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hereforcommentson All it takes is for one to work out

This St Peterburg paradox. I've just learnt it from Veritasium's last video.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Petersburg_paradox

hereforcommentson MCP-B: A Protocol for AI Browser Automation

RIP QA engineers

Because it's hosted on single dedicates server, not in the cloud.

hereforcommentson Teen behind hundreds of swatting attacks pleads guilty to federal charges

In Europe this would have been a completely different story. It's highly unlikely (compared to the US) that a SWAT team equivalent would kill anyone. The guy could have got away with 5-7 years max. I know it's a museum, but I prefer to live here.

hereforcommentson Google Pixel 9 Pro

I'm still on Pixel 2XL. The battery is not that good anymore but has no issues with the phone. I'd definitely not spend 1k on a phone. A Pixel 7 Pro is now a much better deal.

hereforcommentson Show HN: Simulating 20M Particles in JavaScript

Oh, man, can't wait to send it to the UI team who write dead slow React apps. JS is blazing fast. Especially if written well.

hereforcommentson Kitchen store AND its website are closed on Sundays

I've never seen anything like this before. They've got 8 showrooms in the Netherlands, so it's not even a small company. This is the translated message on their website:

"Dear visitor, Thank you for your interest in our organization. From our belief we keep Sunday as a day of rest in honor of our Creator. For this reason, all our business activities are shut down on Sundays. We hope for your understanding and are happy to welcome you on our site or in our showrooms on the other days of the week."

hereforcommentson Show HN: Improve cognitive focus in 1 minute

Awesome! I've added this to CJS Chrome extension and randomly (2%) it will throw me to the site. So during the day I'll do some breathwork to manage stress and get into focus.

hereforcommentson Brother have gotten to where they are now by not innovating

I recently bought at a physical store of a large chain an "open box", unused HP LaserJet printer. I asked why it was returned, they said the buyers could not activate it. I was like "okay, lol, I'm a sw engineer, it would take 30 seconds to do that". I bought it and spend like 2-3 hours installing-uninstalling HP's crap software just to make it work. The quality of the prints are great and it works fine now but I'll never buy a HP ever again. I just want to plug it in and print. If I need additional settings, I'll install the related HP software but forcing it is very bad. Also still has not figured it out how to connect it to the WiFi so I use USB...

hereforcommentson Elevated Errors on API and ChatGPT

Completely agree. At work we make everything so bulletproof that leads to zero innovation and it's painful.

hereforcommentson Elevated Errors on API and ChatGPT

It also signed the petition and refuses to work under this board.

hereforcommentson Ask HN: How do you keep going without burning out?

At the moment I'm trying to remove any source of "artifical" dopamine: no tv, no youtube, no music, no news, no podcasts, no reddit, no social media during the week and minimal over the weekend. I've just started a week ago and it works pretty well, my mind is a lot calmer. Silence is gold.

hereforcommentson The product manager role is a mistake

Our PM is so bad at her role she's rather a cheerleader.

hereforcommentson 'It's quite soul-destroying': how we fell out of love with dating apps

I'm so happy that I dated pre-dating app era, between 2005-2010. There were dating apps but not that mainstream. I walked up to my wife and her friend with some BS reason at a club, kept on the conversation and boom 10+ years together.

I'm average looking, she has a beautiful face and has been dancing since the age of 4. I'd have 0 chance with these kind of girls on dating apps. Absolutely 0.

Another good thing, that time social media have not yet screwed up people's self esteem and that helped a lot -> she has not overrated herself, I have not underrated myself.

