Hacker News: ska

New comment by ska in "Show HN: Software Freelancers Contract Template"

ska — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 15:06:15 +0000

I presume you meant one way NDA, your overall point is a really good one. Contracts are very useful as a leading indicator of how the counterparty thinks about the relationship.

New comment by ska in "Show HN: Software Freelancers Contract Template"

ska — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 15:03:09 +0000

FWIW professional liability insurance absolutely can make sense, even be necessary when writing software, depending on the nature of the contract and your overall responsibilities.

New comment by ska in "Car companies are in a billion-dollar software war"

ska — Mon, 12 May 2025 03:40:30 +0000

FWIW in my experience building both, hardware is always finished first because it’s cheaper to change the software later in the cycle. Much like drywallers patching over electrical/plumbing sins, software fills gaps …

New comment by ska in "Data Compression Nerds Hate This One Trick [video]"

ska — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 14:40:22 +0000

>>> In fact, in certain cases it can increase the size instead of compressing.

Fwiw, all (lossless) compression algorithms will increase the size of some inputs.

New comment by ska in "How refrigeration changed our food"

ska — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 14:43:59 +0000

But also yes. There may be some loss as you describe , but they’ll taste better brought back till room temperature than straight from the fridge .

New comment by ska in "Googler... ex-Googler"

ska — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 18:30:28 +0000

"On paper this was supposed to lead to the immanent collapse of it's service."

I don't know anyone who expected this. The typical failure mode is slow degradation and lack of new development, not sudden collapse. Services become flakier, innovation stops. There was probably some fat to cut,as you put it, but the concept of eating your seed corn is also relevant.

New comment by ska in "Show HN: I built a tool to find devs based on code, not LinkedIn titles"

ska — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 14:27:24 +0000

I think the problem runs deeper than that. What you’ve done is an interesting tool for finding out more about a relatively small slice of developers.

New comment by ska in "Microsoft employees recall their early years"

ska — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 14:58:45 +0000

Didn’t they just release a small-ish one ?

New comment by ska in "Microsoft employees recall their early years"

ska — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 14:54:01 +0000

May have been the wrong time too. 1999 was chock full of companies that failed to get traction and died during the dot-com collapse, but variants became much more successful 20 years later. Much of this was mostly waiting in infrastructure I suspect.

New comment by ska in "Compiling C++ with the Clang API"

ska — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 14:48:33 +0000

This is something Common Lisp got really right.

New comment by ska in "Who exactly needs to get approval from an institutional review board (IRB)?"

ska — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 20:45:23 +0000

Sure, there are also cases where it is not needed. But some called out in GP were not typically correct. And often it is opaque to the researchers only because someone did an IRB in an earlier step with usage that covers sharing it with you.

New comment by ska in "Who exactly needs to get approval from an institutional review board (IRB)?"

ska — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 18:56:23 +0000

This is correct. IRB will be simple is not the same as not needing one.

New comment by ska in "I am (not) a failure: Lessons learned from six failed startup attempts"

ska — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 15:26:00 +0000

Not having to play the game isn’t as expensive as you suggest.

Lots of tech employees, if they don’t let lifestyle inflation take over, hit a point where they could retire early but may not want to. At that point t walking away from a job is much easier.

New comment by ska in "Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam"

ska — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 16:31:55 +0000

This is a problem with 'prosumer' gear in general. If camera manufactures bought a transferable commercial license for everything in it, it would be too expense for consumer use, but the people licensing IP to them want a piece if you are making money with it.

Similar to software that is free or low cost for non-commercial use only, even with the same functionality.

The good news is typically nobody will chase you down on this unless you are making real money. The bad news is, once you are, they will.

New comment by ska in "Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation"

ska — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 16:12:56 +0000

This is one example of an area where economic incentives make it difficult to shift.

  - There aren't that many people willing to pay for such software, but those that do *really* need it, and will pay quite a bit (passing that cost on of course). 
 
  - The technical domain knowledge needed to do it properly is a barrier to many
 
  - It needs to be pretty robust

As a result, you end up with a small handful of players who provide it. They have little incentive to modernize, and the opportunity cost for a new player high enough to chase most of them off to other avenues.

I think the main way this changes is when someone has already spend the money in an adjacent area, and realized "huh, with a little effort here we could probably eat X's lunch"

Beyond that you at most get toy systems from enthusiasts and grad students (same group?) ...

New comment by ska in "Why I Chose Common Lisp"

ska — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 23:12:43 +0000

If that's what you want to do, why would you ever sign a contract saying you won't do it?

New comment by ska in "Why I Chose Common Lisp"

ska — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 15:16:53 +0000

You often will not be, explicitly by contract. Honestly in this case it’s easier to keep things clean.

New comment by ska in "Ingrid Daubechies awarded National Medal of Science"

ska — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 17:25:00 +0000

Well deserved!

New comment by ska in "Why Canada Should Join the EU"

ska — Sat, 04 Jan 2025 05:57:27 +0000

Oh you’re right about relative size of Mexico - my memory had a units error (km vs mi). Still, it’s not even as big as Canada so the statement wasn’t close to right…. It’s a bit under 9/20

New comment by ska in "Why Canada Should Join the EU"

ska — Sat, 04 Jan 2025 00:22:02 +0000

>whose physical presence spans a majority of a major continent,

I take your point, but this part isn't true. Canada is a little larger, and then there is also Mexico which is about 1/2 the size, so US is roughly 2/5ths of North America.