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etothepii

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The Manifesto for Dimensional Design

dimensionaldesign.org
3 points·by etothepii·last month·0 comments

Show HN: Wedding Guest Ranker

weddingguestranker.com
1 points·by etothepii·7 months ago·1 comments

comments

etothepii
·15 days ago·discuss
If we are going to tax things that we want less of; would not taxing stupidity seem like good public policy?
etothepii
·19 days ago·discuss
Is the issue primarily caused by the English language?

(Google Workspace) CLI vs Google (Workspace CLI)

Because Google has there name in the product for which the CLI was produced it looks like he's using the Google brand when he's only using a descriptor of what his CLI was for. Trademarks are funny, but if I build a thing that only works with Google Workspace wouldn't it be a bit weird to not say that?
etothepii
·19 days ago·discuss
Some Hong Kong money definitely goes to startups. I got flights paid for to go to a pitching competition.
etothepii
·21 days ago·discuss
What you know and what you can prove are different things.

I think most people would blow the whistle if they had evidence of personal-enrichment fraud. Suspecting that incentives are producing strange outcomes is one thing; accusing specific people of criminal conduct is quite another.

Hilariously, in the one case I heard about where an MD was eventually fired for taking kickbacks from contractors, the department then struggled to recruit competent staff. It turned out he had only been skimming from people who could actually do the job.
etothepii
·21 days ago·discuss
Lots of shouting on one particular occasion left me with the impression that they genuinely had not anticipated this consequence of simultaneously pulling the "no contractors to be renewed" lever and the "any MD can sign contracts up to $1m with approved suppliers" lever.

The people involved weren’t stupid. They were trying to achieve one outcome and got a different one because the rest of the organisation adapted to the incentives in front of them.
etothepii
·21 days ago·discuss
As a junior software engineer, I worked at a large UK bank.

Senior management routinely seem baffled that they could announce redundancies or hiring freezes, yet technology costs would continue to rise.

One pattern I saw repeatedly was a contractor being let go, only to return via a large outsourcing provider. The provider must have added a substantial markup despite supplying the same engineer back to the same team, without having incurred any procurement costs.

I once asked a more senior colleague how this made any sense. His answer stuck with me:

"You can’t stop people from doing their jobs. If someone thinks their job is to deliver X, they’ll find a way to deliver X. Sometimes that means working around processes and incentives in ways that look very strange from the outside."
etothepii
·3 months ago·discuss
Some people.
etothepii
·4 months ago·discuss
If you write 3 bullet points and produce 500-pages of slop why would my AI summarise it back to the original 3 bullet points and not something else entirely?
etothepii
·4 months ago·discuss
This will never stop as it would require either the reference date to be changed or fir all dates in all saved spreadsheets to be off by one.
etothepii
·4 months ago·discuss
The US has traditionally solved this problem by having dozens of political entities that can compete (at least for elites) and, since the creation of the interstate highway system, the oppressed can flee.
etothepii
·4 months ago·discuss
In the UK open banking was essentially a response to GDPR this has allowed (to a limited extent) a variety of tools to be built on top of bank accounts that others would not have been.
etothepii
·5 months ago·discuss
Can someone explain to me what the difference is between a union in which everyone is a member and a government.
etothepii
·5 months ago·discuss
This might be the biggest benefit of AI coding. If I have a large legacy code base I can use AI to ask questions and find out where certain things are happening. This benefit is huge even if I choose not to vibe code anything. It ends up feeling a lot like the engineer that wrote the code is still with you or documented everything very well. In the real world there is a risk that documentation is wrong or that the engineer misremembers some detail so even the occasional hallucination is not a particularly big risk.
etothepii
·5 months ago·discuss
This.

Once you have revenue you have downside to protect. Pre-revenue the worst that can happen is that you have to start again knowing more than you did.
etothepii
·5 months ago·discuss
That would not have made it to the top of HN.
etothepii
·5 months ago·discuss
I would pay for YouTube premium again if I could switch off shorts.

I actually stopped paying for premium to make YouTube less appealing.
etothepii
·5 months ago·discuss
Having used sunglasses that project a monitor on to them products I am very surprised that the speedometer is going to move with the wheel.

That said an electric Ferrari is not a car built for me. If I could justify such a car I'd want something practical or that makes a great noise. "Fun" to drive would not be on my agenda.
etothepii
·5 months ago·discuss
> My outsider view is that there are more people and more volume of crypto involved in the speculative & scam sector than in the human-rights sector, but I'm willing to be wrong.

I would assume this is true, but is it the right metric?

Would it be ok if it was 51:49? If $1m of crypto lets 100 Russian dissidents get out of Russia does it matter that there are $10b of pump and dump schemes? What if it's only $10m? What if its grannies having their life savings scalped? This feels like trolley problems all the way down.
etothepii
·5 months ago·discuss
I ask because writing a paper with someone is a non secret operator.

I suspect there is no way to establish, if one has an Epstein number >2, what it is.
etothepii
·5 months ago·discuss
How is this defined?