We've been dating in person for a couple of billion years, we are hard-wired for that as body language tells a lot more in a fraction of a second than any made up profile text and over edited photos.

hereforcommentson Good times create weak men (2019)

Yes, I know. I've been listening to podcasts about how to setup a company and create a product for some time. I have an idea about creating a physical product with software (customizing a physical product, it involves using Blender). To test the product market fit I setup a fake webshop where the customers could describe in a textarea how they wanted to customize the product but when they clicked add to cart button, it threw an error. I logged all these clicks. I advertised it on FB, only at a limited region and I could get people add the product to their cart. The cost of getting one user clicking on add to cart button was way-way-way below then the expected profit margin so very likely I can make money out of it. So now I'm 1000% on it. If I'm lucky I can make at least as much as I make now and can leave my day job. I know it's not a full sw company but a sw enabled one and that would satisfy me. I want to go live with an MVP but later on want to make the customization process fully automated -> the users would do it, I'd just create the product and ship it. My goal is to make the UX so good that it would limit others to replicate it. Later on I can think about building a real sw company. Or not.

hereforcommentson Good times create weak men (2019)

https://garbagecollected.org/2017/10/24/the-carmack-plan/

hereforcommentson Good times create weak men (2019)

I work for a large company, global leader with 100k+ employees. Originally I was hired at the business side to build internal applications. These were grey zone apps as I wasn't part of the IT and dev team and did not follow all the company guidelines.

I was free to use whatever I wanted to build apps. One of these makes over £150k annually, another one is has 700+ internal users.

My tech stack and process was the following: -Python-Flask backend -Object oriented plain vanilla JS frontend with Redux state management (yes, it works without React) -MySQL db -Docker -Good enough documentation to be able to hand it over at any point of time if necessary -Test cases for critical things -Deployed everything to an on-premise server with using WinSCP

I really enjoyed the whole process as I only had to focus on the actual business problem and very actively worked together with the stake holders. The results: bug free apps that I rarely have to touch; great satisfaction and feedback from both clients and internal users; short product to "market" time.

Recently I joined the company's dev team. Mate, it's hell. We have to use React for even an app that has a login page, upload page and report page. The db is Snowflake that makes everything freakin' slow. We have mindlessly have to follow the company guidelines to pass all the "cloud gates" before we can go live. We have to pass Snyk, Sonarqube, use Azure Dev Ops, dev-qa-prod environment, 80% test coverage, less than 3% code duplication (nobody cares if it screws up readability); use Jfrog and god knows what, there are 15 different criteria that we have to pass.

The result: extremely sluggish development; slow application; the whole thing can break at 10 times more places; and it does break; the process seems more important than the actual app that we are building; user satisfaction is awful; no time for running experiments or deeply explore the problem.

We add such a complexity to so tiny apps that I could build over 1-2 weekends that it suffocates the application itself.

I'm looking for the way out, I'm sure there are better places but I'm really thinking about setting up my own company where I could use more common sense. If it's a large app then let's follow a strict process but when it's almost like a toy project then let's keep it simple and only invest in sensible amount of energy.

I've seen here the post about John Carmack notes what he accomplished on a single day, I have never got close to that but I was so productive, adding multiple features on a single day and that made me so satisfied. And now it's all about the "gates".

hereforcommentson Ask HN: Best Tech Courses/Certifications Under $400 for a Back End Engineer?

https://frontendmasters.com/

(They have backend courses as well)

hereforcommentson MemGPT – LLMs with self-editing memory for unbounded context

First, the discoverability reduces the required context window. We don't have to explain every app we have, it's enough to tell ChatGPT one sentence about them and it will go deeper if it thinks that would help it to perform the task.

Also, we have not implemented it, we can have one or multiple level of managers just like at a company and each would delegate a task to a worker (who could also be a manager) and they would report back the result. Just like in real life, a manager doesn't have to know how something is done, it should only know it's done and the get the results.

We work for a large company and very likely have 100s of apps. We could build wrappers around them e.g. using selenium and we could interact with even old apps.

We could also do the same approach with databases. The db itself would have docs, each table and each field as well. So we could ask ChatGPT to query data from the db and it could fully understand the data before writing the sql query.

hereforcommentson MemGPT – LLMs with self-editing memory for unbounded context

There will be a Hackathon at work and with my team mate we are preparing with some kind of hierarchical memory/knowledge solution.

Briefly: we tell ChatGPT what API based tools we have, explaines them in 1 sentence and where it can reach their documentation. We added documentations as endpoint. example.com/docs/main is always the starting point that returns high level overview of the app and all available endpoints to call. Every endpoint has its own documentation as well. E.g.: /geocoder has /docs/geocoder documentation endpoint that describes what it does, what input it expects and what it will return.

