Hacker News: drra

New comment by drra in "The beginning of scarcity in AI"

drra — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 07:31:20 +0000

Seems like everybody an their mothers are using max plans these days. I wouldn't be surprised if LTV of each customer was big enough to justify spending.

New comment by drra in "The beginning of scarcity in AI"

drra — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 07:23:32 +0000

Absolutely. Anyone working on inference token level knows how wasteful it all is especially in multimodal tokens.

New comment by drra in "Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans"

drra — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 16:54:41 +0000

Funny how most flipped from being grammar nazi to mistakes are proof of human authorship.

Baumol's Cost Disease

drra — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 12:34:35 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46262592

Points: 138

# Comments: 135

New comment by drra in "Booking.com cancels $4K hotel reservation, offers same rooms again for $17K"

drra — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 15:43:32 +0000

Travel industry especially OTA behemoths like booking or expedia live by exploiting all possible quirks of the systems. For example they could snap super cheap airline promo fares but manipulate it to keep it in an open state for months similarly to how agents wait till the payment clears. Would be than sold with massive profit or abandoned close to flight date without any penalties. Apparently they rotted enough for start blatantly cancelling hotel bookings.

New comment by drra in "Heroin addicts often seem normal"

drra — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 18:39:07 +0000

It can be legal and tightly controlled at the same time. Here in my European country it's perfectly legal to prescribe opiates but after 3rd prescription (regardless of what opiate it was) a patient has to go for mandatory psychiatric evaluation. This has put potential opiate abuser on the radar in a meaningful way. Legalisation doesn't mean free for all just like alcohol.

New comment by drra in "Intel Arc Pro B50 GPU Launched at $349 for Compact Workstations"

drra — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 07:10:33 +0000

Never underestimate bragging rights in gamers community. Majority of us run unoptimized systems with that one great piece of gear and as long as the game runs at decent FPS and we have some bragging rights it's all ok.

New comment by drra in "After 10 years, Yelp gave my app 4 days"

drra — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 19:58:39 +0000

Seen this story play out so many times. I audited a company years ago that claimed to have excellent, personal almost, relationship with Google and all needed paperwork to use their platform as a core of their business. They went bust 6 months after because of "unexpected" change of Google's product strategy.

Real lesson here is to avoid single points of failure, regardless if it's API, people or partners. Ask yourself a question if there's a single entity that can kill your business and remove that reliance.

New comment by drra in "DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate"

drra — Mon, 17 Jun 2024 18:01:57 +0000

Also since national markets in Europe are relatively big by themselves a lot of companies tend to be satisfied with comfort of a single market success.

New comment by drra in "FTC sues Adobe for hiding fees and inhibiting cancellations"

drra — Mon, 17 Jun 2024 17:51:25 +0000

I own an ancient box copy of Adobe Photoshop CS4 and use it just because of muscle memory. Since a year or so, periodically it bullies me with a popup that my unlicensed software is going to be disabled and it shows every 15 minutes regardless if I run Photoshop or not. Can't close it without going to Adobe website.

I'll never going to buy or support anyone in buying anything produced by Adobe. Not going to cry if they go down either.

New comment by drra in "How to get stuff repaired when the manufacturer don't wanna: take 'em to court"

drra — Mon, 17 Jun 2024 12:04:34 +0000

The European Small Claims Procedure[1] might be helpful.

[1] https://e-justice.europa.eu/content_small_claims-42-en.do

New comment by drra in "VideoGigaGAN: Towards detail-rich video super-resolution"

drra — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 07:44:36 +0000

Or upscale every 4th frame for consistency. Upscaling in between frames should be much easier.

New comment by drra in "My 25-year engineering career retrospective"

drra — Sat, 20 Apr 2024 10:56:27 +0000

I'm also 25 years into my programming career, and since my children arrived, I've been getting less sleep and have become accustomed to it. I must admit that my mental capacity and productivity have plummeted, as has my overall mood. It reminds me of the time early in my programming career when I quit using weed because I noticed a significant reduction in focus and memory, especially when working on complex codebases. I wish I could return to regular sleep patterns, but after a few years, it seems extremely difficult, if not impossible, without medications, which I'd prefer to avoid.

