Hacker News: kfse

New comment by kfse in "The Amazon tax"

kfse — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 15:08:33 +0000

> The world would probably be a healthier place economically if every town and region could support a strong network of supermarkets, department stores and independent shops.

I don't know what you mean by that. I used to live in a tier 2 European city pre Internet and there were lots of things that were a pain to buy. We'd often have to check multiple stores. Specialty hobbies were served by one or two shops that you had to drive to. I remember having to take the train to a different city to buy a memory card for my computer. There was real consumer cost and societal cost.

The warehouse and online order model is economically a lot more efficient. The real question is what to do with the surplus it generates, make Bezos richer or something else?

New comment by kfse in "Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing"

kfse — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 14:26:41 +0000

The model doesn't particularly "know" which tokens within its output are "comments", it's not so easy

New comment by kfse in "Stowaway – Take the window seat on any plane or satellite overhead"

kfse — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 20:07:49 +0000

Curious why isn't it using an ADSB receiver?

New comment by kfse in "U.S. used 'virtually all' of its long-range precision missiles during Iran war"

kfse — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 16:39:39 +0000

No for China. Apparently Zhang Youxia was one with combat experience in Vietnam but got purged recently.

New comment by kfse in "Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs"

kfse — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 03:13:48 +0000

Kamangar, Wojcicki, Mohan were all CEOs of YouTube

New comment by kfse in "U.S. used 'virtually all' of its long-range precision missiles during Iran war"

kfse — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 20:23:04 +0000

Didn't at least some living generals fight in Vietnam?

New comment by kfse in "Dates That Don't Exist (2015)"

kfse — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 15:19:11 +0000

Ok now do date math, does the day-of-month accurately jump over the non-existent numbers?

New comment by kfse in "Bonsai: Janestreet's UI Library"

kfse — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 19:11:29 +0000

A lot is said in this thread about user preferences for info density, but it is really a lot more than preference. there's also a big component of it that is user productivity focused. Info-dense UIs simply require a lot less scrolling around and pagination to look at relevant data. For example the ability to look at multiple charts side by side instead of having to scroll one chart after another into position enables users to spot differences that they wouldn't otherwise see.

New comment by kfse in "DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis"

kfse — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 14:23:10 +0000

All models hallucinate. Everything in production with a model will too. It is not a "deal breaker"

New comment by kfse in "The Productivity Mirage"

kfse — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 11:13:14 +0000

Yes. I wished we recognized more often that hyperproductivity exists for these engineers with different strengths too. It just looks very different than Bob's twenty feature launches per quarter

New comment by kfse in "The Productivity Mirage"

kfse — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 11:11:15 +0000

I agree, Bob is great. I think scaling a concept is also really really important. We need features but we need scalable frameworks and platforms to support these features. Bob's not going to write the distributed db system that makes his feature look good, but that also needs engineering. That too needs to be good enough to ship and no more btw, but it's more often the work of a team that has to slow down and think carefully about what it's doing, especially when evolving long-running platforms

New comment by kfse in "The Productivity Mirage"

kfse — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 11:06:49 +0000

Yes exactly. I'm not sure whether Bob is a hyper productive engineer, but in any case, Bob is an engineer hyper focused at shipping new stuff out the door quickly. Which is great! We need Bobs. But we also need the company to run and scale, and Bob might not just be the right guy for that.

New comment by kfse in "The Productivity Mirage"

kfse — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 03:57:28 +0000

I bet you Bob was great at launching new concepts but that taking oncall responsibility for crusty old code that he didn't personally write wasn't for him...

New comment by kfse in "Our position on open-weights models"

kfse — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 05:30:56 +0000

Er... I think I'm used to folks putting in a little bit more homework into creating some form of a consensus or alliance around their position before selling it out in the open

New comment by kfse in "Decathlon Germany adds Wero payment option to decathlon.de website"

kfse — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 05:28:02 +0000

I mean, there's some reason for it as EU countries have different laws and regulations, but yes, it's a dumb choice on the publisher's part

New comment by kfse in "Our position on open-weights models"

kfse — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 04:54:05 +0000

With respect to whomever this dude thinks he is, it's egregiously "main character" to frame a policy recommendation for the US in terms of what's important to his personal beliefs.

New comment by kfse in "Decathlon Germany adds Wero payment option to decathlon.de website"

kfse — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 20:39:21 +0000

Country availability is a policy set up by the app publisher, not a Google policy

New comment by kfse in "Show HN: I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s"

kfse — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 09:49:14 +0000

Work out how many bowling alleys there are and how many of them are in the market for an upgrade or a fresh install, trying to get to be the king of that hill is a lot of work and risk for not really life changing rewards compared with what a self-avowed SRE could make just pulling paychecks

New comment by kfse in "Show HN: I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s"

kfse — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 09:46:51 +0000

My guess:

1) New cars are too cheap to make at scale.

2) Old cars are quite unsafe to drive, comparatively (airbags, backup cameras, lane departure alerts, blind angle alerts, etc)

New comment by kfse in "Show HN: I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s"

kfse — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 09:44:27 +0000

With respect to bowling alleys, for things like professional shows or food safety it's a bit more than "nobody got fired for buying IBM". The stuff's gotta be able to survive field conditions and not cost millions of dollars in refunded show tickets or spoiled foods. Manufacturers test and make themselves accountable for this. Cheap, customized modules work until they don't, and by then the engineer who put the custom system together in the first place isn't there to fix them. Who would you call when some quick-and-dirty integration code that was burned into these embedded modules without ever being put in a source versioning system fails in some weird edge condition? OP is an SRE, it's ok for him, but the average farmer or show operator doesn't have the skill.