Viewing profile — pdinny

This is the HN thread I didn't know I needed until I saw it. I often wonder how many of Brutalism's ardent fans grew up in an environment dense with Brutalist structures. I'm not h…

Retrospectively framing technologies that succeeded despite doubts at the time discounts those that failed. After all, you could have used the exact same response in defense of web…

Often the discussion around these kinds of tech/AI dwell on the wrong things: questions like "will GenAI put artists out of work?" or "should photographers worry about AI-generated…

This is my experience too. I frequently require a single queue for some very specific task but it does not form part of a greater application. My current work (data engineering) is…

This is adjacent to "why would I need EC2 when I can serve from my laptop?" In terms of maturity of solution and diversity of downstream applications you'll go much further with Bi…

I do sincerely apologise for omitting the word "often". My point remains that generalisations should not be made based on the views of a minority. I have noticed that US media in p…

The general dynamic remains: protests against specific actions of Israel are dismissed as anti-semitic by definition . Banning Nazi symbolism is a good thing. Trying to equate neo-…

This is, by definition ("the protesters" used to generalise to all protesters), a gross generalisation. Based on what evidence? All the protests I have been to people have taken gr…

This type of conflation is extremely dangerous. Criticism of the actions of the government of Israel is not the same thing as anti-semitism (a real and very bad thing). To make thi…

I think that dipping into the history of design (both industrial design and architecture) go a long way to explaining the general trends. It is important to also distinguish betwee…

Thank you for this edifying comment. As someone who has, at best, an extremely surface level understanding of anarchism, I found some aspects of what I understood quite appealing b…

The types of arguments discussed here ("once someone predicted a bad thing and didn't happen therefore no bad things will ever happen") seem to be based on vibes more than logical …

Microliths, if you will. Personally, I'm all for macroservices (no joke).

Apples in South Africa are not likely to come from the Netherlands. SA exports about $736m in apples and pears, imports about $284k, not from the Netherlands. https://oec.world/en/…

A more relevant measure might be median income per capita/household, adjusted for purchasing power. On that basis Austria does quite well. Additionally, quality of life amounts to …

There is important missing context from this extremely biased article that leans heavily on the opinion of an anonymous person. It has always been illegal to serve in a foreign arm…

I'd like to hear the fully-fleshed out position about why these particular examples are an indication of some broader, deeper problem. If possible, please do not use the word "woke…

I'm a big Calvino fan and can thoroughly recommend Cosmicomics as a great collection of shorts. If you enjoy Calvino you may also enjoy Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges.

This is very cool! I came across this while scrolling to see how my Streamlit movie recommender on Show HN was doing. I'll spend some more time with your recommender and get back w…

I wrote a movie recommender using only SQL* This started out as an experiment to help me find movies to watch based on the vibe of another movie. For example: you could find movies…

Putting aside all things Elon: Tesla was arguably incredibly overpriced (pick your reasons) and in a falling market that price is correcting. We like to construct simple narratives…

While all of the mentioned companies are tech companies they also encompass other considerations. Many of the challenges that a company like Twitter faces are not purely technical.…

I agree that it would be nice if more platforms facilitated this kind of exchange . I don't see Twitter doing this at all. The majority of my observations suggest ideas being lobbe…

I find the frequent invocation of a town square a bit perplexing. It evokes the idea of a place where strangers may gather to have an exchange of ideas, which sounds quite pleasant…

I've found some really interesting reading on are.na. Something that I particularly enjoy about that mode of discovery is that it is more about curation and discovery. The smallnes…