I hope the OP can try sleeping longer and compare his productivity.

New comment by drra in "Fans quitting Spotify to save their love of music (2022)"

drra — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 09:23:32 +0000

I feel like Spotify generated playlists always lead me into some insignificant easy to listen background music and it feels like it's led by cost-effective algorithm that reinforced itself over years.

Audiogalaxy p2p (2002ish) had way better discovery feature.

New comment by drra in "CNC lasers for cutting and engraving"

drra — Sat, 27 Jan 2024 09:52:52 +0000

> Seriously: stay away from most plastics and all PVC

Could you still test it wit EVA (ethylene-vinyl acetate) foam? I use it for prop-making. While it's easy to cut with knife, CNC laser would make that stage much faster.

New comment by drra in "Haier Europe Eases Off on Legal Threat and Seeks Dialogue"

drra — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 20:05:21 +0000

Surely low power PIR sensor would work. Something like this maybe? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGZFg4SVySM

New comment by drra in "Development slowness in big and legacy applications"

drra — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 09:01:42 +0000

It all boils down to unmanaged technical debt that can have many forms - code, standards, architecture, documentation, tooling, compliance. There are two major indicators of tech debt - slow development pace and high amount of unexpected bugs/problems. Big projects have big capacities for such debt so it's visibility is also higher. Replacing "legacy" solution with a shiny new thing is declaring bankruptcy and starting fresh - it does not change the cause of poor tech debt management.

New comment by drra in "Polish trains lock up when serviced in third-party workshops"

drra — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 15:54:08 +0000

So these trains are exclusively used in Poland by quite a big number of regional train companies. There are 5 servicing levels starting from P1 up to most complex P5. It used to be that only these major companies would do P3+ but since a few years tenders were won by several smaller competitors at much lower prices all thanks to European Union Agency For Railways that opened that market.

It started with 4 trains that were serviced by SPS Mieczkowski and just wouldn't start. The company was forced to pay €0.5m in penalties and trains were sent back to Newag. At the same time several other trains from different companies that didn't even got to service but spent a bit too much time in one place became immobilized. This all led to SPS Mieczkowski hiring Dragon Sector to investigate and they found several separate routines to disable trains.

This case is investigated by Central Anti-Corruption Bureau in Poland but I doubt it'll do much harm to Newag. The Office of Rail Transport of Poland that would spam rail company with complaints and orders for a small mistake in train schedule washed it's hands from intervening in this case and train purchases have highly regulated tender process and very little wiggle room for rail companies.

New comment by drra in "My $500M Mars rover mistake"

drra — Wed, 29 Nov 2023 07:17:12 +0000

This really resonates with my experience. Working at a major airline, I was the one who would pick the most difficult and risky projects. One was a quick implementation of a new payment provider for their website. That website sold millions of euros worth of tickets every day. Seconds after deployment, it turned out that I had failed to recognize the differences between the test and live environments as one of the crucial variables was blank in production. I could have expected this if I had spent more time preparing and reading documentation. Sales died completely, and my heart sank. After a lengthy rollback procedure that resulted in a few hours without sales, a massive surge of angry customers, and a loss of several million euros, I approached the CEO of the company. I still remember catching him in an elevator. I explained that this incident was all my fault and I had failed to properly analyse the environment. I assured him that I was ready to bear full consequences, including being fired. He burst into laughter and said something like this: "Why would I want to get rid of you? You made a mistake that you'll never do again. You are better at your job than you were yesterday!" This experience was formative to me on many levels including true leadership. I successfully completed many high risk projects since than.

New comment by drra in "We Automated Bullshit"

drra — Fri, 17 Nov 2023 14:32:22 +0000

The notion of this article is that LLMs are just for answering question as if these were failed oracles. LLMs are excellent at instruction following to the point where it'll execute instruction by creating bullshit to fill the gap. It's unlikely to get a perfect C code out of Starbucks barista but that doesn't mean these people are in any way flawed at their job. LLMs given enough information about a task can perfectly execute it and enough is far less than any of systems created before.