Take a company already known for its cynical “value extraction” approach to games, barely fostering enough life within its doors to squeeze out acceptable versions of games that used to be truly Great from among their vast hoard of IP—take that company and add 20 billion dollars of debt and private equity overlords and I can only assume we get something akin to the blood orgy from Event Horizon but in game company form.
I have to disagree. Evidence for this being wrong is right on many games websites a la Backloggd with plenty of people rating older games very highly, more than many new releases. More evidence: numerous games being re-released with mainly surface-level changes (older Final Fantasy’s, arguably Oblivion Remastered).
While I absolutely agree some games age like milk (IMO Persona 3 FES/Portable mechanically play like garbage and P4 ain’t much better) there are many games that were either the pinnacle of their of their craft in pretty fundamental ways or were just doing very odd, interesting things that no one tries to do anymore (outside indies). JRPGs are honestly the big genre I see for aging well, but there’s a bunch of PS1/PS2 era games having a big second life with the younger generation.
Same. Mine had expanded so much it almost popped the battery panel off. Thankfully replacements are quite cheap! I went through and replaced old ones on my PSPs, DSs, etc and now keep em all charged (with a mess of cables) to hopefully keep em semi healthy and not cause a bonfire in my closet.
This reminds me of my first software job, an internship in college in 2012 building an application from scratch to facilitate evaluating teachers. It was basically an app to allow people to create a form for their school’s evaluation criteria and then submit those forms. Sounds super straightforward, right? It was. The catch was our team was 2 CS undergrad, a masters CS student, and a high school student. All with no professional experience. We knew nothing. Well kind of but more on that in a second. Our manager was absolutely non technical. In fact they were the second highest person in the company (fairly small company) and were managing our project and a bunch of other stuff at the company. And somehow with almost 0 oversight we built a functional Django application that the business was able to sell and make money from. My favorite highlights were 1) the codebase was initially shared over FTP (“Hey you’re not editing file X, right? Oh you are? Ah woops I just overwrote all your changes.”) till someone intelligently suggested “Uhhh Git?” 2) the actual best programmer amongst us was the high schooler. They suggested Django, picked the DB, they suggested using Celery to speed up async work, Redis for caching, and yes, “Uhh Git?” In retrospect the only reason we succeeded was because of them. They were like top 5 on the stack overflow Code Golf site IIRC. 3) My interview was basically showing my aforementioned manager who had never coded in his life a project I worked on at school and him being like “Yeah looks good. You’re hired.”
With 10 years of hindsight, I cringe thinking back to all the bad decisions I pushed for and the no-doubt terrible code I wrote. But I also marvel and look back fondly at being given a shot and being in an environment where I could just build something from the ground up and learn everything soup to nuts on the job. God bless whoever inherited that codebase.
This is incorrect information. Check out levels.fyi. The average stock grant for Meta E6 is well over $1M/4years. Just one example. Plenty of data on other companies offers there.
Companies give the option to either go Management Track (Manager, Director VP) or Technical Track (Principal/E6, Fellow, Distinguished Engineer)
In public companies, most Engineers will peak at the L5/L64/SDE3/E5 level by their 30s.
> Plenty of data on other companies offers there
Plenty of companies offer that kind of compensation, but the competition is intense as the number of roles paying that much are limited, and WLB is atrocious as it's basically a Architect/Team Lead role.
If anyone thinks they deserve a L6/L7 role with less than a decade of experience at peer companies they need to adjust their expectations or remain unemployed
> If anyone thinks they deserve a L6/L7 role with less than a decade of experience at peer companies they need to adjust their expectations or remain unemployed
I think a lot of HN commenters simply assume that every role at these companies is L6/L7+ and pays $1M/yr or whatever the meme is currently. Like it's the default for "Software Engineer" at these companies. In reality, these roles are exceedingly rare. You won't even often see them publicly posted, simply because there are just not many of them.
People see one example of this kind of compensation and declare, "See, it is possible to make this money at a FAANG." which is true, but in the same sense that it is technically possible to get struck by lightning. Your median FAANG employee is probably L4 and not making $1M/yr in compensation. They're probably not even making $150K, depending on their location.
> Your median FAANG employee is probably L4 and not making $1M/yr in compensation. They're probably not even making $150K, depending on their location
While OP overestimates salaries, you are doing the opposite and underestimating salaries for most mid-career SWEs working a Software companies in the US.
Most L4/5 equivalent engineers across the US will end up earning around $150-250k Base, 10-20% Bonus, and around $50-150k/yr in stocks assuming they are working for a Software Company as a SWE (eg. Salesforce in Indianapolis or VMWare/Broadcom in RTP or Denver - let alone the Bay Area, Seattle, Austin, and NYC scene).
