Hacker News: amflare

New comment by amflare in "Try to take my position: The best promotion advice I ever got"

amflare — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 19:46:52 +0000

Taking on extra responsibility is all well and good until someone figures out that they can just get you to do more work for the same amount of money. At that point your only option is to move on, because if you stop performing at the "expected" level due to lack of reciprocation, suddenly you have "performance issues".

New comment by amflare in "Stranger Things creator says turn off “garbage” settings"

amflare — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 17:21:04 +0000

One reason could be previous season or movie recaps. I know I'll go look for recaps to refresh myself on a story before launching into a new season.

New comment by amflare in "I DM'd a Korean presidential candidate and ended up building his core campaign"

amflare — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 19:58:41 +0000

It's not like anyone is forcing the students to participate. If someone of voting age wants to engage someone on policy positions, then they accept the consequences. Likewise, if someone wants to engage with voters, then a college campus is a perfectly legitimate location.

New comment by amflare in "Software development in the time of strange new angels"

amflare — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 22:36:37 +0000

This. AI is not replacing us, it is pulling the ladder up behind us.

New comment by amflare in "Binary Retrieval-Augmented Reward Mitigates Hallucinations"

amflare — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 18:43:42 +0000

> Existing mitigation approaches often degrade performance on open-ended generation and downstream tasks, limiting their practical utility. [...] Unlike continuous reward schemes, our approach assigns a reward of one only when the model's output is entirely factually correct, and zero otherwise.

Someone correct me if I am wrong, as I'm am on the very edge of this space looking in, but does this mean that they are using a "degraded performance with fewer hallucinations" model to fact check the "more powerful yet prone to hallucinations" model?

New comment by amflare in "Weekend projects: Chicken Squisher 3000"

amflare — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 18:31:39 +0000

As someone who grew up on a farm.... I think this is what your nieces and/or nephews are for xD

New comment by amflare in "The Programmer Identity Crisis"

amflare — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 17:20:30 +0000

Ironically, I love using em dashes in my writing, but if I ever have to AI generate an email or summary or something, I will remove it for this exact reason.

New comment by amflare in "Space Elevator"

amflare — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 17:08:27 +0000

For a standard globe that you might see in a classroom, the Earth's atmosphere is about as thick as the paper glued to the outside that displays the map.

New comment by amflare in "The dangerous intimacy of social location sharing"

amflare — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 16:21:14 +0000

I suspect that they are trying to recreate the experience of bumping into someone they know. Since the destruction of third-spaces, it is increasingly unlikely that you'll serendipitously interact with someone in an unplanned, but welcome, social environment. Leaving your location on for friends and family in this way signals something close to "If you see me, say hi". Whereas announcing "I will be at X for Y time" is a bit more heavy handed. And just knowing that isn't sufficient to actually act on the information, you still have to reach out and plan something unless you are an granular as the actual building you are in, which feels weird. It feels a little intrusive to constantly be announcing my location. Like "Hey! Hey! obk0943t! I'm gonna be in NYC just so you know!" If I just left my location on, then /if/ you care, you can find out. But if you don't, you are not interrupted with the information. Finally, posting leaves a record, whereas location sharing is always "right now". Sure, someone can use that to construct a timeline, but that takes effort on their part (and possibly malice).

New comment by amflare in "Gold hits all time high"

amflare — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 20:09:28 +0000

The short version is that its in limited supply, it has luxury value (think jewelry or artisan crafting), and its doesn't corrode. So it's a supply and demand issue. There is basically always the same amount, kings want it, and it doesn't ever disappear.

It s superior to currency because while (for example) the US dollar will always have value as long as you pay taxes with it, there is not a limited supply

It is superior to bartering because while (for example) a chicken has value due to its utility as food, it naturally disappears (because you ate it or it died).

Gold and other precious metals sort of sit in the middle ground as the "next best thing" to almost everything that humans want. So it remains a useful means of preserving and communicating value.

