Ask HN: Non-tech professionals on HN? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Non-tech professionals on HN?

#201

Post by justathrowaway2 » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 9:37 AM UTC

something98 wrote: post #193

justathrowaway2 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP but philosophy student as well, paying my bills with programming. I spend 20 hours a week in a junior position, having four to five days a week for everything else that interests me. I am not particularly keen on having a „career“ in the classical sense. I don’t want a family with kids, don’t travel and have below average material needs. There is truth in the saying that making your hobby a profession will suc…

I'm slowly, after a few "painful" experiences on either end of the pendulum, coming to see the wisdom in that position. Would you mind sharing how you, currently, find programming work at around 20hrs/wk?

I didn't have to actively find such an opportunity yet so I can’t tell you. In my case, I was unhappy at my first employer while I was still studying CS when my friend’s employer urgently searched for programmers. So I went there and told them that I am interested in a position in which I could work part-time even after graduation. I still work there. It was a combination of luck and connections.

Re: Ask HN: Non-tech professionals on HN?

#202

Post by dd_roger » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 1:05 PM UTC

TimSchumann wrote: post #45

opinion-is-bad wrote: post #21

California farmer, mostly pistachio and almonds. The farm has been in the family for four generations now and we hope to continue that. I found HN while I worked at Google on self-driving cars from 2014-2018. At least two postings on HN have been direct material impact to me: the first about an autonomous tractor we might be experimenting with soon, and the second about water restrictions in CA that fortunately did n…

Conversation I was having with my dad (a dairy and grain farmer in the midwest) earlier this week ‘I wonder what the market for an open source tractor is?’ Not sure about autonomous, but just something you own, that you have full schematics and design specs for, and can repair yourself — seems like a huge market given the state of things right now.

The explosion in the number of sofware components in modern tractors and combines is inherent to what we expect from them. If your open source tractor is essentially a tractor from 20 years ago without the fancy new tech then there's no market for it. Just lookup how much tractors from before the "e-tractor era" go for. I'll break it to you, it's not a lot.

I think people who aren't involved with farming can't really comprehend the amount of technology involved and the savings that technology enables (and ultimately makes it worth it even if the equipment is more difficult/expensive to repair).

As an aside, we always hear complaints about John Deere and never other manufacturers. I wonder if it's because anti-corporate populism works better when it's targeted at a well known american brand or if John Deere is truely that bad. We don't have any modern John Deeres in my area but a few Case IH and Claas, and I've never heard any complaints.

Btw my point isn't to justify the anti-consumer behavior of some manufacturers, but to provide context as to why "an open source tractor" is a completely naive idea.

Re: Ask HN: Non-tech professionals on HN?

#203

Post by delgaudm » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 1:47 PM UTC

atypicalstudio wrote: post #117

delgaudm wrote: post #65

Voice actor here. I've been reading HN since '13. Mostly to stay hip to what's going on in tech as I find it interesting. More recently I've been fascinated by the AI developments in voice / TTS, voice modeling and deep fake video tech.

I'm a software engineer but I work with a lot of projects that require recorded voice narration etc. I've already been able to replace some small/low budget projects with synthesised speech but it definitely does lack the depth and nuance that a real actor brings to it. Is there anything you have seen specifically that you were inpressed by? The one that really stood out to me is the 'deep fake' voice synthesis (thou…

Not yet, as you identify it really is about the nuance, and why people like me get paid for what we do. There are some systems that are trying to add generic emotional states using a matrix of activation vs deactivation (how energetic the delivery is) and pleasantness, to try and generate that nuance. So you can end up with emotional states like "guilt"(unpleasant with moderate deactivation) and "elation" ( pleasant with high activation), but as far as I know the application of those states are not determined through machine learning, there is still a human involvement to determine the emotional state, and then try and generate an inflection that matches it.

Narration is as much about acting as having a nice voice. We've only just begun in getting the computer voice to sound mostly human, getting it to act is another thing entirely.

Re: Ask HN: Non-tech professionals on HN?

#204

Post by delgaudm » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 1:51 PM UTC

thom wrote: post #68

delgaudm wrote: post #65

Voice actor here. I've been reading HN since '13. Mostly to stay hip to what's going on in tech as I find it interesting. More recently I've been fascinated by the AI developments in voice / TTS, voice modeling and deep fake video tech.

Any TTS tech you’ve seen yet that makes you worried (or even hopeful) for your profession?

The TTS raises the barrier to entry for new voice actors. Low-paying jobs that they would normally use to "cut their teeth" are being narrated even more poorly by things like Descript and it's ilk.

You'll hear these particularly bad TTS narrations all the time if you suffer through enough Youtube Pre-roll ads.

Re: Ask HN: Non-tech professionals on HN?

