Hacker News: helge9210

New comment by helge9210 in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)"

helge9210 — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 19:23:57 +0000

No, action points I get either from parsing a video capture of a scoreboard or by pulling them over API, depending on which scoreboard/match management system is used.

I do plan to have a front-end for manual annotation of referee performance: correct relative position, timing, determining attacking/defending wrestler etc.

New comment by helge9210 in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)"

helge9210 — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 18:09:14 +0000

Olympic wrestling education tool.

Indexing multiple captured video streams with awarded action points and adding athlete/referee positions overlay. Stretch goal -- controlling PTZ camera for predictive capture of the high intensity actions.

New comment by helge9210 in "Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again"

helge9210 — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 15:29:54 +0000

Cut the pace to 1 hour a week, than some bursts of two to four months of up to 4 hours a day two to three days a week -- that would be close to how I did it. 45 days 8 hours per day is beyond my brain ability to adapt.

New comment by helge9210 in "Perfection Is Not Over-Engineering"

helge9210 — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 15:26:09 +0000

Perfection is not "perfectionism". Former is provable given set of constraint. Later is anxiety due to fear of criticism.

"We don't want to build the perfect solution." Can both mean "no need to cover use cases we don't care about" and "no need to deal with divizion by zero in a product, where a number is divided by the user entered number".

New comment by helge9210 in "Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again"

helge9210 — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 13:00:31 +0000

Most Germans are not well-read/university educated.

New comment by helge9210 in "Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again"

helge9210 — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 20:12:44 +0000

C1 can be achieved (I did it on 360 hours). C2 is academic level of language proficiency -- you have to either deliberately study for the difficult exam or get an university degree in German. Most of the Germans won't be able to pass a C2 test.

When a company sets C2 as a requirement, it can be interpreted as "must have a degree from German University".

New comment by helge9210 in "The Doorman's Fallacy in action"

helge9210 — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 06:43:14 +0000

I didn't interpret it as "automation bad". The invisible value, cancelled by automation, can also be negative.

Consider a doorman or a waiter in low-trust status based society: to get a service one must exaggerate status signaling and/or bribe the gatekeeper to be deemed worthy of a service. Kiosk doesn't accept bribes and you can trust "no vacancy" from kiosk more than from the doorman.

New comment by helge9210 in "CTOs Agree: Cognitive Debt Is the New Technical Debt"

helge9210 — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 12:22:13 +0000

Depends on the organization and on the SWEs. I do share your understanding, which is making me unfit for organizations, where the authority over "what" is firmly held by POs and the whole vertical on top of them.

New comment by helge9210 in "CTOs Agree: Cognitive Debt Is the New Technical Debt"

helge9210 — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 11:18:40 +0000

CTOs noticed it. When product pipeline is empty, because engineers finished all the outstanding tasks, the engineers are awarded with more work: "The new software engineer is a product leader. Someone thinking about what the product is, not just how it works", or, in other words, engineers are going to be tasked with putting more content "the what" into the product pipeline.

New comment by helge9210 in "CTOs Agree: Cognitive Debt Is the New Technical Debt"

helge9210 — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 11:15:26 +0000

Considering all the possible levels of abstraction software can represent, I'm imagining it as a fractal. The worst case - a mistake can be introduced by generative AI at any of the abstraction levels at any moment. Meaning, at worst case the whole thing has to be in the head of at least one person to validate the result against. The moment a project is growing beyond a single person capacity to hold it in one head possibility of plausibly looking error introduced at any abstraction level is added to the usual multi-engineer coordination costs.

New comment by helge9210 in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)"

helge9210 — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 17:44:12 +0000

Personal (as in, "for personal use, not a product") conversation partner -- I speak in German, one level is correcting the mistakes, allowing me to reformulate the statement, another level is responding to the intended idea. Rinse, repeat.

New comment by helge9210 in "If AI writes your code, why use Python?"

helge9210 — Wed, 13 May 2026 17:19:10 +0000

I did a project with Claude. With unit and integration tests, whole shebang. First in Python. Reached 25% of MVP and understood that I spend more time fixing subtle type mismatches (int/str, function signature vs call etc.), than adding new code. I've switched to Go (note: I've also made sure tests/frontend/backend code are built within the same context) and finished the MVP, without encountering the same problems even once.

New comment by helge9210 in "Poland is now among the 20 largest economies"

helge9210 — Fri, 08 May 2026 12:48:21 +0000

Vacuuming working age population from Ukraine since 2014. Poland did everything right, while Ukrainian governments and businesses were smirking "What are you going to do?" during salary discussions.

New comment by helge9210 in "Japan to require language proficiency proof for engineer, specialist visa"

helge9210 — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 07:16:30 +0000

> you have to go to a school that costs around $2000

So cheap. Comparing to Germany.

New comment by helge9210 in "[dead]"

helge9210 — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 18:56:53 +0000

Sabra and Shatila all over again?

New comment by helge9210 in "Ask HN: AI productivity gains – do you fire devs or build better products?"

helge9210 — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 08:09:31 +0000

From my experience greenfield /brownfield is not the best dichotomy here. I observed, how same tooling is generating meaningless slop on greenfield project and 10kLoC of change (leading to an outage) on existing project in one hands and building a fairly complex new project and fixing a long (years) standing bug with a two lines patch in the other.

And I have more examples, where I, personally, was on the both sides of the fence: defined by my level of the same problem understanding, not by the tooling.

New comment by helge9210 in "German police probe student poster slur against Merz"

helge9210 — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 07:46:07 +0000

These were not private individuals. This was an official cash/good transfer between Austrian bank and Ukrainian bank.

New comment by helge9210 in "The Israeli spyware firm that accidentally just exposed itself"

helge9210 — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 13:56:42 +0000

> tight feedback loop between military intelligence, private startups

It's just friends buying from friends.

New comment by helge9210 in "The Israeli spyware firm that accidentally just exposed itself"

helge9210 — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 13:54:37 +0000

I would put the upper bound on the population relevant to _the_ tech sector at 28000.

New comment by helge9210 in "Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver"

helge9210 — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 18:29:20 +0000

I remember GM cars in Herzliya, Israel with cables and cameras held by duct tape circa 2019 after Andrej Karpathy already presented end to end neural network training for Autopilot in Tesla. Looked like very late to the party.