Semi-related, something that kind of irritates me is the usage of "as" in online newspapers headlines:
"$Something-is-happening as $Something-else-is-happening"
It's usually written in a way that might be suggesting a direct link between the two things to a layman, but often there's none, other than the fact those two things are happening around the same time.
This can be disorienting when the reader is not familiar with the subject discussed, and lead them to wrong conclusions.
One correction about interviews: if the interviewee comes up with an overengineered solution without asking any questions, it's definitely a red flag.
In a good interview, the interviewee would ask clarifying questions; perhaps get told to build something simple that works; and then follow-up questions would expand towards bigger scale to test the breadth of knowledge and experience of the candidate.
The thing being evaluated is not blindly repeating random "best practices", but understanding and adapting to requirements.
I remember kkrieger being impressively small but also requiring insane compute :) it would render at like 0.1 fps on my poor machine. (Aligns with this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14415567)
ChatGPT's image generator has been able to do this since last year. That NBP still can't is baffling. They should at least train it to respond to requests for transparency with a solid colour pink background.
This. Gpt-image-1/1.5 are the only ones that have this built in - though I'd love to have an insider view if its natively considering the alpha channel or just feeding it through a rembg-style post processor.
I know. It sounds like a perfect task for AI to do it though (wasn't the whole premise of AI do to mundane things for us), yet they fail to do it, and I need to use an external tool.
The thing about mobile apps is that majority of people likely prefer it.
Native apps make it much smoother (or just possible at all / with much lower friction) than webapps to do things like taking photos, scanning NFC, doing payments etc. (which the visa apps are doing)
Apps are also natural "storage point" for data, and a "bookmark on the phone" (the latter is partly due to vendors not making it easy to add non-apps to your home page on the phone).
As much as I hate the push to apps for things like Reddit for monetisation purposes (and I don't install such apps), in many cases for specialized apps the experience is actually much better in the app.
And as you can read in op's article, there's a web fallback possible.
The main drawback for me is that apps take 100s of MBs those days.
Use of an app is not necessarily the problem. Requiring Google Play or the App Store is. We should be able to use apps without being in walled gardens.
A potential problem I see with "LLM=true" being set by claude and friends is that some tools whose authors don't like LLMs might be tempted to e.g. don't output anything at all (and don't do what the CLI is supposed to do), out of principle, when they detect LLM is running things.
Just the (small) probability of this being true might be enough for the big players to not consider creating that var. (Although, if it's easy enough to unset it, then maybe not an issue).
> In early December, a 35-year-old passenger from Tanzania was impressed to see that all the handles of the suitcases on the conveyor belt in the baggage claim area were facing the passengers.
> After the luggage is unloaded and collected in the cargo handling area upon arrival at the airport, ground support personnel manually align the handles of the bags and place them on the conveyor belt.
That's a level of attention to detail that we should be striving for in everything we build.
I think it also highlights something: better things are possible.
Zero lost suitcases doesn't require magic to achieve. It just requires enough workers or enough time to make sure each worker is able to do their job successfully. Unfortunately financial and time constraints mean that very often there aren't enough workers or enough time, and some passengers suffer.
Also requires a culture of respect for the people who are handling baggage - an important thing lacking in parts of society in the US, where working fast food is used as a pejorative.
The culture bit is the most important. You could add 100x the current headcount at all American airports and because the workers simply don't give a shit about doing good work, because they're treating it as a 9 to 5, where they have to go and suffer through a meaningless 8 hours, or worse, they treat it like their own personal access to other people's stuff to loot at will.
The TSA is security theater, a vast majority of American jobs seem to be competence theater. You only ever tend to see care and craft in small business and actual crafts. It's so rare that it's incredibly refreshing to find anyone in any business that bothers to do good work and take care of the small things.
It's not about respecting the baggage handlers. It's about a culture where you respect yourself such that you are obliged to do the best work you can, whether it's baggage handling, being a CEO, or flipping burgers. Self respect and respect for the job far outweigh any notion of employers or other citizens respecting baggage handlers. They have sophisticated notions of status and face and place in society that are sadly absent in American culture.
