> Framing it in gigawatts is very interesting given the controversy
Exactly. When I saw the headline I assumed it would contain some sort of ambitious green energy build-out, or at least a commitment to acquire X% of the energy from renewable sources. That's the only reason I can think to brag about energy consumption
Or this brings power and prestige to the country that hosts it. And it gives clout precisely because it is seemingly wasteful. Finding the energy is a problem for the civilian government who either go "drill baby drill" or throw wind/solar/nuclear at the problem.
Whoa, that's fascinating. So their botnet runs in multiple regions and will auto-switch if one has problems. Makes sense. Seems a bit strange to use China as the primary, though. Unless of course the attacker is based in China? Of the countries you mentioned Lithuania seems a much better choice. They have excellent pipes to EU and North America, and there's no firewall to deal with
I worked at Apple and heard a lot of Steve stories. He really did personally approve everything. He would be sitting in a room, and team leads would all line up to give their quick 2-minute update. So it's the MacBook Air guy's turn. He comes in and places his prototype down in front of Steve. Steve opens the lid. Two seconds later he picks up the laptop and heaves it so hard it skipped across the table like a stone on water: "I said fxxking INSTANT ON!!" The poor guy collected his prototype and exited the room. Later the MacBook Air launched... it fxxking turned on the moment you open the lid
Good product development really does seem to require some sort of leader who demands quality and smacks people when they don't deliver. Linux is nice because of Torvalds for example.
I was given a small electric fan. It’s great in that it’s portable and I can use it in some of the crummy hotels I have to stay in.
Unfortunately, it has a bright blue LED on it so it’s a pain to use at night when you’re trying to sleep.
It’s so bright that even covered with tape it still shines through the thin plastic of the fan body.
What really gets me is why they bothered putting an operating light on it in the first place?
It’s a fan. The fact that it’s working tells you it’s working.
A Jobs or Torvalds type character would have pointed that out.
I suspect though that it’s often a case of people noticing these type of design flaws but not having the authority to fix them while those with the authority don’t care.
I've worked in physical product development at some companies that include names you'd recognize.
More often than not, those annoying features are direct requests from the person up top who smacks people. They want that feature because they think it will sell, and it's no use trying to argue with them because you'll just get smacked again.
Oh yeah, it's definitely solvable if you can be bothered with it.
It was more just the observation that an unnecessary light had been included that degrades the performance of the product.
I find it intriguing how that comes to be. On paper it seems like adding the light wouldn't hurt the product even if not useful but no body actually used it it seems.
There is a chance the led is also used as a important diode in the circuit, plainly removing it can greatly reduce the lifespan of the device. (more common in cheaper products)
Adding a appropiate diode in it's place is advised.
> I suspect though that it’s often a case of people noticing these type of design flaws but not having the authority to fix them while those with the authority don’t care.
Kinda related but also not really, my own pet peeve is the pouring spout in many products, coffee machine, water jugs, buckets... they might look effective but I find that more often than not, they are curved too much and drip all over when actually pouring.
And I always have to wonder, after serving coffee from one of those things, did the person who design it never even try it just once? Didn't they ever use such a thing, they never ever poured water from a pot?
I have to agree with that as a lead. Most developers claim to be done with a task without taking care of the small details that users will immediately notice. It’s a constant struggle to try to get them to care about what is actually the value of the feature they are implementing, let alone chase on their own initiative the small issues unless painfully listed in some requirements document.
As a dev Im always noticing these little problems in my designs but my boss just wants the thing done asap without worrying too much about it being nice to use.
Same here to the point when I do leave it’s going to be one of the reasons given.
One example is how this product manager type, because of company politics, isn’t really under the same department as the other software teams.
Because of his very very narrow horse blinkers approach, he doesn’t see or even comprehend why we’d want to align with literally anything in any other team and that includes visual UI stuff.
That’s why we have a bright neon pink “Back” button. Right in the literal center of the screen. It’s insane.
In this case, both fair and fare are words in English. Which shows that spell checking needs to know a lot about grammar and context to work in general. Basically you need an LLM. Or if not a 'large language model', perhaps at least a small language model.
I wonder how it does work, I remember MS Word having a fairly decent grammar checker when I was using it in school - which predated LLMs by many years!
I suspect an LLM wouldn’t be the most optimal choice
Latency is actually an interesting case, because it’s one of those things that, by default, nobody owns end-to-end
If you’re booting a computer or building web search, every subsystem can contribute to latency. If you have more teams and more features, you’re likely to have more latency.
In the early days of Google, Larry Page would push hard on this as well, in person. So Google search was fast.
But later the company became larger and bureaucratized, so nobody was in charge of latency. So then each team contributes a bit to latency, and that’s what ends up shipping.
Google products used to be known for being fast, but they’ve reverted to the mean
The instant on thing actually bothered me enough to make switch from windows back to Mac( by proxy the idle battery drain on windows was also pretty terrible)
Alignment of incentives. I'm sure the personal humiliation of being yelled at by Jobs was a reasonably strong incentive, but I'm certain the perception that failing to deliver would have him personally sending you to the dole queue asap was even more of a strong incentive.
Compare to most corporations where the only thing you can do to get fired is fail at office politics and failure to deliver/delivering the lowest quality crap that can be passed off is just business as usual.
Alas, human don't come fully customisable. You get to pick from the packages on offer. And it seemed like for Apple Steve Jobs' good parts only came as part of a package that also included his bad parts.
Most macbooks I remember since a long time ago were pretty much instant on way before apple sillicon. Maybe you had some corporate crapware installed in yours/.
This is the 452nd time this has been posted on HackerNews. If you look for the older posts, you won't find them – and their authors have been erased from this dimension.
It's important to understand that the firework situation today is VERY different from 5 years ago.
Before pandemic, big fireworks were only sold to professionals, and they were exploded at a pre-determined time and place. If you like big fireworks: no problem you can simply attend one of these shows. If you don't like fireworks: no problem just be somewhere else on that particular evening
Nowadays anyone can buy big stuff. And they are setting them off constantly. I live in an urban area and big BOOMs are going off all the time in my neighborhood, especially at night. I'm not sure how anyone can argue that this is OK or a matter of preference. It's a major disruptor to quality of life, and I wish all fireworks enthusiasts would get to experience this
If you ask me I would prefer a regression to the pre-2020 situation. Who knows. If kids weren't allowed to buy fireworks, Maybe the Palisades would still be here and my parents and all their friends would still have a house
When you are feeling this way it's good to take stock of your 3 fundamentals... Food, Sleep, Exercise. If any are suffering, then it's almost guaranteed to be the source of your problem. It sounds elementary but I have to remind myself of this constantly. Particularly the sleep part
I posted in another thread how reliable some old/popular answers can be. Frustratingly so. :D
Exercise is annoying, as without a lot of modern life, it largely takes care of itself. Back when I could just walk to a grocery, as an easy example, it was unsurprisingly easy to stay in decent shape.
People have made valid criticisms about the basic effectiveness of your strategy. But in any case, this is a pretty awesome hacker project - nicely done! Love the appearance of your CLI tool. I am definitely bookmarking for future inspo
Thanks! I initially just wanted to build a dashboard, with the power optimization part being a later addition. Based on the HN response, it seems that's the feature that resonated most with people. I'll be making improvements to the optimization component in the coming days and will publish what I have.
Exactly. When I saw the headline I assumed it would contain some sort of ambitious green energy build-out, or at least a commitment to acquire X% of the energy from renewable sources. That's the only reason I can think to brag about energy consumption
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