New comment by amflare in "Wind turbine blade transportation challenges"

amflare — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 19:53:25 +0000

You need to be able to distribute power to an area more than once

New comment by amflare in "Morse Code Translator"

amflare — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 17:05:31 +0000

Many years ago when I had an iphone I would set text vibrations to be the morse code of the first letter of someone's name so I knew who messaged me without looking. That's the only feature I still miss to this day with my android.

New comment by amflare in "End of 10: Upgrade your old Windows 10 computer to Linux"

amflare — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 19:37:20 +0000

In fairness, Windows 10 was marketed as the Last OS. I could see how someone would take this into account when choosing an OS. Its not their fault the rug was pulled out from under them.

A First Look at Raytraced Audio (For Videogames) [video]

amflare — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 09:10:15 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6EuAUjq92k

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43609380

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by amflare in "Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age"

amflare — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 17:56:57 +0000

> The very experience and accumulated know-how in software engineering and project management — which might seem obsolete in the age of AI — are precisely what enable the most effective use of these tools.

I agree with the author here, but my worry is that by leaning on the LLMs, the very experience that allows me to uniquely leverage the LLMs now will start to atrophy and in a few years time I'll be relying on them just to keep up.

New comment by amflare in "A new dental scam is to pull healthy teeth to sell you expensive fake ones"

amflare — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 16:28:00 +0000

Given that most of us can only afford to go to the dentist twice a year when our insurance covers it, what advice do you have for sussing out bad apples?

New comment by amflare in "Univ. of North Texas' body parts business: Cutting up and leasing out the poor"

amflare — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 17:27:38 +0000

The premise of this program is reasonable. If a cadaver is unclaimed, then letting the next generation of doctors use it for training is not a bad solution to the problem. I'll grant its sad when loved ones find out too late to do anything about it, but thats the nature of the beast.

The real question is, are we sure that institutions using their "best effort" to find next-of-kin has been corrupted enough as a process that we should switch our default from medical training and science to rotting in an unmarked grave?

I really struggle to say that it has. At least from the information provided by this article.

New comment by amflare in "Why Copilot Is Making Programmers Worse at Programming"

amflare — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 19:47:03 +0000

Pass. This article could have been published as "Why Internet Message Boards Are Making Programmers Worse at Programming" 30 years ago, "Why Google Is Making Programmers Worse at Programming" 20 years ago or "Why StackOverflow Is Making Programmers Worse at Programming" 10 years ago. Its the same-old-same-old. Has it been true in the past? Maybe, if your criteria for "good programmer" is "someone who went through the same struggle I did". But the industry grows and adapts. The next generation of programmers is going to be good at different things than we are. As long as they can get the same job done, who are we to say that they are wrong?

New comment by amflare in "Is 'No tax on tips' a distraction from the fight to end sub-minimum wages?"

amflare — Tue, 27 Aug 2024 18:43:14 +0000

Absolutely not. Compensation should reflect value received. This idea effectively forces a business to subsidize their employees, because you damn sure can't pass all that to the customer (because then we are just back where we started, just with an extra 0 on every transaction). Small businesses and business with low profit margins will be forced out of business. And this would consolidate capital into the hands of the big businesses and billionaires who can afford to pay everyone tens of thousands of dollars more than they can bring into the company.

A McDonald's cashier is not worth $55,000 just because they are >18 years old. That position is not supposed to be a career. That position is supposed to be a first job for a dumb 16 year old who needs gas money and $500 for a PS5. When their needs outgrow their paycheck, they are supposed to move to a job that pays more. Can McDonalds afford to pay the extra? Sure. But Jimmy's Hotdog Stand down the street can't, so he goes out of business and the money he would have made goes to McDonald's instead and the rich get richer.

New comment by amflare in "Moments in Chromecast's history"

amflare — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 16:40:09 +0000

Same. I was so sad when my old chromecast broke. And casting was basically the only thing that kept me on the chrome browser all these years. So perhaps its a good thing and this change will finally allow me to move to a more private browser.