You could take the Kansai airport baggage handler team and drop them into any airline in the world, and they'd perform to the same high standard. Take any halfass United Airline baggage team and drop them at Kansai and they'd be breaking guitars, killing dogs, and all the other usual shenanigans just like back at home, and they wouldn't give a flying rat's behind about how their employer respects them or not. They're there for paychecks. Respect doesn't even enter into consideration.
> You could add 100x the current headcount at all American airports and because the workers simply don't give a shit about doing good work, because they're treating it as a 9 to 5, where they have to go and suffer through a meaningless 8 hours, or worse, they treat it like their own personal access to other people's stuff to loot at will.
This places the blame solely on the workers. Their CEO earns a ludicrous multiple of their wage. They are treated like shit and are expendable. It’s a two way street, treat workers with respect and and you might get some respect from them.
Yep. The reason employees don't care about their work is that caring for their work is not valued. Box checkers and opportunists proliferate as loyal craftsmen get screwed over repeatedly.
> You could take the Kansai airport baggage handler team and drop them into any airline in the world, and they'd perform to the same high standard. Take any halfass United Airline baggage team and drop them at Kansai and they'd be breaking guitars, killing dogs, and all the other usual shenanigans just like back at home, and they wouldn't give a flying rat's behind about how their employer respects them or not. They're there for paychecks. Respect doesn't even enter into consideration.
The hypothetical of dropping one baggage team into another airport might be true in an immediate timeframe but it doesn't address the core issue - each team was formed in a completely different society, one values celebrity and quick-buck scamming, one values planting trees that cast shade long after you're dead. Pretending like the influential people who steer the most economic activity aren't to blame at all for that difference in culture is insane, especially when we have a felon president who has been pardoning many high profile fraudsters.
> The hypothetical of dropping one baggage team into another airport might be true in an immediate timeframe but it doesn't address the core issue - each team was formed in a completely different society, one values celebrity and quick-buck scamming, one values planting trees that cast shade long after you're dead.
I'd say it's even simpler than that - new people quickly adjust to their workplace culture. Take any individual "halfass United Airline" baggage handler and drop them at Kansai, and I'd expect that soon after, they'd be "performing to the same high standard" - or they'll get managed out.
But then, there's the other thing - take a large team, or worse, take the managers from a half-ass shop and drop them at Kansai, and it's quite likely that in a year, Kansai will be no better than United.
Years ago I had an argument with my HR director at the time. I Was hiring for a position and I said I was willing to pay what was approximately 10-15% above market for the position at the time. He said he could get me a dozen prospects at the market rate or even ten percent below, that I was wasting my budget. I said, "I don't want the people who will work for that, the people I'm looking for know they're worth more." He repeated he felt I was over paying. I said, "look at my head count, and compare it to our competitors. I have half the staff but higher metrics in every category. You don't hear about major or long lasting IT problems here. I'm paying 115% but I'm getting 150% and overall spending less."
When your people feel respected and compensated, they work far better.
> This places the blame solely on the workers. Their CEO earns a ludicrous multiple of their wage. They are treated like shit and are expendable. It’s a two way street, treat workers with respect and and you might get some respect from them.
In southern Ontario there are multiple car factories from various makers. The plants of the Detroit Three are all unionized. There are also plants for Toyota/Lexus and Honda, and after decades of asking, the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) or Unifor unions has not unionized them: the employees are not interested.
Seems that the workers don't feel they need a union as a counter-weight to management at Japanese companies.
Them being paid better wouldn't resolve the issue. Updating American culture such that individuals respected themselves, had a sense of shame, operated from a baseline of respect and gratitude for the opportunity to be working in the first place, these things fix the issue. Concurrently, the CEO respecting the workers, the institution, themselves, would result in wages commensurate to their value.
Expecting excellence, putting care and craft into your work, is something that is taught, it doesn't just magically happen.
Paying these same workers more would not noticeably improve outcomes, people would still lose luggage, steal shit, and then have even more money to spend.
