343 karma · joined September 11, 2019
This might be splitting hairs, but I think this is more about the strength of USD than the weakness of CAD. I don't know that you can say CAD has "collapsed" when every other major currency has seen a similar (or worse) drop compared to USD over the last 10 years.
So you’re right that Black Friday might not be the best time to buy something, but it’s fine if you want to get something at a good price and don’t feel like putting any effort into tracking prices throughout the year.
I used to work on a product that handled video, and I would regularly spin up prototypes where I’d stitch together gstreamer pipelines with different plugins to try things out. For reasons that aren’t important, it was easier to use an app linked against the gstreamer libraries than to use its CLI.
There were all sorts of ways I’d evaluate some plugin I was trying out. Maybe I’d look at some test pattern for artifacts. Maybe I’d measure latency. Maybe I’d profile its resource usage. But I can confidently say that in all of those cases, the memory safety of the 100 lines of C++ code that told gstreamer how to plug things together had absolutely no impact on what I was evaluating.
Sometimes the code you’re writing is basically unrelated to what you’re interested in from a prototype.
I can't count the number of times I've wanted to try out some library and whipped up a quick prototype app in an hour or two to play around with it. I don't give a damn if that app is memory safe, handles signals safely, satisfies arcane aliasing rules or deals with any of the other million footguns in C/C++. I'm happy if it compiles and does what I want it to. I deal with that stuff when I inevitably rewrite it from scratch the next day and have an actual design in mind.
FWIW, I'm comfortable enough with Rust that I would personally choose it over C or C++ for most stuff like this these days since the standard library makes a lot of boilerplate prototyping stuff (e.g. setting up a project, pulling in dependencies, handling files and I/O) much more pleasant. But suggesting that anyone who writes unsafe C/C++ in any context doesn't know what they're doing is ridiculous.
Not all recalls are for big mechanical problems. I've received several recall notices for issues that just required the dealership to flash the ECU or some other controller with new firmware. Whether that update is flashed OTA or with a special dongle at the dealership doesn't really make a difference if you're looking at it from the perspective of vehicle safety/reliability/stability. The point is that a recall is a significant enough issue that the manufacturer _must_ notify their customers about it.
I agree that if you count _every_ OTA update as a recall, you can't really do an apples-to-apples comparison. The cost of pushing an OTA update is much lower than the cost of a recall, so Tesla probably pushes a bunch of minor OTA updates that other manufacturers wouldn't bother with. But it's a fair comparison if only some subset of OTA updates are counted as recalls (i.e. updates addressing a safety issue).
If I'm an undergrad doing a math assignment and want to check an answer, I may have no idea that symbolic algebra tools exist or how to use them. But if an all-purpose LLM gets a screenshot of a math equation and knows that its best option is to pass it along to one of those tools, that's valuable to me even if it isn't valuable to a mathematician who would have just cut out of the LLM middle-man and gone straight to the solver.
There are probably a billion examples like this. I'd imagine lots of people are clueless that software exists which can help them with some problem they have, so an LLM would be helpful for discovery even if it's just acting as a pass-through.
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/8398
FWIW, I'm generally a fan of systemd. That's a pretty minor issue in the grand scheme of things and it's not really "mysterious" -- the behaviour was consistent but didn't line up with the documentation.
In my experience, almost every time I hit an issue with systemd, it's when I'm interacting with it at a (relatively) low level. e.g. Monitoring / controlling units via D-Bus. There is theoretically enough documentation to do that, but it's often incomplete or ambiguous and you're left trying to figure out systemd's behaviour via experimentation.
But as I said, this isn't _really_ a dig against systemd. Even if monitoring service state transitions via D-Bus is finnicky, it's a heck of a lot easier than the alternatives with busybox init or whatever.
It looks like they're one rung down the ladder so I'm sure they're doing just fine even in California, but they're probably making quite a bit less than $15M/year.
If a network connection is a non-starter, your choices are way more limited. It looks like the eufy 11s doesn't have any sort of app / wi-fi support.
I'd bet that if you averaged out compensation from the top 100 paying companies for both hardware and software engineering rather than the top 5, the software number would be nearly double the hardware number. Once you start look at "normal" companies, the difference in margins between software and hardware and its effect on pay becomes very clear.
