Hacker News: smdyc1

New comment by smdyc1 in "Meta buried 'causal' evidence of social media harm, US court filings allege"

smdyc1 — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 20:25:22 +0000

Only because you confabulate your personal power with what they really care about.

New comment by smdyc1 in "Meta buried 'causal' evidence of social media harm, US court filings allege"

smdyc1 — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 08:22:16 +0000

Amazon are not resolving your issue in minutes because you have power over them. They do it because it is efficient and profitible for them to keep customers happy. Your actual influence over a trillion dollar company is tiny compaired to your influence as a voter. One customer taking there business elsewhere does not affect Amazon in any meaningful way. One vote is counted directly. The gap is between how it feels and how the power actually works. This of course assumes you live in a democratic country.

New comment by smdyc1 in "Air Traffic Control"

smdyc1 — Tue, 13 May 2025 05:03:43 +0000

I also read there was some difficulty in target designation as the pilots had different maps, so the grid coordinates were off.

New comment by smdyc1 in "Air Traffic Control"

smdyc1 — Tue, 13 May 2025 05:01:54 +0000

I read in A Bridge Too Far, the Hawker Typhoons that attacked German positions at the start of the Operation (called in by the Forward Air Comtroller), flew under the opening barrage and one Typhoon disintegrated as it was hit by a shell. I've often wondered if there was any system in place to prevent that sort of thing.

New comment by smdyc1 in "The Secret History of the War in Ukraine"

smdyc1 — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 16:14:40 +0000

That was more a choice by individual aircrew than higher command or bureaucracy.

New comment by smdyc1 in "US Ends Support For Ukrainian F-16s"

smdyc1 — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 11:44:59 +0000

Playing right into Putin's hands.

New comment by smdyc1 in "Toddlers Shoot Three People Every Month in Texas"

smdyc1 — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 16:59:27 +0000

Toddlers don't kill people. People kill people.

New comment by smdyc1 in "How I ship projects at big tech companies"

smdyc1 — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 11:42:42 +0000

It's also like this in small companies, like the one I work for, and I think rightfully so. One of the mobile app projects I was involved in got bogged down for months due to the lead engineer's need to refine and polish the perfect UX and architecture which kept breaking features we'd already completed. This cost us a lot of money and the product didn't look or function to an end user that much different. Management had enough and pulled the guy off the project because it just wasn't getting shipped and what he was doing didn't align to their goals. After he left i was able to tie up the loose ends and ship it live within two weeks. The only way i was able to do that is I knew every component of that system, our deployment infrastructure, our support staff, the real goals of our management team, etc.

New comment by smdyc1 in "US probes Tesla's Full Self-Driving software after fatal crash"

smdyc1 — Sat, 19 Oct 2024 17:15:17 +0000

Not to mention that when you can't see, you slow down? Does the self-driving system do that sufficiently in low visibility? Clearly not if it hit a pedestrian with enough force to kill them.

The article mentions that Tesla's only use cameras in their system and Musk believes they are enough, because humans only use their eyes. Well firstly, don't you want self-driving systems to be better than humans? Secondly, humans don't just respond to visual cues as a computer would. We also hear and respond to feelings, like the sudden surge of anxiety or fear as our visibility is suddenly reduced at high speed.

New comment by smdyc1 in "LinkedIn does not use European users' data for training its AI"

smdyc1 — Sun, 22 Sep 2024 23:13:27 +0000

Exactly what i was thinking.

New comment by smdyc1 in "Mass tourism protesters squirt water at Barcelona tourists"

smdyc1 — Mon, 08 Jul 2024 18:40:56 +0000

I'd shift the blame somewhat on the owners of the Airbnb properties and Airbnb itself rather than the tourists. They're the ones getting rich at the expense of the locals.

New comment by smdyc1 in "A bunch of programming advice I'd give to myself 15 years ago"

smdyc1 — Sat, 29 Jun 2024 22:15:41 +0000

Yes, I tend on the side of only tweaking things when I realise I'm repetitively using the same context menus. That's the only point I learn the keyboard shortcuts, or map one, these days. I really haven't had to learn too many shortcuts. The best ones are multi-cursor editing like you've mentioned.

New comment by smdyc1 in "Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free"

smdyc1 — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 18:36:23 +0000

Much beloved? Maybe in your circle, certainly nobody i know considered him beloved. I mean, the guy admitted to a room full of journalists he was happy to burn a bunch of Afghan informants. The guy is a narcissistic wanker who put lives at risk.

New comment by smdyc1 in "World War I dangers in France's red zones"

smdyc1 — Sat, 27 Apr 2024 03:09:04 +0000

I totally recommend this, especially if you haven't heard Dan's podcasts before. One of his best, next to Death Throes of The Republic (if you want a fascinating depiction of pre-Empire Roman history)

New comment by smdyc1 in "Problem with selling developer tools is that devs have no purchasing authority"

smdyc1 — Sun, 14 Apr 2024 09:02:59 +0000

It's triple the cost of a single user license for the same thing. Beancounters don't like that.

New comment by smdyc1 in "Problem with selling developer tools is that devs have no purchasing authority"

smdyc1 — Sun, 14 Apr 2024 07:37:55 +0000

If there was a way to get a company licence, I'd have bought it for our dev team.

New comment by smdyc1 in "What made Earth a giant snowball 700M years ago? Scientists have an answer"

smdyc1 — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 18:39:09 +0000

Then can I ask the owner of whatever device we're running on, to add one or two zeros to my bank balance?

New comment by smdyc1 in "How the codpiece flopped"

smdyc1 — Mon, 05 Feb 2024 02:50:42 +0000

I can imagine a season of Curb Your Enthusiasm with Larry David spending the season trying to bring the codpiece back into fashion, after another embarrassing pants tent episode like in the very first season! Would be an awesome signoff for his final season.

New comment by smdyc1 in "Carl Weathers has died"

smdyc1 — Sat, 03 Feb 2024 07:42:56 +0000

Man that sucks. Rest in peace. I loved his character in The Mandalorian.

New comment by smdyc1 in "How to deal with receiving a cease-and-desist letter from Big Tech"

smdyc1 — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 16:46:13 +0000

We (and our new clients) constantly get frivolous cease and desist notices from a particularly butthurt competitor whenever they lose one of their customers to us. They have a habit of shutting off customer access to their systems and ignoring any requests from customers (who are still paying their bills) for their data.