friendzis (u/friendzis)

friendzis commented on Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs cnbc.com/2025/08/25/tech-... · Posted by u/Teever

tptacek · 6 days ago

There are rules like this in other countries around the world, and the impact is that it's much harder to change full-time jobs, because companies work around them by replacing full-time roles with contract positions, something that's much harder to regulate.

But the big thing here is: obviously there's a cheering section for any rules that make things harder for hiring managers, because most people here are on the other side of that transaction. Ok, sure, whatever. But none of this has anything to do with the "ghost job" phenomenon, where job postings are literally fig leaves satisfying a compliance checkbox so that roles can be sourced to H1Bs.

friendzis · 6 days ago

> because companies work around them by replacing full-time roles with contract positions, something that's much harder to regulate.

Yes, then a regulator sniffs on that, company is unable to prove absence of employment-like relationship, then is fined and owes backpay on all the unpaid taxes with interest.

friendzis commented on Show HN: Turn Markdown into React/Svelte/Vue UI at runtime, zero build step markdown-ui.com/... · Posted by u/yaoke259

Tade0 · 7 days ago

For me it stops working after several clicks.

The other day my project owner remarked that in the future perhaps we won't be building catalogs of items like the one I am currently, but interrogate an LLM assistant for a summary of the data - no need for forms and such.

I don't know how accurate that prediction is, but it got me thinking: what if coding assistants are a dead end and what users will actually prefer is going to be just a text box where you type in your human-language query?

Forms are here to stay at least in any kind of government or legal document, as there's liability associated with any mistakes, but less consequential stuff?

friendzis · 7 days ago

Yes and no. Natural language processing querybox will be one of the interfaces for two reasons: some people already (still?) associate that with trustworthy search, however since it is like "I'm feeling lucky" button it is perfect place to hide paid advertisements. On the other hand, your PO dismisses the value of windowshopping and I don't see good catalogs disappearing anytime soon.

friendzis commented on Google's Liquid Cooling chipsandcheese.com/p/goog... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

michaelt · 7 days ago

> TPU chips are hooked up in series in the loop, which naturally means some chips will get hotter liquid that has already passed other chips in the loop. Cooling capacity is budgeted based on the requirements of the last chip in each loop.

Of course, it's worth noting that if you've got four chips, each putting out 250W of power, and a pump pushing 1 litres of water per minute through them, water at the outlet must be 14°C hotter than water at the inlet, because of the specific heat capacity of water. That's true whether the water flows through the chips in series, or in parallel.

friendzis · 7 days ago

While there is some truth to your comment, it has no practical engineering relevance. Since energy transfer rate is proportional to temp difference, therefore you compute the flow rate required, which is going to be different if the chips are in series or in parallel.

friendzis commented on Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me boston.conman.org/2025/08... · Posted by u/classichasclass

Etheryte · 8 days ago

One starts to wonder, at what point might it be actually feasible to do it the other way around, by whitelisting IP ranges. I could see this happening as a community effort, similar to adblocker list curation etc.

friendzis · 8 days ago

It's never either/or: you don't have to choose between white and black lists exclusively and most of the traffic is going to come from grey areas anyway.

Say you whitelist an address/range and some systems detect "bad things". Now what? You remove that address/range from whitelist? Doo you distribute the removal to your peers? Do you communicate removal to the owner of unwhitelisted address/range? How does owner communicate dealing with the issue back? What if the owner of the range is hosting provider where they don't proactively control the content hosted, yet have robust anti-abuse mechanisms in place? And so on.

Whitelist-only is a huge can of worms and whitelists works best with trusted partner you can maintain out-of-band communication with. Similarly blacklists work best with trusted partners, however to determine addresses/ranges that are more trouble than they are worth. And somewhere in the middle are grey zone addresses, e.g. ranges assigned to ISPs with CGNATs: you just cannot reliably label an individual address or even a range of addresses as strictly troublesome or strictly trustworthy by default.

Implement blacklists on known bad actors, e.g. the whole of China and Russia, maybe even cloud providers. Implement whitelists for ranges you explicitly trust to have robust anti-abuse mechanisms, e.g. corporations with strictly internal hosts.

friendzis commented on Counter-Strike: A billion-dollar game built in a dorm room nytimes.com/2025/08/18/ar... · Posted by u/asnyder

arkh · 14 days ago

My intuition is it still exists.

This "old internet" sentiment is due to the fact it was mostly academics in their world and geeks in theirs on internet at the time. Then it made it easier for everyone to use so everyone used it.

But I bet there are still the same proportion of geeks in the population. Which are still socializing on niche area of internet. We don't see it because we're old farts and have jobs and habits so we won't be trawling what are the current young geek channels. It was forum, IRC, ICQ and their ancestors for us. It is some other things for them. The story about the group of teenagers embedding messages in the One Million Checkboxes database shows "the old internet" is still alive.

friendzis · 13 days ago

There is a reason we tend to call "the new internet" "web 2.0": it's dominated by platforms. For better or worse, the dynamics are entirely different. In the new internet interactions are facilitated by the algorithm, whereas in the old internet it was a web of peers.