We also provieded ChatGPT with actions like read_docs, call_endpoint and end_conversation. An action is a structured JSON object with a set of parameters. If ChatGPT wants to interact with the mentioned resources, it emits an action, it gets executed and the answer fed back to it.

With this I can do a task like: "Get a 30 minutes drivetime polygon around 15 Bond Street, London and send it to Foster."

It plans and executes the following all alone. First it calls the geocoder to get the coordinates for the isochrone endpoint, then gets the isochrone by calling the isochrone endpoint and saves it, calls Microsoft Graph API and queries my top 50 connections to find out who Foster is and calls the MS Graph API's send mail endpoint to send the email with attachment to Foster.

It can hierarchically explore the available resources so we don't need a huge context window and we don't have to train the model either. Also we could implement multiple agents. 1 would be a manager and there could me multiple agents to perform each task and return the results to the manager. It would furthet reduce reduce the required context window.

Very likely some BS app will win the Hackathon like always like a market price predictor using Weka's multilayer perceptron with default settings but we believe our solution could be extremely powerful.

hereforcommentson A BART seat-slashing gang that was part of an upholstery racket (2019)

I have a similar story. In my hometown the owner of the Mercedes salon paid money for each emblem that was broken of a car's hood. It was around 2000-2005. I know this from the owner's son.

hereforcommentson Ask HN: Has anyone gotten complete, permanent relief from tinnitus?

https://www.lenire.com/

We want to try this with my dad. He has tinnitus for around 5 years, it started after an ear infection.

It works the same way as the method in obobbobo's comment.

It's FDA approved!

hereforcommentson Show HN: SapientML – Generative AutoML for Tabular Data

We'll have a global ML Hackathon in November, can't wait to try it!

hereforcommentson .KKRIEGER – Fully Functional Sci-Fi FPS into Just 96kb

The last product we worked on has a larger React file with the fraction of the functionality. Very well done!

hereforcommentson Total Commander

I think in Cuba, Belarus, Uzbekistan... "total commander" has a different meaning :D

I don't think it's UTF-8 as Windows has been able to handle non-English alphabet letters for ages. I don't not know whether it has any specific, location related reason. I can work a lot faster with it than with File Explorer.

It's like the Bud Spencer and Terence Hill movies. They are extremely popular here, in Germany, Austria, Italy but the rest of the world have not even heard about them. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...

We even have a statue of him at a frequented area. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bud_Spencer

hereforcommentson Total Commander

It's extremely popular in Hungary, almost everyone has it installed. I've been using in for at least 20 years. When I moved to the UK 10 years ago I was quite surprised that nobody knew it.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%201-d&q=%2...

hereforcommentson Teaching with AI

I agree, they are perfect for language learning. Reusing another project I put together a site as a weekend project mainly for myself to learn Dutch but decided to release it publicly for free (invite only) to see how others interact with it as it's almost free to run it and looks good in my portfolio. It's an audio chat app, it's not my idea, I've seen many of these but wanted to create one for my own needs.

It uses Chrome's speech to text API (webspeechapi) for input, then it sends it to ChatGPT 3.5 and I use Google's text to speech API to generate audio response along with the text. So practically I can talk to ChatGPT.

I also want to add a dictionary module where I can generate and add example sentences and images to a words and phrases.

I'm sure there are complete teams working on apps like this as it's such a straightforward use case.

You can try it, it's all Hungarian but you can translate the page. https://convo.hu/ Invite code: CONVO

hereforcommentson Scrum is a cancer

I can totally relate. We are not told not to do more work but at sprint planning if someone thinks a ticket would spill over then they should add it only to next sprint. So we do less work just to not spill over.

hereforcommentson AI won’t replace humans, but humans with AI will replace humans without AI

It's true in 2023.

hereforcommentson Oral cancer drug kills 100% of tumors in vitro and in animal models

If it passes all the tests, how long will it take to get it to the market/hopsitals? I know there are multiple phases but if it works, is there fast track or something?