janstice (u/janstice)

janstice commented on U.S. senators introduce new pirate site blocking bill, "Block BEARD" torrentfreak.com/u-s-sena... · Posted by u/HieronymusBosch

ryandrake · a month ago

> But instead we hold these works of art captive for no reason, other than a few multi-billion-dollar conglomerates want to keep milking art for money again and again.

In many cases, the conglomerates aren't even making money from them. How much do you think the movie company (and all the various middlemen) are making from some obscure movie from the 80s that they don't even make available on DVD or streaming anywhere? They're just griefing the public by withholding it and not even making any money.

janstice · a month ago

I think the reason that the big guys don’t make money out of old films is that if they did they’d be on the hook to pay the cast & crew(‘s retirement plans).

janstice commented on Ask HN: Any active COBOL devs here? What are you working on? · Posted by u/_false

sethhochberg · a month ago

Some less-common varieties of life insurance start to look a whole lot like investment products and are (sometimes controversially) sold as such for people in very specific financial situations - think like cash value and death benefit value that vary over time based on asset performance. A legacy insurer selling Variable Universal Life or similar policies would have some financial calculation needs.

janstice · a month ago

And I guess if there’s a whole-of-life policy sold in 1962 that hasn’t been terminated - I guess there’s a lot of grandfathered rules that are just easier to keep in their original systems.

janstice commented on Kiro: A new agentic IDE kiro.dev/blog/introducing... · Posted by u/QuinnyPig

lukev · a month ago

This brings up a tangential question for me.

Clearly, companies view the context fed to these tools as valuable. And it certainly has value in the abstract, as information about how they're being used or could be improved.

But is it really useful as training data? Sure, some new codebases might be fed in... but after that, the way context works and the way people are "vibe coding", 95% of the novelty being input is just the output of previous LLMs.

While the utility of synthetic data proves that context collapse is not inevitable, it does seem to be a real concern... and I can say definitively based on my own experience that the _median_ quality of LLM-generated code is much worse than the _median_ quality of human-generated code. Especially since this would include all the code that was rejected during the development process.

Without substantial post-processing to filter out the bad input code, I question how valuable the context from coding agents is for training data. Again, it's probably quite useful for other things.

janstice · a month ago

I suspect the product telemetry would be more useful - things like success of interaction vs requiring subsequent editing, success from tool use, success from context & prompt tuning parameters would be for valuable to the product than just feeding more bits into the core model.

janstice commented on The Death of the Middle-Class Musician thewalrus.ca/the-death-of... · Posted by u/pseudolus

vunderba · 2 months ago

With the advent of streaming services like Spotify, it’s definitely getting worse, but the market has always been difficult from a strictly performative/sales perspective. I never made any real money from my compositions, but I pulled a decent side income teaching piano back in university.

It reminds me of ex-Soviet chess players. The emigration of so many good grandmaster-level players diluted the market, and unless you were in the absolute upper echelons (like Kramnik, Karpov, or Kasparov), you pretty much had to supplement your income by teaching on the side.

janstice · 2 months ago

Oddly enough this also caused similar issues in classical orchestras - in the 90s a bunch of top flight Eastern European and Russian musicians raised the bar of orchestras in places like NZ, with the side effect of having fewer seats for younger musicians to move into.

janstice commented on Bypassing GitHub Actions policies in the dumbest way possible blog.yossarian.net/2025/0... · Posted by u/woodruffw

kstrauser · 3 months ago

Or VirtualBox’s extensions which make it usable. Those are free to download but could make you an audit target.

janstice · 3 months ago

Or even Docker Desktop, which is a bunch of $$ that no-one expects (and I think Microsoft is still recommending in the WSL docs).

janstice commented on Bypassing GitHub Actions policies in the dumbest way possible blog.yossarian.net/2025/0... · Posted by u/woodruffw

neilv · 3 months ago

> Companies have no business telling their employees which specific programs they can and cannot run to do their jobs, that's an absurd level of micromanagement.

I'm usually on the side of empowering workers, but I believe sometimes the companies do have business saying this.

One reason is that much of the software industry has become a batpoop-insane slimefest of privacy (IP) invasion, as well as grossly negligent security.

Another reason is that the company may be held liable for license terms of the software.

Another reason is that the company may be held liable for illegal behavior of the software (e.g., if the software violates some IP of another party).

Every piece of software might expose the company to these risks. And maybe disproportionately so, if software is being introduced by the "I'm gettin' it done!" employee, rather than by someone who sees vetting for the risks as part of their job.

janstice · 3 months ago

For example, if someone installs the wrong version of Oracle Java on a VM in our farm, the licencing cost is seven figures as they want to charge per core that it could conceivably run on - this would be career-limiting for a number of people at once.

janstice commented on OpenAI dropped the price of o3 by 80% twitter.com/sama/status/1... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

OutOfHere · 3 months ago

o3 is very much needed in VSCode GitHub CoPilot for Ask/Edit/Agent modes. It is sorely missing there.

janstice · 3 months ago

Sure is - and o3 is missing from the OpenAI models that Azure is serving, which I suspect isn’t a coincidence - if OpenAI has some secret sauce that lets them undercut resellers this might shake up agreements for a bit.

janstice commented on IT workers struggling in New Zealand's tight job market rnz.co.nz/news/chinese/56... · Posted by u/MarcoDewey

HenryBemis · 3 months ago

> "When an employer was initially interested, they often backed out once they realised I was based in Beijing."

Yes, of course. You/that person may be the best & nicest on the planet, and/but we 'have decided' that 'China is the enemy and cannot be trusted'. So of course your CV will be discarded.

Also.. you pull something (criminal/damaging) off, where will they find you and keep you accountable? China will never extradite you to any country to be imprisoned. Is this a joke? Doesn't the person realize this at all? Is this person naive/5yo or just says shit for the clicks and the LOLs?

janstice · 3 months ago

Or rather; the candidate didn’t have a visa, the employer would need to jump through a bunch of hoops, then a multi-month wait, OR can just hire one of the many on-shore candidates available on the market.

I think previously these sorts of offshore people were picked up by big bodyshop contractors, who could reliably place someone (and afford to have someone on the bench for a few weeks if needed) - since a massive bunch of government contracts were cancelled over the last few years this mode has dried up.

janstice commented on Ask HN: What's your go-to message queue in 2025? · Posted by u/enether

bilinguliar · 3 months ago

I am using Beanstalkd, it is small and fast and you just apt-get it on Debian.

However, I have noticed that oftentimes devs are using queues where Workflow Engines would be a better fit.

If your message processing time is in tens of seconds – talk to your local Workflow Engine professional (:

janstice · 3 months ago

In that case, any suggestions if the answer was looking for workflow engines? Ideally something that will work for no-person-in-the-middle workloads in the tens of seconds range as well as person-making-a-decision workflows that can live for anywhere between minutes and months?

janstice commented on Open-R1: an open reproduction of DeepSeek-R1 huggingface.co/blog/open-... · Posted by u/jonbaer

drakenot · 7 months ago

What are some other domains outside of Math and Coding that would be suitable for RL with automated verification?

janstice · 7 months ago

Management consulting - I expect less than 20% of what a random 24 year old in a suit that you pay $3000 per day produces is actually specific to your business problem, and the rest is formulaic.