brd529
Re:Attention is all you have
on Monday September 21, 2026 @10:36PM (#49796202)
Gen Alpha kid don't say 'look up', they say 'search up'
As the article says, the problem with destination dispatch is that it 'locks in' an elevator. The passenger gets told at call time what elevator to go to, and it can't change that mid flight. RSR has the advantage that the passenger has no idea which elevator will come, and so RSR can change the elevator they will get in real-time as conditions change. This was an insight I had not considered before reading the article.
Re:AWS Fired the One Employee Who Gave a Damn
on Tuesday May 26, 2026 @10:00AM (#48280016)
100% agree with this. The irony of this article critical of AI development culture is that the author used AI to write it.
The 'not a, not b, but c' writing style used to be _effective_. If someone wrote that way I paid attention because it was good writing. But because it is everywhere now, it has ceased to be effective, and it has the opposite effect. My mental heuristic sees this and zones out now.
Re:It's official: Utah is the U.S. state closest to banning VPNs
on Tuesday May 05, 2026 @12:51PM (#48025097)
We (in the tech industry) did this to ourselves. The internet my kids have is very different than the internet I had in the 90s. Algorithmically optimized short form video or other content in an infinite scroll is hurting children so much it borders on abuse. They have no brain capability to resist the micro-dopamine hits we are so scientifically delivering to them. The biggest tragedy is that it hits the lower income kids the worst - the ones whose parents are around less often to monitor their device usage.
Parents and policy makers have noticed that their kids attention spans are lower, their ability to read and reason is lower, and most alarming their ability to socialize suffers. Of course they are going to try and stop it. Requiring age verification, and putting the onus on the social media sites seems like a way to do this. We are able to verify ages for all sorts of things online, e.g. gambling sites, opening bank accounts, etc. It shouldn't be too hard for social media sites to figure out how to require age verification to create an account that can access their service.
Re:The Looming College-Enrollment Death Spiral
on Monday April 13, 2026 @04:13PM (#47757241)
Isn’t there a strong argument that we put too many students in debt with a partially completed or useless degree in a well meaning push for “college for all”? The triumph the author describes - an increase in colleges - came at the expense of a reduction in vocational schools and programs.
Re:Payphone Go
on Friday March 06, 2026 @08:25AM (#47274630)
This is amazing
Re:xAI joins SpaceX
on Monday February 02, 2026 @11:00PM (#46866322)
Overview energy has done interesting work in this area.
Re:Hertz to Sell 20k EVs in Shift Back to Gas-Powered Cars
on Thursday January 11, 2024 @10:15AM (#38953286)
I recently rented a tesla from hertz - I had made sure my hotel had charging in it's parking lot. I arrive at the hotel to find that the tesla was missing it's j1772 adapter, which is what the hotel charger required. I had to hunt down a supercharger and hang out there for an hour. Pretty lame. When I returned the car I complained and was told that there is no guarantee from hertz that the adapter will be included. Without the guarantee renting an a tesla is a scary prospect - I probably won't do it again.
this from someone who has a model y at home as my daily driver and I love it.
Re:"King of the Cannibals": How Sam Altman Took over Silicon Valley
on Saturday December 23, 2023 @10:14AM (#38744770)
the board was about to vaporize employee equity overnight - the secondary was days away and would have been life changing for many employees and significant for all of them. SA is probably a great a leader but the financial incentives for the employees to support him and ensure the secondary went through were huuuuuuge
Re:Redfin Is Leaving NAR
on Monday October 02, 2023 @11:34PM (#37747671)
That’s a great story! Do you know why your friend was willing to sell below market? Was it just 6% below market - what they would have spent on fees anyway?
Re:Redfin Is Leaving NAR
on Monday October 02, 2023 @10:36PM (#37747270)
How did you market it and do you think listing on mls, having an agent show the house, or paying a buyers broker fee would have gotten you more and higher offers?
Re:Elixir Saves Pinterest $2M a Year in Server Costs
on Tuesday August 29, 2023 @08:42AM (#37306898)
Reading higher in the thread, some Elixir folks are saying that the techempower benchmarks used the wrong settings (debug mode, etc) for their Elixir benchmark.
Re:Mortality Patterns for Patients Hospitalized During National Cardio...
on Saturday August 05, 2023 @11:31AM (#37013006)
Remember this is from 2016
Re:Ask HN: Visiting SF on a Budget?
on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @12:18PM (#36880227)
https://www.bart.gov/tickets/calculator
$6.50 one way from downtown SF to somewhere like concord
Re:Ask HN: How to deal with 0.1X programmer colleagues?
on Tuesday July 18, 2023 @10:14AM (#36772617)
Talk to your manager or find a mentor within the company and ask for advice. Rather than framing it as “my colleges are all slackers” frame it as “what am I missing?” At big tech orgs success can mean a lot more than coding. It’s possible you are not doing things the others are doing… writing specs, documenting, interviewing, planning, etc. the bigger the engineering org the more time spent communicating. It may be they are doing more testing than you as well. It may be that this isn’t for you and you should return to the world of tiny teams where you really can code all day and “feel” much more productive because the communication overhead is so low.
