Hacker News: suction

New comment by suction in "More product, fewer product managers"

suction — Sun, 17 Dec 2023 18:09:05 +0000

By knowing the customers business and needs better than the customer, and be able to convince them that the best product possibly conceivable is not a Frankenstein’s monster put together from “100 ideas gathered from the costumers, prioritised by a PM”, but an opinionated tool created by opinionated people.

Of course you need the right developers for this, not code monkeys or offshore outsourced companies with a time zone and cultural barrier to overcome…

New comment by suction in "Coffee in a Can"

suction — Sun, 10 Sep 2023 08:51:32 +0000

Because the taste is not good for European palates.

New comment by suction in "Netscape and Sun announce JavaScript (1995)"

suction — Wed, 19 Jul 2023 07:08:44 +0000

I admire your ability to maintain a rational view on this.

New comment by suction in "At Japan’s first winery, the country’s oldest grape lives on"

suction — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 15:47:50 +0000

I think US culture, which I suppose you're from, is on a very lonely path food-wise - people from all over the world enjoy trying and making other culture's dishes, not everything is for everyone, but this American-style "I can't get into anything, ever, which I am not used to" is so unique.

New comment by suction in "On the slow productivity of John Wick"

suction — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 10:37:52 +0000

I have the theory that this is due to digitalisation. We are now at the stage where "everybody" needs to know Tech, and everybody now wants to work in the hip Tech companoes, regardless of own technical skills or mindset: Project managers, legal, accounting, etc. nowadays all want to have a say in Tech aspects, and this creates pressure on the actual tech departments of a corporation to create reports and documentation and explain themselves much more than it used to be.

It's a bad situation for tech people to have to deal with the FUD of all other departments because those departments want to present themselves as knowledgeable and contributing to the technical aspects, when they are not able to at all.

New comment by suction in "A peek inside Japan's largest “Dagashi” store"

suction — Tue, 30 May 2023 09:40:24 +0000

Usually these people are financially secured enough to run their stores or bars or cafés as a hobby, to have something to do and meet some people instead of just sitting at home.

I know a guy in Tokyo whose family owns a small plot of land in the 23-ku area and he leased it to some company who built an office tower on it. They get an upper-5-figure USD amount every month for rent.

The guy runs an import streetwear store just for fun, he's in the red all the time but doesn't care.

New comment by suction in "The EU AI act is coming, this time for real probably"

suction — Fri, 12 May 2023 13:24:05 +0000

As a EU citizen, I can't even begin to explain to you how willing I am to trade in possibly not having cutting edge software for the higher living standards and cultural superiority of the EU.

New comment by suction in "Starship Flight Test [video]"

suction — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 08:55:54 +0000

Does anyone else feel that calling this thing a "Starship" is too hyperbolic?

New comment by suction in "Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior"

suction — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 05:07:42 +0000

The key is to abandon social media and shame those who keep using it.

New comment by suction in "‘Scanners are complicated’: why Gen Z faces workplace ‘tech shame’"

suction — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 12:48:02 +0000

It's just a function of Japanese-designed UX. "Easy" symbolises "cheap" in Japanese culture, the more buttons and steps and menus the better.

New comment by suction in "How Spotify's podcast bet went wrong"

suction — Tue, 14 Feb 2023 20:14:06 +0000

Used it for years but Pocket Casts beats it in all aspects.

New comment by suction in "Twitter kicking off a developer API campaign on January 16, 2023"

suction — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 10:12:25 +0000

So if I create a free Twitter client that has 10000 users, I will have to pay Elon 80000 Dollars every month? Seems a worthwhile effort ;-)

New comment by suction in "A mistake that killed Japan’s software industry?"

suction — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 06:58:29 +0000

Could you elaborate a little on why she can’t handle living in the US?

New comment by suction in "“Secrets” about the consumer audio business you may find interesting"

suction — Wed, 14 Sep 2022 07:21:37 +0000

I've witnessed some hard negotiating in the car industry about the price of a cable lug for a 6-figure luxury car. The car maker wanted to bring down the price for one lug from 0.05 Euro to 0.03 Euro at a order volume of about 100.000 pieces.

This kept about 50 people (on both sides of the deal) busy for 3 months: Engineers, CAD-Ops, Buyers, Sales, Project Managers...

It was obvious that the amount of extra-work to see if the price could be lowered was a multiple of the savings of the car maker. Yet nobody complained.

New comment by suction in "Dark Sky iOS app will no longer work from Dec 31"

suction — Tue, 13 Sep 2022 06:15:54 +0000

Apple Weather's forecast is unusable in the whole of Europe because of the data providers they use. Pretty disappointing to have such a US-centric view on an app that's so integral to a smartphone. They either should work with European data providers or make the app unavailable outside of those markets similar to how they do it with the "news" app.

New comment by suction in "What's SAP, and why's it worth $163B? (2020)"

suction — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 08:17:00 +0000

Isn't it the most rational thing to assume that a company that is extremely experienced and successful at analyzing business processes and digitalising them will know better than any newcomer with less resources and less experience who operates mainly on "we're disrupting for the sake of it" swagger?

Telling SAP that you want them to change their ways to accommodate your brilliant idea is akin to a layman telling a brain surgeon how he wants his surgery done.

New comment by suction in "Ask HN: Seriously, how do you TDD?"

suction — Sun, 04 Sep 2022 16:23:33 +0000

A very good explanation. Yet what I think is confusing a lot of (very?) good programmers (not me) is that they already do that intuitively by not letting methods become longer than 3 or 4 lines, and whenever implementing a new method, by writing the return statement first (i.e. returning a mock object or similar) and working backwards, i.e. only writing enough code to be able to return the desired value.

If one then goes and tries to write tests for these kind of methods, it feels like superfluous busywork.

New comment by suction in "The forty-year programmer"

suction — Sun, 04 Sep 2022 05:29:51 +0000

A disappointing aspect of being a Programmer at 40, 50, or even 60, is that you’ll meet a lot of people, often your managers, who will think of you as an non ambitious loser. “I used to be a coder but now I’m 32 and the ‘Director of User Experience’ - did you never feel the need to do a little more than coding?”

New comment by suction in "Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)"

suction — Sat, 03 Sep 2022 06:54:31 +0000

The difference is that no "developers are just tools that should be outsourced whenever cheaper" company has a chance against a true software company (which I count Apple towards even though they're more known for the hardware) deciding to enter the competition.

Nokia was not a software company at all. They treated their OS and UX as an afterthought and put hardware features first.

The same is currently happening in the automotive world with their in-car software. Auto makers aren't thinking of their OSs and UX and the people who develop them as the absolute center point of their industry, when they are.

New comment by suction in "Germany pushes for ‘pay as you fly’ model"

suction — Fri, 02 Sep 2022 15:39:57 +0000

> I worry that this would essentially make it easier for airlines to drop passengers in the long run.

That should be easy to prevent. It has to be designed so the airline (i.e. the party that holds all the power in this contractual agreement) cannot cancel the contract, but the customer's money can only be collected the moment the flight touches ground on the destination. Like a reserved amount on a credit card that car rentals use.

Flights are already "connected", it should be easy to auto-bill once the destination has been successfully reached.