Hacker News: DLarsen

New comment by DLarsen in "Claude for Legal"

DLarsen — Thu, 14 May 2026 22:25:02 +0000

"Are (legally and morally) entitled" vs "act as if they are entitled"... yes, a big question.

New comment by DLarsen in "The Signal Is Broken"

DLarsen — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 16:07:52 +0000

I've been thinking a lot about team formation and competence hierarchies in the age of AI. I'm particularly concerned about the disruption that occurs when performance and output outruns competence. In such a world, it's not obvious whose judgment to trust and how risk/reward should be allocated.

The Signal is Broken

DLarsen — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 16:07:52 +0000

Article URL: https://dataxam.com/blog/the-signal-is-broken/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47923419

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by DLarsen in "Show HN: Budget Kanban – Visually manage finances in Kanban boards"

DLarsen — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 15:08:42 +0000

I like the creativity of the new form factor.

My son and I are working on a spending journal which puts forth a new kind of form factor for tracking expenses. Our emphasis is less on the accounting angle and more on the behavioral side. We use the journal for self-evaluation of individual spending decisions and as a tool to communicate spending intent within our household. It turns out that between myself, my wife and our teens... not everyone naturally geeks out with spreadsheets, and this collaborative journal has been a decent middle ground to coordinate spending.

New comment by DLarsen in "Mitchell reflects as he departs HashiCorp"

DLarsen — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 13:00:41 +0000

I remember near the start of HashiCorp, Mitchell and I spoke about buying one of his side projects. In seeking to rustle up some funds, friends asked me why anyone would offload a profitable project at such a price. Mitchell essentially explained that he was moving on to focus on bigger and better things. Boy was he right.

Someone else beat me to the punch on buying the website, but Mitchell’s clarity of purpose was profound.

New comment by DLarsen in "Ask HN: Show me your half baked project"

DLarsen — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 02:21:50 +0000

https://spendlight.com

My 13-year old son and I have been working on a behavior-oriented personal finance tool. I've kicked this idea around for years, and we had a chance to use it as our subject for a 12-week entrepreneurial program. I built a version of it for personal use years ago, but had fun looking at it through the lens of a more serious endeavor.

It's not feature complete, but the demo of the SMS-based journaling input works pretty well: https://spendlight.app/demo

New comment by DLarsen in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2023)"

DLarsen — Tue, 01 Aug 2023 18:11:16 +0000

MPP | SaaS-savvy Product Leader | Remote

Get in on the ground floor (2nd hire) of a new B2B, data-heavy venture.

We're looking for someone with hard-earned street smarts, and can help establish an outstanding working relationship between engineers (me for now!) and our subject matter expert (a 30+ year lawyer). Experience in finance, legal and data viz are a plus. A fruitful previous working relationship with DataSci professionals is a mega plus.

At the heart of our company, we seek to manifest a new business paradigm as usable (sells like hotcakes) SaaS. Big challenges, big potential reward, and (to shoot you straight) plenty of pitfalls on the product front that you can help us avoid.

We've got a good support network for both funding and advisors, all with legit unicorn-level chops.

Connect and message me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/larsenal/ to learn more.

New comment by DLarsen in "FDIC Takes over Silicon Valley Bank"

DLarsen — Fri, 10 Mar 2023 17:14:44 +0000

I think I'm going to start asking potential employers where they do their banking.

New comment by DLarsen in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (March 2023)"

DLarsen — Thu, 02 Mar 2023 00:26:17 +0000

Location: Prescott, AZ

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Resume/CV: https://dataxam.com/about

Technologies: Python, SQL, R, dbt, Snowflake, Postgres, D3, Spark, Flask, HTML, CSS, Scala, Ruby, etc.

Email: david.larsen+hn [at] gmail.com

Mostly interested in nascent data product work. If your data asset strategy is critical to your organization's success, you'll find me to be a capable, thoughtful contributor.

New comment by DLarsen in "How Southwest Airlines melted down"

DLarsen — Mon, 02 Jan 2023 02:45:03 +0000

Integrating into the operations on a provisional evaluation basis is a whole lot of work and the stakes are high. As my grandpa used to say, "There's nothing easier than doing nothing." Both parties (our company and the airline) brought the right people to the table, but for the system to really be evaluated we needed an entire crew base to use the system in a "realistic" fashion. There was a fair bit of understandable skepticism about how the system would perform under the stress of real user input, but due to the overall complex nature of the system there was a non-trivial learning curve and lots of crew members didn't see a lot of value in spending their time help us put the thing through its paces. As an example, the system would allow crew members to specify a highly detailed, specific set of flight preferences that were either declared as ranked priorities and/or they could select specific flights. If a crew member was forced to "try" our system, they could put in a generic set of input ("I like the Vegas flight."). However, we suspected that once they were faced with the opportunity to share their real schedule, they would have a lot more incentive to put in a lot more particulars, which would stress our optimization engine differently.

New comment by DLarsen in "How Southwest Airlines melted down"

DLarsen — Thu, 29 Dec 2022 10:54:54 +0000

Does the algo work? Is it better than the status quo and under what circumstances is it susceptible to failure? Does it know when the whole system is over-constrained?

If we assume the algo rocks (because you have operations research veterans), what stage of planning does your system address? What is the experience required and cost of manual intervention?

Fun problem. Human factors and edge cases abound. So much is at stake for a system that already works (to any predictable degree).

I'd love to hear more though.

