Hacker News: LevGoldstein

New comment by LevGoldstein in "I don't like passkeys"

LevGoldstein — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 19:17:43 +0000

The responsible product owners will already have bounced 18 months prior after tweaking the stats to falsify the customer satisfaction rate and grabbing their bonus on the way out.

New comment by LevGoldstein in "If coding is solved, what now?: Measuring the sloppiness of code"

LevGoldstein — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 16:12:07 +0000

Consider that the people who have never have never had to be on-call for a product that results in losses for the company in the event of an outage, and/or have never had to attend an RCA meeting have just as much of a voice in this discussion. Some segments of the software industry don't even have to worry about those sorts of things, and it's easy to get myopic after a while...I doubt that a long time dev at hobbyist-centric wearable manufacturers or audio plugin shops has the same sorts of concerns as someone who has specialized in ad delivery for social media sites.

New comment by LevGoldstein in "Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children"

LevGoldstein — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 14:31:46 +0000

They profited so thoroughly from building the addiction machine that they sought to lobby for legislation that imposed restrictions on internet usage that will actively and permanently add friction to computing and make the internet as a whole less free, just to try to avoid culpability for their actions. They knew what they were building.

New comment by LevGoldstein in "Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra"

LevGoldstein — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 14:39:14 +0000

It's a grovel-for-investor-dollars site that we've long pretended is for serious technical discussion. Comments should always be filtered through that lens.

New comment by LevGoldstein in "If AI data centers are so great, why are they being built in secret?"

LevGoldstein — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 21:43:05 +0000

Not OP, but here's a link from one of the previous times this was discussed.

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/01/almonds-nuts...

Almond farming uses massive amounts of water, which has caused environmental impact concerns in the past.

New comment by LevGoldstein in "The Window Chrome of Our Discontent"

LevGoldstein — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 17:43:27 +0000

I'm very curious what their workaround plan for something like U&I MetaSynth would be.

New comment by LevGoldstein in "The Brand Age"

LevGoldstein — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 20:52:39 +0000

My least favorite of that eras Gerald Genta designs. The original Royal Oak is comparatively far more attractive. Both are outdone by the 222 (different designer though), but it's all subjective.

New comment by LevGoldstein in "Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown"

LevGoldstein — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 03:01:08 +0000

> M$ has now introduced web-latency into the desktop along with their adoption of web-tech into the OS.

So we're back to the woes of Active Desktop on Windows 98. Everything old is new again.

New comment by LevGoldstein in "A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw"

LevGoldstein — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 17:08:52 +0000

This only lasts until dark patterns can be inserted that disrupt the ease of use that agents are currently providing. If I can't force the end user to watch unskippable ads or trick them into spending money on a service they don't need, what are we even doing?

New comment by LevGoldstein in "The Cathedral, the Megachurch, and the Bazaar"

LevGoldstein — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 23:14:23 +0000

I recall stuff like the Intel icc compiler being expensive and desirable, and things like client access licenses, hardware licenses (to allow using non-trivial amounts of RAM and multi-processing) and support plans for proprietary OSes being rather expensive. Consulting a SCO Unix price sheet from that era, a license that allowed 150 users and up to 32GB of RAM was $10k.

Prices also varied around OS features used. Vendors loved to nickel-and-dime you (separate *-user client licenses for file services, print services, remote access, etc), generally to drive you towards bigger packages that seemed like a better deal.

New comment by LevGoldstein in "Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster (2014)"

LevGoldstein — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 17:43:18 +0000

Which is why you take the time to put usage docs in the repo README, make sure the script is packaged and deployed via the same methods that the rest of the company uses, and ensure that it logs success/failure conditions. That's been pretty standard at every organization I've been at my entire professional career. Anyone who can't manage that is going to create worse problems when designing/building/maintaining a more complex system.

