I wouldn't know, the choice was made years before I joined the company, and I haven't come across anyone who told me what considerations went in back then.
I think developers will just do more. Already in a team of 10 programmers there’s a few who don’t do very much. I think they will be gone. And a 1x programmer becomes a 10x programmer using AI.
I think there will be more work for developers, but it will be harder to slack off.
It sort of seems like the author is billing for the time saved and having a coffee or something. Seems a bit off.
Paying programmers by the hour always seemed weird for me because of the productivity spikes. I prefer paying by the job or just buying a weekly block that assumes someone works full time on my project.
I would be annoyed with a consultant who billed me for 4 hours when it was 30 minutes of work and an estimated savings from using AI.
> I spent around $400 on o3 last month because I was banging my head against a wall with some really tricky code. When I hit truly difficult problems, throwing o3 at them for a few hours beats getting stuck in debugging rabbit holes for days.
I wish I could get some examples of this. I remember asking seniors for help on problems and they could help in minutes what would take me hours. And, likewise, I’ve had people ask me for a minute of help to stop them being blocked for days.
It surprised me that people would block for days and I wonder what that looked like. Do they just stare at the screen, walk around, play candy crush?
I’m trying to figure out if the author is a junior, average, or senior programmer and what they get stuck on would be something that a good programmer learns how to debug around. So you can finally get a good ROI on being a good programmer by comparing the time to what an AI would cost.
Yea I’d love to know what these look like. I’ve been using Claude and Claude code a bit for things I’m too lazy to do myself but know it’ll be solid at, for example a parser for iso dates in Janet. I set a $10 budget in February and have used $4 of it. I genuinely don’t know how to use these tools to spend $20 a month but at the same time they've been very helpful.
I similarly get confused about normal blocking. I genuinely don’t understand it. I get procrastination. I go for runs during work. But rarely is something genuinely so much that it’ll take hours of programming.
Edit: of course some tasks take multiple days. But visible progress is almost always achieved on the scale of hours not days.
They were sued, and lost, for capturing and analyzing data off all the WiFi networks they drove by. [0] I assume they are recording all the metadata and data that they can to stay compliant with this.
My guess is they have a list of every MAC address of every device they can find, geolocated. And then they match that to data from all those apps that ask to discover devices on my local network. Now they know how old my tv and lightbulbs are, etc etc
Wikipedia urls ending in punctuation are unreliably broken or not depending on caching and the platform, so if you put a # on the end to escape it, it fixes it, without having to worry about percent encoding.
The problem here is that the HN URL encoding interpreted the period as the end-of-sentence rather than as part of the URL. It would be simply bizarre for any browser or web server to choke on a perfectly legal dot to end a URL.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_or_Astro-man%3F is another story -- since "?" is a reserved character in URLs for CGI queries. Enter the question mark anyway, and the article comes up! Why? There's a redirect without it!
For Wikipedia's gory details on technical restrictions for article titles: (note that HN properly parses this article title ending in a right-paren)
> The problem here is that the HN URL encoding interpreted the period as the end-of-sentence rather than as part of the URL.
That’s the first problem.
> It would be simply bizarre for any browser or web server to choke on a perfectly legal dot to end a URL.
I agree? I never said anything like this. My original comment was:
> Wikipedia urls ending in punctuation are unreliably broken or not depending on caching and the platform, so if you put a # on the end to escape it, it fixes it, without having to worry about percent encoding.
I mentioned the platform specifically, which in this context could be either the server context or client context. You mentioned server/client context, as in what HN serves the user or vice versa. I mentioned that and client context inclusively. If you’re correcting me, assume I need you to show my error.
> Enter the question mark anyway, and the article comes up! Why? There's a redirect without it!
It seemed that the issue was incorrectly diagnosed, and MediaWiki or Wikipedia was being blamed for the error, and that you had also proposed a rather strange workaround for it. The issue could be solved completely within the context of Hacker News post markup, as linked.
If you put a hashtag at the end of a Wikipedia URL, then I suppose it works, until the URL already has a hashtag in it, because these are used for section headings. It's not called "escaping" anything, it's just... an empty URI fragment: a link to the top of the article?
There is also nothing preventing a Wikipedia editor from creating a redirect from the title y'all linked. In fact it's a perfectly fine idea for a redirect. The fact is that the canonical title is in US English, and in US English, "Inc." takes a period as an abbreviation.
There's nothing wrong with your workaround or your percent-encodings to escape some dubious glyph, but I hoped to clarify things and derail the thread further on pedantic technicalities. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
> It's not called "escaping" anything, it's just... an empty URI fragment: a link to the top of the article?
It’s an escape from pedantry.
I appreciate your gentle needling, as imprecision in my words reflects an imprecision in my rhetoric, making it vulnerable to nitpicking. It’s okay to be wrong if it allows me to make a larger point in favor of my position, but at a cost to readers’ time and patience.
Thanks for your close reading and feedback, it helps.
My point is basically that someone learning about this from a business perspective might only see that it was a net positive for the company. The same way so many companies materially benefit from genocide today and don't expect there to be any consequences.
I mean, there are my local clones. The odds of all my locals crashing at the same time as GitHub seem to be the same as local+github+sourcehut+whatever crashing.
reply