Never heard of this. So I went to the website to find out what it is. "Your pocket companion" the top of the website reads. Ok, don't know what that means. Scroll down "push to talk button", "conversational interface", and some other hardware features. Still no idea what it's for. They have a keynote video. I press play. It starts with them showing a bunch of press coverage and social media. Still no description of what it is. Not even a demo of what it does. I got several minutes into the video and it's all acting like I already know what it is. I've completely lost interest. Mystifyingly bad marketing.
On the technical side, it gets worse. For example, it turns out things like their Spotify "integration" is actually interacting with the Spotify web site. It doesn't even use Spotify's APIs. So it breaks any time Spotify modifies their website.
Yes; at the same time, it’s a scam only because people didn’t like it. If it got popular, it would have been a successful hustle and a new business model.
Chatgpt, a product that successfully disrupted the market and inspired a number of other companies, is largely misunderstood and falsely advertised.
A HN submission about chatgpt hallucinating broken links to partner websites has comments like:
> It drives me nuts how OpenAI has misleadingly marketed their products, and the tech community at large has failed to clarify what their products really are.
My biggest lament with the PS3 is the forward incompatibility making many great games locked to the platform (MGS4, Demon’s Souls, etc.). Meanwhile in Xbox land there are *633* 360 games you can play on any new Xbox by just slipping the disc in. Now some of this is no doubt due to differing approaches to business by the corporate masters but from what I’ve read a lot of it is the unique and befuddling architecture of the PS3.
The PlayStation 3 is the primary reason I maintained ownership of discrete dvd/Blu-ray players and never got into the PlayStation ecosystem. There were a couple PS3 games I was interested in and if they had run on the PS4 I would have owned a 4 and thus likely a 5
I wonder if the engineer working on this thought “I wonder if someone on YouTube will use this to try and become famous by breaking their finger? Surely not…”
An algorithm that closes the door harder if it meets resistance seems a bit insane, right? What if there’s something fragile? Is this how these auto closing doors normally work? God I’m happy I drive a dumb manual car with no real electronics other than a radio.
I know I'm preaching to the choir at HN, but I really wish there were more "dumb" EVs. Robert Downey Jr. recently hosted a giveaway for his vintage retrofitted electric cars (to clarify, he takes vintage cars and retrofits their engine to make them EVs), and I honestly wish I could just buy one outright.
I love my Chevy Bolt EUV. Normal door handles inside and out. Manual open/close trunk. Normal window controls. Normal infotainment unit with carplay/AA. Buttons and knobs for volume, HVAC, and hazard lights. Normal stick controls for turn signals and wipers.
It’s a great, simple EV and my only knock against it is the slow max charging speed making it not ideal for multiple stop road trips.
I have a 2017 Bolt EV, and I feel similarly. GM accidentally made an ideal EV for a reasonable price, and now they are correcting course by ruining future models.
Note that carplay/AA is already killed for the next model year of the bolt (2026) and you can probably also expect regressions in the number of physical interfaces from the first gen you own.
I'm a huge Tesla fan, but the Bolt is amazing. I love renting them. I wish they could charge faster than 50kW; that would make them useful for road trips.
I feel the same way about e-bikes: expensive, proprietary parts and form factors everywhere. Oh, your battery is worn out? You need one that's custom molded to your downtube? That's too bad.
I think that at least some of this comes about because it's still relatively early days for the form-factor. As the industry matures, as it becomes more cutthroat everything will become more comodified and therefore standardised.
Look at some of the cars of (say) the late-19thC where not even the steering wheel was standard. So, while e-bikes are probably not quite that early stage right now, they've not advanced terribly far from the plain vanilla bicycle yet.
There are thousands of e-bike manufacturers. Many use the so-called "dolphin" battery pack which is fairly standard and always removable. The dolphin doesn't look as sleek as an in-frame battery but it's replaceable and it will usually provide longer range.
I've been expecting a ebike that could take the tool eco-system batteries: DeWalt 60v, Eco 58v, Milwaukee 18v. Probably would need to dock several of them with the exception of the Eco.
Unless you find out it's potted, the BMS needs to be reprogrammed and there's a custom mesh or holder that doesn't work with some standard cells because of tolerances...
Companies that specialise in this do exist, the one I'm most aware of is Electric Classic Cars in the UK (https://www.electricclassiccars.co.uk), who started/specialise in rear-engine VWs, original Minis, and original Land Rover Defenders.
Obviously very tailored for a nostalgic UK market, but if there's not equivalent companies in the US and elsewhere I'd be surprised!
Retrofits for cars are around $50000 to make them barely street legal. You are looking at double the price for that retrofit and you might not get the range. You also have to buy a car (some retrofits on YouTube get around this by buying broken cars and restoring them) buying a broken car could be done if you don't have to do much work or if the engine is broken already.
More realistically, a car manufacturer could make an EV that is basically a vintage car but made to modern standards. Obviously you can’t make the exact same car if you want to have things like crumple zones, but a lot of the changes to car designs have been for fuel efficiency and that’s not as important in an EV. And things like huge internal displays or automatic doors are just preference.
