Hacker News: strfry

New comment by strfry in "The Abundance Illusion"

strfry — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 21:24:35 +0000

| Just plotting the SPR level would make the same point honestly.

They'd still have to zoom in a lot.

Here's the SPR level since the 80s: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=W... The big drop around 2022 is, supposedly, related to the Ukraine war.

New comment by strfry in "The Abundance Illusion"

strfry — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 21:18:16 +0000

I thought the same thing about matching the line to the axis, but the legend is marked with LHS and RHS. It's very subtle.

New comment by strfry in "The Abundance Illusion"

strfry — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 20:55:22 +0000

'Figure 2: US energy exports outpace production'

We're producing 14,000,000 barrels of oil per day and exporting about 6,000,000 per day, but the author used a graph with two different y-axis scales to make the lines cross so it looks like more oil is being exported than produced.

New comment by strfry in "Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?"

strfry — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 20:06:26 +0000

You can analyze a company in different ways, like as a machine or organism. All images are valid, but some are more appropriate. If you fixate on one, like treating an organization as a machine of interlocking parts with defined purposes, then you may be overly surprised that people aren't adding value and start to expect either some deeper purpose or a "correction": imminent layoffs. If you try to understand large businesses as a kind of welfare system to keep the middle class satiated, then the behavior of your boss and coworkers makes sense. They're doing an acceptable amount of work to justify their salaries.

Instead of being demoralized, shouldn't you be happy that you have a nice financial buffer, smart coworkers, and the choice to either effect change internally or compartmentalize work and create a more meaningful life outside of it? I'm not saying you should keep working there, but if you want to play hardball you can always step up or out.

New comment by strfry in "FPGAs Need a New Future"

strfry — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 18:06:25 +0000

Neat, but we've been in the same situation for a while. A couple years back, I wrote a tutorial for using an open source stack with the Nandland Go FPGA board: a simple Lattice board. This was because the FPGA book I bought from No Starch required Windows (shock and horror). This was 2023. Now we're coming up into 2026?