#205

Post by baremetal » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 3:37 PM UTC

georgeoliver wrote: post #167

I'm a carpenter who's always been a programming enthusiast. I guess it's like programmers with a woodworking hobby.

im a programmer who quit and got a job framing to learn to build my own house. i really enjoy it. bought a farm and now slowly building out. just finished first barn.

Re: Ask HN: Non-tech professionals on HN?

#206

Post by lambdatronics » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 5:46 PM UTC

Physicist working on nuclear fusion. I do scientific programming. I'm also interested in understanding what makes the difference between good & bad leadership/management. I kept seeing interesting search results/links pop up on this weird orange website, so I finally started reading it on the regular.

Re: Ask HN: Non-tech professionals on HN?

#207

Post by zxcero » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 7:13 PM UTC

NamTaf wrote: post #81

Mechanical enigneer in transport & logistics. I like keeping abreast of the tech industry and I'm a nerd at heart with an interest in a lot of things posted here. I get more out of it from interest's sake than from a career perspective. I think like several others here that had I pursued this hobby as my career, I'd enjoy it a lot less and probably wouldn't even post here. That said, occasionally there's some nice cr…

Transport and logistics seems to be a tried and trodden industry compared to Software. Another thing is that developers are not against careful consideration of tech choices. They are rather against old legacy code that cannot be refactored or changed or bureacracy ignores developers concerns to the detriment of the company's future.

I've seen where tech decisions were made on a whim in a startup and new engineers had to suffer the decaying legacy code. It depends on context and circumstances.

Re: Ask HN: Non-tech professionals on HN?

#208

Post by mbrodersen » Sun, Oct 10, 2021, 11:13 PM UTC

rapht wrote: post #161

Mid-thirties, CFO of a largish French/European (non tech related service, brick and mortar) service business. Always been a geek, used to code, love to think in terms of systems / data / interfaces... kind of missed that natural "tech" path in my career, went to a top business school out of what you'd call laziness (achieving a top business school in France is much easier than achieving a top engineering school)... s…

I am curious if you have any advise for software consultants advising/selling to Senior management? How best to present your case/discuss issues so that it is perceived as a win-win?

Re: Ask HN: Non-tech professionals on HN?

#209

Post by solmanac » Mon, Oct 11, 2021, 4:24 AM UTC

71a54xd wrote: post #168

solmanac wrote: post #13

I do inventory and paperwork at a large recreational marijuana grow site. I work with python as an amateur and found this place through python interests somehow.

Hey there, I've been working on something similar except with gourmet mushrooms. Curious if I could ask some questions about your process sometime?

Sure no problem!

Re: Ask HN: Non-tech professionals on HN?

#210

Post by james_in_the_uk » Mon, Oct 11, 2021, 8:31 AM UTC

myfrogatemywork wrote: post #98

james_in_the_uk wrote: post #48

Lawyer here. I specialise in tech deals and the burgeoning tech regulatory sphere. (Think AI regulation, cryptocurrency, etc.) HN is a great way to keep my finger on the pulse. I try to contribute to legal threads where I can, but /some/ HN contributors' level of obtuseness towards the nuance of legal issues can be off-putting. As can the insistence to treat every social and moral issue as newly discovered, merely be…

> As can the insistence to treat every social and moral issue as newly discovered I think this is more a quality of hackers than a quality of the CS-crowd, though they often go hand-in-hand. Hackers looking into any field will treat it as if it's never been discovered before; trying to build the field again from first principles. That's interesting, though. What are your thoughts on AI+law 10, 20 years from now? How…

Yes, fair observation. The hacker mentality is a good way to describe it.

I think AI will keep us very busy over the next decade. There are a lot of individual issues of a legal nature where AI creates some non-trivial challenges (equality, privacy, intellectual property) and there’s also some more fundamental themes which challenge some of the liberal underpinnings of our legal system. There’s a lot of hyperbole around AI but at least some of the wild predictions of change will probably bear out in practice.

I think that my colleagues see the value in the advice I give; either that or they’re too polite to tell me otherwise. Clients seem happy to pay for the advice, which is a good indicator, although I now work in-house because in private practice it is a difficult area to scale. (This is more a reflection on how much of private practice has become about leveraging a lean team of junior lawyers to transactional work at bulk scale; even multi-million dollar corporate M&A or real estate deals can be very repetitive in nature. AI will eventually eat this type of work. Ref: Richard Susskind.)

There’s still a bit of scepticism that tech is a standalone discipline. I can see the argument both ways. I believe that it is helpful to have lawyers who understand all of the legal implications of e.g. AI, across multiple legal disciplines, and so can give general counsel. I practice elements of privacy, IP, contract, discrimination, regulatory law etc. etc. all as they affect tech. On the other hand, there are situations where it might be better to have deeply specialist advice with a tech overlay. Where necessary, I will partner with my colleagues. The idea is that the client gets legal advice that is correct both as a matter of law and on application to the technology they are working on.