Hacker News Reader

prng2021on Why software only moves forward

“You'll find finance moving it to spreadsheets and other weird programs, data integrations putting it in warehouses and BI tools, and it's going out in emails and 3rd party payment processors and their bank and your bank”

How did you miss something so close to the beginning of the article? I’d love to hear how you “restore from backup” all the external systems that data propagates to.

prng2021on Shopify Is Winning Salesforce Clients, Stoking E-Commerce Rivalry

“Salesforce will still appeal to big businesses with annual sales of $300 million or more since it has more sophisticated tools”

I question how much Salesforce cares about these smaller businesses. They might have let Shopify take this segment of the market to focus on bigger companies.

prng2021on Character amnesia in China

China should make another attempt at simplifying their written language. Yes it’s a monumental task, but Korea managed to mostly transition off of Chinese characters.

prng2021on Next.js 15 and Turbopack Dev (Stable)

Fair, I’ll provide some reference.

Next has 130k stars and 2550 issues labeled as bugs.

Svelte has 80k stars and 64 issues labeled bugs.

Vue has 47k stars and 80 issues labels bugs.

Remix has 30k stars and 240 issues labeled bugs.

prng2021on The PlanetScale vectors public beta

https://www.uber.com/blog/postgres-to-mysql-migration/

https://www.mysql.com/customers/

prng2021on Next.js 15 and Turbopack Dev (Stable)

“We've focused heavily on stability”

Fantastic, it only has 2550 open bugs now! /s

prng2021on Software engineer titles have almost lost all their meaning

You’re disconnected from reality. You say titles cost nothing. You really don’t think it costs companies money to progress employees from engineer to senior to staff and so on?

You seem to agree title inflation is common and you say fancy titles are given out like candy. If everyone easily gets promotions, what does that say about someone who’s not given such easy candy?

prng2021on Svelte 5 Released

I think being able to use React Native and Expo are a huge differentiator.

prng2021on Worldcoin has a new Orb and is now just World

So this orb scans your eyes and face and stores your ID on your phone. Why wouldn’t we just use Face ID and passkeys to authenticate a human? I don’t get the value of this product.

prng2021on It's Time to Stop Taking Sam Altman at His Word

If it's stuck at 12 year old level intelligence then it's not generally intelligent. 12 years can learn to think like 13 year olds and so on.

prng2021on Amazon employees are 'rage applying' for new jobs after RTO mandate

If you currently work at a publicly traded company, you're definitely just a number. If your company doesn't show continuous growth quarter after quarter and they announce layoffs, your stock will likely jump up that day.

Amazon has survived the dotcom bubble collapse, the Great Recession, and a global pandemic. Whatever happens here with talent loss will be meaningless.

prng2021on Amazon says workers must be in the office. The UK government disagrees

I'm not saying they're doing this to reduce headcount but if they are, it does make sense. They're a company with 300,000 corporate employees making over $600B/yr in revenue. They survived the dotcom bubble, the Great Recession, and a global pandemic. My point is they should be viewed as a well oiled money making machine, not a small business where the owner directly hires and manages people. Their executives and importantly, their investors, don't care about individuals or short term blips in headcount or financial impacts. They'll recover and move on.

prng2021on What Is a Particle? (2020)

Is the first law of thermodynamics whatever we say it is? If that's how you want to phrase it, then again, this is a useless discussion. All you're really saying is that the literal English words and sentences we use to define something are human constructs. That's so obviously true.

prng2021on What Is a Particle? (2020)

When you say particles are whatever we say they are, I assume you believe particles are subjective. I'm saying particles are objective, like a "wavelength" as opposed to subjective, like "morals".

If you are saying even objective things are whatever we say they are, then this is a useless discussion. Obviously every word is defined with other words and all words are human creations. So yea in that sense, literally everything we know of is whatever we say it is. That's a pointless statement to make in response to this article or really ever.

prng2021on What Is a Particle? (2020)

We're not asking questions about human constructs like what is moral or what is the ideal form of government. We're trying to understand what the most fundamental building block of reality is, which is something objective. Something independent of whether of not people ever existed.

