder sinking an investment over a personal or interpersonal issue.
davidjfelix··on Meta Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2023 Results
They had an ETF that did this called SJIM but just announced it's closing: https://www.etf.com/sections/news/inverse-jim-cramer-etf-shu...
davidjfelix··on Subject-First Commit Messages
Use multiple messages.

`git commit -m "Fix actual words that humans read" -m "Fixes: #234353"`

You could probably script this based on branch if you're one of those people who names branches after ticket numbers.

But my actual advice is that I think -m is a bad pattern that leads to bad commit messages, and omitting the message argument opens your EDITOR, and you should use that.

davidjfelix··on Subject-First Commit Messages
I can't stand the ticket number in the message. It's an immediate waste of 6-10 characters on meaningless metadata that GitHub can pull from the body and link for you. Further, the numbers are sequential, so frequently VERY similar, and highly prone to typos, which is harmful to anyone even minorly dyslexic.
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