Re:Ask HN: (How much) do you get paid for being on call?
on Sunday July 09, 2023 @11:09PM (#36661604)
Google pays for on call but it is absolutely the exception in the US. Most Silicon Valley tech companies do not - it’s considered part of the job. Paying for a call is an elegant solution when you have a massively profitable business. Comp days like you are describing are more common, but often informal arrangements.
It would be informative if someone made a list like the extended exercise window list [1] for on call practices and comp if it exists
However one piece of conventional wisdom - on call rotations should be no less than eight people, and not much more. Going on call any more than one week in two months leads to burn out. Any less frequently than that you risk losing familiarity with on call procedures, the observability systems, etc.
Re:There's a mansion hidden directly under the Bay Bridge
on Friday May 05, 2023 @11:54PM (#35837816)
This has been our experience
Re:Millions snap up new Germany-wide public transit ticket
on Monday May 01, 2023 @05:52PM (#35779708)
Monthly train pass on New Jersey Transit, LIRR and Metro North can get to above $300 once you are 20 miles from NYC.
Re:Taking the Initial Phone Screen with Candidates
on Sunday February 05, 2023 @08:47AM (#34664846)
I think it’s great. SingleStore and any database company that ships binaries and supports customers managing their own clusters running those binaries requires a very different programming environment and culture from your typical saas or consumer app. Just picking any two of those articles at random will help candidates
understand that. I think “cringy” is a very unkind description of a genuine attempt to answer the most common candidate question - “what is it like here.”
Re:When McKinsey Comes to Town
on Monday December 05, 2022 @11:08PM (#33875805)
A lot of the comments make this mistake, but the article clearly talks about both. It snarkily says the Ivy League graduates end up doing strategy and everyone else ends up doing software implementations.
Re:Star Trek (1964) [pdf]
on Monday October 31, 2022 @06:41AM (#33404019)
Super 8 has a coherent reveal of the mystery box. Lost did not and disappointed at the end.
The kelvin timeline from when he rebooted Star Trek is sort of mystery box but then we learn who Nero is in a coherent way early on as well. I did not like that JJ destroyed Vulcan and frankly made a confusing alternate, darker timeline at all. The reboots are good movies but they were not good Star Trek movies. Missed opportunities to explore the Roddenberry style themes of humanity and deep moral questions under a backdrop of optimism.
Re:Office Vacancy Rate in San Francisco Just Hit a New High
on Monday October 24, 2022 @03:32PM (#33321351)
Right now developers say it’s too expensive. Some data and a potential path forward: https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/empty-offices-housing...
Re:UK Prime Minister Liz Truss resigns after just 45 days in office.
on Thursday October 20, 2022 @10:00AM (#33274802)
In England “public schools” are what they call elite privately run schools.
Edit: interesting history on why: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_school_(United_Kingdo... the schools “were "public" in the sense of being open to pupils irrespective of locality, denomination or paternal trade or profession.”
Re:Citrix acquired and merged with Tibco for $16.5B
on Friday September 30, 2022 @08:01PM (#33042278)
That’s right it was a Vista LBO
Re:SingleStore’s Skiplist Indexes (2014)
on Thursday September 22, 2022 @02:02PM (#32942483)
For those of you that think you've seen this before, MemSQL was rebranded to SingleStore, and this was the first blog post MemSQL made - skip list indexes were always a fundamental performance innovation of MemSQL. I am not sure if MemSQL/Singlestore is still the only commercially available db using skiplist indexes but I do think it was the first when they debuted in 2014.
Re:Poll: Contractors, what is your hourly rate
on Friday August 26, 2022 @09:57AM (#32607606)
These are the rates that the agencies certified by salesforce as “platinum” “gold” etc charge their customers. One idea is to start by working for one of those agencies, figure out how the system works, how salesforce refers them to their customers, etc and then when you feel like you have enough connections start your own agency to charge those rates.
Re:Poll: Contractors, what is your hourly rate
on Friday August 26, 2022 @09:48AM (#32607480)
Salesforce is an interesting one - many eng leaders don’t consider it “engineering” because they aren’t that familiar with the platform (often the salesforce devs are grouped in the the salesforce admins in their minds, and organizationally the salesforce devs often sit under IT), so it’s a problem they don’t think about much.
Then they are surprised when they find themselves desperately needing the skill set once the business has decided to do a big salesforce thing and not having anyone on hand who a) can do apex / knows salesforce or b) is willing to do it.
So they often turn to salesforce speciality agencies and pay through the nose.
To answer your question - I’ve seen salesforce agencies bill their developers and designers at a blended rate of $170-$200 for $1M+ projects for onshore (US) talent. I suspect if you are a decent software engineer who knows salesforce well you can probably find clients willing to pay higher rates.
Re:Ask HN: DALL-E was trained on watermarked stock images?
on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @12:32AM (#32575019)
Great points but scary. If training ML models on copyrighted data becomes illegal in the US but remains legal in say China or Russia then the US will quickly fall
Behind on ML capabilities - major national security implications at the very least. I suspect if the decision went the way you suggest congress would have to change the law to allow training.
Re:Oven: The Company Behind Bun
on Wednesday August 24, 2022 @12:20AM (#32574942)
I’m not sure where this movement went but efforts like SSPL [1] and similar aim to make it hard for cloud providers to resell an open source product as a service.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/29/the-crusade-against-open-s...