Hacker News: Breza

New comment by Breza in "I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack"

Breza — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 14:58:15 +0000

This is real. If your app breaks because your AWS region crashed, the CEO probably isn't going to blame you. If you have similar uptime but the crashes are due to you picking a cheaper setup, you might be in more trouble.

New comment by Breza in "OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation"

Breza — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 13:04:52 +0000

I wonder if there's a single trainer in Kenya who is responsible for some of the conventions we see so often. Maybe (s)he just really likes full stops and used them in all of the training examples.

New comment by Breza in "OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation"

Breza — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 13:01:14 +0000

I'm not excusing Altman's many many lies, but it is worth noting how many algorithmic advances in the past 20 years were made with relatively little computing power. Think of things like xgboost (2016). A modest computer can run a pretty big dataset on CPU. When Tensorflow was launched in 2015, I played with it on an ancient laptop and it worked just fine. Then I upgraded to a mobile workstation and was still able to keep up with many SOTA models. Turns out LLMs are massively more power hungry than most earlier algorithms, even in NLP.

New comment by Breza in "US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology"

Breza — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 12:56:30 +0000

US law is more murky if they are responding to a perceived emergency. That can give probable cause. Imagine someone calls 911 due to smoke coming out of the neighbor's house. Clearly the drone can legally use IR to look for fire in the house. But it gets complicated fast, which is what worries me. Now imagine a car backfires, a microphone array reports it as a gunshot, and a drone shows up and starts scanning the nearest apartment building.

New comment by Breza in "Show HN: Wageslave – I quit my soul sucking job to make a game about it"

Breza — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:21:57 +0000

What a terrific and depressing game!

New comment by Breza in "SpaceX files to go public"

Breza — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:02:38 +0000

Nicely done! When I started moving up from being an individual contributor to corporate management years ago, the brass would casually say things like "P&L" or "EDITDA" and I had no idea what they meant. I read textbooks, took online classes, and it was a big deal when I finally could lead a conversation related to our finances.

New comment by Breza in "Oracle slashes 30k jobs"

Breza — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 13:57:54 +0000

Well said. There are so many better companies out there. It reminds me of Microstrategy before their Bitcoin madness started... why would anyone use it?

New comment by Breza in "Oracle slashes 30k jobs"

Breza — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 13:55:20 +0000

I remember when Salesforce was a true innovator. I attended a Salesforce conference the other day. Sounds like they're all-in on their "agentic" vision. I miss when the Salesforce conferences were tailored to nerds like me and included products that the CEO would never hear about but my team would fight tooth and nail to keep in the budget.

New comment by Breza in "The Little Book of C"

Breza — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 13:40:43 +0000

I still had trouble setting up C on my home PC when I was a teenager. I read The C Programming Language and really enjoyed it but couldn't figure out how to get the code to run at home. I went to the local community college and took an intro class that used C++ then I took AP Comp Sci using Java and left the C family behind.

New comment by Breza in "CodingFont: A game to help you pick a coding font"

Breza — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 13:37:34 +0000

I write a lot of R and I love fonts that convert <- and |> into a single character. It's definitely a preference, but it matches how my brain thinks about the code.

New comment by Breza in "Claude Code's source code has been leaked via a map file in their NPM registry"

Breza — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 12:25:43 +0000

The novel Red Team Blues involves a similar plot with a crypto token that's supposed to be immutable. It's pretty entertaining.

New comment by Breza in "Google releases Gemma 4 open models"

Breza — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 14:41:35 +0000

I'm very active in family history and this kind of project is massively helpful, thank you

New comment by Breza in "US Job Market Visualizer"

Breza — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 18:13:31 +0000

For a business, the second question is what your competition is going to do. If you have a monopoly over something, you can reap the rewards. But if you're in a space with lots of competition, you might not end up with any better profit margins if everyone's in a Red Queen's Race.

New comment by Breza in "Personal Encyclopedias"

Breza — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 17:33:55 +0000

I disagree strongly with your broader point. We now have the technology to sort through the minutia of the past and learn deep things. Here's one tiny example. I was able to find out where one of my ancestors lived because someone sent him a letter via General Delivery around 1900 that he didn't pick up. The Post Office listed everyone with letters waiting for them. The smallest detail, but it proved useful for me in tracing my family's origins across the Wild West.

New comment by Breza in "Personal Encyclopedias"

Breza — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 17:30:58 +0000

Preserving the past is how we learn, adapt, and grow.

I got into family history fifteen years ago. As a history buff, it was a fun hobby. I even put together family trees for several friends. When I read old newspapers, it's incredible how similar many problems seem to what we face today.

There's also a practical aspect. Last year the Canadian government declared that I can get a Canadian passport if I can prove my links to that country. Now I've reactivated my Ancestry account and would love it if I had a box of personal diaries to sift through for evidence of my heritage.

New comment by Breza in "We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do"

Breza — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 17:18:00 +0000

The rise of low/no fee brokers is a fantastic advancement for the reasons you cite. Robinhood gets grief because it tries to drive people to trade often and take riskier bets when the long-known wisdom is that accumulating wealth requires patience and diversification.

New comment by Breza in "We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do"

Breza — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 17:15:49 +0000

I assure you that poor people have always been focused on money. Every time the rent is due, they are very aware. It's the wealthier folks who have historically had the privilege of being Bogleheads and ignore having to think about the financial implications of every decision they make.

Lower-income families have traditionally had community institutions to support them. You could be a church member for free, hang out at the union hall, or participate in any number of IRL activities that let you quit thinking about cashflow for a few blessed hours.

Replacing community engagement with an obsession over cash isn't healthy, either for individuals or communities.

New comment by Breza in "We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do"

Breza — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 17:08:03 +0000

How dare you impugn the mystical powers of the wisdom of the crowd. Why would anybody fix outcomes?

Wait a minute, you can bet on pro wrestling? OK I'm out of ideas.

https://www.betus.com.pa/sportsbook/entertainment/wwe/

New comment by Breza in "We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do"

Breza — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 17:01:45 +0000

I don't think Nash envisioned politicians and their aides being able to profit from making decisions. Do you launch an attack on Eastasia? Well the market right now says there's a 40% chance, so I guess it's a good idea to grab your crypto keys and make some bets before you call the Joint Chiefs.

New comment by Breza in "Runners who churn butter on their runs"

Breza — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 12:05:51 +0000

I highly recommend the book Running Weight. Despite the title, it's useful for all kinds of athletes.