But it's more common if you zoom out a bit and look at other industries that haven't been consistently booming. I went to university during an O&G downturn, and I had several friends who had accepted internship offers at oil companies which were cancelled at the last minute. There were even companies that suspended their co-op programs for students already working there. Students who had an 8 month internship arranged through the university were laid off in the middle of it and were left sitting on their hands since they weren't enrolled in any classes.
But I probably couldn't find any news articles about it, since those same companies were also going through mass layoffs at the time and nobody really cared about some interns having a rough time.
Airbnb isn't trying to revolutionize home ownership. They can have a successful business even if 99% of homeowners have no interest in renting out their place to strangers.
But when Musk talks about robotaxi, he doesn't describe it as a feature that some small percentage of Tesla owner will take advantage of and that Tesla will use to pull in some extra revenue. Instead, it's used as a justification to treat Tesla as a tech company rather than a car company, since robotaxi is going to completely change how society looks at transportation.
Even if Tesla successfully delivers robotaxi (a hard task in itself), there's no reason to assume it's going to cause the seismic shift that Musk seems to assume it will.
https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/rcl/2019/RIONL-19V615-0655.pdf
> If the build-up happens, it may be possible to remove the key from the ignition switch without the shift lever being in the “P” park position because the system is unable to recognize that the vehicle is not in “P” park
That's obviously not a good thing and I'm glad it was caught, but it's not quite as dangerous to the public as a 7000lb truck's accelerator getting stuck or a car catching on fire when it gets rear-ended.
That's not to say those other automakers haven't had recent recalls just as bad as the Cybertruck's -- I have no idea.
Most of those companies do compete with Tesla, but the price range of a Tesla ($40k to $90k for most models) lines up much more closely with Audi and BMW than any of those companies. I'd imagine that those companies would have higher gross margins if they didn't sell any cheap models or trims levels.
Do you really expect anyone to engage with you in good faith if you feel this way?
Copyright law isn't perfect, but most of the great creative works from the last few centuries wouldn't exist if their authors didn't have legal protections allowing them to monetize their work. Redistributing existing media without worrying about copyright might be great in the short term, but the next century of art will probably look pretty barren if that becomes the status quo.
Maybe we'll reach a point where the benefits of training AI outweigh the benefits of all human creative output. But you don't need to be a stooge of some author's guild to not feel like we're there today.
The obvious comparison is Rust. There are way more C++ jobs out there than Rust jobs. And even if I'm hiring for a team developing something in Rust, I'd generally prefer candidates with similar C++ experience and a basic understanding of Rust over candidates with a strong knowledge of Rust and no domain experience. Modern C++ and Rust aren't _that_ dissimilar, and a lot of ideas and techniques carry over from C++ to Rust.
Even if the DoD recommends that contractors stop using C++ and tech / finance are moving away from it, I'd say we're still years away from the point where Rust catches up to C++ in terms of job opportunities. If your main goal is employment in a certain industry, you'll probably have an easier time getting your foot in the door with C++ than Rust. Both paths are viable but the Rust path would be much harder IMO.
When I bought a TV ~10 years ago, rtings had various Vizios as their top-rated TVs at different price points. I remember my choice at the time being less "which of these TVs should I buy" and more "which of these two Vizios should I buy".
But looking now, I can't find a single model that's rated highest at any size or price point. It's a pretty stark difference.
MBB consulting is still a prestigious job for most students. It's probably not _as_ sought after as it was a decade or two ago, but I think most students at most business schools would be incredibly happy to get a job at McKinsey after graduating.
And I can guarantee that when you were in school, there were plenty of people who looked at McKinsey exactly like you do now. But most people don't form that opinion until they get out into industry and get exposure to management consultants in the wild.
I get it, developing and supporting some feature at a company like Google requires more people (both in engineering and elsewhere) than if you banged out a prototype of something similar at a startup. But I've read stories where hundreds or thousands of employees were laid off, and they were all working on some small service (or even an obscure feature of that service) that never had a chance of moving the needle for the company and offsetting their costs.