The workers and the CEO are products of their culture, and without some sort of specific intervention against the outcomes wrought by those cultural influences, things would continue as before. Serious institutions indoctrinate their members and build a culture oriented around expectations of excellence and care and craft.
Such institutions can't compete in the marketplace we've set up, because it's cheaper to offer shitty service and low product quality, to keep employees expendable, low skill, low paid cogs, and to reward CEOs and management willing to screw over their fellow employees at every opportunity to ensure the number goes up.
That doesn't change unless the culture changes, which would change the regulatory environment, which would allow for things like excellent service and quality to be valued accordingly. America doesn't value excellence, it values "number go up."
I'm interested to hear why you think that better pay wouldn't help the issue. Being comfortable with your living situation and feeling like you're respected in excess of your boss's federal or state legal obligations plays a big role in having the wherewithal to put serious effort into whatever you're doing day to day, and it helps to mitigate the divide between the richest and the poorest among us / bad jokes or insults that originate out of fear of being poor.
> Such institutions can't compete in the marketplace we've set up, because it's cheaper to offer shitty service and low product quality, to keep employees expendable, low skill, low paid cogs, and to reward CEOs and management willing to screw over their fellow employees at every opportunity to ensure the number goes up.
The federal minimum wage has been the same since 2009, but In-N-Out is an example of a company that chooses to avoid blaming the worker or the market or the regulatory environment for all of their business difficulties. They choose to pay well over the California minimum wage, and I don't find it coincidental that I've had better experiences with employees there vs some other fast food locations. Costco has made similar choices with how they treat their employees and they're doing great. No regulation needed, just better leadership.
The CEOs that blame "inevitable" market forces on why they have to treat employees poorly while refusing to look inward will ironically lose out in the market. And at a larger scale, probably the countries too.
It's certainly possible to find people who care about doing a job properly in a western society. Paying a bit more has been suggested on another post as a method of trying to achieve that, but I'd argue that that is necessary but not sufficient. You need to not only pay people a bit more, but also screen them very carefully for the attitude of doing the job properly.
It is a cultural problem. Just paying a bit more won't fix it. By paying a bit more, you might be able to get a larger share of the limited portion of people in the society that care, but you're not changing the people fundamentally, just being more selective.
> Based on recent 2023-2024 data, the average CEO-to-employee pay ratio at major Japanese corporations is roughly 12:1 to 20:1, significantly lower than the 200:1–300:1 ratios seen in the U.S..
Oh why even mention time constraints, we all know damn well it's financial. Every corp on the face of the earth is constantly cost-cutting everything to the bone to justify more bonuses and higher executive compensation, while making sure the service or products provided are just barely good enough where people don't stage outright riots.
In the sixties, the C-suite earned 21 times what the line worker did. In 2024 it's almost 300 times. So every single time you're dealing with a product that's been value-engineered to where it barely functions, or service people paid too little and empowered too little to actually help you, or stuck in a long ass line because they won't hire enough people, or stuck talking to some damn robot because people are expensive, it's beyond a safe bet that you have an executive or several to blame.
We should be spreading our cynicism over both management and customers. There is almost no level of service so terrible that people won't buy cheaper airline tickets. Let alone losing luggage, you could dial up the risk of death and people would still buy the cheaper tickets.
There's also something about the collapse in civility. Or... something. If you asked a plane full of passengers if they'd be happy to get their suitcase 5 minutes earlier even though it meant someone else lost theirs a lot of them would say yes.
I think we can lay the blame for this on the wealthy elites, too. When people see someone better off than them greedily destroying society for their own personal gain, they naturally think "well why not me, too?".
We need shame, really, societal shame that we inflict on those who have to take government benefits, perhaps. Flying an airline that's known to treat their employees like shit should cause the people at the cocktail to look at you strange.
(We kind of have something like this in that shopping at Costco is considered "good" but lots of people won't admit they shop at Walmart - I'm sure they'll be bankrupt soon given how many people don't shop there!)
What I meant is that most people do admit to shopping at Walmart with no embarrassment. Not the same for buying CCC. They still buy it but they know they shouldn't. Shopping at Walmart isn't like that.