So no, countless people around the world aren't wasting their lives researching particles when the answer is simply, it's whatever we say it is.

prng2021on The "email is authentication" pattern

“It offers a guaranteed, repeatable, low-effort solution”

Doesn’t this answer the question? I would have preferred to read and discuss what they believe to be better alternatives.

prng2021on Show HN: Using SQL's Turing completeness to build Tetris

Wow this is amazing. Makes me realize how elementary my SQL skills are.

prng2021on Is My Blue Your Blue?

Why has this been upvoted so much? It's a completely useless test where it seems we all agree there are a bunch of turquoises.

prng2021on The Threat to OpenAI

I purposefully used the word feature in my reply and I don't think CUDA is a feature. I see that as a massive ecosystem built on a proprietary platform. For that, it takes orders of magnitude more money and something else money can't buy.. time. Time to have the platform adopted by countless vendors and the ecosystem built up.

prng2021on The Threat to OpenAI

Yep I agree with that. I will say though that people, teams, and even entire companies (like what happened at Inflection) get poached everyday so maintaining a moat that way is tough. Also, even though it could happen in the future, is OpenAI's lead due to a moat of scientists with ideas so novel that no other AI company can compete? Certainly not because even though ChatGPT took the world by storm, numerous other companies built LLMs in a very short time span that now perform at very similar levels, both subjectively and based on benchmarks.

prng2021on The Threat to OpenAI

When these companies are getting literally multiple billions of dollars of funding thrown at them, I can't think of a single feature that can be a moat. If it's truly a feature that leapfrogs competitors, there's just no way that someone like Anthropic spending $1B on engineering resources can't replicate the same exact feature that engineers elsewhere implemented.

prng2021on 6G revolution begins: Researchers achieve record-breaking data speeds

Maybe I somehow missed it but when did the 5G revolution happen?

prng2021on AnandTech Farewell

Same. It's so hard to stand out with a tech review site when there are dozens of other great ones, but this one truly did for me.

prng2021on We built an open-source UIPath alternative that solves problem in all RPA

This sounds amazing! Can you explain how semantic targeting works?

prng2021on Cerebras Inference: AI at Instant Speed

Super informative video!

prng2021on IRS has a method of last resort to collect overdue taxes: Revoking your passport

What do you mean its already happening? The US takes in $4.5T a year in tax revenue.

Or are you implying that they already print some money today so they can just print a lot more? Why do you think the government doesn't just print $45T and eliminate all their debt? I mean why doesn't every economically poorer country just print the equivalent of $100T and leap past the US?

prng2021on IRS has a method of last resort to collect overdue taxes: Revoking your passport

Are you saying the government should eliminate taxes and print $4.5T a year instead?

prng2021on Micro-libraries should never be used

Why even stop at micro-libraries? Instead of "return num - num === 0" why not create the concept of pico-libraries people can use like "return isNumberSubtractedFromItselfZero(num)" ? It's basically plain English right?

You could say that if all the popular web frameworks in use today were rewritten to import and use hundreds of thousands of pico-libraries, their codebase would be, as you say, composed of many high modular, self contained pieces that are easy to understand.

prng2021on Flaw has Microsoft Authenticator overwriting MFA accounts, locking users out

Seems like the bug is specific to the iOS app when scanning QR codes.

prng2021on Ask HN: Do we need to pay billions in fees to Stripe, Block, PayPal and Visa/MC?

You've lumped together companies that do very different things. I would just google "payment card network" and you can spend days going down rabbit holes to understand how complex the system is. And yes it is all totally necessary: https://www.spreedly.com/blog/card-processing-network

"Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and AmEx also form the PCI Security Standards Council (SSC) alongside Japan’s JCB International. The PCI SSC acts as an authority in the payments industry, regulating and enforcing the PCI Data Security Standard (DSS) to protect cardholder information. The rules set by this consortium are not guidelines, but the ground-rules participants must abide by in order to participate in card-payments."