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helge9210on Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)

No, action points I get either from parsing a video capture of a scoreboard or by pulling them over API, depending on which scoreboard/match management system is used.

I do plan to have a front-end for manual annotation of referee performance: correct relative position, timing, determining attacking/defending wrestler etc.

helge9210on Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)

Olympic wrestling education tool.

Indexing multiple captured video streams with awarded action points and adding athlete/referee positions overlay. Stretch goal -- controlling PTZ camera for predictive capture of the high intensity actions.

helge9210on Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again

Cut the pace to 1 hour a week, than some bursts of two to four months of up to 4 hours a day two to three days a week -- that would be close to how I did it. 45 days 8 hours per day is beyond my brain ability to adapt.

helge9210on Perfection Is Not Over-Engineering

Perfection is not "perfectionism". Former is provable given set of constraint. Later is anxiety due to fear of criticism.

"We don't want to build the perfect solution." Can both mean "no need to cover use cases we don't care about" and "no need to deal with divizion by zero in a product, where a number is divided by the user entered number".

helge9210on Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again

Most Germans are not well-read/university educated.

helge9210on Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again

C1 can be achieved (I did it on 360 hours). C2 is academic level of language proficiency -- you have to either deliberately study for the difficult exam or get an university degree in German. Most of the Germans won't be able to pass a C2 test.

When a company sets C2 as a requirement, it can be interpreted as "must have a degree from German University".

helge9210on The Doorman's Fallacy in action

I didn't interpret it as "automation bad". The invisible value, cancelled by automation, can also be negative.

Consider a doorman or a waiter in low-trust status based society: to get a service one must exaggerate status signaling and/or bribe the gatekeeper to be deemed worthy of a service. Kiosk doesn't accept bribes and you can trust "no vacancy" from kiosk more than from the doorman.

helge9210on CTOs Agree: Cognitive Debt Is the New Technical Debt

Depends on the organization and on the SWEs. I do share your understanding, which is making me unfit for organizations, where the authority over "what" is firmly held by POs and the whole vertical on top of them.

helge9210on CTOs Agree: Cognitive Debt Is the New Technical Debt

CTOs noticed it. When product pipeline is empty, because engineers finished all the outstanding tasks, the engineers are awarded with more work: "The new software engineer is a product leader. Someone thinking about what the product is, not just how it works", or, in other words, engineers are going to be tasked with putting more content "the what" into the product pipeline.

helge9210on CTOs Agree: Cognitive Debt Is the New Technical Debt

Considering all the possible levels of abstraction software can represent, I'm imagining it as a fractal. The worst case - a mistake can be introduced by generative AI at any of the abstraction levels at any moment. Meaning, at worst case the whole thing has to be in the head of at least one person to validate the result against. The moment a project is growing beyond a single person capacity to hold it in one head possibility of plausibly looking error introduced at any abstraction level is added to the usual multi-engineer coordination costs.

helge9210on Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)

Personal (as in, "for personal use, not a product") conversation partner -- I speak in German, one level is correcting the mistakes, allowing me to reformulate the statement, another level is responding to the intended idea. Rinse, repeat.

helge9210on If AI writes your code, why use Python?

I did a project with Claude. With unit and integration tests, whole shebang. First in Python. Reached 25% of MVP and understood that I spend more time fixing subtle type mismatches (int/str, function signature vs call etc.), than adding new code. I've switched to Go (note: I've also made sure tests/frontend/backend code are built within the same context) and finished the MVP, without encountering the same problems even once.

helge9210on Poland is now among the 20 largest economies

Vacuuming working age population from Ukraine since 2014. Poland did everything right, while Ukrainian governments and businesses were smirking "What are you going to do?" during salary discussions.

helge9210on Japan to require language proficiency proof for engineer, specialist visa

> you have to go to a school that costs around $2000

So cheap. Comparing to Germany.

helge9210on [dead]

Sabra and Shatila all over again?

helge9210on Ask HN: AI productivity gains – do you fire devs or build better products?

From my experience greenfield /brownfield is not the best dichotomy here. I observed, how same tooling is generating meaningless slop on greenfield project and 10kLoC of change (leading to an outage) on existing project in one hands and building a fairly complex new project and fixing a long (years) standing bug with a two lines patch in the other.

And I have more examples, where I, personally, was on the both sides of the fence: defined by my level of the same problem understanding, not by the tooling.

helge9210on German police probe student poster slur against Merz

These were not private individuals. This was an official cash/good transfer between Austrian bank and Ukrainian bank.

helge9210on The Israeli spyware firm that accidentally just exposed itself

> tight feedback loop between military intelligence, private startups

It's just friends buying from friends.

helge9210on The Israeli spyware firm that accidentally just exposed itself

I would put the upper bound on the population relevant to _the_ tech sector at 28000.

helge9210on Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

I remember GM cars in Herzliya, Israel with cables and cameras held by duct tape circa 2019 after Andrej Karpathy already presented end to end neural network training for Autopilot in Tesla. Looked like very late to the party.

helge9210on Major European payment processor can't send email to Google Workspace users

Long time ago when I was managing ISP email relay and customers asked "Where is the message I've sent?" seeing in the logs message accepted by receiving SMTP server was the end of the debug for me: I just handed the customer the part of the log and suggested talking to the receiving side IT administrator.

helge9210on We asked 15k European devs about jobs, salaries, and AI [pdf]

These reports are not for engineers, but for businesses. HR will point to the statistic and state "we are paying top of the market". In reality, trying to hire a senior engineer below EUR100k is like looking for a black cat in a dark room (you can be certain, the cat is not there anymore).

helge9210on Heap Overflow in FFmpeg EXIF

https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/2006773495066464580

> Seeing as this has made the orange site, let it be known this person is a model security researcher.

> The issue was not in any FFmpeg release, and a report was sent three days after a new code was added to FFmpeg Git.

> There was no big CVE ADVISORY "MUH SECURITEH" "you need to fix this now or you will be hacked and the world will end" associated with the report.

helge9210on Video game union workers rally against $55B private acquisition of EA

If we assume the company runs N projects with positive Net Present Value (NPV) at the start of the project and after re-evaluation some of the project NPV turned to be negative, closing the project and laying off the staff will actually make company worth more.

helge9210on Tesla influencers tried coast-to-coast self-driving, hit debris before 60 miles

I would try to pass it between the wheels and would crash the same.

At least for me there was nothing indicating there is not enough clearance.

helge9210on How the Slavic migration reshaped Central and Eastern Europe

Not if you consider all the modern negative connotations of being called "white". Eastern Europe was under colonial rule (of Russian empire) up until 1980-90s.

helge9210on How the Slavic migration reshaped Central and Eastern Europe

Reminds me of a joke: calling a Slav white is like buying a "made in Vietnam" Rolex.

helge9210on Freeway guardrails are now a favorite target of thieves

Don't try to catch thieves. Go for the scrapyards/recycling companies buying the metal.

helge9210on Cognitive load is what matters

You can carefully pick an order of features to build in a way, that every new feature will invalidate an abstraction correctly implementing all the previous features.

helge9210on Ukrainian hackers destroyed the IT infrastructure of Russian drone manufacturer

AI translation (to English) is off in places. "Ukrainian cybercriminals" is not in the original and was picked as the translation of the closest sounding full word.