Funnily, a substantial amount of interaction over the past some years has been shifting back to private, invite-only spaces, e.g. private Discord servers. Being old farts without real-world contacts in those spaces we are getting left out a bit, not too dissimilar to the old farts of yesteryear.

friendzis commented on Perplexity offers to buy Google Chrome for $34.5B theverge.com/news/758218/... · Posted by u/ndr

hackrmn · 20 days ago

I'd argue that depends on what you mean by "innovation" -- Google has been pretty busy, meaning specifically developers on their payroll, churning out more or less useful Web API implementations, certainly at a far more frantic pace than people traditionally _blamed_ browsers of yester-decade for. Nevermind that some of these APIs are more haphazardly designed than others, truth be told most of them are okay and are aptly designed so it's not a critical issue (for Web developers or Chrome's market share). Google co-authors most Web standards and implement them often _before_ the "standard" is published (for better and for worse; anti-trust allegations, I am looking at you). But they're not idle, one thing's for sure. Markedly different than how I remember Microsoft resting for months if not years on their IE laurels, like a CO2 blanket in a room that evacuated all the air.

So yeah, how would you describe this lack of innovation you're referring to?

There can always be more innovation that isn't of the sort I described above, but Web _is_ made of Web APIs -- if a website cannot "do" it, you as a user of the site, won't be able to experience it, is my crude opinion. But I'd love to hear examples to the contrary, illustrating innovation that isn't Web APIs.

Removing tab-based browsing (an anti-pattern if you ask me)? Optimizations (speed, size, etc)?

friendzis · 19 days ago

Web browsers from 90s can render html perfectly well.

> if a website cannot "do" it, you as a user of the site, won't be able to experience it

Ever heard of native applications? Those could always do the thing, there is not only no reason for web browsers to implement "web apis", but every one of those is actively harmful.

When "web developers" can finally implement a page where focus does not jump around and layouts do not shift around we can start talking about being allowed access to more than plain html.

friendzis commented on Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context anthropic.com/news/1m-con... · Posted by u/adocomplete

onion2k · 20 days ago

Large enough repos don't fit on a single machine.

I don't believe any human can understand a problem if they need to fit the entire problem blem domain in their head, and the scope of a domain that doesn't fit on a computer. You have to break it down into a manageable amount of information to tackle it in chunks.

If a person can do that, so can an LLM prompted to do that by a person.

friendzis · 20 days ago

Fitting the entire problem domain in their head is what engineers do.

Engineering is merely a search for optimal solution in this multidimensional space of problem domain(-s), requirements, limitations and optimization functions.

friendzis commented on Figma will IPO on July 31 figma.com/blog/ipo-pricin... · Posted by u/nevir

wwweston · a month ago

Adobe has been thinking about GenAI longer than you probably have (probably added because this is HN and you never know).

I got to talk to a product engineer about some of their work back in 2021, and he was describing generative (and even generative-editive) capabilities they had in hand that most associate with the last two years, they were just figuring out how to productize them, many of which they have.

I have my own complaints about Adobe products and choices but they are far from out of the game, and they’re probably going to be fine, especially if a lot of people make the mistake of thinking of them primarily as a dinosaur Figma competitor.

friendzis · a month ago

Content-aware fill was introduced in 2010

friendzis commented on Study mode openai.com/index/chatgpt-... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

filoleg · a month ago

> How are you supposed to spot errors if you don't know the material?

By noticing that something is not adding up at a certain point. If you rely on an incorrect answer, further material will clash with it eventually one way or another in a lot of areas, as things are typically built one on top of another (assuming we are talking more about math/cs/sciences/music theory/etc., and not something like history).

At that point, it means that either the teacher (whether it is a human or ai) made a mistake or you are misunderstanding something. In either scenario, the most correct move is to try clarifying it with the teacher (and check other sources of knowledge on the topic afterwards to make sure, in case things are still not adding up).

friendzis · a month ago

It absolutely does not work that way.

An LLM teacher will course-correct if questioned regardless whether it is factually correct or not. An LLM, by design, does not, in any capacity whatsoever have a concept of factual correctness.

friendzis commented on Study mode openai.com/index/chatgpt-... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

jacobedawson · a month ago

An underrated quality of LLMs as study partner is that you can ask "stupid" questions without fear of embarrassment. Adding in a mode that doesn't just dump an answer but works to take you through the material step-by-step is magical. A tireless, capable, well-versed assistant on call 24/7 is an autodidact's dream.

I'm puzzled (but not surprised) by the standard HN resistance & skepticism. Learning something online 5 years ago often involved trawling incorrect, outdated or hostile content and attempting to piece together mental models without the chance to receive immediate feedback on intuition or ask follow up questions. This is leaps and bounds ahead of that experience.

Should we trust the information at face value without verifying from other sources? Of course not, that's part of the learning process. Will some (most?) people rely on it lazily without using it effectively? Certainly, and this technology won't help or hinder them any more than a good old fashioned textbook.

Personally I'm over the moon to be living at a time where we have access to incredible tools like this, and I'm impressed with the speed at which they're improving.

friendzis · a month ago

LLMs, by design, are peak Duning-Kruegers, which means they can be any good of a study partner for basic introductory lessons and topics. Yet they still require handholding and thorough verification, because LLMs will spit out factually incorrect information with confidence and will fold on correct answers when prodded. Yet the novice does not posses the skill to handhold the LLM. I think there's a word for that, but chadgbt is down for me today.

Furthermore, forgetting curve is a thing and therefore having to piece information together repetitively, preferably in a structured manner, leads to a much better information retention. People love to claim how fast they are "learning" (more like consuming tiktoks) from podcasts at 2x speed and LLMs, but are unable to recite whatever was presented few hours later.

Third, there was a paper circulating even here on HN that showed that use of LLMs literally hinder brain activation.