Hacker News: artifaxx

New comment by artifaxx in "IBM Plunges After Anthropic's Latest Update Takes on COBOL"

artifaxx — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 22:00:14 +0000

Interesting, where do you think LLMs perform the best?

New comment by artifaxx in "alpr.watch"

artifaxx — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 19:31:08 +0000

Tracking already feeling pervasive suffers from the cognitive bias of all or nothing thinking. A phone can be turned off or apps disabled far more easily than a network of surveillance cameras. There are degrees of surveillance and who has access to the data. We can push back.

New comment by artifaxx in "alpr.watch"

artifaxx — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 19:26:40 +0000

Didn't lose me, but point taken about gathering more support. How about: the costs of implementing a zero-crime world are far greater than the crime. Or attempting to trade freedom for safety will result in losing both.

New comment by artifaxx in "Everyone in Seattle hates AI"

artifaxx — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 23:54:53 +0000

Definitely, AI sentiment is positive among most people at the small startup I work at in the Seattle area. I do see the "AI fatigue" too, I bet the majority is from using AI as a repeated layoff rationalization. Personally AI is a tool, one of the more useful ones (e.g. Claude and Gemini thinking models make quite helpful code reviewers once given a checklist) The hype often overshadows these benefits.

New comment by artifaxx in "Replacing a $3000/mo Heroku bill with a $55/mo server"

artifaxx — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 22:52:11 +0000

Indeed, there are levels to the asymmetry though. Oil change might be ~5x cheaper vs the 20-50x claimed for Heroku...

New comment by artifaxx in "Dijkstra On the foolishness of "natural language programming""

artifaxx — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 15:32:34 +0000

I can share a similar approach I'm finding beneficial. I add "Be direct and brutally honest in your feedback. Identify assumptions and cognitive biases to correct for." (I also add a compendium of cognitive biases and examples to the knowledge I give the LLM.

New comment by artifaxx in "Meta to ask many managers to become individual contributors or leave"

artifaxx — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 20:21:55 +0000

I don't see their comment as trolling. Reducing the negative impact Meta already has is a more accurate description. Given their track record so far, you'd be a tiny minority to even get to work on that instead of ad/user engagement optimization for example.

New comment by artifaxx in "The Google Squeeze"

artifaxx — Wed, 13 Nov 2019 00:23:15 +0000

DDG is growing exponentially, Google is just massive and it takes a while to grow big enough to notice https://duckduckgo.com/traffic

New comment by artifaxx in "What Happens to the Body on No Sleep"

artifaxx — Fri, 11 Oct 2019 01:27:47 +0000

Correlation vs causation leaves a lot open, chronically sick with a number of illnesses people may sleep more. Their mortality risk is also higher. I'd wish we could see controlled studies that randomly assign people to different sleep durations. You also have to control for gene mutations that affect sleep requirements https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/genetic-mutation-...

New comment by artifaxx in "Don’t Let Facebook Make You Miserable"

artifaxx — Sat, 06 May 2017 21:28:04 +0000

Different people are trying to get different things from Facebook. I use facebook but disable notifications and unliked all pages/companies. Crippling the annoying parts to them allows people to have their Facebook cake and eat it too. Without being bothered by stupid notifications mid bite.

New comment by artifaxx in "Don’t Let Facebook Make You Miserable"

artifaxx — Sat, 06 May 2017 21:25:15 +0000

I remember a professor who equated smartphone use with smoking, he told people to go outside with the smokers if they wanted to use their smartphones/Facebook.

New comment by artifaxx in "How to Survive as a Solo Dev for Like a Decade or So"

artifaxx — Fri, 05 May 2017 20:26:49 +0000

This definitely depends on a lot of factors. If you do work where you are easily replaceable sure. Most software developers don't have anything special rights wise as so few unionize. As an independent developer if you choose work in niches where the demand is greater than supply you can fire your painful customers anytime and move on to other ones. Different solutions work for different people.

New comment by artifaxx in "How to Survive as a Solo Dev for Like a Decade or So"

artifaxx — Thu, 04 May 2017 17:03:28 +0000

It really depends on the person, thats great you recognize that you do well in the corporate world. Unfortunately in many places the company would own your spare projects due to the intellectual property assignment rules in their employment contracts. Beyond that some of us strongly dislike conformity and being a replaceable cog in the corporate machine. Connecting with one's customers and seeing directly how what you build helps them instead of dealing with corporate politics is a huge improvement to me.

New comment by artifaxx in "Just Say No"

artifaxx — Sun, 30 Apr 2017 00:26:48 +0000

Depends on where you are, in some US states you can get licensed to call yourself a software engineer. This holds you legally liable to the code of ethics. It often influences court cases involving companies too: http://ethics.acm.org/code-of-ethics/using-the-code/

New comment by artifaxx in "Just Say No"

artifaxx — Fri, 28 Apr 2017 16:57:56 +0000

Software has a professional code of ethics, it isn't universally read/adhered to though: http://www.acm.org/about/se-code

New comment by artifaxx in "Unhappy Developers: Bad for Themselves, for Process and Bad for Software Product"

artifaxx — Wed, 01 Feb 2017 07:29:31 +0000

Good point. I don't think Google did exactly that, but I did find this: https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-man... It still is Google specific data though, so sadly it won't generalize as more than a set of ideas to test.

New comment by artifaxx in "Unhappy Developers: Bad for Themselves, for Process and Bad for Software Product"

artifaxx — Wed, 01 Feb 2017 07:18:18 +0000

I agree, the title is certainly overconfident if not negligent. Preventing people from writing inaccurate communications would be the topic of many studies and papers by itself though!

New comment by artifaxx in "Unhappy Developers: Bad for Themselves, for Process and Bad for Software Product"

artifaxx — Tue, 31 Jan 2017 22:28:16 +0000

For current issues yes, it doesn't matter you just fix it and get the results. If you want to prevent it in the future it helps to know which one causes the other. Then you can focus preventative efforts on the factor that causes the issue.

New comment by artifaxx in "Unhappy Developers: Bad for Themselves, for Process and Bad for Software Product"

artifaxx — Tue, 31 Jan 2017 22:27:08 +0000

Unfortunately without putting randomly assigned teams into controlled settings to test this, how else can we figure that out? I want to know too, but this seems expensive to test to any high level of certainty for the causation.

New comment by artifaxx in "Bootstrap 4 drops IE9 support and goes full flexbox"

artifaxx — Wed, 21 Dec 2016 21:41:16 +0000

I agree, its great to take that personal responsibility yourself. When it comes to software that others use, the easier you make it the more people use it. Isn't that a key part of why we use automation? Put work into setting it up once for end user simplicity and reap the rewards the next 10,1000,n times.