New comment by LevGoldstein in "AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering"

LevGoldstein — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 16:26:46 +0000

People have been sounding the alarm about excessive water diverted to almond farming for many years though, so that doesn't really help the counter-argument.

Example article from a decade ago: https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/01/almonds-nuts...

New comment by LevGoldstein in "They Thought They Were Free (1955)"

LevGoldstein — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 16:16:55 +0000

> Armed civilians with their puny little guns and little organization are right out as soon as any part of the military joins a fight, that's why I only mentioned the latter to begin with.

We have several recent real-world examples of that not working out for the military. Assuming like minded people wont self-organize is a bad starting point, and jets and tanks have a tough time doing things like enforcing curfews. That's also ignoring that such a scenario would involve portions of said military force joining the civilian resistance, including those in leadership positions.

Besides, I've always hated this argument, because why fight the military when they can just target the politicians directly.

New comment by LevGoldstein in "Claude can sometimes prove it"

LevGoldstein — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 19:49:21 +0000

Having encountered this spread across our orgs greenfield codebases which made heavy use of AI in the last 90 days: Restating the same information in slightly different formats, with slightly different levels of detail in several places, in a way that is unnecessary. Like a "get up and running quickly" guide in the documentation which has far more detail than the section it's supposed to be summarizing. Jarringly inconsistent ways of providing information within a given section (a list of endpoints and their purposes, followed by a table of other endpoints, followed by another list of endpoints). Unnecessary bulleted lists all over the places which could read more clearly as single sentences or a short paragraph. Disembodied documentation files nested in the repos that restate the contents of the README, but in a slightly different format/voice. Thousands of single line code comments that just restate what is already clear to the reader if they just read the line it's commenting on. That's before getting into any code quality issues themselves.

New comment by LevGoldstein in "Bitwig Studio 6 details revealed, and editing gets a big boost"

LevGoldstein — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 15:41:36 +0000

It's been around for over a decade at this point, so I'd say it's as likely to disappear as Ableton Live at this point. Bitwig was made by ex-Ableton engineers and outside of some of the more niche features, they're similar enough that anything you learn about Bitwig is transferable to using Ableton Live. Much more so than trying to move to one of them from Reaper, for instance. If you depend mostly on 3rd party plugins and less on what's built into the DAW, then they're effectively the same outside of simple navigation quirks unique to each.

I have active licenses for both and have used both for personal projects. I find Ableton to be slightly faster to navigate, probably because I've been using it for longer. If manufacturers of high quality multichannel interfaces had better Linux support, I'd migrate fully to Bitwig.

New comment by LevGoldstein in "It is worth it to buy the fast CPU"

LevGoldstein — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 18:20:40 +0000

...and we're back to trying to convince a penny-wise pound-foolish company to buy twice the computing hardware for every developer.

New comment by LevGoldstein in "Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears"

LevGoldstein — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 16:39:29 +0000

Is it imminent? Reading the article, the only thing that's actually changed is that the CEO has stopped hand-picking AI hires and has placed that responsibility on Alexandr Wang instead. The rest is just fluff to turn it into an article. The tech sector being down is happening in concert with the non-tech sector sliding too.

New comment by LevGoldstein in "Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding"

LevGoldstein — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 13:44:36 +0000

How long before a handful of entities, having already ingested the available content into their proprietary systems, bankroll assaults on Wikipedia and the Internet Archive.

New comment by LevGoldstein in "The Future of WATMM"

LevGoldstein — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 20:14:21 +0000

Depends on what you mean by alternatives. Some gear focused forums (ModWiggler, Lines, Elektronauts, etc) necessarily cover some of the same ground. The Dogs On Acid forum is also still around, though it's changed hands over the years.

New comment by LevGoldstein in "What it's like to work on cold cases"

LevGoldstein — Mon, 26 Aug 2024 18:24:10 +0000

You say that as though this is a brand new problem and not something that's been an issue for many, many decades regardless of what party has majority control at the federal level.