Walmart is pretty much the only big discount store available to many people regardless of their income level unless they have personal shoppers picking stuff up for them. I have a nearby Walmart; the nearest Costco is an hour away and it's a different type of product mix anyway. I don't love shopping at Walmart for a number of reasons but it's convenient for many purposes.
Yes, there will always be someone willing to buy on price alone, but that doesn't mean that there aren't also people who will pay more for better service. To wit: Spirit is financially fucked, mainline carriers are in better condition. The existence
I think the real thing is that - in North America at least - there is a pretty good chance that a mainline carrier will treat you poorly, hit you with unexpected fees, jam you into a tiny seat, etc.
For many people, the difference between an ultra-low cost carrier and a mainline carrier is whether they have to walk through first class on the way to their seats. If you are going to get treated like cattle and upsold on everything anyway, might as well save a few bucks.
Given the choice between Singapore Airlines and United, I'll pay extra for SingAir because I KNOW the service will be better. Given the choice between United and Southwest, I'll just get whichever flight makes the most sense since I don't really expect United to offer better service.
> For many people, the difference between an ultra-low cost carrier and a mainline carrier is whether they have to walk through first class on the way to their seats. If you are going to get treated like cattle and upsold on everything anyway, might as well save a few bucks.
That goes beyond airlines and extends to everything. The trend I've been observing in every product and service category is the hollowing out of the middle: the market bifurcates, one part serving the cost-sensitive customers and getting stuck in a race to the bottom, the other serving premium clientele with highest-quality or bespoke goods/services, gravitating towards few customers and "if you have to ask, you can't afford it pricing".
Multiplying volume by margin, "lots of cheap shit" and "few pricey sales" are both sustainable, but the middle segment - "reasonable quality for reasonable price" - is not.
I would argue this is because the middle class itself has been largely hollowed out. Everyone is either a millionaire or on the edge of bankruptcy, no in-between.
I mean, is that a consequence of people being innately, for it's own sake, cheap to a point of farce? Or is that a consequence of fifty years of stagnant wages?
I'm sure it's a healthy blend of both, but IMO, if you want to see this actually change, the first thing to even make it tenable as a possibility is the owning classes need to let some money flow down the hierarchy. Like I'm sure we'll always have our misers, our people who refuse to spend a penny more for anything, but I think the vast majority of the time what drives people to shitty retailers selling crap-quality products is that most people are fucking broke.
> I mean, is that a consequence of people being innately, for it's own sake, cheap to a point of farce?
Yes.
The price-driven market segment will never disappear and is an emergent property of human nature and the dynamics of a marketplace where prices are instantly comparable.
Plane tickets are way more affordable for nearly everyone than they used to be, but price competition is more savage than ever. The marketplace has spoken.
While I agree that concentration of wealth at the top is a major problem, I don't think that shaking loose that wealth will change the price dynamics of the airline industry in the slightest.
Well not every one on the face of this earth as that’s where Kansai airport is located. It happens a lot in America and other places too but not everywhere
Something I noticed when I traveled to Japan was how many workers there were just doing things. Attention to detail is so amazing. Things as simple as guiding people in the sidewalk while construction vehicles exit the site has a person dedicated to it
That sounds more like an attempt to fight with unemployment - any job, even if unnecessary, is better than no job for both finances and mental well-being.
> What a passive way to say executives kept a larger share of profits for themselves, forcing workers to be stressed and do a sub-optimal job.
This is a very limited view of why things don't work. The main issue in my experience is whether the company values the outcome and ensures focus on optimizing for it. That can include everything from adequate staffing to comp to training to management focus. (A lot of the last one.)
You can spend a huge amount of money and still get a crappy outcome. US healthcare provides a rich field of examples.
US healthcare is a leader in administration fees (e.g. paying health system executives) compared to other countries around the world. High US healthcare cost isn't because of increased usage, but because of the higher admin fees and higher prescription drug prices. Prices are fixed high because law prevents the government from negotiating prices (o.b.o. Medicare/aid), and those provisions were inserted on behalf of pharmaceutical companies so their executives could make more money.
