Hacker News: StevePrefontain

New comment by StevePrefontain in "Autism is genetic – and why this information matters now"

StevePrefontain — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 12:35:47 +0000

How do geneticists go about identifying alleles associated with autism? Seems like the effect size would be very small for most of them, and given the relatively small sample population of humans that can be practically sequenced for this, it seems difficult to separate true signal from statistical noise.

Also is it actually just “a sum of cumulative effects of these alleles crossing a threshold causes autism” or more complex like “Allele A and B together has a very significant effect, A and C has a moderate effect but A, B, and C together is has no effect”

New comment by StevePrefontain in "Fed hikes rates as inflation worries push up bond yields"

StevePrefontain — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 12:07:16 +0000

GDP growth is never going to be that high again. GDP growth is just per-capita GDP growth (1-1.5% per year) + population growth (used to be 1%, now is 0% or slightly negative). GDP growth of 1-1.5% will be normal going forward and could even go lower if population decline is at -.5% per year, for example.

New comment by StevePrefontain in "Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes"

StevePrefontain — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 14:23:27 +0000

Very hard to tell if this is satire. It reads like one of those old r/programmerhumor posts where people competed to come up with the worst designs possible for a volume control.

I could not think of a worse technology to use for an ETL pipeline than throwing LLMs at it and asking it to vibe out the correctness of the data every time it runs.

New comment by StevePrefontain in "How Much Has Trump Made from Crypto? ($1.4B from 2025 Federal Disclosure)"

StevePrefontain — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 12:15:26 +0000

Trump is almost amoral. It’s why he can’t understand at a basic level why his corruption would even be considered a scandal at all. In his mind, of course I’m using the presidency to enrich myself, my family, and my friends; that’s the whole point of gaining power. Of course I’m selling presidential pardons for cash, what’s the point of getting access to that power if I don’t sell my access to it.

New comment by StevePrefontain in "Algorithmic rent-pricing litigation expands under new state and local laws"

StevePrefontain — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 12:36:15 +0000

You’re misunderstanding 2 fundamental things. First is that it’s very expensive to build anything in major US cities with the high cost of labor, materials, and permitting. Rent control completely tips the balance against building housing that you’ll rent out. Second is that the value of land is not going to depreciate in these premier US cities just because it’s not profitable to build rental units. There’s many valuable things you can do with that land, rental units will just stop getting built in favor of other things.

New comment by StevePrefontain in "Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras"

StevePrefontain — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 12:21:55 +0000

These camera also monitor the ambient Bluetooth output of phones in cars that pass by to identify who exactly was in the car at the time. Don’t think the LLC will hide that unless your phone is also owned under an LLC

New comment by StevePrefontain in "Flock Cameras Can Track Every Car in America. Police Love Them. Citizens Don't"

StevePrefontain — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:22:36 +0000

They have already added the ability for these cameras to scrape Bluetooth metadata from phones passing by as well so they know who is in the car with you as well

New comment by StevePrefontain in "Why Wall Street is ignoring big tech's debt [video]"

StevePrefontain — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 01:52:40 +0000

I highly doubt anything more than a small single-digit percent of users are willing to pay $50-100 for a Claude subscription themselves. Just like everything else (if your company isn’t paying for a seat) 90% of people will just use the free tier, 7-8% will use the first paid tier, 2-3% use some kind of power user plan. It could end up being a whale-driven business model in the end.

New comment by StevePrefontain in "LLMs reward expertise"

StevePrefontain — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:44:04 +0000

We are having trouble onboarding engineers with AI now. Some still struggle after their first year with very basic concepts/patterns we use and make the same mistakes again and again in their PRs because they just ask Claude to fix it and never internalize it. I think using LLMs feels good at first because you can get tickets out the door faster but you never develop enough knowledge to make a big impact or become an expert in the code or business.

New comment by StevePrefontain in "Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI"

StevePrefontain — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 12:13:54 +0000

It’s not better than human review. It’s good at catching low-hanging issues but it is often requested overly-defensive code to handle edge cases that don’t exist or are handled elsewhere in the stack. It generates a ton of noise with low-signal comments. It basically cannot at all identify problems that pose the highest risk, like integrations, correctness from a business perspective, etc.