Hacker News: HighGoldstein

New comment by HighGoldstein in "DHS 'Predictive Policing' Unit Is Analyzing Americans' Financial Habits"

HighGoldstein — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 16:18:48 +0000

> In practice, KYC does little to stop any of that

Source? The fact that it's not infallible doesn't mean that it's ineffective.

New comment by HighGoldstein in "GLM-5.3 is now open-weight"

HighGoldstein — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 17:13:28 +0000

Not every tech worker is making top-tier US salaries. For some (I suspect not few) people on HN that $20,000 Mac is almost a year's salary.

New comment by HighGoldstein in "Bomb fishing is wreaking havoc on Indonesia's coral reefs"

HighGoldstein — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 16:55:04 +0000

"You say we should improve society yet participate in it, curious"

New comment by HighGoldstein in "Fable and the end of the free lunch"

HighGoldstein — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 14:48:43 +0000

I find it somewhat funny that the author starts by talking about how Moore's law enabled inefficient software and that we then had to make it more efficient, when almost all software today is horrendously inefficient compared to even 10 years ago, let alone 20-30. We've somehow even achieved a state where it doesn't matter how fast your CPU and memory are, the software will just perform horribly on any machine.

New comment by HighGoldstein in "How I find problems to solve as a staff engineer"

HighGoldstein — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 11:42:19 +0000

Inefficient allocation of work aside (where you end up with people doing nothing, despite I suspect a substantial amount of work in the backlog), I think the mindset of "just reduce devs so there's not so much context switching/they can own more" is short-sighted from a business perspective.

Even in projects that could objectively be owned by 1-2 people but are allocated to a 5-10 person team instead, I've encountered cases where velocity gets absolutely obliterated by a sub-domain "owner" dev being on vacation. Now imagine this is not a fairly small sub-domain but half the project, and instead of a vacation your one-of-two dev gets hit by a bus.

New comment by HighGoldstein in "Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter"

HighGoldstein — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 11:11:46 +0000

Do you believe half the human population should have the same rights as the other half? I'd say this is rather basic, yet the subject of much disagreement.

New comment by HighGoldstein in "Chinese chipmaker shares surge 470%"

HighGoldstein — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 12:23:29 +0000

The EU isn't monolithic, you could probably do this fairly easily in someplace like Poland where there isn't a bureaucratic hell and a large supply of skilled workers and engineers. But of course, Poland and co. are the "lessers" in Europe where you outsource for cheaper labor, a prestigious thing like a cutting-edge chip fab would need to be built somewhere like Germany or the Netherlands, and so it never shall exist.

New comment by HighGoldstein in "Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI"

HighGoldstein — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 03:10:04 +0000

Decade? We're 4 years in since ChatGPT released publicly and have gone from "Wow this thing is stupid" to running coding agents on auto mode, and the Chinese labs have been around for even less time. The US providers may lose dominance in 1 or 2 years.

New comment by HighGoldstein in "LG monitors silently install software through Windows Update without consent"

HighGoldstein — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 13:26:00 +0000

> Do. Not. Buy. LG.

> There are a lot of decent alternatives.

Can you name them? Dell and Samsung are the main competitors for displays as far as I'm aware, Dell tends to be hit-or-miss when it comes to monitor features and quality, Samsung's high end displays come preloaded with a whole OS. The monitor market is really in the toilet.

New comment by HighGoldstein in "Steam Machine launches today"

HighGoldstein — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 04:47:28 +0000

The PS5 (which is realistically the main competitor) has the caveat that to get even something as basic as multiplayer you need to pay a $10-20 monthly subscription, so you can multiply that by however many months you plan to own it and add it to the price.

New comment by HighGoldstein in "Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground"

HighGoldstein — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 11:15:15 +0000

At some point I was thinking that maybe I am too hard on the AI and that humans routinely produce exceptionally stupid code, however after a while I've realized that this is only partially true. AI produces a class of mistakes that humans would almost certainly not make because creating even the context of the mistake would require a level of skill that would preclude such mistakes. It's like if you took a mid/senior engineer and randomly lobotomized them mid-task.

New comment by HighGoldstein in "SQLite is all you need for durable workflows"

HighGoldstein — Sat, 30 May 2026 15:54:00 +0000

Yes, which goes in line with the argument that claiming that it's "the most deployed" as proof of superiority or suitability for any use case is equivalent to claiming the same for Internet Explorer. It's the most deployed because it's bundled in a lot of systems, not because people are purposefully using it as a DBMS.

New comment by HighGoldstein in "SQLite is all you need for durable workflows"

HighGoldstein — Sat, 30 May 2026 12:13:59 +0000

The reason SQLite is the most deployed is that it's used by Android.

New comment by HighGoldstein in "GitHub confirms breach of 3,800 repos via malicious VSCode extension"

HighGoldstein — Thu, 21 May 2026 11:43:20 +0000

Sandboxing doesn't necessarily mean isolating the extension from all potentially dangerous functions, you can have a permission system so that for example a color theme extension can't modify files.

New comment by HighGoldstein in "Railway Blocked by Google Cloud"

HighGoldstein — Wed, 20 May 2026 07:52:36 +0000

Considering how many AWS and non-AWS services go down at least partially when us-east-1 fails, this reads somewhat like "Don't worry that the steering wheel and pedals aren't working, your engine is still running on cruise control".

New comment by HighGoldstein in "Crystals found inside wreckage from the first nuclear bomb test"

HighGoldstein — Mon, 18 May 2026 13:04:39 +0000

The Greek term would be decatetrahedron.

New comment by HighGoldstein in "Tesla Solar Roof is on life support as it pivot to panels"

HighGoldstein — Sun, 17 May 2026 21:03:35 +0000

> That's the problem though. Thinking your product will get by on looks when it's clearly outcompeted on performance, price, availability and longevity. That's not just optimism, it's delusion.

May I present to you the Apple corporation, at least until recently.

New comment by HighGoldstein in "Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career"

HighGoldstein — Mon, 11 May 2026 15:38:58 +0000

> Haven't most people looked around and asked themselves where are all the 50+ engineers? They basically don't exist in large numbers.

I'm not discounting ageism in the industry, but how popular of a career was it 30+ years ago compared to now?

New comment by HighGoldstein in "Poland is now among the 20 largest economies"

HighGoldstein — Sat, 09 May 2026 08:17:39 +0000

> P.S. I also live in Poland, not Polish. I also lived in Berlin, and I dont think the salaries are always so different.

Anecdotally this is also my experience. Several countries in eastern Europe have vastly lower taxes, and as a result international companies can pay salaries that are on par with western Europe but still cheaper than an equivalent worker in Germany or France because the cost to the employer is much lower.

New comment by HighGoldstein in "Granite 4.1: IBM's 8B Model Matching 32B MoE"

HighGoldstein — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 11:48:08 +0000

An article without telltale signs of an LLM is indistinguishable from an article written by a human, so yes.