Hacker News Reader

volenton 'Thirsty' ChatGPT uses four times more water than previously thought

> Many data centres use water-based systems to cool the plant with towers evaporating the heat, like a huge perspiration system, which means that the water is lost.

Someone doesn't know what "evaporation" or "lost" means.

volenton Teslas Are Involved in More Fatal Accidents Than Any Other Brand, Study Finds

Or maybe it's not the type of car but the type of person who buys these cars :)

volenton 10k Bounty for Rewriting Prettier in Rust

I believe you don't see the big picture.

What you just described is running on thousands of machines several times a day.

volenton John Carmack and Rich Sutton partner to accelerate development of AGI

I thought about this too. People say that LLM models are only saying the most common tokens that come after the previous token. And that this makes them incomparable to human intelligence.

But Humans are basically long running LLMs that are retrained in real-time. We are the product of our environment.

volenton Ask HN: I'm a SWE without a CS degree. Will online certs help me get into FAANG?

Study leetcode and system design. That's enough.

volenton Doing laundry on campus without a phone

I don't understand, what's the point of having a dedicated mobile device to access banking services at home?

Why not a computer?

volenton Cash payments above €3000 to be outlawed in Netherlands

That's a very strange question. Obviously businesses are still allowed to deposit more than 3000€ to their bank accounts.

How would supermarket function otherwise?

The farmer isn't an individual, it's a business as well.

volenton Cash payments above €3000 to be outlawed in Netherlands

That is not true in most of Europe.

Money you deposit in a bank is guaranteed by the state up to a certain limit (often 100 000€ per person per bank).

Source (french) : https://www.ecb.europa.eu/ecb/educational/explainers/tell-me...

> Selon la réglementation européenne, ces systèmes assurent 100 000 euros par déposant. > (DeepL) According to European regulations, these systems guarantee 100,000 euros per depositor.

volenton Don't ask to ask, just ask (2019)

    A: high effort ask

From experience, this is never wasted. At the contrary, stating a problem clearly very often helps finding the solution, without bothering anybody else :)

volenton 13 years sailing around the world

> useless for anyone who isn’t fluent in every single language on the planet

It's not about languages but about alphabets. Translating names doesn't make sense.

volenton Group of monkeys kill over 250 dogs for 'revenge' in Indian town

> evil > profoundly immoral and wicked.

I think the concept that animal can be moral / immoral is already a philosophical subject. See the book "Can Animals Be Moral?" for reference.

And in order to say that these monkeys are evil, you must first prove that they can be moral.

volenton Software Engineering Salaries in Europe vs. the United States

This is just not true.

There are plenty of product companies in Europe. To give just a few examples: Spotify, Deliveroo, Blablacar, BackMarket

volenton The global fertility rate is falling

Quite right, but [having children] involves making compromises along with the benefits.

volenton Manager's Playbook: Heuristics for effective management

> PRs should always be prioritized. Aim for review SLA of 1 hour.

I don't agree with this. For the sake of the argument let's agree that a review takes less than 1 hour (which is definitely not always the case). That would mean that an Engineer needs to check his emails / notification more than once an hour to meet this SLA.

This is totally unproductive IMO.

I like most of the other points though, nice list.

volenton Highest French court reclassifies Uber drivers as employees

You don't pay more taxes as an employee than you do when self-employed AFAIK.

volenton The Man Who Guards America's Ketchup

what

volenton How the pursuit of leisure drives internet use

By looking at their map of mobile data cost [0] across the world I understood something that I find annoying in many apps.

Whenever there's a big file to download/upload the app will not download it unless I'm connected to a WiFi network. There's often a hidden settings that can disable this but I never understood why WiFi was considered a better choice for big file downloads.

Very often my 4G network is faster than the WiFi I have access to and with 100Go of data (for 20€) each month it's basically unlimited.

But from the map 100Go would be $1237 in the US ?

[0]: https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/640...

volenton Ask HN: What product/service would you be willing to pay for?

Why would you pay for something that is already free ?

volenton Bitcoin exchange Youbit shuts after second hack attack

Cashing out is a great way to reduce damage as a user. Don't hold coins/fiat you're not willing to lose in an exchange.

volenton Clicker Heroes 2 is abandoning free-to-play

You paid $150 and make it sound like it's a lot cheaper than the $160 that wow would cost you for the same period of time.

volenton Gitter is open source

If you go through the commit history you can see that they removed a lot of secret keys from the repo.

What if the main reason why people don't want to opensource their project is because they don't know how to use their secret keys without including them in the repo ?

volenton Introducing Cloud Functions for Firebase

https://firebase.google.com/support/contact/troubleshooting/

volenton The closest I've ever come to falling for a Gmail phishing attack

Yes

volenton When You Are Depressed, Make Something

I believe that if you find yourself needing distraction to keep going you should refactor your life. You should really talk to someone about your situation, distraction is temporary, you'll always end alone with your own thoughts at some point and it doesn't have to be painful.

If you believe that there's more to life then you should keep looking for more. Dream and make your dreams happen, even if it takes time you'll have a goal and purpose.

There is no point in living but there's no point in staying in the box society puts you in and be miserable neither. You can do whatever you want.

volenton New XPS 15 Laptop

There are different models, you can check a given laptop model under XPS logo under the keyboard.

volenton [dead]

http://gittrends.io/#/explore?page=1&language=All&domain=All...

The projects are sorted by star, it represents pretty well the size of the community.

volenton Paper Planes

Wow it's blinking like crazy on my Android phone using Chrome. Impossible to use. It looks neat on a computer though.

volenton Taylor – Swift on bare metal

Try with baduk :)

volenton Show HN: A self-hosted alternative to Trello, Basecamp, and Freshbooks

Your product looks really nice.

If you are not profitable yet maybe you should consider increasing the price, you're much cheaper than the competition based on your pricing page.

volenton [dead]

This wouldn't have to exist if it was easy to contribute to the official documentation of the products we use.