I'm sure most of those employees were hard-working, motivated, and tried to build the best product possible, but there are no other companies on earth that would pay that many people top-of-market salaries to work on anything that isn't existential to the company. Other companies would simply go out of business if they operated this way, but in big tech companies, this is lost in the noise when times are good. But when things slow down, big tech companies start to pay very close attention to this.
You _can_ make money hand over fist working with the US military, but winning giant money printing contracts is easier said than done. It’s a super volatile industry that Boeing unsurprisingly limits their exposure to.
Discussing anything related to the US military on HN can be frustrating, and the recent surge of “Boeing only really cares about their cash cow, defense” comments is no different.
I’m no fan of Boeing, but they’ve been focusing on the military for a very long time.
That being said, maybe it's a lemon, but my wife has a low-end (still ~$400CAD) colour laser printer from Brother which...not great for that kind of thing. It's built well and might outlive me, but it's clearly meant for printing documents with the occasional coloured chart in them, and things get pretty ugly if you push it beyond that. The cheap inkjets I grew up with 20 years ago might have crapped out every few years, but I remember them having better colour output.
Obviously this is a bit facetious, but basing your ethical framework on utilitarianism and _nothing_ else is pretty radical.
I've never heard of this being used with really low-power embedded stuff, but if you stretch your definition of embedded to the point where you include things running stripped down Linux, this is a pretty viable setup if you have those devices distributed across a LAN with a managed switch in the middle.
Car manufacturing is a regulated industry. When I buy a car in the USA, even for my taxi business, I shouldn't need to hire a team of engineers to verify that it was properly designed and won't spontaneously combust. I should be able to assume that if the car is being legally sold to the public in the USA, the manufacturer has demonstrated that it meets some basic safety requirements set out by the government. I obviously have some _operational_ responsibilities (e.g. taking my taxis out of service if they're recalled for a design flaw), but I wouldn't consider myself responsible at all if my taxi happened to be the first 2025 Toyota Camry that spontaneously combusted from some design flaw.
Regulators aren't perfect but this is one reason they exist. The FAA has a set of requirements for manufacturing and selling planes in the USA and they have a set of requirements for operating an airline. If I'm operating an airline and the FAA tells me that the verification of an airplane's design and its assembly is the manufacturer's responsibility and not mine, I don't think it's fair to hold me responsible if my brand new airplane falls from the sky because of a design flaw.
This is sorta like saying the US government introduced the Communications Act of 1934 because they had predicted the internet and wanted to normalize the idea of wiretapping so there would be less friction to introducing mass surveillance 75 years later.
The US government does do a lot of horrible things that violate the rights of its citizens, but they also really don't like organized crime and terrorism. Not everything is an explicit attack on privacy.
I don't think a dark pattern requires any fraud or lying. I think the most obvious example is having users opt in to something (e.g. sharing private data) by default and only offering the option to opt out by navigating some convoluted series of menus. You aren't explicitly lying to users and telling them they can't opt out, but you're going out of your way to make sure the option isn't advertised or easily accessible.
In my opinion, there's a gap between that and what airlines and AirBnB do. I guess there's an element of deception with both, but airlines and AirBnB are just waving a nice number in front of your face to drive engagement. That doesn't personally meet my threshold, but I understand how it might meet yours.
Ultra low-cost airlines are pretty aggressive in upselling seat / baggage / food / fare class upgrades during the checkout process. It is annoying to have no idea what a ticket will really end up costing when it pops up in Google Flights or whatever, but I don't think that's enough to call it a dark pattern since everything is clearly disclosed before you pay for anything. Airlines are very upfront about all the things you aren't getting with your ticket.
It's easy to imagine a central SoC receiving the update, verifying its signature against a local key and then reprogramming some MCU over an internal interface. But then after resetting the MCU, you realize that the image you just flashed isn't compatible with the boot security keys burned into that MCU. It's not uncommon for a device performing the OTA update to not have access to the "source of truth" keys / certificates used to verify the updated image at boot time.
Not that this is a great excuse. If you add OTA updates to a product that has this design, you should really be confident in your recovery solution.
I once went in to buy their store-brand garden knife since I've had good luck with a bunch of their gardening stuff. As I pulled it off the shelf, an employee told me that their design had a big flaw and that lots of customers bring them back for returns. He told me I'd be better off with cheaper options from Amazon with a different design.