borplk's comments

On: Show HN: GETadb.com – every GET request creates a DB

[borplk]

Gimmickmaxxing?

On: Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce

[borplk]

I don't remember 2001. But 2008 tech job market was way wayyy better than today.

On: Write some software, give it away for free

[borplk]

Unfortunately nerds are easy to trick. Good luck convincing any other discipline to do free labour for optional donations, vibes, and "the community".

[bigstrat2003 → borplk]

People in other professions do that all the time. Doctors go to serve in poor places so that they can have medical care, carpenters volunteer to help make furniture and structures for charity projects, and so on. It simply is not the case that programmers are the only professionals who will donate labor for the sake of the communal good.

[OldSchool → bigstrat2003]

However... those professions are encouraged to donate basic human needs/rights to those without resources. Yes, even tradespeople donate their time to those in need sometimes, but normally only to those in need.

Contrarily, open source can be easily observed to take resources in the form of created capital (ip) for less than full value or no value from the arguably more needy (individuals) and gives them to the not-needy-at-all (business).

On: Train Your Own LLM from Scratch

[borplk]

Can anyone suggest or come up with viable "use cases" of a custom LLM like this? I wouldn't mind giving it a try but ideally I'm looking for something that is not just a toy.

On: Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

[borplk]

That doesn't justify it because the user should still be able to decide when to initiate it. People are ok with not interrupting the update if they get to choose when it starts.

On: Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained

[borplk]

I find it shocking (not really) that among the many BILLION dollar companies built on the back of Postgres there isn't enough sense to pay the salary of one dude to keep a project like this going forever.

[alexpadula → borplk]

wild isn't it

On: Self-updating screenshots

[borplk]

Site appears to be down intermittently with a Django error

If author sees this: Turn off Django debug mode

On: Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?

[borplk]

My observation is that people who love this stuff are not programmers so they feel like they have been empowered to automate things that they could not otherwise automate.

For people who are already highly skilled in scripting/automation it's a lot less impressive.

They notice all the things that could go wrong. All the non-determinism issues. And they think I could do this better with a custom script myself.

The use cases I have heard all seem like gimmicks to me.

On: Tell HN: Fiverr left customer files public and searchable

[borplk]

Unfortunately everything is going in the opposite direction.

We are in the age of AI-slop AI-everything AI-break-it AI-fix-it.

Software companies are competing with each other on how low they can push the quality and still get away with it.

There's no reward or incentive for paying attention to the details or the quality. In fact you will get penalised for it.

On: Ask HN: Are Web Agencies Cooked?

[borplk]

I think it means charging based on the value of the work to the client not just the cost of doing the work.

That means if you get fast and efficient at doing something valuable for the clients you get to enjoy better margins because your costs are relatively low but the value is high so the customers still happily pay a good amount for it.