Paying individual workers more may have some benefits, but I think the key issue is usually overworking and burnout because the incremental cost of adding a whole new employee is way higher than just pressuring workers to do more work in the same time.
Also you need to keep organized crime out of airports. Some percentage of lost luggage is actually stolen luggage. Misrouting is also another large percentage. In the US unclaimed lost luggage ends up in some gigantic warehouse in Alabama.
What percentage? I imagine it is insanely low. The risk to reward ratio of making money off a random bag at the airpot has got to be as low, if not lower than, the actual percentage stolen. One thing I've never been worried about it is organized crime, or anyone really, stealing my bag at an airport.
My understanding is it's taken as a given that the authorities at US airports aren't bothering to catch baggage / item thieves amongst airport staff. The only exception is when a firearm (or luggage containing a firearm) goes missing.
I call that "hidden inflation", and if I were to guess, the ongoing degradation of services across the board, in every aspect, can easily account for actual inflation figures being half of what it feels they should be.
It's the tiny things. Like, you visit a beauty salon or restaurant today, and compare it to the same or equivalent place 5 years ago. PDF menus instead of paper. Apps for booking instead of support staff. Leaflets where there used to be magazines to browse. No complimentary coffee. Kitchenware that used to be pristine and high-quality, is now the cheapest offering for commercial wholesaler. There's less light, worse decor, no music (or louder music, to boost turnover), worse sound-proofing, etc.
Sure, the prices are the same, or maybe little higher. But the overall quality of service - not just direct service, but whole experience and ambiance - took a nosedive, so you pay a little more, for much less.
You start looking for it, and the slow decay of everything becomes apparent even on the scale of months.
As an American who has lived in Japan and traveled around Asia, Europe, and South America, Japan's attention to detail is almost superhuman. From how bathroom lines are managed, packages are wrapped, garden moss is curated, dishes are plated, everything is almost perfect. It's like the level of service in Michelin restaurants, applied down to the lowliest of jobs.
There's nitpicks people will find with a statement like this but I've never found anything like it.
In the airplane industry, KPIs and beancounting are just a response to a mindbendingly price-driven marketplace — to the extent that consumers need to be protected by regulations from flying in unsafe planes.
I agree that there's an issue about western capitalism, but I don't think it's in the tension between middle management and craftspeople who take pride in their work. I think the problems arise at a higher level, with the modern-day aristocracy of the capitalist ownership class and the slice of the pie that they capture.
It's quite interesting that "boiling water" in many Slavic languages is actually a separate word (and not derived from "water", but from "boiling"; similar how the author mentions "ice" being used instead of "frozen water").
It was mentioned in other comments but boiled water is steam, and frozen water is ice. We do not have separate words for freezing water or boiling water.
in the slavic languages do they have a different way to describe boiling or freezing milk, or any other liquid?
We have the word slush to mean a mixture of ice and water. A single word for boiling water would occupy a similar conceptual space.
While these are not separate states of matter, they ARE special thermodynamic systems, with the particular property that they tend to remain exactly at the phase transition temperature while heat is added or removed from the system.
This is a somewhere esoteric technical distinction, but it has practical everyday consequences. It's why boiling food works so consistently as a universal cooking option.
You don't need to control the temperature of boiling water, it is an exact temperature that depends only on ambient pressure. As a consequence recipes work by only specifying time, sometimes with a single adjustment for people at higher altitudes.
This is remarkable given the wide variety of containers and heat sources used, and it is used practically by virtually every cooking tradition, even if it's reason for working is not common knowledge.
It shouldn't be surprising it'd acquire a single word as a unified concept.
but what about boiling milk? or boiling oil? I get your point, I just don't understand why we would have a word for boiling water but then still need boiling-x for everything else that boils.
edit: In those other languages is it like how we use ice? where water is the default, but it could mean any frozen liquid?
It's a great question, and is tough to answer intuitively without speaking a native language that actually has such a word.
