Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49355948

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49355233

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

This is such a ridiculous, preposterously self-confident claim. Claims like this give HN (and engineers in general) a bad reputation.

Edit: relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/793/

I appreciate the backwards compatibility they highlight in the article, and more generally the ownership oss gives you over your files. My small business uses gimp, canva, and Inkscape, and they all have their purpose, but one of the complaints we have with canva is that it’s really hard to get the original files backed up somewhere, aside from canva itself. You have to download each file individually , which is quite a pain (please correct me if there’s an easier way!). Gimps openness is an obvious path for oss, but really is a great feature. If the gimp team stops, we’ll still be able to edit our gimp files. If the canva team stops, we mostly lose all the canva stuff.

> A lot of new and existing contributors have submitted improvements to GIMP’s user interface and its user experience. We wanted to highlight their efforts, and encourage you all to continue sharing your feedback on our design issue tracker.

I see no active resistance. If you have feedback, maybe share it with them?

They claim that spacex has competitive advantage. They take no stance on condoning spacex’s behavior. Personally I strongly dislike musks behavior, but I appreciate discussion of competitive advantages/disadvantages, independent of moral views. I liked the thread, it adds new info to the conversation.

1. Human reward-seeking becomes longer-term, with less of an emphasis on short term rewards. I'd bet this trend has probably already been ongoing for a long time. But I wonder if there are some negative effects of this -- for example perhaps it takes us longer to learn things that truly do have very quick, direct feedback loops. Maybe it takes us longer to learn how to walk, swim, etc as a result.

2. Screen-avoidant communities start to dominate the human population. Eg, Amish communities, "traditionalist" communities like that, your friends that religiously don't use social media, etc. I'd bet this is already happening too! Would be really interesting to look at the proportion of new births, perhaps controlling for usage of birth control. I wonder if this effect could result in humanity generally becoming more religious (as opposed to the recent trend of becoming less religious). Admittedly, this is more of a cultural change than a change in our dna, but I feel it fits the category -- it's a widespread change across humanity in response to the pressure of distracting apps.

3. Humans grow a stronger distaste for blue light. I suspect this wouldn't be the "end" state, because if it happens we'll probably just start buliding devices that put off less blue light.

This is just like animals that didn’t run from humans — they didn’t know to be scared of us and now they’re dead. Even massive things that could crush us can be killed if we slip through their defenses. The ones that survive are the ones that learn to fear the dangerous thing.

This is also an absolutely great way to ensure the participants really understand what they’re saying, even aside from ai-related concerns. You could always pull definitions straight from textbooks, and write something which mostly makes sense but that you don’t really understand. But you really can’t teach something unless you do understand it, imo. The best command I ever got on a topic was due to TA’ing

> No they most definitely are not.

> They're marketed as high end, but their engineering is a tour de force of cost cutting behind the scenes.

Whether you personally like it or not has no impact on the product positioning. BMW is a luxury car brand [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW

This is absolutely horrible to hear!! I know you probably don't want homework, but would you ever consider taking this story to news outlets? I suspect there'd be no compensation, but the uproar might (eventually) result in change.

Just to clarify, I think our numbers are in agreement here. From your numbers, phase I + II + III would be in the range $21-75M, all told. Let's double that to account for inflation (2012 is quite stale), to get $42-150M. In California, I'm going to estimate a "normal" engineer's compensation is $150-400k, and the company actually pays more than this because of benefits, HR, etc -- call it $250-600k. Let's say it's 350k fully loaded on average. Then the $42-150M number represents 120-430 engineer years. I'd totally believe that Boom has 120-400 engineers working full time, so if they make a major revision every year, then each major revision is like a full phase I-III progression!

I think there's some reverse-dunning-kruger going on in this thread, where because we're all engineers we think engineering is comparably easy. My claim is that it's actually pretty similar to medical testing, in terms of generic human effort (to the extent that can even be measured and quantified).

edit: According to wikipedia, Boom had 150 employees in 2021 [1]! I'm very proud of my estimate lol, it seems like it was right on the nose. Somebody give me a prize!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boom_Technology

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49063598

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

This is bizarre, bordering on stupid. Frist of all, there likely is ~90% failure rate of prototypes; I feel that roughly matches my experience in engineering. Of course the design that makes it through the process, testing, refinement, and into mass production is not going to have a 90% failure rate, but that's a _finished product_, whereas clinical tests are just that -- tests. Finished cars are more analogous to individual pills coming out of the factory. And I'm not even sure the analogy would be very meaningful anyways, because we have different requirements for things of different impact and importance. A 10% manufacturing defect rate is fine in forks, but not for fire extinguishers.