New comment by DLarsen in "How Southwest Airlines melted down"

DLarsen — Thu, 29 Dec 2022 10:46:28 +0000

We ran a pilot with one carrier for a subset of their crew for maybe a year, but eventually failed to gain further traction. Very tough sales and implementation cycle in spite of the fact that we could convince many individuals (bothe crew and management with their competing concerns) of the benefits of our system.

New comment by DLarsen in "How Southwest Airlines melted down"

DLarsen — Thu, 29 Dec 2022 06:15:27 +0000

About a decade ago, I was part of a startup trying to disrupt crew scheduling. It's a non-trivial operations problem when you aim to honor crew preferences, union-negotiated affordances, FAA legalities, etc. We were only involved in the pre-planned schedules. At that time, the airlines we were courting had entirely different human-hravybsystem to resolve real time issues. There was some level of reserve redundancy baked in so the human planners had some wiggle room to work with... but redundancy is expensive to maintain. As a relatively new engineer at the time it was a pretty neat domain with big $$$ at stake. As it turns out, pretty much nobody wanted to take the risk on a new system even if it had provably better schedules for all parties. All it takes is one snafu for the whole thing to turn into a major regret.

New comment by DLarsen in "Show HN: Life Skills Website"

DLarsen — Tue, 22 Nov 2022 15:11:05 +0000

Great feedback. There are several sample lessons, but from your feedback I see how I can make them easier to find.

Show HN: Life Skills Website

DLarsen — Sun, 20 Nov 2022 15:10:22 +0000

Over a year ago, I purchased a small online business selling life skills curriculum to homeschool and special education families. The main asset was the library of 400+ lessons, each including a short video and PDF. The revenue appeared to reflect meaningful demand for such a program. At the time I purchased the business, the delivery mechanisms were pretty fragmented and browsing the lessons was all behind the paywall. Today I'm releasing a whole new website that brings (I hope) a more modern experience. Principally you can now browse all of the life skills library. I'm also hoping that this approach lends itself to better SEO as well.

While this is pretty far from being able to sustain the family from an income perspective, it's been really neat to connect with families who are taking the initiative to raise capable young adults.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33681456

Points: 14

# Comments: 3

New comment by DLarsen in "Ask HN: What is something you built but never marketed?"

DLarsen — Sun, 14 Aug 2022 19:59:16 +0000

I built https://www.spendlight.com/ for my wife and I to not just track spending but to get a handle on our sentiment around our spending choices. While we still have different reactions to spending decisions, it at least gave us the language and ground rules to work towards our personal finance goals.

New comment by DLarsen in "Ask HN: How do I learn drawing?"

DLarsen — Fri, 05 Mar 2021 19:55:00 +0000

If you really want to gain knowledge and confidence in the fundamentals, spend some time watching (in real time, NOT sped up) an excellent artist. Good art is often very slow. I saw a huge improvement in my own (self-taught, hobby-level) art when I began to get comfortable spending 10 hours on a drawing instead of one. I enjoy drawing portraits and can recommend this guy's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/stephenbaumanartwork

New comment by DLarsen in "Pitch: Collaborative presentation software for teams"

DLarsen — Tue, 20 Oct 2020 13:53:41 +0000

The footer has more links for "Legal" than for "Product"... a sign of the times.

New comment by DLarsen in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2020)"

DLarsen — Wed, 01 Jul 2020 17:03:47 +0000

Catasys | REMOTE | Sr. AI Engineer | good pay

We're in the healthcare space working on some pretty compelling problems at the convergence of behavioral health and chronic conditions. I come from an ad-tech background where the general theme was to use loads of data to help advertising be "more efficient"... which is to say we tried to help sell folks on things they usually didn't need... meanwhile in spite of noble aspirations to clean up the industry, ad-tech has gotten creepier over the last 10 years. (I'm glad there are still folks working on that problem.) But today I'm so happy now to be directing my effort toward a somewhat surprising opportunity to A) benefit humans and B) be more efficient from a cost perspective. The general idea is that we find cases where providing behavioral health care (think treatment for SUD, anxiety or depression) has a very good chance of improving the management of one or more chronic conditions (think diabetes, COPD, asthma, etc). I don't want to over-sell it as a mythical win-win-win (the individual, the insurance companies, and our company), but so far the model is working pretty well. We're growing both in terms of business as well as our capabilities.

My team of 2 is looking for 2 more to join our fully remote team. If you're a thoughtful, experienced practitioner who has built successful (and let's face it maybe a few unsuccessful) ML or AI systems, you might be perfect. If you're searching this post for buzzwords, as a means of shameless SEO I'll mention Python, Tensorflow, Keras, Spark, Scala, SageMaker, Deep Learning, RNN, LSTM, R, ggplot, and (why not) Flask. Note that we may or may not use all of these _right now_ (the team is new and much TBD), but I'm hoping to catch the attention of the right folks in the midst of so many job HN postings.

Ping me via LinkedIn messaging or my email (dlarsen at the company domain name) if you're curious about the role. Having recently joined the company and this team, a lot of the considerations that are probably on your mind as a job seeker are fresh in my mind as well, and I'd be happy to have a candid conversation about the company, the role and how you might fit in.

https://www.paycomonline.net/v4/ats/web.php/jobs/ViewJobDeta...

New comment by DLarsen in "Laura Deming, founder of the Longevity Fund, on being homeschooled"

DLarsen — Thu, 25 Jun 2020 20:03:44 +0000

I enjoyed reading this recent post from Nathan Barry, which tells some of his story: https://nathanbarry.com/homeschool/