I would agree that "boiling milk" and "boiling oil" are very unlikely to get separate words, unless one of them happens to be an extremely common thing that people encounter a lot and that has special practical implications.
Milk might be a special case, in that it essentially is just water with some other stuff dissolved. It is to water as salt water is to water... but more so.
My guess would be that the single word might get pressed into service like "ice" does, but I think we'd have to find languages that include this word and survey native speakers. It could vary.
Nearly everyone encounters boiling water in everyday life, but do most people ever see other liquids boiling, even once, and especially during the historical periods that shaped our current languages? If not we might be getting into something like technical language, where daily life lines up poorly and terms and jargon get formalized.
As you note, we have a specific word for solid water. Additionally, in colloquial speech “water” almost exclusively refers to the liquid state. Finally we have “steam” to refer to the gaseous state.
So English arguably has three unique words for the three common states of H2O.
What do you mean by "why we would have"? Dictionaries aren't prescriptive, they're descriptive. If by "we" you mean English speakers, clearly you don't have a word for that. But if you mean some Slavic languages, they do. Likewise, English has "ice", while other languages simply call it "frozen water". Or take the example from the linked article, "at home", which some languages do have a separate word for. I don't think many languages have a distinct word for "at work" though, or "at the shop". That simply reflects that being at home is a more common and generally important concept, just like boiling water is more important in some sense than boiling milk.
Asking for the "reasons" behind a certain word existing is sort of like asking why the human body looks the way it does. Sure, scientists may have good theories why it was evolutionary advantageous to have five fingers and no tail, but in the end the only answer that's for certain is, "because it evolved that way". So the answer is, "we" have a word for boiling water because people found it useful to have such a word.
When those technical distinctions are important we use specific technical terms for them (of which there are a few different ones for the phase transition - depending on discipline).
The cooking term is "rolling boil" which is a nice two word combo with a specific meaning.
> but boiled water is steam > We do not have separate words for freezing water or boiling water.
I don't know how it is in other languages but in English "boiled water" and "boiling water" refer to different things - boiled water may be steam or water that has underwent some boiling, e.g. for sanitation, on the other hand "boiling water" refers strictly to water that is in the process of boiling.
I can see why some languages may have a separate word for one of these concepts to avoid some of the ambiguity.
I'm not a fan of extending the language with new words unless they are compound (with or without spaces) but extending the dictionaries with more and better descriptions is a no-brainer, there's a lot missing from them.
Arguably it depends more on the atmospheric pressure to get boiling water as close as possible to 100°C.
The general rule of thumb is that black tea (i.e. fermented tea leaves) should be brewed at 100°C, green tea (non-fermented tea leaves) should be brewed around 80°C to avoid it being bitter and white tea (young, non-fermented tea leaves) is best at around 70°C.
I'd argue that boiled water very specifically refers to the water left ofter after boiling water, not steam. Steam is no longer water, at least not in common parlance.
Boiled water does have the extra connotation that it is presumed to be mostly sterile, which, while not hard to derive from the fact it has been boiling, is not immediately clear. After all the past tense does not tell us how recently it was boiled.
For that reason I'd argue that if one of boiling water and boiled water should be in the dictionary, it should be boiled water. Of the two, it is the term that potentially carries extra information.
In Norwegian, we have "isvann" - ice water - which can both mean water implied to be cold enough to feel like it has recently melted, or specifically water with ice in it.
If you're asking for isvann at a restaurant, you'd expect to get water with ice, not just very cold water.
But if you're talking about having gone bathing in isvann one spring, it specifically means in water that - whether or not there is actually ice in it - is cold enough that it might have recently melted.
(I'm a native speaker, but had to look up the precise nuance there to be sure I wasn't just making stuff up)
I mean it’s interesting that this is generally the case with many (or even most) words across languages… But I’d wager it’s more the norm than the exception, so I don’t know if “boiling water” is that interesting of an example.
This was a great detail — added Russian kipyatok and Polish wrzątok to the article as evidence that "boiling water" carries enough conceptual weight that other languages crystallized it into a single word
reply