HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

vages

1,464 karma · joined September 7, 2017

submissionscomments
vages··on Writing Code Was Never the Bottleneck
What does EI mean in this sentence? Tried looking it up and found no definition that stood out.
vages··on Will the AI backlash spill into the streets?
Most of the adults alive today have lived sometime when CPU speeds doubled every 12–24 months (see Moores law). This has conditioned many to believe that all information technologies improve exponentially, while, in reality, most are not.
vages··on Man pages are great, man readers are the problem
I use batman from bat-extras[0]. It may very well be the best named command line utility I know.

[0]: https://github.com/eth-p/bat-extras

vages··on Coding Isn't Programming
At around 32 minutes, he explained that a sufficient implementation of negative infinity would be the smallest possible value representable by the data type (e.g. 32 bit integers).
vages··on Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting
With a much better acronym.
vages··on macOS Tips and Tricks (2022)
That is because the green button is a «zoom» button, which maximizes the window to display its contained document: https://blog.xoria.org/macos-tips/#window-management

I am not sure if I agree with the choice either, but that’s the explanation.

vages··on Gene Hackman has died
Saying that a profession is less stressful than others, doesn’t imply it’s stress free.

Most professions have a much higher risk of physical violence, for instance.

vages··on The European VAT Is Not a Discriminatory Tax Against US Exports
I really liked the critique of the US sales tax. I did not know such taxes still existed.
vages··on Tabby: Self-hosted AI coding assistant
It may be a “level of abstraction”, but not a good one, because it is imprecise.

When you want to make changes to the code (which is what we spend most of our time on), you’ll have to either (1) modify the prompt and accept the risk of using the new code or (2) modify the original code, which you can’t do unless you know the lower level of abstraction.

Recommended reading: https://ian-cooper.writeas.com/is-ai-a-silver-bullet

vages··on When will we fix the tools that run the world?
Interesting. Does Epic come with any pre-built UI for its products? Some of the bad UX complaints have been explained away as bad reuse of interfaces adapted to the realities of US private health care (which is very different from Norway’s public health system).

I do not think a language barrier is at play; Norwegians and the other Scandinavians are among the most fluent English speakers of English as a second language in Europe, surpassed perhaps only by the Dutch.

vages··on When will we fix the tools that run the world?
Do you have any links for this? Tragic that people got killed, but even more so if the same software was at the core. And I sure hope it was cancelled, if that was the case.
vages··on When will we fix the tools that run the world?
Yes, this was the kind of thing I was curious about.
vages··on When will we fix the tools that run the world?
Could you articulate in what ways it is patchy?

I have worked with passenger rail transport. Knowing the quirks of that domain, I am quite impressed with air travel software. Anecdotally, I have rarely heard of cases of «Computer says no» in air travel, which are abundant in most other domains.

vages··on When will we fix the tools that run the world?
In Norway, one of the regional health authorities have recently replaced its old software. The replacement, Helseplattformen (The Health Platform, based on Epic Systems’ software) has been making headlines since before its introduction. Doctors and nurses first warned about bad usability and seeming instabilities which would lead to data loss and lower quality treatment. Their warnings were ignored, but have since become a reality. You can follow the news about the system on https://helvetesplattformen.no (“the hell platform”)

While there is certainly such a thing as bad software, a lot of old software actually has its merits, and its users will often tell you about them if you ask. In my experience, developing a desktop app for a point of sales/backoffice, the users were often very satisfied with the old software we were replacing. They liked how fast they got things done with it: For instance, the old software had keyboard shortcuts for everything. Its layout was more information dense.

vages··on A pilot raced through the airport to surprise the woman who saved his life
That is for blood donation. See https://www.oslo-universitetssykehus.no/fag-og-forskning/nas... for bone marrow.
vages··on Contribution of childhood lead exposure to psychopathology in the US
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_horse_manure_crisis_of_1...

While streetcars may have made it easier to transport people, you still need to deliver goods to stores. There’s also the problem of having to wait for tracks to be built.

vages··on Cat Is Listening to You
Please explain how
vages··on Don't squander public trust on bullshit
Visiting Seoul, I would get alerts several times a day, written in Hangul.

Seoul being close to the border with North-Korea, I first suspected that they were about missile tests. When I got an app to translate the messages, they were all about lost elders.

Seoul is a city of 10 million people.

vages··on Visualizing Weather Forecasts Through Landscape Imagery
Reminds me of the main view in the Yr.no app, which visualises the weather as a picture of how things would look outside a window at different times of the day. It is actually quite easy to get a feel for the amount (and type) of precipitation, as well as the wind, from the animations.

However, you only get to see one moment at a time, requiring you to scroll horizontally through the day, and the temperature is only shown as a number.

https://apps.apple.com/no/app/yr/id490989206?l=nb

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=no.nrk.yr&pcam...

vages··on Nintendo Files Suit for Infringement of Patent Rights Against Pocketpair, Inc
And Monopoly itself is based on The Landlord’s Game, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord%27s_Game

The original game was covered by two patents. Parker Brothers bought them from the creator after finding out that Charles Darrow had lied when he claimed that Monopoly was his own invention.

vages··on Ask HN: Do you already see the impact of LLMs on the job prospects for dev's?
LLMs are to a programmer what a rhyming dictionary is to a writer.

A good poet says complex things using few words. A bad poet is someone who conveys something simple using a lot of words.

vages··on Let yourself be monitored: EU governments to agree on Chat Control
> Now is the time to take to the barricades for privacy and secure encryption!

How? I have signed a few petitions, but living in Norway, I do not have a representative to write to

vages··on An AI robot is spotting sick tulips to slow disease through Dutch bulb fields
Quite sure the tulip robot company will turn a profit on this quicker than most generative AI companies do with their products.
vages··on Commission opens non-compliance investigations against Alphabet, Apple and Meta
I recommend the article “Facing reality about the EU is a core requirement for good management”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39602417
vages··on The Super Mario Maker community faces its final boss
Because a lot of Switch games require downloading the finished game to be playable. See which here: https://www.doesitplay.org/switchCartsRevisions
vages··on Google ordered to identify who watched certain YouTube videos
Did you forget the link to Blackstone?
vages··on Launch HN: Retell AI (YC W24) – Conversational Speech API for Your LLM
No. LLMs are worse for customer experience than their predecessors: LLMs confabulate, and their language is so smooth that you often need expertise to catch them in it.

People call customer service because they don’t know what to do. It would be better for most customers to talk to a bot that they can catch making a mistake.

Recent example: https://bc.ctvnews.ca/air-canada-s-chatbot-gave-a-b-c-man-th...

vages··on How ChatGPT made me lazy
Haha. But taking the statement seriously: Do you think the engineers in question employ more of their critical thinking capacity when using code from a generator than when adapting existing snippets?
vages··on How ChatGPT made me lazy
> How materially different is this from "copy-pasted boilerplate from an example on a website that isn't fully understood"?

When finding and copying, you have to employ at least some degree of critical thinking. The result is rarely the first on the search results, and usually cannot be used without some adaptation. Generated solutions usually require less adaptation.

vages··on Sora could ruin peoples lives
The modern use of the term Luddite is perhaps the clearest example of how “history is written by the winners”: The Luddites protested the wealth inequality and bad working conditions that the new technology allowed for, for example child labour. Their opponents painted them as fearing and hating the technology itself.

A good book on the subject is “Blood in the Machine” (2023) by Brian Merchant, which is about what the Luddites actually meant. The 99 Percent Invisible podcast recently interviewed the author: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/blood-in-the-machine/

← PreviousPage 2 of 9Next →