The changes to ICE vehicle designs for fuel efficiency are needed even more and are made more drastic for EVs. EV designs have painful, often ugly, aerodynamic considerations that have to be made. They go so far as to let aerodynamics completely dictate wheel design.
Your 1967 Pontiac GTO sitting on Kragers isnt going to go very far on batteries.
Yeah, but due to range and slow charging vs. refilling, electric cars are mostly used for city/commuting, where speed isn't that high to make a difference in aerodynamics.
You don't need to retrofit, you can just build a reasonably-featured car to begin with. I imagine most people just want a corolla with a battery (or cheaper).
Trouble with my ('95) Corolla is that it's the body that's showing its age. (Rust, and not the good kind.) The ICE is just fine and probably good for another 1/2-million km, but the whole thing has got to go soon.
"Let it rust"? If you live near the sea, cars rust and there's not a lot you can do about it. You can attend to visible rust timeously, but there are plenty of hollow spaces where it can fester for years, all unnoticable, before it pops out through the paintwork.
There’s a quickly growing ev conversion industry. Lots of shops that will take your vintage ride and convert it. the amount of wrecked evs showing up in wrecking yards is resulting in a new era of hotrodding. check out www.openinverter.com
My trunk is push-button. I’ve had to manually hold it in place for it to latch when I’ve had it very full with materials soft enough to compress. It won’t force it on its own.
Would it break my finger if I placed it right on the edge? I don’t know. I never thought to try.
Other cars with self-closing trunks for example, immediately stop if they detect some resistance. I guess other carmakers care more about safety than tesla, at least for the cybertruck (thinking about the vegetable-chopping possible with their trunk).
I can see that if you have very little experience building and selling vehicles in colder climates you just think "oh so there can be ice, let's just allow it to break the ice with more force" instead of, like, not designing the door in that way in the first place.
I got my head bonked by the rear hatch of my SUV due to me hitting the button while I was standing too close to it. Fortunately, it didn't have much force behind it and stopped immediately.
Which tells us there are probably times when we should assume the user is right - for instance, a user taking over control of a self driving vehicle - and some when we should not - closing a door on someone's finger - and it's important to identify the difference.
> God I’m happy I drive a dumb manual car with no real electronics other than a radio.
Me too! I'm not looking forward to my next car. I don't trust a lot of these automatic closing trunks/hoods/etc[1]. But even setting that aside all this complexity is just more stuff that can break and in some cases costs a ridiculous amount to fix. I'd love a car with an EV drivetrain, a radio, power windows, AC, and maybe a small screen (<7") for CarPlay[2]. No other smart features beyond what's mandated by regulation.
One of the oddities about Hacker News is that a solid chunk of the users will reliably rail against Smart TVs, but drool over smart cars with touchscreens and surveillance everywhere.
You're on a forum with literally millions of visitors from all over the world, but with comments on any given article from maybe 100 people.
There could be tens of thousands of "rail against smart tv" users and tens of thousands of "drool over smart cars" users, without there being even a single hypocritical poster who was in both groups.
- Rented Model Y. Show up and no Model Y. “We got a 3”. I’m driving to Vermont with snow but no choice now. “Ok sounds great.”
- Have to stop every couple hours to charge.
- Multiple times the GPS plotted us a route which would have battery hit 0% before arriving to charger. Nerve wracking.
- Most of the full speed charging stations had lines and if we did the slow speed ones our entire weekend trip would be spent charging.
- Regenerative braking is cool till you’re going down hill in snow with all season tires. Then it’s a great way to lock up and slide. Thankfully I’m not a noob. (Also not that I expected winter tires from a rental, even in Boston, but cmon Hertz.)
My biggest takeaway is that if where we stayed had a charger for overnight charging it would have been fine. Without that it was undeniably worse than renting a gas car. We basically had to plan our days around the rental which is a bit insane. I don’t doubt that having one to whip around local with a charger at home would rule but for anything more than short drives I don’t think a rental electric makes sense.
I don't understand how this isn't considered fraud. If you try to cancel your trip, they want to charge a crazy fee, but if they don't have the car that you reserved, sorry maybe we can offer you another one. Rental car companies need a good lashing from a government regulator.
Generally you don't rent a specific model, you rent a "So-and-so or similar". And undoubtedly the rental agreement specifically gives them permission to make substitutions. It's unlikely this scenario has not been fully mitigated by corporate legal and risk management.
It's been a while since I've rented, but I assume this is covered in the agreement when you make a booking. I'd guess their butts are covered from the fraud perspective. Maybe misleading advertisement though?
Isn’t the 3 and Y mostly equivalent, one just slightly larger? There is big difference in clearance, 2/4wd or anything else that would make them different in a cold climate drive? Or am I missing something?
This sounds like it mirrors my usage. Basically treat it like pairing with a really junior dev: assume everything it writes will be wrong and then go from there. If you do that then best case it speeds you up and worst case you waste a little time reading what it wrote that was wrong and ignoring the suggestion and moving on.
